by Herb Boyd
The crux of this issue originated with the founding of the UAW-CIO and job security. Most black workers were content just to have a job, and they knew that upgrading and admittance into apprentice programs were out of the question. Black workers were restricted to unskilled labor and foundry work, and neither they nor the union seemed to care. “Not only did colored union members generally accept this situation,” wrote Robert Weaver, who would become secretary of housing and urban development, “but in certain instances they encouraged its development. At one of the large automobile factories in Flint, Negroes were employed as laborers, machine cleaners, and truck drivers and the local union classified all Negro employees as janitors.”9
Classification as janitors gave black workers seniority, and no matter what other actual work they did, their status as janitors was secure. These circumstances were altered considerably with the shift to defense work. A new transfer agreement among management, the government, and labor limited the number of janitorial jobs in war production. Black workers had to struggle, either for upgrading or for a new interpretation of the union contract. By the summer of 1941, President Roosevelt, under the threat of a mass march on Washington, had already begun to take action on discrimination in the workplace. He issued Executive Order 8802, creating the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, a name soon slightly rearranged for a better acronym as the Fair Employment Practice Committee, or FEPC.
The new committee stepped in to forcefully push the policy of nondiscrimination. This action was greatly strengthened and enhanced by contracting agencies, especially the War and Navy departments. Gradually, from plant to plant, Detroit began to modify its color-caste occupational patterns. “The UAW-CIO had become convinced that it had to face honestly and aggressively the problem of opening new and better jobs for its Negro members, [and] . . . the most difficult problem in this area was to be that of achieving employment opportunities for Negro women.”10 Later in 1942, President Roosevelt, under continuing pressure from A. Philip Randolph and his union cohorts, issued an executive order, a stronger directive. As a result, more than seventy-five thousand Black Detroiters were employed in the war plants.11
As the war intensified, more troops were needed, which meant fewer male workers in the plants. This was the opening women needed to enter the workforce via temporary employment in the rapidly growing war machine. Soon Rosie the Riveter, various colors and ethnicities, became indispensable to the war effort. Becoming a black Rosie certainly was Louise Thomas’s aim when she enrolled in a defense training course at Commerce High School. In 1942, after passing the course with relative ease, Thomas, one of the twenty-eight thousand able-bodied black women in Detroit available for work, hurried to Ford’s Willow Run bomber plant, which was in need of female riveters. Frustrated after two failed attempts to gain employment, she returned to the school to confer with her instructor and overheard him telling another black woman that Detroit factories would never hire them. She voiced her complaint in a letter, the gist of which was: “If I were a white woman, instead of a Negro, my school credentials and my O.K. slip for work at the Ford Willow Run plant would mean something and I would now be working on a defense job . . . riveting war weapons to help our nation win the war. It is time for those in authority to get behind these issues and help get a square deal for Negro women in [the] defense industry. We, too, are Americans.”12
Black women like Thomas registered their complaints with a number of institutions, including the NAACP (whose Detroit branch since the early thirties had been among the nation’s largest), the UAW, and the federal government, demanding that they enforce the FEPC policy of nondiscrimination. The response was inadequate, so it wasn’t unusual to find women rallying outside the plant gates or passing out leaflets assailing Ford minions like Willis Ward, accusing him of being an Uncle Tom and a sellout. “Mr. Ford,” one flyer argued, “Negro women and men will and must play their rightful part in helping win this war.”13 These actions were successful. The number of black women employed in the war industries made an astronomical leap from very few in 1942 to fourteen thousand by November 1943. Of course, in many instances the jobs they held were classified as nonessential; still, they were earning more money than they would have doing domestic work.
For many black women in the 1940s with little education, especially young women recently arrived from the South, domestic work was the only available employment. Such was the lot of Katherine Brown, who was twenty-two and a new migrant from Alabama. She was on a bus from Louisville, Kentucky, traveling to Alabama, when she met a woman who told her about someone in Detroit who was looking for women for housecleaning jobs. She followed up and was asked for references. From a friend, she got a letter of reference and mailed it to the woman in Detroit, who immediately responded and sent her a ticket to travel from Alabama to Ypsilanti. She later recalled this story while traveling to her great granddaughter’s high school graduation ceremony at Eastern Michigan University. “This is the very city where I arrived in 1941,” she said. “I rode the bus all the way from Alabama to Ypsilanti and the woman picked me up and drove me to her home in Detroit and that began my connection to the city.”
After two years of domestic work, her reliable girlfriend Hazel told her they were hiring at Ex-Cell-O, a small company on Oakman Boulevard that made aircraft engine parts and electronic parts for the defense industry. “When I got there at seven o’clock in the morning, there was already a long line of people but since Hazel knew the foreman I was hired. Plus, I had some experience working at the Briggs factory.”14
The work at Ex-Cell-O was much easier and the pay was better, she said. “All I had to do was to attach a wire to a bulb and push it on down the line.” Katherine was one of one hundred black women employed at Ex-Cell-O, one among a veritable army of black women in the workforce at the plants. Like her, many of them had been cleaning houses in the suburbs of Detroit and elsewhere before the men were called off to military service. “Well, it was good while it lasted,” she sighed. “But like all good things, it came to an end when the war was over and I went back to cleaning houses.” Even during her employment in the plants, Katherine maintained her relationship with the housewives, working for them on the weekends and during special occasions such as Bar Mitzvahs and Jewish holidays.
Katherine’s relative success was an exception, for even during the war, black women were on the bottom rung of the employment ladder. Even when they were lucky enough to be hired, they were often shunned by the white workers—male and female—who often would refuse to work with them. “At Packard,” wrote Thomas Sugrue, “whites walked out on a hate strike in 1943 when three black women were placed as drill operators. . . . In January 1943, fifty leading war production plants in Detroit had women workers, but only nineteen hired black women.”15
In 1940, James Boggs, like Katherine, had migrated to Detroit from Alabama. He was hired at the Chrysler assembly plant on Jefferson Avenue, where he would remain for nearly thirty years. His path to the factory from the farm did not come via trade school but as a result of the war. “Hitler and Tojo put me to work in the plant,” he often remarked, referring to the Nazi and Japanese leaders with no intention of allegiance to their fascism or any possible alignment with the remnants of Satokata Takahashi’s pro-Japan movement.16 Takahashi’s presence in Detroit began during the Great Depression; his objective was ostensibly to arouse sympathy for Japan by pretending that it was the champion of oppressed nonwhites, which he did through an organization called The Development of Our Own. “If there is a political lesson to be learned from pro-Japan movements among blacks during the Great Depression,” wrote Ernie Allen, “it is perhaps that the waters of self-determination continue to run deep within the African American national community even during times of significant class conflict. . . .”17
As a member of Local 7 of the UAW, Boggs became active in union politics, accepting a position on the local’s organizing committee, more popularly known as the “flying
squadron,” which provided support and protection for striking workers. Boggs was part of “a generation of black workers who found in the UAW a platform for various forms of working-class black activism. They developed organizing skills, gained exposure to many currents of radical thought, and used the union as a political base from which to mount efforts to address racial discrimination both inside and outside the plant. Boggs thus joined black UAW members who, as they moved in and out of black institutions, constructed significant networks of black political activity.”18
Coleman Young put his political and union activity on hold, or, more accurately, he shifted much of it to his affairs in the military. “In our neighborhood, only fools went off to war,” Young wrote. “And the only fools were me and my brother George.”19 Young’s behavior and achievements in the army mirrored his success in civilian life. He rapidly advanced from a buck private to OCS (Officer Candidate School); upon graduation he attained the rank of second lieutenant. Ever restless and with a military file increasingly full of reports about his words and deeds in opposition to the flagrant racism and discrimination he was encountering, he decided to transfer to the US Army Air Corps. Trained as a bombardier/navigator, even as a member of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, Young refused to go along with the protocol, to be a dedicated serviceman with nothing on his mind but dropping bombs on the enemy. The closest and most threatening enemies for him were the white officers he encountered as he was bounced from one outpost to another in the South, including his native Alabama, where hostile interactions were almost a daily routine. His militant attitude followed him from the barracks to the company headquarters. His defiance spread, and while it earned him enduring respect from his fellow black soldiers, many of them from Detroit, it was a thorn in the side of his commanding officers.
Young was not ordered into combat, but he had plenty of confrontations with white military police and first sergeants. On more than one occasion, he was arrested for protesting against the restrictions that kept him from exercising his rights as an officer to enter facilities set aside for them; the black officers were not allowed to congregate with the white ones, a prohibition that was untenable for the defiant Young. Hardly a week passed that didn’t find him in hot water for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice, being insubordinate to a superior officer, or acting like an inveterate troublemaker. Thanks to fellow Detroiters Gene Savage, Robert Millender, John Simmons, and Hayes Porter, he had companionship as well as the secretarial support he needed when facing court-martials. After his discharge from the service on December 23, 1945, despite his provocative behavior, Young began receiving mail from the army urging him to extend his military obligation by joining the reserves. “But I preferred not to set foot on a military base again, and because I never served in the reserve—or maybe because I never filled out the papers correctly—I wasn’t officially discharged in the eyes of the Army until 1950, which I didn’t realize until I read it in my FBI file a few years ago.”20
Young was reluctant to re-enlist; Elijah Muhammad avoided service altogether. On May 8, 1942, for the second time, Muhammad was arrested in Washington, DC, by the FBI for not registering for the draft. “When the call was made for all males between 18 and 44, I refused (not evading) on the grounds that, first, I was a Muslim and would not take part in war and especially not on the side with the infidels. Second, I was 45 years of age and was NOT according to the law required to register.”21 According to noted historian and activist Ernest Allen, Muhammad was arrested again in Chicago in September 1942, in a series of highly publicized raids conducted by federal agents. Muhammad and eighty-four other African Americans were detained; nine women and three men, including Muhammad, were charged with sedition, the remainder with draft evasion.22 The sedition charge was dropped, but Muhammad was convicted of encouraging draft resistance. His arrest in the nation’s capital was a strong indication that he had been on the move and was no longer based in Detroit, though the main Temple was in Chicago. Eventually Muhammad was sentenced to the federal correction institution at Milan, Michigan, thirty miles southwest of Detroit. From July 1943 to August 1946, he served three years and one month of his five-year sentence. Upon entering the prison, he was given a standard psychiatric evaluation, wrote Louis De Caro. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic because he claimed to have had visual and auditory communications with Allah.23
While he was in prison, Muhammad’s wife, Clara, struggled to keep his flock together, even after the Chicago police closed down Temple No. 2 under the pretext that it was affiliated with the Japanese. That allegation stemmed from Muhammad’s association with Takahashi, the Japanese radical fascist. Muhammad’s imprisonment turned out to be a blessing in disguise, wrote E. U. Essien-Udom. It helped to establish his claim to leadership. The fact that he had been incarcerated was an integral part of the “Messenger’s charisma, enabling him to liken himself to the persecuted prophets of the past. For his followers, his persecution is not only an important qualification for his leadership, but also evidence of his sincerity and the divinity of his mission.”24
In 1946, when Muhammad was released from prison, Malcolm Little was going in. Not only were they geographically miles apart, Elijah in Michigan and Malcolm in Massachusetts, but they also served time for different reasons. As fate would have it, however, they were on a similar path of engagement, and thanks to his siblings, Malcolm by 1948 would be a member of the Nation of Islam. He was still four years from release from prison and residence in Detroit. During the Depression years, membership at Temple No. 1 in Detroit had reached eight thousand but had begun to decline significantly by 1945.25 One of the basic tenets for members of the Nation of Islam was the Yakub theory, which posited that white people were created as a race of devils by selective breeding conducted by an evil black scientist named Yakub (the biblical Jacob) about 4,600 BC. Despite their outspoken hatred for white people, the black Muslims cannot be blamed for the Detroit race riot of 1943. In fact, if their behavior then was like it was in 1967, they probably stood on the sidelines, imploring black Detroiters not to participate in the looting because they were breaking the law.
This advice was ignored by thousands of Detroiters—black and white—after a minor incident ignited the volatile animus when the disturbance reached its peak. “The riot began like those in 1919, with direct clashes between groups of Negroes and whites,” wrote Harvard Sitkoff. “Over 100,000 Detroiters crowded onto Belle Isle on Sunday, June 20, 1943, to seek relief from hot, humid city streets.”26 Suddenly, after some jostling among visitors, the ninety-degree weather seemed to get even hotter. Charles “Little Willie” Lyon, a young black man, assembled a bunch of friends seeking revenge on the “hunkies,” after having been attacked a few days earlier by whites as he tried to enter Eastwood Amusement Park at Eight Mile Road and Gratiot. Willie and friends broke up family picnics, beat up some boys, and started a melee on the bridge connecting the island to the city. Fights broke out all over the island. From the playground to the bus stops, blacks and whites were ripping into each other ferociously. Several white sailors from a nearby armory, who were angry about a previous incident in which blacks had attacked one of them, went to the bridge and fueled the furor. Like a wildfire, the riot and rumor spread beyond the island into the city, coiling dangerously around Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, where from the stage of Sunnie Wilson’s Forest Club, a patron named Leo Tipton screamed, “There’s a riot at Belle Isle! The whites have killed a colored lady and her baby. Thrown them over a bridge. Everybody come on. There’s free transportation outside!”27
Inflamed by the story, blacks began to assail any white person they saw, precipitating a brutal response from white policemen. With their revolvers drawn, they used their nightsticks to beat blacks indiscriminately. In retaliation, blacks broke store windows along Hastings Street and vandalized white-owned businesses in other parts of the city. Katherine Brown and her girlfriend, just home from their jobs at Ex-Cell-O, changed clothes and rushed to the street
s to join a crowd of black residents on their way to Russell Street. Someone had thrown a brick through Isaac’s Market window; there, unlike on Hastings Street, the looting was intense, with folks grabbing anything they could carry. Katherine had a Virginia ham and a can of Swift’s chitterlings when she returned to her apartment on Cardoni Street. “One of the reasons I didn’t stay out there very long is that the police and the National Guard were patrolling the street and I saw a man get shot in half,” she recalled. “He was running from the pawn shop on Holbrook with an armful of clothes when they shot him down. That was enough for me.”28
Practically every store on Russell Street on the North End was vandalized except Barthwell’s Drug Store on the corner of Russell and Alger. “My father had eleven drug stores and three ice cream parlors with thirteen flavors, all of them delicious,” Magistrate Judge Sidney Barthwell Jr. said. “My grandfather, Jack, came to Detroit from Cordele, Georgia in 1919 and worked at Ford’s River Rouge plant for 33 years. People obviously knew my father and respected him and his business. That’s why they didn’t break the windows like the others. That store on Russell Street was his first store, opened in 1933, even before the one in Black Bottom.”29 William Hines arrived in Detroit from Albany, Georgia, the same year as Jack Barthwell, and they became very close friends. Hines remembers buying ice cream from his soda fountain. “Then I went back to him as one of the first black liquor salesmen in the state of Michigan. Mr. Barthwell had five liquor licenses, so they hired me to crash the market. He did accept me, but he let me know that I had to make my own way. It wasn’t easy because my competition was Jewish and they were heavy in the wine business.”30