working in the foundry in the early twentieth century in an oral history project cited in a 1979 Journal of Negro History article:
As I looked around, all the men were dirty and greasy and smoked up. They were beyond recognition. There were only three or four Whites. These were Polish. Negroes told me later they were the only ones able to stand the work. Their faces looked exactly like Negro faces. They were so matted and covered with oil and dirt that no skin showed. My friend and I went home discussing how it was that they could say everyone was free with equal rights up North. There was no one in the foundry but Negroes. We didn’t believe those men wanted to be in the foundry.6
Blacks were most often excluded from the assembly lines because White laborers refused to work with them, limiting the amount of quality jobs available for Blacks. Frank Hadas, a Ford engineer during the period, described in an oral history project cited in a 1979 Journal of Negro History article on how employers justified putting Blacks in inferior roles and dangerous positions in the early twentieth century. “You could have them on some dirty, rough job where there wouldn’t be many Whites to complain against them,” said Hadas. “But if you tried to mix them in the assembly lines or any place else where Whites predominated and hung their coats touching those of the Whites you know, ‘that nigger is poison;’ you couldn’t do that.”7 Again, the federal government intervened. Apparently, when it comes to winning wars, patriotism had little patience for racism.
In 1941, Navy Secretary Frank Knox attempted to squelch racial harassment that may have slowed production. Knox issued warnings to White employees who refused to work with African Americans, according to Boyd. Refusals were to be seen as being disloyal to the government and the war efforts. Knox proclaimed that those who refused to work with Black laborers would be subject to dismissal and banishment from other wartime production jobs.8
Civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and unions like the United Auto Workers fought alongside the federal government to eradicate employment discrimination in the factories. People knew then, as they do now, that many problems in Black communities stem from a lack of job opportunities. In 1943, the preeminent scholar W.E.B. Dubois recommended in his column in the Amsterdam News these crime reduction strategies: employment at a livable wage, the eradication of African American illiteracy by 1980, healthcare for all people, and a social security system that included eliminating unemployment.9 Today we know that those who are out of the labor force for reasons that generally are not socially acceptable (such as retirement and disability) and who also are not looking for work are much more likely to commit burglary and robbery, according to a 2016 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology by researchers Gary Kleck and Dylan Jackson.10
A national Black labor movement led by A. Phillip Randolph pressured the auto industry for greater inclusion in the 1940s. Organizers put enough pressure on President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943 that he issued an executive order to get more Blacks hired in the factories, resulting in the hiring of more than 75 thousand Black Detroiters, highlighting the role the federal government could play today in improving employment outcomes.11
While labor organizers helped Black Detroiters acquire housing and jobs, victories for equity didn’t assuage hardline prejudicial attitudes of White residents, and back then they were the majority in the city: 91 percent in 1940; 84 percent in 1950; and 71 percent in 1960. The attitudes that fueled racial tensions in the 1940s and 1950s helped motivate White people to move out of Detroit. And the federal government’s housing and transportation policies facilitated those desires. White Detroiters abandoned Detroit at the expense of Black residents’ assets rather than make it a place everyone could call home.
The establishment of the interstate highway system in 1956 literally paved the way for White flight to the suburbs. Freeway construction, most notably the Edsel Ford Expressway, which was completed in the 1950s, also known as I-94, tore through predominately Black neighborhoods. Black businesses and homes were seized through eminent domain polices. More than 2,800 properties were removed for that project alone, debilitating Black wealth and economic growth. Detroit’s population dropped from 2 million to approximately 1.5 million during the 1960s when Whites moved to the suburbs, taking their tax dollars and discretionary incomes with them.
“Whites were able to use the government guaranteed housing loans that were a pillar of the [GI] bill to buy homes in the fast growing suburbs … But Black veterans weren’t able to make use of the housing provisions of the GI Bill for the most part,” wrote David Callahan of the left-leaning think tank Demos about the discrimination against Black veterans that occurred across the United States, including Detroit. “Banks generally wouldn’t make loans for mortgages in Black neighborhoods, and African-Americans were excluded from the suburbs by a combination of deed covenants and informal racism.”12 The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation established in 1934 the practice of drawing red lines around precise geographic areas the government-sponsored corporation classified as “hazardous,” disqualifying potential homebuyers from using federally-backed, low-interest loans to purchase homes in these neighborhoods. Racially restrictive housing covenants that prohibited Blacks from buying in certain areas throughout the twentieth century, isolating Blacks in areas that realized lower levels of investment than their White counterparts. “As the wealthier White population left Detroit, the overall population shrank and the city’s tax base shrank, too, leaving Detroit less able to support public schools, public safety, and its huge, geographically spread-out infrastructure,” wrote research fellow Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute in a 2014 blog post.13 People like my father Floyd were negatively impacted by a school finance structure based on local property. Born in 1951, Floyd attended severely underfunded schools in the city White people abandoned.
In the late 1950s, Floyd moved out of the Black neighborhoods of Detroit and into the Black sections of Pittsburgh. Unlike his White peers, he could not escape harsh conditions. Urban development across the country had decimated Black neighborhoods in cities everywhere, hurting the economic and social fabric that supports people. Less than a decade after developers in Detroit displaced Blacks by building highways through Black areas, city planners in Pittsburgh displaced Blacks in the 1950s by building the Civic Arena sports stadium in the economic and social center of the Black community.
The devaluing and abandonment of Black people by White Detroiters, facilitated by the federal government, left those who remained behind without a government-backed means to uplift their own social status like their White peers had done. For instance, the Black soldiers who could not use the GI Bill because of redlining and racial covenants had no choice but to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
The Civil Rights Movement did produce gains during the period: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But that legislation was followed with the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. The next month, police sicced dogs on 600 civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, racial tensions were at a breaking point. White people’s resistance to integration around the country led up to the turbulent “long hot summer” of 1967 in which 159 race riots erupted nationwide.
In Detroit, racial tensions exploded after police raided an unlicensed bar known as the Blind Pig. What police officers thought would be a standard police raid turned into “five days of violence, leaving 43 people dead, thousands of others injured and much of the city looking like a smoldering war zone,” according to Detroit Free Press reporting.14 Black Detroiters set the city ablaze, proclaiming that their lives matter. “The insurrection was the culmination of decades of institutional racism and entrenched segregation,” according
