When riots erupted on April 4, 1968, engulfing Washington, Chicago and dozens of other American cities in violence, journalists and scholars tried to make sense of the chaos.

Newspapers covered the arson, shattered glass and occasional bloodshed, focusing on its most immediate cause, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. earlier that day. Monographs chronicled the racial tensions of a more distant past, analyzing urban segregation and racially motivated mobs from the turn of the century to the Depression. 

Most of the scholarship, however, failed to analyze institutional forces during World War II and the decades that followed, when millions of African Americans migrated to cities outside of the South, high-rise towers sprouted up in predominantly black neighborhoods and policymakers announced a cheery-sounding doctrine known as “urban renewal” — what writer James Baldwin would later dub “Negro removal.”

With few exceptions, the impact of these policy decisions went unexplored until 1983, when historian Arnold R. Hirsch published “Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960.” The book sent a jolt through the field of urban history and remains a touchstone for historians, sociologists and journalists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates. ...