by Herb Boyd
Some African Americans decided to open their own businesses. Wilson Beard, the grandfather of vocalist Azalia Smith Hackley, had been in Detroit since the 1840s. He established a laundry to take care of his family and hired eight to ten employees. Later Azalia’s father, Henry Smith, opened a curio shop, which contained a collection of rare ancient coins that later became a valuable addition to the city’s library, an added attraction for visitors.32 Even more prosperous was James Cole, who before his death in 1907, was considered the richest black man in the city. He began to accumulate his wealth during the Civil War, when his grain store and livery stable brought him a lucrative contract with the Union Army. As his wealth increased, he began to invest in real estate and other small businesses.33 Cole’s wealth—estimated at $200,000—and his business savvy often combined with his general interest in the welfare of the black community. In 1919, Cole opened what would become the oldest black-owned funeral parlor in the city. It grew to become a vital and cherished institution, and emulating its impressive wakes, other funeral homes, including Swanson’s, Diggs’ (now Stinson-Diggs), McFall’s, and Mason’s, followed.
In contrast to the relative prosperity of the black elite, there was the salt of the earth, the city’s toiling class, those fortunately employed just above the economic fault line of society. These African Americans were the street cleaners, haulers, bootblacks, steamer refuelers, and longshoremen, workers at all the menial jobs less desired by the Europeans. For black men trying to raise a family, these jobs were nothing to sneer at. They would have to do until the factories began offering them opportunities, albeit only the grimiest and lowest-paid positions in warehouses and foundries. This was a very intense period of racism in America. The Spanish-American War only exacerbated white racism, because the enemies, whether Spanish, creole, mestizo, or native, were all of a darker shade and were considered people of color. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, “two Negroes were lynched by mobs—hanged, burned, mutilated.”34 The arrival of millions of immigrants to America radically shifted the composition of the nation’s working class, and nowhere was their presence more keenly felt than in Detroit, where they represented a preponderant percentage of the workforce. They brought with them their own prejudice against blacks, and too many of them hardened this animosity to assure themselves of their place in the American hierarchy.
Like many other Americans, the new arrivals often believed the mean-spirited stereotypes about black Americans. They picked up these elements of white oppression from various aspects of American culture—from newspapers such as the Free Press and later from films like Birth of a Nation, from their native-born coworkers, and even from ex-President Grover Cleveland who, during a speech at a Madison Square Garden fund-raising event for Booker T. Washington in 1903, asserted that blacks were ignorant, lazy, and shiftless.35
There were a few black workers hired as iron molders in the foundries of the stove companies. By 1900, Detroit was among the nation’s leaders in the production of cast-iron stoves. Making a stove involved nearly two dozen departments, all dependent on the foundry. To produce the metal castings, molten iron was poured into the mold cavity. After cooling, the wood-framed flask that held the sand mold was dismantled and the casting shaken out from the sand. Each casting then had to be further cleaned and polished; then the parts were assembled and voilà!—the stove.36 Back in the fifties, travelers up and down Jefferson Avenue or on their way to Belle Isle used to marvel at the giant stove—said to be the largest in the world—with WELBILT inscribed on the side, which hovered near the entrance to the bridge. Visitors driving on I-94 to Detroit from the airport are often stunned to see a huge roadside Uniroyal tire as part of an advertisement and were jokingly told back then, “You ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait till you see the stove.” At one time the Iron Molders Union was one of the city’s largest and most effective. Black workers were in the union, according to the report of the Seventh Annual Conference on the Study of the Negro Problems, held in Atlanta in 1902. Nearly two hundred pages of the study are devoted to tallies of black artisans in state-by-state listings. In Michigan in 1900, there were 15,816 black artisans, including 731 barbers and hairdressers, which constituted the largest category. There were 235 lumbermen and rafts men, 122 carpenters and joiners, and more to the point, 28 iron and steel workers in the local plants. Most of the black women artisans fell into three categories—dressmakers, milliners, and seamstresses, of whom there was a total of 194.37 The study underscored the presence of longshoremen, carpenters, and engineers. According to the Longshoremen’s Union, Detroit had 60 members. The union also noted that Detroit was one of the few cities where blacks were employed as motormen and conductors on the street railways.
No indication was given for the number of black members in the Iron Molders Union, other than stating that there were very few. In Toronto at the union’s annual convention in 1902, the race question was raised by a delegate from the South who said that blacks should be excluded from the union, but delegates from the North and Canada advocated for black membership. Later, when the secretary of the union was asked about a resolution on the issue, he asked to be left alone because he had more important matters on his agenda.38
Indecision, ambivalence, and rejection were the prevailing options exercised by trade unions when it came to enlisting black members. From the Brotherhood of Boilermakers and Iron Shipbuilders to the Stonecutters Association, blacks were not wanted, hadn’t applied, or were barred by the group’s bylaws.39
Things were a lot different at the Knights of Labor, which by 1886 had approximately seven hundred thousand members, of whom sixty thousand were African Americans. Obviously, depending on the region, some of the union’s locals had both black and white members, while others had separate (but “equal”) organizations.40 During the early 1900s, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois had their own ideas about the unions. Uppermost in Washington’s mind was the dichotomy between black workers in the South and those in the North. His focus was mainly on black agricultural workers, 34 percent of the black workforce in 1900. In the Southern states, he wrote, the trade unions had not hindered the progress of black skilled laborers or of black workers in special industries, such as coal mining and iron mining, etc. But in border-state cities like Saint Louis, Baltimore, and Washington, black bricklayers and carpenters were a rarity. He was saddened by what he observed on the campus of Howard University as a building was being erected. “Every man laying brick on this building was white; every man carrying a hod was a Negro. The white man, in this instance, was willing to erect a building in which Negroes could study Latin, but was not willing to give Negroes a chance to lay the bricks in its walls.”41 Those knowledgeable about Washington’s use of examples will note how similar it is to others, and this one could have easily come to mind, for at Tuskegee the students made the bricks and constructed the school’s buildings.
Du Bois attacked union favoritism as a symptom of capitalism as well as racism, decrying, “. . . the practice among employers of importing ignorant Negro American laborers in emergencies, and then affording them neither protection nor permanent employment, and the practice of labor unions in proscribing and boycotting and oppressing thousands of their fellow toilers, simply because they are black. These methods have accentuated and will accentuate the war of labor and capital, and they are disgraceful on both sides.”42
8
DETROIT AND WORLD WAR I
I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a good job
Said I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a good job
Tried to stay around here with the starvation mob.
Yeah, I’m goin’ get me a job up there in Mr. Ford’s place
Uh huh, goin’ get me a job up there in Mr. Ford’s place
Stop these eatless days from starin’ me in the face.
When I start makin’ money, she don’t need to come around
I said when I start makin’ money, she don’t need to come
around
’Cause I don’t want her now, Lord, I’m Detroit bound.1
—BLIND BLAKE
Two things commanded the nation’s attention between 1915 and 1920—the Great Migration and World War I. One was a domestic, demographic shift of population, and the other, an international conflict. Both had a dramatic effect on American social and political life. And both had meaning and effect on black Detroiters. As it was during the days of slavery, Detroit was a primary destination during the Great Migration. Many of these migrants traveled along the same byways as the fugitives on the Underground Railroad, perhaps with less fear but with a similar apprehension about what awaited them on the other side of the Cotton Curtain, and how real was the so-called promised land.
By the middle of the decade, this movement had reached critical mass. Henry Ford’s announcement of paying workers at his automotive plants five dollars a day was an additional stimulus for black Americans eager for a fresh start in life. Carole Marks, in her book Farewell—We’re Good and Gone, adds another factor to the push-and-pull tug of this historic demographic shift. “First, a majority of the migrants of the Great Migration were urban, nonagricultural laborers, not the rural peasant usually assumed. Secondly, black migrants left the South not simply to raise their wages but because they were the displaced mudsills of southern industrial development. Thirdly, much of the mobilization of the migration was orchestrated in the board rooms of northern industrial enterprises.”2
Five dollars a day instead of five dollars a month seemed too good to be true, and in too many instances, it was. Of course, this was by no means the first illusion the newcomers would struggle to transcend. A year or two after Ford’s announcement, an African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, picked up the beat and became the drum major for the march of black migrants to the North. These future workers were not aware that one of Ford’s motives for five-dollar-a-day pay was to impede the growth and effectiveness of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist Party. Offering workers what he viewed as a decent salary would, he hoped, be incentive enough to keep them from the pull of an alternative economic system. Nor did these workers know or care about Ford’s racial ambivalence. Emblazoned in the headlines was the call to the lowly to abandon the land of lynch law. Blacks getting their hands on one of the papers was akin to their ancestors having a copy of David Walker’s Appeal in the 1830s. It was as if they possessed a subversive weapon with intentions of overthrowing the government. The Defender posted job opportunities, train schedules, and other pertinent information for those wishing to venture north, particularly to Chicago, though Detroit and other industrial centers were also listed. From the responses the paper received, it was clear that the migrants were fully alerted; even if they had no idea where Detroit was on the map, they knew it had to be a better place than where they were. This letter, addressed on May 29, 1917, from a hopeful in Greenville, Mississippi, is an example of this yearning:
Dear Sir: this letter is from one of the defenders greatest frends. You will find stamp envelope for reply. Will you put me in tuch with some good firm so I can get a good job in your city or in Cleveland, Ohio or in Philadelphia, Pa. or in Detroyet, Michian in any of the above name states I would be glad to live in. I want to get my famely out of this cursed south land down here a negro man is not good as a white man’s dog. I can learn anything any other man can. Not only I want to get out of the south but there are numbers of good hard working men here and do not know where they are going and what they are going to.3
Between 1910 and 1920, New York State experienced a 66 percent rise in its black population; in Chicago there was a 148 percent increase, and Detroit, with a 611 percent surge, was by far the fastest-growing African American urban center.4
John Dancy, the Detroit Urban League stalwart, was both a witness and a member of this black population explosion in Detroit. As he noted in his memoir, there were 5,741 blacks in the city in 1910, according to official census figures, although the enumeration of blacks, no matter what year, is always questionable. “At the time I came here,” Dancy recalled, “the Negro population was estimated at about 17,000. By 1920, when there was another official census, the figure had risen to 40,838; and in the next 40 years this increased a dozen-fold.”5 The swelling black population meant one thing to local businesses and another to Dancy and his colleagues at the Urban League, whose immediate responsibility was to make sure the new arrivals were not left out in the cold, literally and figuratively.
Prior to Dancy’s arrival in Detroit, Forrester B. Washington was the secretary of the league. He had done a lot of groundwork, welcoming the newcomers with provisions and teaching them survival skills for the North. Suddenly, almost overnight, Detroit’s dramatic increase in population put the city in the national spotlight; it became a symbol of full employment, high wages, and a better life for African Americans.6 By 1917 a representative number of black workmen were employed throughout the industrial sector, including 1,100 at Packard Motor Car Company, 200 each at Ford and the Continental Motor Car Company, and 100 at Michigan Central Railroad.7 At the beginning of the automobile industry, black workers were vital, and Packard took the lead in hiring them, though mostly as unskilled workers, as at Ford, which quickly surpassed all other companies in the number of African American employees.
Detroit was soon overflowing with new arrivals from the South. The city became an ideal test case for the National Urban League on how to deal with a dense population in need of social, political, and economic assistance. The National Urban League, the brainchild of sociologist Dr. George Edmund Haynes, had been in existence eight years when Dancy came aboard in 1918. Haynes, a professor at Fisk University in Nashville, had conducted a survey of African American conditions in the city and presented a summary of the report in 1918 in New York City at the annual meeting of the Home Missions Council. He selected Detroit because it was a typical industrial center receiving a large influx of new migrants. It was a good choice. After a series of faltering steps, the Detroit branch of the Urban League finally gained traction, due to the correspondence between the league’s national director, Eugene Kinckle Jones, and the administrators at the Associated Charities in Detroit. This exchange of letters mirrored in intensity and concern others shared with the Chicago Defender.
The letters from both parties expressed a bit of uncertainty on how to proceed and how to overcome the cumulative problems. With Washington and Dancy at the wheel, policies gradually fell into place. Washington, who had earned a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University, settled in Detroit in 1916. In only a few months, he had created a model comprehensive plan that would later be emulated by other branches. “You cannot do much for a man spiritually until you have given him a healthy and wholesome physical environment,” Washington opined. “In other words, ‘you cannot grow lilies in ash-barrels.’”8 But Detroit proved to be potent compost, especially given the metaphorically rich soil of densely populated Black Bottom.
Moral uplift, very similar to the teachings of Booker T. Washington, was a primary strategy in Forrester Washington’s plan to assure that his charges were prepared for jobs and shielded from the lure of less wholesome activities such as gambling, prostitution, and frequenting bars and nightclubs. If the social agency was not doing its job, unsavory attractions would take control, and the newcomers would eventually become undesirables. To prevent migrants from being seduced by “demoralizing elements,” Washington resorted to a tactic used by women in the reform movement’s Dress Well Club and warned the newcomers not to wear audacious, flamboyant outfits that would mark them as country bumpkins, not ready for urban complexities. He was also aided and abetted by the Young Negroes’ Progressive Association (YNPA), which helped steer migrants toward redeeming social affairs, dances, baseball games, and even into organizations like the Boy Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls. A decade or so later, the League, under Dancy, inaugurated the summer sojourns to Green Pastures, a highly regarded recreational
camp.
Washington’s tenure as director of the branch lasted only two years. Before turning the reins over to Dancy, he had been highly successful in developing community-building strategies to help the migrants get their footing, wrote historian Richard Thomas, but it was left to Dancy to devise and perfect those long-term programs that could—and did—sustain the black community through tough times.9 “One of the first things I had attempted to do when I took up my duties in Detroit,” Dancy related, “was to work in close cooperation with other social agencies such as the Children’s Aid Society, the various settlement houses and similar organizations.”10 Dancy’s mission was to provide a warm and friendly greeting for the migrants, decent housing, and preparation for a job. He often carried out the first of these obligations personally. Once during a two-day period, he took a break from the office then located at 1911 Saint Antoine, and counted 270 people as part of the steady stream of migrants entering the city. Getting a job wasn’t that difficult during the early years of the migration; in fact, in those days recruiters roamed the South looking for laborers. In one year, he reported, they supplied 19,000 black workers in response to job requests. The biggest challenge for Dancy and his cohorts was housing. “There was much doubling up of families, in houses that, in many instances, were unfit for human habitation. Conditions grew worse. Rents were high. The average rent for white families was $30 a month; for Negro families, it was closer to $50, and the Negro got worse housing for his money.”11