by Herb Boyd
This was the period when Marjorie Ramsey Lewis’s parents arrived in Detroit from a small town outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. They arrived in 1915 still haunted by memories of life in the South.
“My grandfather purchased property, a house, and moved his family to Chattanooga,” she recalled. “The KKK did not want them there so they burned a cross in the yard. All six of my family members were sharp shooters. One by one they would target practice in the yard. The police next door let the Klan know he was on our side. I guess the Klan felt the risk was too great. So, my family won the battle and lived there without another burning.” Civil rights activist Charlie Cobb in his book This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed wrote: “Few if any white terrorists were prepared to die for the cause of white supremacy; bullets, after all, do not fall into any racial category and are indiscriminately lethal. . . . In place after place, a few rounds fired into the air were enough to cause terrorists to flee.”12
Lewis’s uncle and father were among those black Detroiters who volunteered for the army and marched off “to make the world safe for democracy.”
“In 1915,” Lewis continued, “they migrated to Detroit. In 1917 my dad and uncle, Raymond Ramsey, were drafted into the army. They were in the 372nd Infantry which was loaned to the French. My uncle received the top honor, the Croix de Guerre from the French.”13
Along with the highly decorated 372nd Infantry was the 371st Infantry (mainly composed of black recruits from South Carolina), three all-black National Guard regiments, the 369th Infantry (the legendary Harlem Hellfighters), and the 370th Infantry; all were part of the 93rd Provisional Division, provisional in the sense that it never attained full strength. The three National Guard units were turned over to the French.14 The 372nd Infantry, formed in 1918, was composed of six National Guard units from Ohio, Maryland, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Washington, DC. Two hundred fifty draftees from Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan were transferred to fill out the regiment. Two white officers headed the unit, in which there was a lot of racial tension.15
Colonel Charles Young knew firsthand about racism and discrimination in the armed forces, both in and out of uniform. He earned his colonel or “full-bird” status in the Spanish-American War, as a leader in the Philippines, and under General Pershing in Mexico. The son of former slaves, Young was born in a log cabin. He believed that although he was more than fifty years of age he still had “strength for the fight” and the readiness to serve his country. The top military brass thought otherwise, rejecting him due to age. To prove he was physically fit, Young rode a horse from Wilberforce University in Ohio to Washington, DC. When the army turned him down a second time, he began to accept the rumors that he wasn’t wanted because if they had allowed him to reenlist as a colonel, he would have been in command of troops, and that could not be tolerated.16 This action against Colonel Young occurred in 1917. Although he was officially retired, he continued to campaign on behalf of young blacks in the army. His tour brought him to Detroit, where Dancy was given the task of handling his accommodations. Dancy wrote that there was no hotel room available. The city’s only black-owned hotel, the Biltmore, was filled to capacity. Each attempt Dancy made to provide a place for him was turned down by Young. “Don’t worry about me,” he told Dancy, “the [Urban] center is warm and I can make a bed here with my overcoat and be completely comfortable.”17 The next day he gave a rousing speech at the Light Guard Armory, located at Brush and Fort streets. He held the huge audience spellbound and clearly inspired a number of young black men to join the army. Five days before the war ended, Young was granted permission to serve.
Young’s speech was similar to the one delivered by Frederick Douglass during his recruitment drive for young black men to join the Union Army to fight the Confederate forces. Of the nearly 368,000 black draftees who served in World War I, about 90 percent were assigned to labor, supply, and service units. Only 11 percent of all black military forces saw combat—the National Guard units and a few Southern draftee units.18 As for other fighting men and women, only the navy had a substantial number—11,000 blacks, most of them working in the galleys as cooks and mess stewards. There were no blacks in the marines, the air corps, the army field artillery units, or the Army Corps of Engineers.
A number of black Detroiters distinguished themselves in the war, including Second Lieutenant Coit Ford, who served overseas. After their military service, other soldiers spent valuable time in the city. Both Harry Haywood and Robert Poston were active politically, though in different ideological camps. Haywood is remembered mainly in political circles for his book Black Bolshevik, which chronicles his beginnings in Omaha, Nebraska, then on to Moscow and membership in the Communist Party. During the war, Haywood (his birth name was Hall) was a member of the 8th Regiment, an Illinois National Guard unit. When he was deployed overseas, his unit, like the other all-black National Guard units, was attached to the 93rd Division. This placed him in the same division as Michigan’s 372nd Infantry.
“Bullets whizzed over our heads,” Haywood wrote, recounting conflict in the last major battle in Europe, in the Argonne Forest, located in a long strip of rocky mountain and dense woodland in northeastern France. “All of us scrambled to get into the communication trench which opened on the valley. Second Lieutenant Binga Desmond, our platoon commander (and the University of Chicago’s great sprinting star) fell from the embankment on top of me. Fortunately, he was not hit. But even with his 180 pounds on my back, I am sure I made that ten or fifteen yards to the communication trench, crawling on my hands and knees, as fast as he could have sprinted the distance.”19 Haywood went on to become a major leader in the party and often returned to Detroit to speak, but none of his appearances was more publicized than his powerful speech in defense of James Victory, a World War I veteran, who in 1934 had been accused of slashing and raping a white woman. Attorney Maurice Sugar, representing Victory, was able to get an acquittal for his client by exposing the weakness of the prosecution’s case in contrast to Victory’s alibi. This wasn’t Sugar’s first involvement in a high profile case. Two years before, he represented survivors of the Ford Hunger March. Six men died during a massive protest march of laid-off workers at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant in Dearborn. The march was to present a list of demands to the company, but it was met with tear gas from a phalanx of police. Five of the slain marchers were white. The lone black man among the fatalities was Curtis Williams, who died three months after the altercation. He was denied burial beside the five white men in Woodmere Cemetery. According to some accounts his ashes were scattered by plane over the Ford plant.20
Haywood’s political counterpart Robert Poston had traveled widely since the early 1900s after leaving his hometown of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Before enlisting in the army in 1918, there were brief stops in Nashville, Boston, and at Howard University in Washington, DC. Within three days, probably because of his college background, he was promoted to sergeant and then recommended for a commission. An altercation with a racist sergeant put an end to his rapid ascent, and soon he was snared in a legal fight for his life that led to an honorable discharge within a year. He never made it overseas.21 Back in civilian life, Poston launched a publishing company in Hopkinsville but ran afoul of printers who refused to print his paper after he reported that returning black veterans were placed at the back of parades. He tried to publish a newspaper in Nashville, but it proved to be too expensive. Ultimately, he and his brother, Ulysses, landed in Detroit and began publishing the Detroit Contender. “Within eight months the new paper had surpassed all its local rivals in circulation.”22 Their paper was perfectly poised to cover Marcus Garvey’s celebrity. Enthralled by the charismatic leader, they joined his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
Garvey made Poston an assistant secretary general of the UNIA. The industrious Poston brothers—Ulysses rose in rank to become an editor at the organization’s paper, the Negro World—provided the movement with a solid Detroit bas
e. The presence of Detroiters J. A. Craigen, F. Levi Lord, and John Charles Zampty, who often traveled with Garvey as his adjutant general, greatly enhanced the organization.23
Zampty had migrated from the West Indies to Detroit to work for the Ford Motor Company. He was employed there until he opened his African export and import shop uptown on Woodward Avenue in the mid-1950s.
When the Poston’s paper lasted less than a year, the brothers shifted their journalistic efforts to Garvey’s paper, and two years later, Robert married the gifted sculptor Augusta Savage. He died in 1924 on a ship returning from a business trip to Liberia. By this time Haywood was a member of the Communist Party and to some extent connected to the African Blood Brotherhood, a militant coterie of activists with ties to the Communist Party who sought to infiltrate the Garvey movement for recruitment purposes. Except for an occasional visit to attend a rally and to confer with party comrades in Detroit, Haywood’s base was in either Chicago or New York City.
Though they were never around very long, when they were in town, Poston and Haywood were prominent political figures, even if philosophically they were at opposite ends of the spectrum. The Great Migration brought thousands of people with diverse beliefs to the city—Garveyites, communists, socialists, and, as we will see, various significant religious leaders, both Christian and Islamic. During this time, many immigrants from the Caribbean became permanent residents of Detroit.
Elijah Poole, who later became Elijah Muhammad, was also a follower of Garvey before meeting the seductive W. Fard Muhammad, or W. D. Fard. Poole and his wife, Clara, and their children left Georgia and arrived in Detroit in the early twenties. They settled first in Hamtramck, a Polish enclave, before moving to Black Bottom. For Elijah, war was not the answer (and with the advent of World War II, he would spend time in prison as a conscientious objector). Despite the lure of the bustling automobile industry, his preference was Fard and his religious ideas. For black soldiers returning home from a war, the amalgam of cultlike religion, restrictive covenants, the rise of industry, and a budding black middle class made Detroit a unique urban matrix. Many veterans went directly to the newly opened Dunbar Memorial Hospital, where a cadre of competent doctors—Dr. J. W. Ames, medical director, Dr. A. L. Turner, and Dr. Joseph Dancy, John’s brother and the hospital’s first intern—awaited them. Ossian Sweet was another young doctor on the hospital’s staff.24
The first two decades of the twentieth century were relatively promising for black Detroiters, who in the previous decades had witnessed nothing but lynch law and raw indifference to their humanity and quest for equal rights. Detroit was blossoming industrially. Black and white residents had come a long way from the Underground Railroad and the riots of the past. Even so, they were not naive about the challenges ahead, the need to build coalitions to make the city more governable and more accommodating to all of its citizens. Though factories were mass-producing an array of useful products, for many black workers they resembled the plantations—owners like the slaveholders, the supervisors like the overseers, the foremen like the drivers, and security guards like the pattyrollers (slave patrols). For them the working conditions were a form of neoslavery. There was still a lingering despair, an unrelenting disparity between black and white income, housing, education, and decent employment.
9
DR. SWEET AND MR. FORD
By 1925, the budding Garvey movement was grinding to a halt after its leader was convicted and sentenced to the Atlanta Penitentiary for mail fraud. His flock of followers believed the charges were trumped up to stifle his movement. The chanteuse Josephine Baker and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet could no longer endure the country’s racism and took their flagging careers to Paris. Much closer to home, Dr. Ossian Sweet was on his way to a major confrontation with bigots as he moved into an all-white neighborhood on Detroit’s east side.
The job market, which had been robust during the previous five years, was beginning to slide into recession. A hopeful sign, however, was found in the work of the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who organized black workers into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Similar recruitment was occurring in Chicago, where the nascent American Negro Labor Congress was convening for the first time. The two organizations shared many members and the purpose of improving working conditions and civil rights for black Americans.
During this era, Dr. Sweet’s case was the centerpiece. An editorial in New York’s Amsterdam News declared unequivocally that the court case could possibly be the most important “ever figured in all the history of the United States.” What if the situation was reversed? the paper’s editors asked. “Imagine that a mob of Negroes has resented a white family’s moving into a colored neighborhood; and, in defending themselves, the besieged white family had shot and killed a colored man. What grand jury in the United States would indict the white family for murder in the first degree? What police officer would take the stand and testify that they were not acting within their rights protecting themselves? Why, then, should Negroes be charged with murder? Who dare to defend themselves and their property?”1
This Amsterdam News editorial was reprinted by the Cleveland Gazette, an indication of the extent to which the case resonated nationally. In all the African American papers and some major white dailies, Dr. Sweet’s case was front-page news for several weeks. Even the Detroit Free Press covered the incident and the subsequent trial, albeit discreetly. “We Must Fight If We Would Survive,” the Gazette editorial blasted in a twenty-four-point headline, and none did so more unswervingly than Dr. Sweet and his wife, Gladys. The Sweets did not walk blindly into this fray. Both were aware of the possible repercussions of their audacity, the likes of which had been brutally forecast on the city’s west side months before, where, in three separate incidents, black families had sought to integrate an all-white neighborhood.
If Dr. Sweet was a bit naive about the situation, Gladys certainly could not have been, because she was born and raised in Detroit. Dr. Sweet’s introduction to racism occurred during his youth in Bartow, Florida, when he witnessed the lynching of a black man. In 1911, he came to Detroit to work during a semester break from his studies at Wilberforce University. Choosing to work in Detroit between semesters for the next three years was not an arbitrary decision. Like thousands of black Americans—and eventually millions—he was among the first to heed the siren call to workers that was emanating from Detroit. However, he was not employed by the Ford Motor Company, but as a bellhop at various hotels and a vendor at Bob-Lo Island Amusement Park.
Sweet was a young man in Detroit at a most propitious time in America’s history. From Europe the drumbeat of war was getting stronger. In America, another major migration was taking shape; the Ku Klux Klan, covered in white sheets, was marching boldly in the streets; and Detroit felt the impact of several social, political, and economic shocks. Ford’s offer of five dollars a day must have had special resonance for Sweet, who grew up in Florida, where the daily rental of a horse and wagon for cartage cost the same. Even so, he would have welcomed a chance to earn that much, and it would have put him on a faster track to purchase that Model T, which was much less expensive than the nearly nineteen thousand dollars he paid to purchase the house on Garland during that fateful year of 1925. By then, more than a decade since Ford’s offer of a job in exchange for loyalty to the company, autos were rolling off his assembly line in Highland Park and the River Rouge plant in record numbers. Unrivaled, the Tin Lizzie soon became the epitome of the motor vehicle, the veritable sine qua non of transportation and, as Beth Tompkins Bates wrote in her thorough study of Ford and black workers, the Ford was “synonymous with the word ‘car.’”2
Although 1914 is the year cemented in the memories of migrants setting off in search of River Rouge or Highland Park, an industrial Valhalla, it wasn’t until 1919 that Henry Ford stepped up the process of hiring black workers. This occurred eleven years after the company was incorporated, which was the same year the Wright Brothers took to the
sky. “After World War I, Ford hired thousands of African American men to work for the FMC [Ford Motor Company], a policy decision that launched black workers on the road to modernity so they, too, could take part in Ford’s ‘new world.’”3
Getting a job at Ford, no matter what year, had to be a boon to the black unemployed, and in 1919, with the nation rocked by racial disturbances and the spilling of so much black blood that it was called the Red Summer, such a job was a balm for the miserable circumstances that seemed to relentlessly batter black Americans. Ford wasn’t the only automobile company searching for black workers. At the beginning of the 1920s, Dodge and Packard were eagerly recruiting, but even their combined total didn’t equal the thousands who were employed.
John Dancy, head of the Detroit Urban League (DUL) and the Rev. George Bundy of Saint Matthew’s Church may have had close and cordial ties to Henry Ford, but when it came to counseling on African American affairs, the Rev. Robert Bradby of Second Baptist Church was at the top of Ford’s list. “It all started one day in 1918,” wrote historian Richard Thomas, “when Charles E. Sorenson [Sorensen], the plant manager of Ford Motor Company, invited Mr. Bradby to his office. Since 1910 the Canadian born Bradby had been the pastor at Second Baptist. During his 18-years of leadership at the church, he had demonstrated a tenacity and was known not to cower before the city’s elite. Sorenson showed Bradby a number of knives and other weapons that had been confiscated from black and white workers, and asked him to help manage the racial conflicts in the plant and to recommend ‘good Negro workers’ to the Ford employment office.”4 Thus, the portals to heavenly wages at Ford opened with the Rev. Bradby as the gatekeeper, a position he would hold for nearly a quarter of a century.5 And of course, the Rev. Bradby wasn’t the only minister at Ford’s beck and call.