Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  Young was one of many Detroiters who joined with the established civic leaders supportive of the Rev. Hill’s audacity and fearlessness. John Dancy of the Urban League, soon-to-be-Congressman Charles Diggs, militant labor activist Snow Grisby, and attorney Harold Bledsoe all looked forward to sharing a foxhole with Hill as they began to develop workers’ councils and formulate a strategy to involve blacks in the union movement, which for the most part excluded them from membership. Dancy did not readily adopt a pro-union position; thus he stood in opposition to the Urban League’s national leaders, most notably Lester Granger and Eugene Kinckle Jones. Under pressure from the national office, he eventually supported the UAW-CIO, though he chose not to dwell on his reluctance to change his anti-union stance in his memoir.8

  When Detroit’s Civic Rights Committee (CRC) was formed in 1933–34, though perhaps not at the very start, the Rev. Hill was among the key organizers. The organization was allied dutifully with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration and his New Deal policies. The president was determined to make his vision a reality on the local level. The CRC was one of several important political groups taking shape in a city that was ablaze with union activity, civil protests, and the legal defense of constitutional rights. Members of the Booker T. Washington Trade Association (BTWTA), led by the Rev. William Peck of Bethel AME Church, who came to Detroit in 1930 from Oberlin, Ohio, were among those who aided the defense of Angelo Herndon, the young Communist agitator in Georgia facing charges of insurrection for organizing workers, as well as that of the Scottsboro Boys, the nine youths who in 1931 were falsely accused of raping two white women on an Alabama train.

  As Young related, there was very little middle ground in the city at that time. The atmosphere was polluted by proponents of virulent, toxic racism and bigotry. None were more fascistic than Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith, who were widely known for spewing their Klan-like anti-Semitic hatred on radio and at various forums. To ensure his place in the fight against these right-wing zealots, Young became the secretary of the Detroit chapter of the NNC.9

  Black women were not absent from the front lines of battle. Led by Fannie Peck, Reverend Peck’s wife, the Housewives’ League of Detroit often stood shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts, equally concerned about the discriminatory practices of white businesses and about poor housing, and simultaneously advocating for self-determination, particularly for black small businesspeople. They were a critical support team for the BTWTA, Beth Bates wrote, and “Peck’s strategy encouraged alliances between working-class and middle-class clubwomen who no longer valued ‘respectability’ so highly.”10 She was also deeply committed to Bethel and rarely missed a Sunday school session with her young charges, unless of course duty called at Parkside Hospital or the Women’s Missionary Society, where she was a board member. In 1936, she organized the Fannie B. Peck Bethel AME Church Credit Union, which for years remained a stable institution. 11

  When the Rev. Horace White arrived in Detroit in 1936, he was welcomed by the Rev. Peck, both graduates of Oberlin’s College of Divinity. Although he arrived in the city six years after Peck, he was soon carving out a leadership position as the pastor of Plymouth Congressional Church. The Rev. White “was as well-spoken as he was outspoken,” wrote historian Angela Dillard. It was also the same year that Charles Diggs Sr. was elected the nation’s only black state senator. “White, Hill, and [Canon Malcolm] Dade formed the core of a pro-Union Black religious movement, but they were also part of a much larger network of progressive activists,” Dillard noted. “The same year that White arrived in Detroit, Louis Martin, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, became the editor of the Michigan Chronicle, a subsidiary of the Chicago Defender.” Martin, a skillful writer and an astute politician with national connections, gradually turned the paper around, and it became a vocal opponent to the Republican, anti-union Detroit Tribune.12

  Louis Martin was a formidable operative for Ford, particularly as the company sought to keep its black employees in check; he was firmly against the campaign to establish the UAW in its plants. The headlines in the late 1930s in Detroit reported the conflict brewing in the automobile industry; the Ford Motor Company, with its sizable number of black employees, was at the center of the struggle. For the most part, the faith and trust that black workers expressed toward their employer is understandable—paychecks from the automobile companies put food on their tables, kept a roof over their heads, and were the path to greater prosperity. Black workers were reluctant to participate in the strikes against the companies and felt uncertain about the promises made by the emergent union. After all, there was a four-century history of white betrayal to counsel hesitancy and prudent neutrality. A few blacks even went so far as to stand shoulder to shoulder with Ford’s security forces as they brutally attacked union members, and some joined the legions of strikebreakers who dared to cross the picket lines surrounding the plants.

  The complexity of the fight for collective bargaining in the automobile industry is thoughtfully analyzed by labor historians August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, who wrote that progress came gradually on the job front given the “tangled web of interaction among Negro advancement groups [the National Urban League and the NAACP], black workers, officers in union locals, International UAW leaders, corporate managements and the various concerned federal agencies.”13 Out of this matrix of turmoil was forged an unbreakable alliance between the black workers at Ford and those at Chrysler, General Motors, and the other plants where the UAW-CIO had been chosen to represent them. On both sides of the shifting encounter emerged a cadre of men and women, black and white, who would play decisive roles in the city’s overall development—Shelton Tappes, Horace Sheffield Sr., John Conyers Sr., Emil Mazey, Geraldine Bledsoe, R. J. Thomas, Reverend Robert Bradby, John Dancy, Reverend Everard Daniel, and Gloster Current—were among a number of unsung heroes and heroines that also included Walter Hardin, Christopher Alston, Joe Billups, Leon Bates, Oscar Noble, Veal Clough, and the Reverend William Bowman.

  With the advent of World War II and the urban riots in the early forties, this alliance between black workers and the unions would again be tested. During the extremely troubling moments the existing camaraderie was stretched to the point of breaking; however, the end result brought greater understanding among the participants and broadened opportunities in the industrial complexes for black workers.

  Whether from the pulpit, the foundry, or the political arena, Detroit’s black community has always been active and highly volatile. There has been a dependable minority who refused, under any circumstances, to abide insult or neglect. This unyielding impulse was certainly the case during the Depression, no matter how dispiriting it was for most residents. Action from the black community’s cultural and black nationalist realm seemed irrepressible, and out of Black Bottom in the thirties would come a musical pulse that renewed what had always been there and a religious development that was relatively new—Islam.

  There was only a trace of Islam in Detroit before Elijah Poole (Elijah Muhammad) arrived. He was the avatar of an unorthodox form of Islam passed on to him by W. D. Fard. “I was born in Georgia, went to public school in Georgia and was never out of the state of Georgia until I was 25 years of age,” Muhammad declared in his book Message to the Blackman in America. “I married and had two children and moved to Detroit in April, 1923, from Macon, Georgia where I worked for the Southern Railroad Company and the Cherokee Brick Company, the latter as a tram road foreman and builder. I never was arrested and served no jail terms on any charge or charges until 1934.”14 He told a reporter that he moved to Detroit “because I thought the life might be better, but even there the first year I saw my people shot down right in the street without any justice whatsoever.”15

  Muhammad was the son of sharecroppers, and both his father and grandfather were circuit preachers who, during his childhood, inculcated in him a strong sense of religious belief. Also during his childhood, much like Dr.
Ossian Sweet, he witnessed the lynching of a black man for no other reason than he had supposedly insulted a white woman. That impression lived with him for years, and it made him ripe for the messianic appeal of W. D. Fard. During their first encounters, Poole quizzed Fard about his name and who he was. “I asked him, ‘Who are you, and what is your real name?’ He said, ‘I am the one that the world has been expecting for the past 2,000 years.’ I said to him again, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘My name is Mahdi; I am God, I came to guide you into the right path that you may be successful and see the hereafter.’”16 Depending on the source, Fard was the reincarnation of Noble Drew Ali, the founder of the Moorish Science Temple, who died in 1930 or, as Poole later as Elijah Muhammad put it, “had come to us [reincarnated in Fard] from the Holy City of Mecca, Arabia in 1930.” It has been estimated that between 1930 and 1934 he recruited eight thousand followers among black Detroiters. “The rapid growth of the first Temple [located in Black Bottom] was accompanied by the establishment of various subsidiary organizations, among which was the University of Islam for the training of ‘Moslem’ youth and families in the ‘knowledge of their own’ as distinct from that of the ‘civilization of the Caucasian Devils.’”17

  The FBI records about Fard revealed that he spent time in prison and committed some less than prophetic actions. When he began assembling his following, he formulated a number of theories and concepts, several of which were brought to fruition by Burnsteen Sharrieff Muhammad (or Mohammed), the wife of John Muhammad, one of Elijah’s brothers. According to attorney Gregory Reed of the Keeper of the Word Foundation in Detroit, a cache of rare documents was found in the attic of the home where Burnsteen Muhammad lived. As the result of her courses at Commerce High School, she possessed the clerical skills that enabled her to translate Fard’s dictations into curricula, proposals, and various programs. Reed discovered among more than one thousand documents a copy of “The Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam,” which converts never actually saw but memorized in order to certify their membership and grades from the University of Islam, founded by Fard. A sample exam problem gives an idea of intellectual fare at the university:

  The uncle of Mr. W. D. Fard lives in the wilderness of North America, and he is living other than himself; therefore, he weighs more than his height and his blood pressure registers more than thirty-one. This killed him at the age of forty-four years. The average person breathes three cubic feet of air per hour, but the uncle of Mr. W. D. Fard breathes three and seven-tenths of cubic feet of air per hour. How many cubic feet of air did Mr. W. D. Fard’s uncle breathe in forty-four years? How many atoms does he breathe in all of his forty-four years when one one-hundredth of a cubic inch contains two hundred million atoms?18

  With the same air of mystery that brought him into contact with Elijah and his followers, Fard disappeared. According to Malcolm X, he was seen in Harlem in the sixties. Muhammad, no longer buttressed by the Mahdi and besieged by the Detroit police department, vanished like his mentor, gathered his flock, and relocated to Chicago.

  Even so, Temple No. 1 remained in Detroit and would later prosper under the leadership of Malcolm’s brother, Wilfred. Muhammad was gone, but a large number of his flock continued his teachings, and they were among the activists who inspired a new generation of political organizers that emerged in Detroit. Minister Muhammad and the Nation of Islam solidified the foundation of black nationalism, providing a wellspring of social and political thought that would be manifested in several organizations throughout the country. These political formations were not confined to the tenets of Islam but also found formidable expression in the Christian theology promoted by the Rev. Albert Cleage. By the late sixties, some of Muhammad’s “do for self” philosophy was evident in Cleage’s vision: “Through the concept of self-determination,” Cleage said in a speech in 1968, “black militants have been able to give unity to a people fragmented by oppression and have begun the laborious process of transforming the black ghetto into a black community.”19

  Elijah Muhammad, influenced by Marcus Garvey and possibly the Moorish Science Temple movement of Noble Drew Ali, extended their notions of black nationalism. Cleage and a coterie of others would apply a more militant tone to nationalist demands as the fight for self-determination flowered in the sixties.

  12

  BOOM TOWN

  In the summer of 1941, months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, an influx of newcomers overburdened the city’s housing stock. These arrivals were Detroit’s second major wave of migrants. The Detroit Housing Commission, expecting federal grants, approved two sites for the development of housing projects for defense workers. Its members envisioned units similar to the Brewster Projects, which had been constructed in Black Bottom several years before.1 As Beth Smith Jenkins observed in her master’s thesis, a site on the northwest corner of the intersection of Dequindre and Modern streets was set aside for African Americans. The original site designated for whites was located several blocks away, on the northwest corner of Mound Road and Outer Drive.

  The problem began when the federal government stepped in and overruled the proposal for the African American site. Only one site, at Nevada and Fenelon streets in a white neighborhood, was approved and designated for white occupancy. Given the urgency of the housing situation, the City Commission, with the Rev. Horace White as the sole black member, did not oppose the federal government’s decision.2

  A bitter tug-of-war ensued. The pressure from blacks and white liberals forced Washington to reverse its decision, and the plan for projects for black occupants was restored. On September 29, 1941, the public housing project was named Sojourner Truth, in tribute to the abolitionist and women’s rights advocate whose gravesite is in Battle Creek, Michigan. “On the night of February 27, 1942, a fiery cross was burned in a field close to Sojourner Truth Homes,” Jenkins wrote. “That same night one hundred and fifty white pickets patrolled the project with the avowed purpose of preventing occupancy by Negro tenants assigned to the first twenty-eight units. By dawn the crowd of picketers had grown to twelve hundred, many of whom were armed.”3 What would be called the Sojourner Truth riot erupted the next morning when two cars driven by blacks crashed through a line of white picketers. The bold action sparked a bombardment of bricks from whites. Blacks retaliated from the opposite side of Ryan Road. Only after the police placed the blacks under protective custody was the riot halted. Even so, the skirmish broke out again in smaller encounters and a great number of blacks and whites suffered injuries. To keep the peace, Mayor Edward Jeffries dispatched a large contingent of police officers to the scene. More than a hundred people were arrested for disturbing the peace and carrying concealed weapons. It was also decided to delay any further attempts to move blacks into the units, in the hope that time would mollify the protesters on both sides. Meanwhile, the occupants who had been promised the units were given temporary quarters in the Brewster Public Housing Projects. Workers from UAW Local 600, led by Horace Sheffield and Shelton Tappes, manned the picket lines and raised funds at weekly mass meetings to continue the protest.4

  It’s no surprise that coverage by the white, mainstream dailies—the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press, and the Detroit Times—was flush with “unconscious racism,” an assessment offered by Matthew W. Kapell. A counternarrative emerged from the pages of the Michigan Chronicle, the city’s black weekly. It implied that the endemic racism of the period, from the KKK and other fascist influences, caused the outbreak. Kapell is careful to note the differences among the three white dailies. The News and Times tended to “emphasize collusion with America’s World War II fascist enemies and a need to return to order quickly for the war effort. The Detroit Free Press offered less organized reporting by both noting detail on violence against Detroit’s African-Americans and suggesting that those same African-Americans were somehow responsible for the terror perpetrated against them.”5 The Rev. Charles Hill, noted for his activism in the community, defined the situation as “a cr
isis of all America. Our enemies are the same. . . .”6

  Not until April 17, after a long, drawn-out investigation, did the National Housing Agency render a decision and establish a program for black occupancy. Eleven days later, Mayor Jeffries deployed more than 1,000 police officers and 1,600 National Guard troops to protect the families who moved in.

  One lesson learned from the Sojourner Truth debacle was the need for the city and federal governments to stand firm with unwavering decisions. Vacillation was disconcerting for both blacks and whites, only intensifying the anxiety of newcomers, whose primary concerns were getting jobs and decent housing. Early in 1941, Navy Secretary Frank Knox, to short-circuit racial tension in the defense industry, issued an ultimatum to the naval ordnance stations condemning the refusal of white employees to work with African Americans. Any such refusal, he decreed, would be viewed as disloyalty to the government; by his order, those involved “are not only subject to immediate dismissal but may be prevented from obtaining employment in other establishments engaged in war production.”7 But an official sanction from on high sometimes loses its clout by the time it reaches the plant floor, having very little impact on the animosity among workers.

  At the Ford, Packard, Dodge, Murray Body, and many other firms, in too many instances the company and the union were on the same page with regard to the treatment of black workers. Management and the unions, faced with the problems of converting production from cars to tanks, as well as the attendant issues of seniority and transfer of workers, sought to avoid dealing with bigotry, tossing that responsibility to the government, which had no day-to-day oversight. Twice in August 1941, a group of Negroes in the Dodge foundry stopped work for a short while to protest management’s arranging for the transfer of only white foundry workers, no Negroes, to production jobs at the Chrysler tank arsenal.8 Movement from the hot, dangerous foundry to the production line was a big step up, and of course, whenever black workers were upgraded, the whites were outraged. In September 1941, when the Packard Motor Company transferred 2 black polishers to defense work, approximately 250 white workers staged a forty-minute sit-down strike, which halted the unit’s operations. A few months later, in January 1942, white workers repeated the action at the Hudson Motor Company.