Below is a graph charting the growth and eventual decline of Detroit’s population over a one hundred year period, 1880 to 1980.
This graph is helpful in its visualization of the effect which major historic events within the US had on the city, as well as events which were unique to the city itself. At the start of 1880, Detroit had a meager population of 116,340, which in just forty years rose to almost one million in 1920, and only continued to climb till after the 1950s, when the population finally begins its decline.
Some of the factors, many already discussed in my earlier blog posts, which contributed to Detroit’s population growth were national events such as the Great Migration starting in 1910. On the graph we can observe this event by the massive climb beginning at 1910, as the population more than doubles in just ten years to 1920. As the Great Migration progressed throughout the northern US, Detroit continued to build an empire of steel with its ever expanding factories and industries, chief among these being Detroit’s automotive manufacturing. These industries only expanded during World War II, as factories retooled to build the world’s arms, munitions, and even uniforms–with federal funding and assistance to facilitate the growth and necessary output for the war effort.
This growth begins to turn and decline in the 1950s, dropping almost to 1940s levels by 1960. This new trajectory was largely the result of scaled back wartime efforts, and the many Americans who moved out of the city to suburbs and less dense areas of the state. This was particularly the case for white and middle class Americans, who in an exodus known as the “White Flight,” fled from desegregated school systems and neighborhoods to newer suburbs outside city jurisdiction, a popular trend for many major US cities during the post war period (Clotfelter). By 1980, Detroit’s population– while smaller than in its glory days of the 1940s and 50s, was still roughly 1.1 million persons larger than it had been one hundred years prior.
Obviously, this data leaves many more questions still unanswered–knowledge of quality of life or economic status remain undetermined as the graph merely supplies a tally of population and its changes throughout the years. But, the graph serves well as a tool for tracking trends, and as evidence of success within the city during its manufacturing heydays and as a place of refuge for black southerners.
References
U.S. Census Bureau and Erik Steiner, Spatial History Project, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University
Clotfelter, Charles T. “The Detroit Decision and ‘White Flight.’” The Journal of Legal Studies 5, no. 1 (1976): 99–112. http://www.jstor.org/stable/724076.
