1: Beyond Racial Polarization

Political Complexity in the City and Labor Movement of the 1950s

I came looking to see if I could better my living conditions. I wanted to get schooling in a better system than Mississippi.... I wanted just to be able to make a decent living. Earn a decent wage which you could not do in Mississippi.

—Testimony of James Johnson Jr., May 11, 19711

James Johnson Jr. was born on May 28, 1934, in Starkville, Mississippi, to twenty-year-old James Johnson Sr. and fifteen-year-old Eleanor “Edna” Hudson.2 For these young parents, the grinding poverty that had come as such a shock to many northerners in the 1930s was nothing new. From the moment that each was physically able, they had labored as sharecroppers on an 1,800-acre estate owned by the family of ex-Confederate officer Hubbard Turner Saunders. And although they were delighted by the birth of James Junior, trying to provide for the new family unit only made James and Edna’s lives more difficult.3

Despite their economic hardships, the Johnsons enjoyed an active social life that revolved around the Josey Creek School and the Josey Creek Missionary Baptist Church. Both school and church were located about a mile away on Highway 82 leading into Starkville. In 1944, the army drafted James Senior. While he was stationed in Missouri and in North Carolina, James Senior sent a monthly military paycheck of $140 to Edna. Her goal, in turn, was to save enough to buy a home for the family far from the property where they labored. About a year after James Senior came home, and right after the birth of daughter Marva,4 Edna and James Senior finally bought an $800 house with the army checks that Edna had saved.5 Edna and James Senior’s new home was a little wooden “shotgun shack.” The house was not sealed, but Edna and James Senior put up weather-stripping to make it warmer. They had a kitchen and two bedrooms now, and although they had no running water, at least there was a well in the backyard.6

James Junior was eleven when his parents became homeowners, and yet this move had not made his life much better. James Junior’s childhood experiences of working in the fields, attending school, and participating in religious revivals may have been typical, he was by no means a typical child. By the age of twelve, he was unusually terrified of violence, experienced blackouts, suffered hallucinations, and felt intense insecurity around white people. When James was only nine, he had witnessed the gruesome lynching of his cousin Maggie Foster Taylor’s brother, Henry, on Highway 82. On June 13, 1943, a mob of whites killed Henry, allegedly for being in love with a white girl. It was after this brutal attack that James went into “a nervous rage” and “heard voices,” and this is when his nightmares began.7 By the time he was thirteen, James had such a hard time sleeping and such a nervous stomach that his mother took him to see Dr. Hunter Ledbetter Scales. The doctor gave him a “Pepto-Bismol-like” medication, and James continued to see him about twice a month. James still woke up screaming and sweating at night, however, and he was still terrified of whites.8

James Junior’s emotional troubles were further exacerbated by the fact that, throughout his childhood, his father was often verbally and physically abusive to his mother.9 Indeed, even though they went on to have three more children, over time tensions between Edna and James Senior escalated. Seeking a better life for the family, James Senior decided to go to Michigan to search for a job.10 When a better position never materialized, James Senior eventually came back to Mississippi, where he got a job as a janitor at Mississippi State University.11 Because of the strain of uneven employment and the already rocky nature of their relationship, James Senior and Edna divorced soon after his return.

After the divorce, Edna began a new life for herself and her children by taking a job cleaning the house of a white woman, Obera Powell.12 Edna walked five miles to her job, and the fact that she had to work so far away from home placed a new strain on the family.13 Although James managed to keep up his attendance first at the Oktibbeha County Training School and then Maben High School, he continued to have terrible nightmares. Clearly, the years of severe economic deprivation, as well as the violence at home and the lynching of Henry Foster in 1943, had scarred James deeply. Shortly after James began high school, he began to think about moving north to find a good job, to flee the poverty and racism of the South, and, he hoped, to escape his own personal demons. He finished one term at Maben High School and then decided to move to Detroit in April of 1953.14

When Johnson arrived in the Motor City, housing was difficult to come by, so he went to live with his aunt and uncle, Ora and Charlie Johnson, who had migrated there in 1942.15 After moving in, James joined the Calvary Baptist Church, decided to finish high school, and got two jobs so that he could pay rent to his relatives and send some money home. Almost immediately, however, he was drafted into the army. When James left Detroit in December 1956, he arranged for his brother L.A. to take one of his jobs as a kitchen helper at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

James was stationed in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, until 1957, and during this time his nervous condition worsened dramatically. His deep-seated fear of whites was only exacerbated in the army, where almost all of the authority figures were white Eventually, recurring emotional problems caused army doctors to recommend his early release. After his discharge, James returned to Detroit and went back to work at the Selfridge Air Force Base, this time as a stock helper. After a few years, James quit the job at the base and remained unemployed for about six months.16 Eventually, he began working with his aunt for a white family in the wealthy suburb of Bloomfield Hills. He did yard work and window-washing for several months, but then he quit this seasonal job to take a full-time position as a janitor in a local restaurant, the Scotch and Sirloin.17 With a higher-paying job, Johnsons faith in his decision to move to the North was renewed. Like many recent migrants to the Motor City, he optimistically believed that life in Detroit in the coming years was indeed going to be better than it ever could have been in the South.

James Johnson Jr. was a constituent of one of the United States’ largest demographic transformations of the twentieth century—the Second Great Migration. The disappointments that Johnson faced after he arrived in Detroit mirrored those of many other recent migrants to the Motor City. But Johnson’s abiding faith that, despite adversity and disappointment, he one day would find greater opportunity in the North was also held by scores of African Americans new to Detroit after World War II.

The sheer magnitude of the Second Migration certainly unsettled many northern white urbanites. But to the utter dismay of Detroit’s hopeful migrant black community, such white unease often translated into vicious violence against them, just as it had in the South. And yet, while brutal and daily white-perpetrated racial violence was certainly one hallmark of Detroit in the 1950s, white racial conservatives were neither the only nor most powerful group trying to determine Detroit’s postwar character. First, very real political differences among whites routinely thwarted every white attempt to unify along racial lines. Indeed, for every group of white racial and political conservatives in Detroit, there were other whites who championed civil rights as well as a liberal, if not a leftist, political agenda for the city. Second, but of no less importance, despite the ugly and relentless white-on-black violence that took place in the Motor City, Detroit’s African Americans were never passive victims. They, too, became politicized in complex ways during the 1950s and actively sought to shape their urban destiny. In short, because every racial tension visited upon Detroit was immeasurably complicated by contending political visions of how the new biracial metropolis should evolve, and because Detroit’s African Americans and progressive whites actually began to unite against racial injustice and political conservatism as the 1950s progressed, this decade would leave a legacy of possibility, not merely polarization, for the Detroiters of the 1960s to reckon with.

* * * *

Between 1910 and 1966, the number of African Americans living outside the South rose from 800,800 to 9.7 million—an eleven-fold increase.18 The most concentrated movement occurred during World Wars I and II, as the labor markets of the northern cities opened up to blacks.19 Of the 6.5 million African Americans who moved from the rural South to the urban North between 1910 and 1970, 5.5 million migrated after 1940.20

Wartime jobs are what lured southern African Americans like James Johnson’s father to the North. Changes in the southern labor market soon became an equally important incentive to move. The introduction of cotton-picking machinery, for example, signaled the demise of the labor-intensive sharecropping system.21 A new reliance on chemical herbicides also contributed to what has been called a general “black disengagement from southern agriculture,” as did landowners’ resistance to paying farm laborers a minimum wage.22 As a result of all these factors, 1,597,000 southern African Americans migrated to the North between 1940 and 1950, and another 1,457,000 migrated between 1950 and 1960.23 By 1966, the proportion of American blacks living in the South had dropped to 55 percent.24 In Johnson’s home state of Mississippi alone, the percentage dropped well below that.25

African Americans who left the South during the 1940s and 1950s headed for a number of major northern cities, including Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, New York, and also Detroit.26 Detroit in particular attracted thousands of men and women hungry for a decent wage, since auto magnate Henry Ford enjoyed a national reputation as the black man’s friend, willing to employ him when others would not.27 As testimony to the magnitude of postwar southern migration to the Motor City, by 1970, most black Detroiters had direct family ties to Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and the Carolinas.28 And, as a result of this massive migration, African Americans fundamentally altered the city’s geography, dramatically recomposed its working class, and unwittingly unsettled both the civic and labor order.

African Americans, of course, had not migrated to an empty city. Since the late 1800s, Detroit had been a magnet for the world’s immigrants, who found the promise of an auto industry job, and eventually a decent union wage, a powerful enticement. Postwar Detroit was as ethnically diverse as any major northern city, with 81,383 migrants from Canada, 59,343 from Poland, 29,908 from Italy, 22,868 from Germany, 26,102 from England and Wales, and 21,976 from Russia.29 These and immigrants from other countries greatly cherished their ethnic individuality. Despite their ethnic differences and the fact that political differences had also divided them during the not-so-distant 1930s, Detroit’s ethnic whites came out of World War II optimistic that the postwar period would be characterized by political unity that, in turn, would facilitate social stability and economic security. The moment that hostilities ceased abroad, however, political tensions at home reerupted with a vengeance.

Detroiters were not likely to forget the political clashes in their city before World War II. During the depression, and especially during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First New Deal, Detroit had experienced some of the nation’s most severe political fragmentation and worst social upheaval. The depression hit the Motor City hard, and in its wake, communists, socialists, right-wing populists, and left- as well as right-leaning liberals vied for political control.30 But though Detroiters appeared irreparably divided during this period, in fact a cross-fertilization of their seemingly incompatible agendas was taking place. For example, the UAW, which became a key supporter of the New Deal, largely succeeded in its battle for industrywide recognition because of the agitation and activism of communists and socialists in its midst. Likewise, liberal Democratic party support of union recognition made FDR the electoral choice of many Motor City residents who had previously been suspicious of him. And, of course, during FDR’s first term in office the threat posed by both conservative demagogues and Communist party organizers in cities like Detroit led the president to adopt far more aggressive measures for improving life in America during his second term.31

Out of this heady political mix that was the 1930s came the Second New Deal. Not surprisingly, FDR’s affirmation of a worker’s right to join a union, as well as his popular welfare and work initiatives, went a long way toward dissipating political discord in Detroit. And because Detroiters seemed so willing to put aside their political differences for the war effort thereafter, a New Deal consensus appeared to reign. Certainly, political consensus, even during wartime, only ran so deep. Each of FDR’s Second New Deal initiatives generated much political controversy, and, of course, labor conflict surfaced repeatedly in countless wartime work stoppages despite the labor movement’s “No Strike Pledge” to industry and government alike. Compared with the political front of the pre–Second New Deal period, however, that of the war years was remarkably calm.

As soon as Detroiters came home from the battlefronts of Europe and the Pacific and began converting their auto plants to peacetime production, it became clear that any wartime political unity had in fact been fleeting. Political fragmentation once again became a Detroit hallmark. Certainly the political debate had shifted markedly from what it was in the 1930s, primarily because the Communist party’s erratic positions on the war had undermined much of the Left’s support base, and also because the programs of the Second New Deal had stolen the thunder of the city’s right-wing populists. With the power of both the far Right and the far Left in Detroit on the wane during the war, immediately thereafter political debates largely took place within the framework of New Deal liberalism. This fact, however, did not ensure greater civic harmony. Indeed, from 1945 to 1959, those in the New Deal coalition who saw themselves as more conservative regarding fiscal as well as domestic and foreign policy continually fought those New Dealers more progressive vis-à-vis these same policies for the right to shape the new postwar city and labor movement in their image.

Detroit’s postwar political discord is clearly reflected in the mayoral elections of 1945 and 1949, as well as in the bitter factional fighting that came to polarize the city’s largest labor union, the UAW, between 1946 and 1947. In 1945, mayoral candidate Richard Frankensteen, a left-of-center liberal who supported racial equality as well as a militant posture for the labor movement, faced off against a politician noticeably to his right named Edward Jefferies. Indicating that a quite conservative pall had fallen over Detroit immediately after the war, it was Jefferies who won that year. But indicative as well of how politically fractured white voters had become in this same period, the bitter 1945 election had been close.

Encouraged by the closeness of the race, Frankensteen decided to run against Jefferies once again in 1949. This time, however, an even more conservative candidate, Albert Cobo, as well as another left-liberal contender, George Edwards, entered the race. The candidates in the 1949 mayoral election spanned the political spectrum and yet once again it was the most right-leaning candidate, Cobo, who emerged victorious. Both Jefferies and Cobo won their offices after embracing the anti-Communist rhetoric of the cold war.32 Given both Frankensteen’s and Edwards’s left-of-center position in the New Deal coalition, as well as the fact that Frankensteen openly had opposed anti-Communist purging in the UAW and Edwards had once been a member of the Socialist party, their opponents had much fuel to fire up voter suspicions that these men were “subversive.” Campaign literature from both the Jefferies and Cobo camps accused Frankensteen and Edwards, respectively, of being too “Pro-Negro.”33 Considering that blacks were becoming a larger percentage of the Detroit population, this accusation struck a particular chord among those hostile to this demographic transformation. During the 1945 election, white neighborhoods were mysteriously flooded with cards claiming that a vote for Frankensteen was “a blow to White Exclusive neighborhoods.”34 And the discrediting of Edwards’s racial progressivism in the 1949 election was even more explicit.35 But while left-of-center liberals had clearly suffered a major defeat in the 1945 and 1949 elections, their narrow losses indicate that numerous Detroiters still held a progressive vision for the city and thus that urban conservatives were unlikely to rule indefinitely.

A similar conflict plagued Detroit’s labor movement during this period. Given its genesis, the political spectrum of the UAW was far to the left of that in the city proper, but, nevertheless, ideological battles in the labor arena were intense.36 Before World War II, communists and militant socialists had enjoyed enormous power in the UAW, particularly because their often aggressive and uncompromising efforts had secured union recognition. And even though the Communist party’s earlier ideological and strategic waffling vis-à-vis the war effort had cost it credibility in the labor movement just as it had in the city, during and after the war there was still a left-of-center force to be reckoned with in the UAW. Indeed, in 1942, left-leaning UAW leaders openly supported blacks’ efforts to move, amidst much controversy, into a new housing project in the city. And when whites openly attacked blacks during an infamous riot in 1943, the UAW’s left-of-center president, R. J. Thomas, “mercilessly criticized the conduct of the mayor and police ... and mobilized union stewards to end the violence.”37

But the left-of-center voices in Detroit’s biggest union met with serious internal resistance during these years. Take, for example, the motion introduced by black union member Shelton Tappes to get a black man on the International Executive Board of the UAW during the union’s 1943 convention. Whereas Tappes’s effort was supported by UAW leaders George Addes and Richard Frankensteen, his motion failed after other key UAW figures, most notably Walter Reuther, opposed it.38 Thus, when the war came to an end, the question of whether the UAW’s more progressive or more conservative forces would guide this union into the 1950s was uncertain.

During a bitter factional fight for control of the UAW in 1946-47, this question was decided, at least on the surface. The left wing of the UAW suffered as major a setback in this struggle, as had the city’s left-of-center political forces. Indeed, in 1946-47, a left-center caucus comprised of communists, non-communist leftists, and progressive New Dealers and led by Thomas and Addes engaged in numerous bitter battles with a right-center caucus comprised of former socialists, New Deal stalwarts, and conservative Catholic trade unionists.39 And in 1947, the head of the right-center group, Reuther, successfully took control of the 800,000-member UAW. Just as the city’s mayoral victors had tarred their opponents with the brush of “communism,” so had the right-center caucus in the UAW used unsavory red-baiting tactics to ensure its triumph. Also as in the city, however, the defeat of left-center forces in the UAW did not mean that political consensus was now on the horizon.40 Significantly, while Reuther had defeated Thomas for the UAW presidency in 1946, his “margin of victory consisted of only 124 votes of over 8700 cast,” indicating that not everyone in the UAW saw the future of the union as he did.41 Indeed worker actions in the 1950s and thereafter would prove that a left vision of postwar labor relations was not abandoned when the Reuther caucus took over.

Within this context of a politically fragmented white community and the cold war-fueled ascendancy of the white racial and political conservatives in both the Motor City and its motor plants, the Second Great Migration of southern blacks took place. As the brutal attacks by working-class whites on poor blacks attempting to move into the Sojourner Truth housing development in 1942 and the grisly riot of 1943 make clear, white racial conservatism played a visible role in postmigration Detroit.42 As blacks came to comprise an ever-greater percentage of Detroit’s population, and as they grew increasingly insistent on equal treatment and access to civic resources, conservative whites worried greatly about their future. Believing that all Detroiters were feeling the pinch of a tight postwar housing market and the uncertainty of the postwar economy to an equal degree, such whites were not sympathetic to the plight of city blacks.43 Thus, as the numbers of blacks in Detroit increased, racial conflict escalated.

As historian Thomas Sugrue has shown, the issue of access to housing most split city residents along racial lines after the war and into the 1950s.44 Between 1950 and 1960, Detroit had gained 183,183 African Americans, and this group primarily resided in areas known as the Black Bottom and Paradise Valley—a thirty-block district that originally had been home to the city’s Jewish population. Life for these transplanted southerners was both exhilarating and exceedingly difficult. On the one hand, they made Paradise Valley a cultural Mecca of music, dance, poetry, and painting. There, blacks socialized in the Chesterfield Lounge, the Flame Bar, and the Forest Club, each of which hosted some of the country’s finest African American entertainers, such as Josephine Baker, Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughn, and Nat King Cole.45 On the other hand, the average lifespan for African Americans living in Paradise Valley fell far below that of Detroit’s whites, partly because their death rate from pneumonia was three times higher and the percentage of blacks with tuberculosis was 71.5 percent higher as well.46 From the earliest days of the migration, the health statistics in Detroit’s black neighborhoods were so dire that city officials could not help but notice.47 Yet because city officials did so little to change the situation, conditions only worsened with time. In 1950, the United Community Services found that in the all-black subcommunities of Cadillac, John R., Mt. Elliot, Fort, Michigan, and Cass, most dwellings were still in extremely poor condition, severe overcrowding still existed, and there was still much death from disease.48

Of course, not every migrant endured such onerous conditions, and not every African American new to Detroit experienced deprivation or difficulty to an equal degree. Some, such as the migrant father of Detroiter Bernard Odell, owned small businesses.49 Others, such as Charles Diggs Sr., became politicians, and still others, like Shelton Tappes and Hodges Mason, became important figures in the UAW.50 Clearly, the Black Bottom was as diverse in terms of class as it was isolated by race. No matter what their class background, however, it was extremely difficult for African Americans of any status or means to move out of unhealthy and impoverished neighborhoods, particularly since the Detroit Housing Commission had formally adopted a policy of residential segregation in the riot year of 1943.51

Despite both the legal and social mandates for segregated housing, however, Detroit’s African American population eventually began to seek housing outside of the lower East Side. According to scholar June Manning Thomas, in 1952 the black poor’s need for shelter meant that there were 5,226 black families on the city’s waiting list for public housing, and these African Americans had to find a place to live with or without the help of government officials or the goodwill of white Detroiters.52 Indeed, the city’s racially conservative whites had no intention of sharing Detroit’s notoriously limited housing stock. Too often they greeted black attempts to move out of the Black Bottom with brutal violence. In 1955, Detroit’s Commission on Community Relations (CCR) noted that the most vicious housing violence was erupting in city neighborhoods that were “on the periphery of the area most heavily populated by Negroes,” because “there is a strong feeling in this ‘border’ area that it is being ‘invaded’ by colored people.”53 The CCR remarked further that “the one outstanding fact here is that mass intimidation is an important part of these cases.” In one such case cited by the CCR, whites held two mass organizing meetings; one was attended by 600-800 people, the other by about 1500 people.54

Such white opposition to black residential mobility was expressed politically as well as physically. For example, whites’ demand that the city build more white housing set in motion urban renewal projects that quickly raised the specter of housing blacks in ways that these very whites strongly opposed. At the behest of his white constituents, for example, Mayor Jefferies condemned 129 acres of inhabited land on Detroit’s all-black lower East Side in November 1946 to construct new housing. While his white constituents were delighted, they also felt it necessary to clarify their solid opposition to erecting any public housing in this area. Quite unexpectedly Jefferies’s major slum-clearance initiative, called the “Detroit Plan,” had become politically dicey. To appease his conservative support base, Jefferies quickly denounced any plan for erecting public housing on the cleared land. His constituents, such as those who read the Polish edition of a local newspaper called the Home Gazette, believed firmly that “American citizens have the right to demand that their children have a right to be brought up in an area of their choosing without being forced to associate with an element which breeds crime, immorality, and rowdyism.”55 And when the conservative Cobo became mayor in 1949, he was equally determined not to disappoint such electors. Cobo repeatedly assured white Detroiters that urban renewal and public housing would never be synonymous.56

City conservatives’ success in preventing the construction of sufficient housing for city blacks during the late 1940s meant that urban renewal cost more than 6,000 black Detroiters their homes. Ironically, this in itself only fueled white conservatives’ fears. Such severe African American displacement virtually ensured that blacks would be forced to seek housing in all-white neighborhoods. As attorney and professor Harold Norris noted in 1952, “The city is creating refugees ... [and] there will be a price to pay for this inhumane eviction policy.”57 Indeed, racially conservative whites may have temporarily prevented African Americans from leaving the Black Bottom for new public housing developments, but they failed in their larger effort to keep the city fully segregated. As Detroit scholar Steve Babson points out, “The very color line that whites hoped Cobo would preserve with his anti–public housing policies, was breached by the Mayor’s demolition crews. As Cobo’s bulldozers pushed poorer blacks into surrounding black neighborhoods, higher income blacks, in turn, pushed into nearby white areas.”58 And, according to social geographers Bryan Thompson and Robert Sinclair, between 1950 and 1960 “no fewer than 83 additional census tracts became 50 percent black compared to 24 in the previous decade.”59 Thus, Detroit’s housing issue only became more contentious as many whites refused to accede to neighborhood integration gracefully, while many blacks had little choice but to move into neighborhoods occupied by these very whites.

Housing was not the only issue that divided Detroit racially during the 1950s. Equal access to education soon paralleled housing integration in its rancor. Because many of Detroit’s southern black migrants either brought children or had children within ten years of their arrival, the Detroit public school system was as demographically disrupted as the housing market. Writing in 1967, experts appointed by the federal government noted that, over the previous decade, “the [Detroit] school system had gained 50,000 to 60,000 children. Fifty-one percent of the elementary school classes were overcrowded. Simply to achieve a statewide average, the system needed an additional 1,651 teachers and 1,000 classrooms.”60 As black children flooded into certain city schools, white children exited them due to parental fears about race-mixing and declining standards. As one such white parent put it, city officials should “separate the whites and the Negroes, especially in the schools.”61

That African American residents needed decent places to live and decent schools for their children clearly heightened racial tensions in the postwar Motor City. Not surprisingly, African Americans’ need for secure and decent-paying jobs also generated noticeable racial conflict in the city’s motor plants. It was logical that black migrants would gravitate most to jobs in the auto industry. By 1930, 14 percent of all autoworkers were African American because auto employers had made a push to bring blacks north to work in their factories during World War I. As scholar Joyce Peterson Shaw notes, during the Great War, “employment agencies distributed advertisements with glowing accounts of conditions and wages in northern factories. Bus companies helped distribute leaflets urging blacks to use their services to take them to a better life.”62

During and after World War II, however, northern industrial employers became far more circumspect about hiring “too many” blacks and they often specifically requested white workers when they contacted the U.S. Employment Service. According to Detroit’s African American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, on 31 August 1946, General Motors went directly to the U.S. Employment Service in Washington, asking that it send “white workers” to Detroit.63 Auto employers’ preference for white over black hires in their facilities may well have stemmed from a suspicion that black workers would be political troublemakers on the shop floor. As scholar Roger Keeran points out, “the intense activity of the communists in support of Black rights during the war naturally resulted in increased Party membership and influence among black autoworkers.”64 Indeed, by 1942, the Communist party’s recruitment in Michigan was averaging 39 African American members a month, which was “more than double the monthly average of 19 in 1941.”65

Regardless of their prejudices, however, auto employers were forced by the tremendous wartime and postwar demand for their products to hire thousands of African Americans. Yet, as with housing and schools, the jobs available to blacks were noticeably the worst. Auto companies not only routinely relegated their new African Americans hires to the least desirable jobs, but they also forced them to labor disproportionately in the industry’s dangerous foundry and stamping operations. While virtually every white-owned company in Detroit placed blacks in the most inferior and most hazardous jobs, auto companies also sent them to extremely hostile all-white plants that in turn precipitated numerous ugly “hate strikes.” In 1941 alone, whites shut down Curtis Aircraft, Hudson Motors, and Packard Motors in protest of the influx of black workers. In 1943, Packard Motors experienced another particularly vicious strike that dramatically escalated racial tensions throughout the industry.66

This sentiment did not disappear during the 1950s. Despite white Detroiters’ deep commitment to trade unionism, particularly to the industrial unionism of the CIO, they were not always persuaded that the New Deal’s promise of workingmen’s rights necessarily extended to black citizens. Indeed, according to survey results in 1951, “the [Detroit] CIO has slightly larger numbers opposed to equal treatment of Negroes than do other unions.”67 Notably, 65 percent of CIO members surveyed in the Motor City opposed such equality.68 Far fewer whites advocated formal segregation in the workplace than they did in housing (2 percent compared with 56 percent). Integration in the workplace, however, was far less of a potential threat than it was in the neighborhood, as employers made sure to lock blacks away in the least-skilled and most dangerous areas of a given plant.

Although black Detroiters’ overwhelming need to draw on civic resources such as housing, education, and jobs clearly fueled tremendous white racial hostility, it is nevertheless a mistake to see racial polarization as the dominating force in postwar Detroit. While white racial brutality clearly flourished after the Second Great Migration, that was not the only, nor even the most important, result of this demographic transformation. This dramatic migration also fueled African Americans’ determination to achieve equal opportunity in both the city and its workplaces, and, significantly, numerous whites not only sympathized with these efforts but also actively promoted them. Indeed, the most notable fact about the mass movement of African Americans to Detroit was that it brought greater political complexity than already existed to both the urban center and its labor movement. During the 1950s, Detroit was as politically fragmented as it was racially divided.

While blacks were certainly marginalized and intensely discriminated against in postwar Detroit, they were never passive victims.69 Between 1945 and 1960, a full-fledged civil rights movement was being born in northern cities just as it was in the South. And because of Detroit migrants’ southern roots and their long history of resisting discrimination in that region, they arrived in the Motor City well versed in the necessity of fighting racism where they lived and worked simultaneously. Armed with such a broad-based activist tradition, Detroit’s black community was well equipped during the 1950s to challenge every racially exclusive and discriminatory practice of the city and the auto industry at once.

Because class divisions within the black community were even more palpable in the North than they had been in the South, such fault lines always had the potential to compromise mass action. While Detroit’s blacks fully recognized the class divisions in their midst, however, they were united by the shared experiences of being forced into the least desirable housing and jobs, barred from most positions of both civic and labor authority, and singled out for punishment by the keepers of law and order.70 Indeed, during the 1950s, racial and political consciousness, not class consciousness, led Detroit’s African Americans to form a formidable civil rights movement.71

The prevalence of residential discrimination first led scores of black Detroiters to join local civil rights groups and to encourage these organizations to use both direct action and legal activism to make Detroit a better place to live. Formed in 1911, the Detroit Branch NAACP was one of the oldest chapters in the country and became one of the largest as the 1950s progressed. When the NAACP successfully waged a dramatic legal battle against discrimination in public housing between 1950 and 1954, it won great favor among city blacks from every walk of life. In 1958, once again the NAACP and other civil rights groups enjoyed a key victory when they forced city officials, who were planning to raze a black neighborhood of 3,000 to 3,400 families to make room for a new medical center, to build low-income housing on that site as well as three black churches.72 Through actions such as these, the Detroit civil rights movement made it clear to local whites that the desegregation of city neighborhoods was a top priority, but it was by no means the only priority. City blacks were also determined to target the rampant segregation that plagued city schools.

Thanks to the activism of lawyers for the NAACP nationally, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court finally outlawed school segregation, and Detroit blacks ran with this ruling to the same extent that blacks living in Little Rock did. Even before the famed Brown v. the Board of Education mandate, however, blacks had already pressured city leaders to adopt an “intercultural policy” for Detroit’s school system in 1945. After Brown, blacks pushed city officials even harder and forced them to adopt a Fair Employment Practices provision for the city’s educational facilities in 1955, to endorse a Fair Employment Practices Act in 1956, to support the goal of Equal Educational Opportunity in 1957, and to pass a nondiscrimination bylaw for all city schools in 1959.73 The NAACP was particularly gratified to see that it had succeeded in pressuring the city also to appoint the first African American to Detroit’s Board of Education in 1955, because this indicated clearly that blacks might play an important role in shaping school policy.74

The Detroit civil rights movement also attempted to desegregate city restaurants and end hiring discrimination in major urban department stores. In 1951 and 1952, NAACP volunteers on a “Restaurant Discrimination Committee” conducted sit-ins because, as Detroiter Clyde Cleveland recalls, “the North was just as segregated as the South when I was growing up, particularly in terms of housing, [and] the experiences that I had of not being served at a restaurant were not in Georgia or Alabama or Mississippi—they were right here in the city of Detroit.”75 Many black residents became optimistic as the Detroit civil rights movement actively fought all aspects of urban exclusion. As all city blacks knew, however, two key barriers to securing a better life still had to be eliminated: police brutality and the rampant discrimination that African Americans faced on Detroit’s shop floors and within its largest union.

Between 1950 and 1960, the abominable state of police-community relations is what most encouraged Detroiters to participate in the civil rights movement. After the Second Great Migration, whenever conflicts about housing or education erupted, city leaders charged the Detroit Police Department (DPD) with restoring law and order. Yet, between 1950 and 1960, increasing numbers of black citizens began to feel that the police did not serve and protect all Detroiters equally. In 1951, 21 percent of the Detroit blacks surveyed, as compared with only 4 percent of the whites, “included the Police Department as one of the three most important matters that needs attention in the city.”76 One black respondent noted that the police “are too prejudiced. All Negroes look alike to them; they can’t tell a good Negro from a bad one.”77 Another suggested that “the police shouldn’t be so quick to shoot and go into homes and wreck them as they do some Negro homes.”78 According to longtime Detroiter Arthur Johnson, “the ugliest part of the problem in the ’50s was police brutality against Black people.”79

Before World War II, the majority (65 percent) of Detroit’s white police officers came from the Midwest, and almost half of all officers grew up in small rural towns. In the early 1940s, almost one-quarter of the DPD consisted of men whose previous job had been as a foreman or a skilled craftsman,80 although the work backgrounds of police officers became a bit more diverse by 1945, with the entrance of hundreds of returning veterans. During the 1950s, more police recruits began to come from the South, although most still came from Detroit’s virtually all-white pool of tool and die workers, pipe-fitters, grinders, drill press operators, postal clerks, and mail carriers; this pool also included former foremen, inspectors, and security personnel from the auto industry.81 Because the Second Great Migration had no impact whatsoever on the DPD’s hiring practices, it remained remarkably homogeneous throughout the 1950s.82 The few blacks who were hired endured much white hostility. In 1957, for example, “white police officers revolted against the Commissioner’s orders to integrate scout cars.”83 Clearly, the DPD’s all-white character did not bode well for black efforts to improve civic race relations as the 1960s dawned.

But city blacks were undaunted. In response to escalating acts of racial brutality, in 1957 the NAACP conducted “an analysis of police brutality complaints reported to the Detroit Branch NAACP in the period from January 1, 1956 to July 30, 1957.”84 With this report, the NAACP intended to bring the DPD’s rampant racism to the attention of city officials and also to suggest ways for them to resolve the problem. The organization noted in its report that it had received 103 complaints and that the most frequent type stemmed from “physical assault followed by racial epithets.”85 Of the 103 complaints, 33 involved physical assault and 23 involved both physical and verbal assault; 12 complaints arose from racial epithets on the part of police officers and 4 from false arrests. Eighteen complaints were filed by black women, and one complaint came from a 16-year-old black boy.86 The NAACP pointed out as well that “90 percent of the complainants are working people without a previous record who believe they are subjected to unwarranted abuse because of their race.”87 Seeking to correct this situation, the NAACP suggested “organizing a representative biracial citizens group to make a survey of the police department and recommend improvements based on their findings.”88

Just as a civil rights movement began to tackle the city’s ever-present injustices in the 1950s, so did a civil rights movement come of age in Detroit’s auto plants. The labor civil rights movement shared much, including leadership personnel and tactics, with its urban counterpart. In the 1940s, for example, city civil rights activist George Crockett Jr., who was also a senior attorney for the U.S. Department of Labor and one of the first hearings officers in FDR’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, turned his attention to Detroit’s auto industry, where he pushed for a UAW Fair Practices Department to achieve greater racial equity in the union’s ranks, as well as to get “no discrimination” clauses placed in all UAW contracts with the major auto employers. Crockett sometimes found himself at odds with UAW officials over such intra-union civil rights efforts, but he was undeterred. Throughout the 1950s, Crockett continued to promote civil rights in the labor arena by fighting to integrate UAW bowling leagues as well as the leadership of various UAW locals. Because the UAW supported at least the principle of civil rights, the black middle-class leadership of Detroit’s civil rights movement largely supported its white leaders, just as it stood by white progressives in the city. As historian Philip Foner points out, “in the eyes of the NAACP’s Labor Department, the UAW was ‘the best of the industrial unions on the issue of race.’”89

Civil rights demonstration outside of Kresge Department Store, 1961. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Nevertheless, Detroit’s civil rights activists were always outspoken about the need for this union, and all city whites, to take a far more active role in eradicating racial inequality. As they well realized, there was a widespread feeling among working-class blacks that white labor leaders needed to be pushed in that direction. To African Americans on the line, “the disparity between UAW rhetoric and conditions in the union and on the job was really what mattered.”90 As a result of this sentiment, in 1957, thirteen black union members came together to form a civil rights organization for workers in the UAW called the Trade Union Leadership Conference (TULC). Although the TULC only had 500 members when it started, by the mid-1960s it had 13,000 registered members, with many more nonmember workers supporting its goals.91 As in the city, whites in the auto plants were put on notice that their discriminatory desires would not be allowed to dominate postwar Detroit.

If it were the case that blacks alone were agitating against racial discrimination in the Motor City and the motor plants then, indeed, racial polarization (albeit with blacks and whites more evenly matched in their efforts) would appear to have dominated Detroit’s postwar landscape. Significantly, however, many city whites joined black efforts to end civic and labor discrimination, and thus white racial solidarity was always being undermined. The existence and importance of white opposition to prejudice and white privilege in postwar Detroit became clear in 1947, when a group of white families joined with several black families to form a nonprofit organization called the Schoolcraft Gardens Cooperative Association in order to build a new 400-unit housing development. The association bought a seventy-acre tract of land and drew up plans for its new biracial neighborhood that, in addition to housing, would offer playgrounds, community facilities, and even a shopping center.92

By 1949, the proposed Schoolcraft development had generated much political tension within Detroit’s white community. Both reflecting and fueling this tension, a story appearing in the conservative Brightmoor Journal on the eve of Cobo’s election intimated that the Schoolcraft Association had chosen the particular plot that it did because “it was on route to the new race track.”93 The article then suggested that white Detroiters should worry greatly about the “race-mixing, sex, and gambling” that were sure to take place if the cooperative was built.94 By December 1949, and for months thereafter, a series of articles appeared in several other conservative white community newspapers, such as the Red ford Record, “in which various appeals to racial prejudice were made under such banner headlines as ‘Co op Seeking Conflict? Move to Bring Racial Housing into Area’ and ‘Biracial Group Seeks Tax-payers Cash.’”95 In addition, racially conservative white homeowners had formed their own organization called the Tel-Craft Association and began to petition the city’s Common Council to change the local zoning ordinances so that Schoolcraft Gardens could not be built. In the weeks that it took council to decide this issue, both black and white members of the Schoolcraft Association wondered openly whether “the responsible elected officials of the city government [would] bow to the demands of a small group of bigoted citizens who have stooped to a campaign of lies, misrepresentations, and appeals to religious and racial prejudice.”96 Their answer came in March 1950, when the Cobo-sympathetic council decided in favor of the Tel-Craft Association and rezoned the proposed Schoolcraft Gardens plot.

The significance of the political battle over Schoolcraft Gardens cannot be overestimated. The fact that city whites were actively supporting biracial neighborhoods indicates clearly that differing political perspectives on how best to deal with Detroit’s postmigration demography directly served to undermine white racial solidarity. And although biracial political solutions to the city’s racial problems had not yet, in 1950, found a following that was strong enough to shape the contours of the postwar city, numerous city whites were determined to change this situation. Indeed, after supporting biracial initiatives such as Schoolcraft Gardens, progressive whites in Detroit stepped up their efforts to create a more racially just city by working hard to implement Brown in city schools, by joining black Detroiters during restaurant sit-ins, and by helping to set up important checks on the DPD, such as a city department to hear citizen complaints.

Having worked collectively to try to elect left-liberals such as George Edwards in the early postwar years and then having worked individually in the legal arena or within city agencies to promote equal opportunity, many white Detroiters clearly rejected the premises of white solidarity. Take, for instance, two key figures in Detroit who repeatedly and publicly rejected any appeal to white privilege and who worked actively to end it: white attorney Maurice Sugar and white sociologist-turned-city-official Mel Ravitz. Not only did Sugar personally recoil from the idea of white dominance, in legal battle after legal battle he represented blacks as well as whites and fought directly against segregation initiatives in the city and the labor movement.97 Likewise, Ravitz worked tirelessly in the 1950s to eliminate segregation in Detroit by creating neighborhood block clubs and also by supporting various civil rights initiatives as a member of the Detroit City Planning Commission.

Civil rights activism by both blacks and whites only cemented the view of Detroit’s racially conservative whites that ridding Detroit of all African Americans, or at least keeping them segregated from whites, was the best way to achieve civic harmony. As one white Detroiter suggested, “send them to Africa. Make a community of their own. Send them back South. Send them.”98 And, when they were asked what should be done about “Negro-White Relations,” a full 68 percent advocated some form of city segregation.99 According to one of these whites, “I’d like to see the city sectioned off and have different races sectioned off and each live in their own area. I hate to see a territory invaded, like by colored.”100 With 54 percent of Detroit’s whites feeling “unfavorable toward full acceptance” of the city’s African Americans and with these same whites feeling under siege from the many “Pro-Black” whites there, white out-migration to nearby suburbs, in addition to racial violence and political divisiveness, characterized the city in the 1950s.101 Of course, a distaste for living near blacks and a disgust with the political agenda of racially progressive whites were not the only things fueling suburbanization in this decade.102 Many whites left after having witnessed or participated in “more than 200 racial incidents ... when blacks broke through the city’s invisible racial lines.”103 Others left because they were tired of Detroit’s ugly political factionalism in every civic election since 1946. But as Sugrue points out, many also left because “between 1954 and 1960, Detroit lost nearly 90,000 jobs, many of which evaporated during a severe recession in 1957 and 1958.”104 And, just as important, a new matrix of federally funded freeways and the more affordable automobile made white mobility away from any city problem both possible and highly attractive.

But while white flight in the 1950s was dramatic and indicative of the degree of postwar instability, it was not itself a decisive factor in Detroit’s long-term social or economic viability. Such outmigration was certainly a drain on city resources, but it by no means dealt the city a death blow. Most white urbanites did not pursue the dream of less contentious, more affluent, more homogeneous living on the open suburban frontier. Most stayed in Detroit—sometimes because of economic barriers to their own mobility but just as often because they still laid major claim to the city. For every white Detroiter who left the urban center because he or she hated its new racial composition or felt that “everything seems too crowded here in the city to raise a family,” there were many others who remained committed to inner-city living and decided to stay put.105 Despite white conservatives’ hostility to what Detroit had become since World War II, most of them were nevertheless unwilling to surrender the city to blacks. And despite progressive whites’ dismay at Detroit’s racial injustices, they were equally unwilling to give up on the dream of biracial civic coexistence. Instead, each white group still sought political solutions to the thorny racial problems introduced to Detroit after 1945.

Of course, the suburbs’ racially exclusive nature made out-migration an impossibility for African American Detroiters. But rather than lament such unjust barriers, they took pleasure in the fact that their efforts to achieve equitable biracial living in their city over the course of the 1950s seemed to be gaining momentum. Granted, Detroit and its auto plants had become more politically and racially fractured than ever during that decade, and, on the surface, this did not bode well for the future. Nevertheless, by 1959, at least the city’s African American community and its civil-rights-sympathetic whites had reason to be optimistic. In that year, city blacks, in deliberate alliance with racially progressive white Detroiters, began to mobilize very effectively to take control of the city. Because these Motor City residents worked collectively and tirelessly as the 1950s came to a close to bring their social, economic, and political agenda for a different Detroit to the electoral arena, in 1961 white racial conservatism would suffer a major defeat.