by Herb Boyd
Some of the black businesses were rapidly expanding, and within a few years they would top the nation in their independence—in competition with the Jewish merchants, who actually were not that disturbed by the rioting that destroyed many of their stores. They felt they could do more business with the competition gone, but that wasn’t necessarily the case, for with the others gone, the predators could now focus on the Jews. Nowhere were the Jewish merchants more devastated by the riot than on Hastings Street. This street was densely populated by blacks and was, in the opinion of the Urban League’s John Dancy, a veritable cesspool of filth and squalor, but it also “contained a number of small businesses operated by whites, mainly Jewish merchants. The mob began to stone and destroy these shops; the destruction spread until practically all the white-owned businesses in the Negro section had been attacked.”31 By daybreak, Hastings was littered with debris and broken glass, and unwanted merchandise was strewn along the entire street from one end to the other.
According to a report by Thurgood Marshall, the two days of mayhem produced thirty-four corpses, twenty-five of them African American, seventeen killed by the police. These deaths, the police claimed, were justifiable homicides because the victims were looting the stores on Hastings Street.32 In addition, nearly two thousand people were arrested, the majority of them black, and an unknown number were severely wounded, most of them black. Not one white person was convicted of any crime committed during the riot.33
The expected reports, none of them favorable for black Detroiters, came a week later. Mayor Jeffries established an interracial committee to assess what had happened, but it did not consider issues of racism, housing, or employment, nor did it call for a grand jury investigation. It determined that whites were culpable only for retaliating against black attacks and that the police had been exemplary in carrying out their duties. Mayor Jeffries’s staff also produced an appropriately named white paper, which reached the same conclusions, commending the police and taking the black leaders to task if they continued to criticize police behavior. Both reports were accepted and approved by the Common Council.34
“I have always said that the 1943 riot could have been avoided,” wrote John Dancy. “The problems that led to it were apparent long before the riot occurred. A year earlier, the National Urban League had conducted a study of specific areas of racial friction in Detroit and presented its findings to an interracial study committee established by the mayor.”35 The riot also reverberated beyond the destruction in Detroit. The riot renewed A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement, which two years previously had threatened to bring the nation to a halt. “Riots are the result of the government policy of segregation of and discrimination against Negroes,” Randolph said as his group gathered for a meeting in Chicago. Not only was his movement refueled, but the tremors from the riot in Detroit also had an impact on elections throughout the nation.36
The wave of destruction in Detroit couldn’t compare with the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought World War II to a cataclysmic close in August 1945. Americans were still recovering from the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the sorrow lingered longer among black Detroiters, for he had been sympathetic to their plight. Also, there was their deep admiration of Eleanor Roosevelt. Residents of Black Bottom forever cherished her visit to their neighborhood on September 7, 1935, when she attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the Brewster Projects.37 To see her seated in the back of a plane with a Tuskegee Airman at the controls was an unforgettable image for many black Americans.
But it was her husband’s pen that signed those executive orders that made the lives of blacks a bit more tolerable, although on at least one occasion he had been forced to acquiesce to the “fierce urgency of now” expressed by A. Philip Randolph and his unwelcomed march on Washington.
With the war abroad over and at least a scintilla of domestic tranquility in the city, black citizens in the Bottom and Paradise Valley were no longer willing to tolerate Southern hostility up south, as they termed their disturbingly familiar new locale. This new non-subservience was increasingly evident from those who had served in the US military and were now returning to earn their piece of the American pie in the factories of Detroit, which were slowly making the conversion from war production back to manufacturing Oldsmobiles, Chevrolets, Fords, Buicks, Dodges, and Cadillacs. This change also meant that Katherine Brown and many other black women were no longer needed; if they were among the fortunate few, they could return to domestic service.
By the late 1940s, “more and more blacks were eager to join the union movement,” Coleman Young noted. “The labor challenge was no longer organizing the emboldened black workers but enlisting the whites who had fought them on Woodward Avenue and the Belle Isle Bridge.”38 The often irreverent and obstreperous Young led this unionizing struggle as politics and civil rights began to coalesce. He became the first African American to serve on the executive board of the Wayne County CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) Council in 1947.
The convergence of organized labor and the burgeoning civil rights movement created opportunities for Young and a number of other aspiring leaders. One such aspirant was Cora Mae Brown, a native of Alabama, who was eight years old when she arrived in Detroit in 1922. Her journey toward political and social prominence was managed well by her family. They made sure she had the best early educational training, followed by enrollment and graduation from the prestigious Cass Technical High School, before sending her off to Fisk University in Nashville. At Fisk, one of her professors was the renowned sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, author of Black Bourgeoisie. When she returned to the city, she acquired a job as a social worker in the Women’s Division of the Detroit Police Department. With the experience she gained there, she was perfectly poised to assist young black women during the Great Depression and into the war years. Always eager to improve herself, Brown entered Wayne State University Law School and earned her doctorate of jurisprudence in 1948. She was entering the legal arena at a most propitious time, just as the US Supreme Court was sounding the death knell of racially restrictive covenants. The cases in this decision—Shelley v. Kraemer, Uricolo v. Hodge, and McGhee v. Sipes—would have special significance for the budding young lawyer, especially the last, because the McGhees lived in Detroit, on Seebaldt Street on the city’s west side.
After receiving her law degree, Brown’s next goal was to enter the electoral arena. Although she failed in her first two attempts at winning a seat in the Michigan State Senate, she succeeded in 1952, becoming the first African American female state senator in Michigan—and in the nation. At the top of her legislative agenda were fair housing and equal employment. With finesse and determination, she made great progress toward these objectives and other civil rights objectives. In 1956 she ran for Congress but was defeated. However, there was a payoff for someone of her immense talent—she was appointed special associate general counsel of the US Post Office in 1957, a position she held until her death at the age of fifty-eight in 1972. She is buried in the historic Elmwood Cemetery.
When Cora Brown finally arrived in the state senate, Charles Diggs Jr. had been there a year. For several years, they served simultaneously. Diggs was born in Detroit in 1922, the same year Brown came to the city with her family. Both attended Fisk University, but Diggs had also been a student at the University of Michigan for two years, 1940–42, before heading to Nashville. In 1943, he was drafted into the US Army Air Corps and stationed at Tuskegee Army Airfield. After he was discharged from service, Diggs returned home and began working at the family funeral home on Saint Aubin Street, which was located directly across the street from Young’s tailor shop. “We lived upstairs, and the funeral parlor was downstairs,” Diggs said of the family’s new location at 1939 Saint Aubin. “We were renting the place.”39 The family also ran an insurance company employing about a hundred agents, and along with selling burial insurance policies, the only ones in the state, they were selling th
e Democratic Party, which was just beginning to make some headway among blacks who traditionally voted Republican. Diggs Sr. parlayed his lucrative business into politics and was elected to the Michigan Senate. The younger Diggs followed in his father’s footsteps successfully in both business and politics, but his most fruitful endeavor began in 1954, when he was elected to Congress and acquired the political influence needed to usher important bills through the legislative process. In 1955 he shed light on such national issues as the Emmett Till case. Along with several black reporters, he was among the daily observers who attended the trial of the men charged with Till’s murder in Mississippi. They were seated in the courtroom’s section for black spectators.
Gradually black Detroiters began to move beyond Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. Many of them had accumulated enough savings to move to the city’s west side, mainly to the neighborhood bounded by Tireman, Grand River, Buchanan, Bright, and Central streets. But the shadow of segregation still lingered and curtailed their entry to the YMCA located at West Grand Boulevard and Grand River.40 It has been documented that whenever black aspirations are denied and when social and political prohibitions block them from enjoying their full civil and human rights, in the words of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Elijah Muhammad, they begin to “do for self.” Barred from white social clubs, black Detroiters in 1949 created the Cotillion Club, a place for young professionals to associate, mingle, and refine their skills. It was also a place where future leaders—such as Charles Diggs, Judge Damon Keith, representative and attorney George Crockett, and the city’s first black councilman, Bill Patrick, could strategize while they were entertained by music played by the city’s finest orchestras.
13
BREAKTHROUGHS
Mr. George Jackson once lived in the Bottom but now had a home on the west side and was the owner of a brand-new Cadillac. He worked at the Ford Motor Company, but owning a Cadillac, with its flashy fins, a powerful V-8 engine, and trade-in value of $700, was a manifestation of status.1 His was a noticeable breakthrough—an ordinary worker who showcased his upward mobility by parking a Cadillac in front of his home. Such a luxury, however, wasn’t obtainable in the early 1950s for the Binion family, who moved to Detroit’s Eight Mile Road district fresh from the Mississippi Delta. Even so, theirs was a significant breakthrough: they had broken away from the Jim Crow shackles that tied them to sharecropping and hopelessness.
“My family moved to Detroit from Mississippi with hundreds and thousands of other families making their way to northern cities from the South,” recalled artist McArthur Binion. “My father and my uncle (they’d married two sisters) came to Detroit, got work in the Cadillac plant then sent for their families. There were eighteen of us in a two-bedroom house at Eight Mile and Monte Vista.” John Binion, McArthur’s first cousin, amplified the memory. “When my father, and McArthur’s father, Uncle Earl, showed up at the plant they didn’t have to take a test. They were asked to make a muscle and because they were fresh from doing farm work, their muscles were well-developed. They were singled out, along with other southern young men and hired immediately.” Eventually, there were six Binions employed in several automobile factories, many of them working more than forty years before retiring.
“We broke the color line in our neighborhood in 1952,”2 McArthur added, “and were the first African Americans on our block”—but not the first in the neighborhood. Katherine Brown and her children had been living on Pinehurst, a block away, for two years, and there was one other family, the Foremans, who must have been the first blacks in the neighborhood to move beyond the six-foot wall that separated blacks and whites. The white wall ran for several blocks between Mendota and Birwood, beginning at Eight Mile Road. Some of the kids in the neighborhood would play ball against the wall or challenge each other by walking on it. “I had never seen my boys so excited,” Katherine said of the Binions’ moving in. “They came home yelling about how many boys and girls got out of a truck.”3
Working at Cadillac, like the Binion men, was one thing; owning one of the cars they made was another. Most of the former sharecroppers were content just to see the other side of the Cotton Curtain, whether or not they could afford a luxury car. The powerful-looking Cadillac symbolized another notable breakthrough—General Motors had surged ahead of Ford and become the largest, richest corporation in the world, the first corporation in the history of humankind to gross a billion dollars a year. This rise to fiscal dominance was, in part, facilitated by Walter Reuther and the UAW in 1948, with the historic agreement that guaranteed wage increases tied to a cost-of-living index.4 The bitter hundred-day strike of 1945–46 was clearly in the past. The union, in effect, became a junior partner.
The racial situation at the Chevrolet plant and throughout GM reflected strong support for discrimination and continued resistance to upgrading black workers or even hiring them. There was little help from the UAW, whose record on race relations continued to be mixed.5
Discrimination was also evident in the city’s neighborhoods, particularly on the lower east side. What the government and city agencies defined as urban renewal meant “Negro removal” for many of the residents in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. “My father’s tailor shop was plowed under in 1950,” Coleman Young lamented. “Mabern’s barbershop bit the dust a little later. Ours was the first neighborhood to be eliminated, with long stretches of stores and houses being demolished seemingly at random.”6 It took merely three years for the black community on the lower east side to be leveled; in the end more than seven hundred buildings were razed and some two thousand black families forced to relocate.7
When the Dies Committee, aka the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), set up shop in Detroit in 1951, many black activists scurried for cover, but not Coleman Young. His courage was never more evident than in his refusal to hand over the membership lists of the local chapter of the National Negro Congress, an organization HUAC had defined as subversive. “I refuse to answer that question,” Young told the committee when he was asked if he was a member of the Communist Party. He invoked his First Amendment rights and declared, “I have no purpose of being here as a stool pigeon, I am not prepared to give any information on any of my associates or political thoughts.”8 Young’s defiance and tart-tongued responses were broadcast on local radio. His attorney, George W. Crockett Jr., had represented Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, and much closer to home, Carl Winter in similar bouts with HUAC.
Jones had been arrested and tried for un-American activities under the Smith Act, which was written so that labor organizing and agitation for equal rights could be construed as sedition and treason, the same as actually fighting to overthrow the government by force. Defending political activists in New York City, Crockett was operating outside of his familiar base in Detroit. But in Detroit, he was part of a breakthrough when he and his law partners Dean Robb, Morton Eden, and the inestimable Ernest Goodman formed the first integrated law firm in the nation. Furthermore, they secured an office in the Cadillac Tower Building, which had a policy of not leasing space to African American law firms.9
Crockett, a native of Jacksonville, Florida, and a graduate of Morehouse College and the University of Michigan Law School, was a no-nonsense attorney. When defending Robeson, Jones, and eight others accused under the Smith Act, he was charged with contempt of court and served four months in jail himself. Despite the conviction, he was not disbarred and later served as legal counsel for the Mississippi voter-registration project of Freedom Summer 1964. It was in this capacity that he asked Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney to investigate a church burning, the assignment that led to their murder.
While her husband was busy on the legal front, Ethelene Crockett, having raised three children, earned a medical degree from Howard University in 1942. She completed her internship at Detroit Receiving Hospital, and because no Detroit hospital would accept an African American woman physician, she did her residency in New York City. Finally
in 1952, she was accepted at a hospital in Detroit, becoming the first black woman in her field of obstetrics and gynecology to practice in the state. By now Detroit’s African American population had increased to more than three hundred thousand, and Dr. Crockett brought her share of new babies into the world.10
It was often said that between them Dr. Ethelene Crockett and Dr. Charles H. Wright delivered more than ten thousand black babies—and a few white ones. Both doctors had experienced a similar path. Faced with the same obstacles that prevented Dr. Crockett from having a residency in Detroit, Dr. Wright, a native of Alabama with a medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, went to Cleveland and New York City to fulfill the requirements to practice obstetrics and gynecology in Detroit; he began practice there in 1953. After establishing an enviable record in private practice, he was admitted to practice at Hutzel Hospital and certified as a general surgeon in obstetrics and gynecology in 1955.
A year before Dr. Crockett began her tenure at Hutzel Hospital, John Conyers Jr. was returning home from the Korean War; Malcolm X had risen to become the national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam; and the country would soon be embroiled in three of the most important milestones in its history—Brown v. Board of Education, the murder of young Emmett Till in Mississippi, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, marked by the emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Conyers, like his future colleagues in Congress Charles Diggs and Charles Rangel, was an army veteran, a member of the 127th Combat Engineers, an all-black unit. He was a lieutenant when his unit was activated in 1950, but they had been well back from the front lines of battle. “I didn’t have a bad experience,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “In a way, it gave me travel I might not have otherwise experienced. I like to think that my worldview was broadened by my military experience.”11