Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  11.J. R. Hamm, “Proceedings of the National Negro Business League,” Boston, August 23–24, 1900. Could this be the same Susie Smith whom David Katzman describes as the daughter of AME Bishop C. S. Smith who taught music and harmony at the Michigan Conservatory of Music? Such was her prowess at the keyboard that she was invited to perform a recital at President Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1905. See Katzman, 160.

  12.Gavrilovich and McGraw, eds., op. cit., 43; and Harlan, 142.

  13.Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 15.

  14.Ibid., 13.

  15.Ibid., 16.

  16.Warren, op. cit., 86.

  17.David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 95–96.

  18.Ibid., 97.

  19.Ibid.; and Cleveland Gazette, Apr. 7, 1900, p. 2.

  20.Detroit Plaindealer, June 19, 1891, p. 1.

  21.James A. Riley, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994), 810–11.

  22.Cleveland Gazette 5, no. 21 (Jan. 7, 1888), 1.

  23.Ibid.

  24.See http://strakerlaw.org/History.html.

  25.Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 127–29.

  26.Detroit News-Tribune, Apr. 27, 1902.

  27.Gavrilovich and McGraw, eds., op. cit., 43.

  28.See www.detnews.com/history/ames/ames.htm.

  29.Wilma Hendrickson, ed., Detroit Perspectives: Crossroads and Turning Points (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 254.

  30.Katzman, op. cit., 104–5.

  31.Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 35.

  32.M. Marguerite Davenport, Azalia: The Life of Madame E. Azalia Hackley (Boston: Chapman & Grimes, 1947), 23–29.

  33.Detroit News, May 16, 1907, in Burton, Scrapbook, vol. 27, p. 126; and Katzman, op. cit., 131.

  34.Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 315. Many American troops in the Philippines were brutally gung-ho. Once soldier wrote that killing Filipino “niggers” was better than coon hunting back home.

  35.Lewis, op. cit., 298.

  36.Gavrilovich and McGraw, op. cit., 165.

  37.W.E.B. Du Bois, ed., Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference for the Study of Negro Problems (Atlanta University Press, 1902). Paradoxically, the closing remarks at the conference were delivered by Booker T. Washington, who praised Du Bois lavishly, noting, “The work that Dr. Du Bois is doing will stand for years as a monument to his ability, wisdom, and faithfulness.” A year later, Du Bois in his book The Souls of Black Folk excoriated Washington in one of the most famous essays in American literature. But Du Bois’s criticism was mild compared to that of William Monroe Trotter, who militantly opposed Washington’s ideas of accommodation and conciliation.

  38.Ibid., 171.

  39.Ibid., 167.

  40.John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), 310.

  41.Howard Brotz, ed., African American Social & Political Thought, 1850–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 449.

  42.Ibid., 535.

  Chapter 8: Detroit and World War I

  1. Lars Bjorn with Jim Gallert, Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920–1960 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 11.

  2. Carole Marks, Farewell: We’re Good and Gone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 3.

  3. Emmett Scott, “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918,” Journal of Negro History 4, no. 3 (July 1919), 290–340.

  4. Alferdteen Harrison, ed., Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991); and Carole Marks, “The Social and Economic Life of Southern Blacks During the Migration,” 46.

  5. John C. Dancy, Sand Against the Wind (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 103.

  6. John M. T. Chavis and William McNitt, A Brief History of the Detroit Urban League, and Description of the League’s Papers in the Michigan Historical Collections (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), 5.

  7. George Edmund Haynes, Negro New-Comers in Detroit, Michigan: A Challenge to Christian Statesmanship, a Preliminary Study (New York: Home Missions Council, 1918), 14. Most of the workers listed here were men, and the tabulation was compiled from a house-to-house canvass of 407 heads of families, of whom 362 were men. Of the 45 women, 12 were doing day work; 10 were housekeepers taking in roomers; and among the others there were 6 laundresses, 2 hairdressers, 1 nurse, 1 unspecified, 1 seamstress, 1 cook, 1 receiving a pension, 4 miscellaneous, and 7 unknown. Black women were also showing increased numbers among theater ushers and in the garment trades, particularly with the A. Krolik Company.

  8. Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 53.

  9. Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 63–63.

  10.Dancy, op. cit., 99.

  11.Ibid., 56.

  12.Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 241.

  13.Horace Junior, ed., Remembering Detroit’s Old Westside, 1920–1950: A Pictorial History of the Westsiders, 2nd ed. (Detroit: The Westsiders, 1997), 5.

  14.Bill Harris, The Hellfighters of Harlem: African American Soldiers Who Fought for the Right to Fight for Their Country (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002), 31.

  15.Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 79–81. The renowned poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote a poem that summarizes the role of the black soldier during that “great war.” He wrote: “If the muse was mine to tempt it / and my feeble voice was strong / If my tongue were trained to measure / I would sing a stirring song. / I would sing a song heroic / of those noble sons of Ham / of the gallant colored soldiers / who fought for Uncle Sam.”

  16.Rachel Kranz, The Biographical Dictionary of Black Americans (New York: Facts on File, 1992), 181–82.

  17.Dancy, op. cit., 122.

  18.Gail Buckley, American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm (New York: Random House, 2001), 165.

  19.Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberation Press, 1978), 59–60.

  20.See www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=3217.

  21.Tony Martin, Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts, and the Harlem Renaissance (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1973), 70–71.

  22.Ibid., 71.

  23.Thomas, op. cit., 196–98.

  24.Dancy, op. cit., 146.

  Chapter 9: Dr. Sweet and Mr. Ford

  1. Cleveland Gazette, Nov. 28, 1925, p. 2.

  2. Beth Tompkins Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 20.

  3. Ibid., 21.

  4. Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 273. Thomas misspells Sorensen’s name and cites David Lewis’s unpublished term paper as the source for this meeting. But as Angela Dillard observes in her highly informative book Faith in the City (p. 318), this term paper was based on interviews and materials subsequently removed from the Ford archives. While Dillard does not indicate it, the David Lewis here is David Levering Lewis, who submitted the paper as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and later wrote
the Introduction to Sorensen’s My Forty Years with Ford. Dillard has his name as Sorenson too.

  5. Shelly, Cara L., “Bradby’s Baptists: Second Baptist Church of Detroit, 1910–1946,” The Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 1991), p. 4.

  6. Interview with Shahida Mausi, June 14, 2014.

  7. Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York: Random House, 2009), 491.

  8. Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Holt, 2004), 26.

  9. Phyllis Vine, One Man’s Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream (New York: Amistad/HarperCollins, 2004), 9.

  10.See http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/sweet/transcriptexcerpts.HTM#Opening.

  11.Vine, op. cit., 112.

  12.Ibid., 227.

  13.See http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/sweet/transcriptexcerpts.

  14.Ibid.

  15.Ibid.

  16.Boyle, op. cit., 345.

  17.Vine, op. cit., 244.

  18.Boston Herald, May 14, 1926, p. 2.

  19.Broad Ax (Chicago), May 22, 1926, p. 2.

  20.Joyce Shaw Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 1900–1933 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 131.

  21.Bates, op. cit., 26.

  22.Charles Denby (Matthew Ward), Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 35. The explanation for the two names: just before the Depression, when Denby was fired by Graham Paige, he returned as a worker under another name, claiming he had never worked at the company before.

  23.Ibid., 36.

  24.Horace Junior, ed., Remembering Detroit’s Old Westside, 1920–1950: A Pictorial History of the Westsiders, 2nd ed. (Detroit: The Westsiders, 1997), 188.

  25.Jayne Morris-Crowther, The Political Activities of Detroit Clubwomen in the 1920s: A Challenge and a Promise (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013), 137.

  Chapter 10: White Ball and the Brown Bomber

  1. Richard Bak, Turkey Stearns and the Detroit Stars: The Negro Leagues in Detroit, 1919–1933 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 125.

  2. Ibid., 125. Oddly, Bak fails to mention that Walker was himself a Negro Leagues star and was involved in a fracas in 1891 when he was attacked by a white gang while visiting friends in Syracuse. Later he was also part of the Ferguson v. Gies discrimination case in 1900. See chapter 6.

  3. Larry Lester, Sammy J. Miller, and Dick Clark, Black Baseball in Detroit (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2000), 62.

  4. Ibid., 11.

  5. Ibid., 241.

  6. A recent book, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015) has a different take on the less than admirable accounts of the player’s life, on and off the field. He writes that Cobb was not a racist and that many of the stories about his character and incidents in his life are either false or greatly exaggerated.

  7. Cheryl Wells, Paradise Valley Days: A Photo Album Poetry Book of Black Detroit, 1930s to 1950s (Detroit: Detroit Black Writer’s Guild, 1998), 100.

  8. Ibid., 99. Two years before, Turpin had killed a Purple Gang member who, it was claimed, was involved in the killing of a police officer, Vivian Welsh, who allegedly was extorting money from the gang.

  9. Barney Nagler, Brown Bomber (New York: World Publishing/Times Mirror, 1972), 22.

  10.Richard Bak, Joe Louis: The Great Black Hope (Dallas: Taylor Pub. Co., 1996), 24.

  11.Nagler, op. cit., 27.

  12.Herb Boyd with Ray Robinson II, Pound for Pound: A Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson (New York: Amistad/HarperCollins, 2005), 14.

  13.Bak, op. cit., 199.

  14.Lester, op. cit., 69.

  Chapter 11: The Turbulent Thirties

  1. Langston Hughes, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, ed. Dolan Hubbard and Leslie Catherine Sanders, vol. 13 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 191.

  2. Wilma Hendrickson, ed., Detroit Perspectives: Crossroads and Turning Points (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 353–54.

  3. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 42.

  4. Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 96; and interview with Joseph Billups, Oct. 27, 1967, transcript, Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, p. 5.

  5. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1947), 274–75.

  6. Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberation Press, 1978), 345–46. Lengthy accounts of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights appear in a number of books by Gerald Horne, including Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 47, 58. See also Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict 1919–1990 (East Lansing: Michigan University Press, 1995), 141; Richard B. Moore, The Collected Writings of Richard B. Moore: Caribbean Militant in Harlem, 1920–1972, ed. W. Burghardt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 57–58; Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 42; and The Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed. Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 535. Interestingly, the name Mary Dalton figures prominently in Richard Wright’s novel Native Son.

  7. Coleman Young and Lonnie Wheeler, Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young (New York: Viking, 1994), 25.

  8. Ibid., 43.

  9. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 219.

  10.Ibid., 45.

  11.Beth Tompkins Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 197.

  12.Tamara Barnes, “Buying, Boosting, and Building with the National Housewives’ League,” Michigan History, Mar.–Apr., 2013, p. 33.

  13.Angela Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 70. The anti-union description is in direct contrast to the poetry of James McCall, and one wonders if by this time he is still the editor and publisher of the paper. His poem “The New Negro” is considered one of the seminal documents in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance.

  14.Meier, op. cit., 119.

  15.Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America, (Phoenix, AZ, Secretarius Memps Ministries, 1965) 17.

  16.E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 44. Searching for Fard’s identity is no easy assignment, but here are few things that might be helpful for future scholars interested in such a pursuit. After 1934, very little is known about Fard’s whereabouts. In his absence, the leadership role was assumed by Muhammad, and like his mentor, he too was known by various names, including Gulan Bogans and Mohammed Rassoull, and much earlier as Elijah Karriem. Among the lessons Fard taught his acolytes was not to participate in military matters since they are citizens of the Nation of Islam, not of the United States. Muhammad followed the letter and spirit of this advice.

  In 1943, the FBI had entered the fray, if Fard and Muhammad weren’t already in their crosshairs. It is clear from the blacked-out names in the redacted documents compiled by the FBI that one of their agents or an informant was among the small membership of the Nation of Islam, or Temple of Islam, as it was known at its inception. That informants were recruited and subsequently infiltrated the various organizations in Detroit and Chicago was confirmed in FBI documents during the period when Muhammad was interviewed and admitted that he hadn’t registered with the Selective Service, resulting in his incarceration for four years (
1942–46) in the Milan federal penitentiary in Michigan.

  Overall, according to Clarence Kelley, director of the FBI, there were nearly fifty thousand pages of information pertaining to Fard and the Nation of Islam by 1974. Strangely, for all the snooping by law enforcement agencies, there is little evidence of correspondence between Fard and other members of the Nation of Islam, particularly between him and Muhammad and Burnsteen Muhammad, whose secretarial skills and good sense were absolutely indispensable for the founders of the NOI.

  One of the few letters extant from Fard to Muhammad is not very coherent, perhaps merely a note in advance of a proposed future meeting in which points could be clarified. It was written at four in the morning, dated December 18, 1933, a year before Fard vanished, and mailed from the “South West Part of North America.”

  Fard begins by noting that he had received letters from Muhammad and from his brother, Kallatt. “I have been just getting over the terrible mistake and unofficial movements that you [sic] been taken not only one that you [sic] went to Birmingham but different time you have done minus things without saying anything before,” Fard wrote, seemingly chastising his protégé. “I have numbers of records of charges against you; but I [sic] not brought them to enforce knowing you have taken these steps with good attentions. NOW MY DEAR BELOVED BROTHER, I will tell you again and again you have heard me from time to time that must not undertake the labor of Islam unless you do know it 100%.”

  Further along in the letter, Fard tells Muhammad that “the time is not ripe yet” for him to spread the word of his wisdom. Meanwhile, Muhammad is to study his assignments, particularly the complex math problems, to write down all the questions to ask when they meet, and to prepare for his trip to Chicago, of which he was to tell no one except his brother. In addition, he wrote, “you may promise some Ice Maker a big bone and get in with him and start arising [sic] the dead.” An “ice maker” is a Christian minister, presumably someone who freezes his congregation with his sermons.

  This letter may have been the last word from Fard, whose disappearance was as shrouded in mystery as his arrival. But perhaps, as noted scholar C. Eric Lincoln asserted in his book The Black Muslims in America, Fard had accomplished his mission and turned it over to an African American, Elijah Muhammad to lead. “Within three years,” Lincoln wrote, “Fard had developed an organization so effective that he was able to withdraw almost entirely from active leadership.”