Sociology of the American Auto Industry
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This research examines the sociology of the American automobile industry, in particular attributes of the industry's connection with and impact on the city of Detroit, Michigan, and the race-related issue fronts that have surfaced uniquely in that area. To see the connection it is important to set the auto industry's realities in context. Excitement generated by Internet-related enterprises in the 1990s and energy- and finance-related businesses in the 1980s was not at all unlike the excitement generated by the automobile industry in the first years after Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford applied the principles of mass production to the concept of an assembly line in basic industry. Ford's mechanization innovations enabled that company to revolutionize productivity numbers, and that in turn made automobile transportation economically feasible for mass-market consumers. Equally, the mechanized assembly line--distinguished chiefly by the conveyor belt that brought vehicles in the process of being assembled to stations designed to complete the construction of a car--transformed the character of employment in such a way as to create a new basic industry on the scale of steel mills, railroad manufacture, and shipping. An industry that in 1904 was employing some 3,000 workers nationwide was so transformed by Ford's innovations in Detroit that by the end of World War I it was providing some 75,000 jobs, just in the Detroit area (Winter, 1996).The savings in production costs wrought by
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e North, especially to urban centers like Detroit, occurred during World War I and World War II, when military recruitment fostered significant labor shortages and black migration northward (Larson, 1992). However, housing segregation in Detroit, plus residual white feelings against blacks as strikebreakers, came to a head in 1943, with a race riot that involved whites attacking blacks and blacks responding, and blacks attacking and looting whites' property (Capeci & Wilkerson, 1991). According to Betty Shabazz, who grew up in Detroit, the 1943 riot started from "rumors of white and black people killing or injuring each other. This escalated to a destructive riot in which 34 persons were killed, more than 461 injured and over a million man hours lost" (Shabazz, 1995, p. 62).
One outgrowth of the 1943 riot was a new spirit of racial mobilization among blacks in Detroit, which boasted the most black-owned businesses of ay city in the country (Shabazz, 1995). That momentum was shattered, however, by the July 1967 riots, which wrecked 14 square miles of white- and black-owned property, a scale of destruction visible in the city to this day in the inner city (Nuechterlein, 1997).
The riot began with a police raid on an illegal inner-
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Southern California, Betty Shabazz, Dr King, Henry Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Detroit Winter, Workers UAW, War II, Detroit Michigan, Depression Ford, norwood 2002, nuechterlein 1997, clark 1971, civil rights, shabazz 1995, winter 1996, detroit police, world war, wilkerson 1991, inner city, capeci wilkerson 1991,
Approximate Word count = 1890
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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