Wartime Riots: Detroit, 1943

A flaming car sets fire to a streetcar station on Woodward in the early hours of the riot. The mob can be seen behind the streetcars.

"The 1943 Detroit race riots," by Vivian M. Baulch and Patricia Zacharias of the Detroit News on February 11, 1999:  Recruiters toured the South convincing whites and blacks to head north with promises of high wages in the new war factories. They arrived in such numbers that it was impossible to house them all.

Blacks who believed they were heading to a promised land found a northern bigotry every bit as pervasive and virulent as what they thought they had left behind in the deep south. And southern whites brought their own traditional prejudices with them as both races migrated northward.

The influx of newcomers strained not only housing, but transportation, education and recreational facilities as well. Wartime residents of Detroit endured long lines everywhere, at bus stops, grocery stores, and even at newsstands where they hoped for the chance to be first answering classified ads offering rooms for rent. Even though the city enjoyed full employment, it suffered the many discomforts of wartime rationing. Child-care programs were nonexistent, with grandma the only hope -- provided she wasn't already working at a defense plant.

An injured driver from Busy Bee Moving Company is detained by police after he attempted to drive through a picket line of angry white neighbors near the Sojourner Housing Project.

The prevailing 48-hour work week put lots of money into defense workers pockets, but there were few places to spend it and little to spend it on. Food and housing were either rationed or unavailable. Detroit's nickname was the "Arsenal of Democracy" but stressed-out residents often referred to it as the "arsehole" of democracy. Workers disgruntled by the long commute out to the Willow Run plane factory dubbed that operation "Will it Run."

Police try to disburse a crowd of blacks at Sojourner Truth Housing Project Feb. 28, 1942.

Times were tough for all, but for the Negro community, times were even tougher.

Blacks were excluded from all public housing except the Brewster projects. Many lived in homes without indoor plumbing, yet they paid rent two to three times higher than families in white districts. Blacks were also confronted with a segregated military, discrimination in public accommodations, and unfair treatment by police.

The summer of 1941 saw an epidemic of street corner fights involving blacks and Polish youths who were terrorizing black neighborhoods in Detroit and Hamtramck.

Early in June 1943, 25,000 Packard plant workers, who produced engines for bombers and PT boats, stopped work in protest of the promotion of three blacks. A handful of agitators whipped up animosity against the promotions. During the strike a voice outside the plant reportedly shouted, "I'd rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work beside a nigger on the assembly line."

Whites resentful over working next to blacks caused many stoppages and slowdowns. Harold Zeck, a former Packard defense worker, recalls the time when a group of women engine workers tried to get the men on the assembly line to walk off the job to protest black female workers using the white restrooms. "They think their fannies are as good as ours," screamed one woman. The protest fizzled when the men refused to walk out.

An armed black homeowner protects his property and family from roving crowds near the Sojourner neighborhood.

Unions did their best to keep production figures up and to keep the lid on confrontations, even though the Ku Klux Klan and the feared Black Legion were highly organized and visible in the plants.

Overcrowded housing combined with government rent control further aggravated racial problems in the city. Once spacious flats were divided and then subdivided into tiny rooms to rent. Many living under these oppressive conditions relied on hopes for the future to get them through the long tiring days.

Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal government was concerned about providing housing for the workers who were beginning to pour into the area. On June 4, 1941, the Detroit Housing Commission approved two sites for defense housing projects--one for whites, one for blacks. The site originally selected by the commission for black workers was in a predominantly black area. But the federal government chose a site at Nevada and Fenelon streets, a white neighborhood.

The Rev. Horace White, the only black member of the Housing Commission, stated, "As much as I disagree with the site selection, the housing shortage in Detroit is so acute, particularly among Negroes, that I feel we should cooperate."

Detroit police arrest a group of blacks when one was found to be carrying a knife during the Febuary 1942 disturbances.

On Sept. 29, the project was named Sojourner Truth, in memory of the female Negro leader and poet of Civil War days. Despite being completed on Dec. 15, no tenants moved into the homes because of mounting opposition from the white neighborhood.

On Jan. 20, 1942, Washington informed the Housing Commission that the Sojourner Truth project would be for whites and another site would be selected for black workers. But when a suitable site for blacks could not be found, Washington housing authorities agreed to allow blacks into the finished homes.

On Feb. 27, with a cross burning in a field near the homes, 150 angry whites picketed the project vowing to keep out any black homeowners. By dawn the following day, the crowd had grown to 1,200, many of whom were armed.

The first black tenants, rent paid and leases signed, arrived at 9 a.m. but left the area fearing trouble. It wasn't long in coming. Fighting began when two blacks in a car attempted to run through the picket line. Clashes between white and black groups continued into the afternoon when 16 mounted police attempted to break up the fighting. Tear gas and shotgun shell were flying through the air. Officials announced an indefinite postponement of the move.

Detroit newspapers, union leaders, and many other whites campaigned for the government to allow the black workers to move into the homes. The families, having given up whatever shelter they had in anticipation of their new homes, were left with no place to go and were temporarily housed with other families in the Brewster Homes and other sites.

Finally, despite the simmering resentment, black families moved into the project at the end of April. Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries ordered Detroit police and state troops to keep the peace during the move.

Walter Jackson, a 35-year-old defense worker, his wife and five children were the first to move in. "We are here now and let the bad luck happen," said Jackson. "I have only got one time to die and I'd just as soon die here."

Jackson, a short, wiry 130-pound former UAW-CIO shop steward, had taken an active part in the auto sit-down strikes of 1937.

Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries

White neighbors on the project's eastern boundary quizzed each passing white: "Which side are you on?" A score of white women, some pushing baby carriages, waved American flags and paraded briefly along Conley Avenue north of the project. They booed when the Rev. White appeared to show support for the new neighbors.

Although the Sojourner Truth riots resulted in no fatalities, the trouble was a warning of what was to come.

By 1943 the number of blacks in Detroit had doubled since 1933 to 200,000 and racial tensions in the city grew accordingly. To protest unfair conditions, some blacks began a "bumping campaign" -- walking into whites on the streets and bumping them off the sidewalks, or nudging them in elevators.

Local and national media anticipated trouble. Life Magazine called the situation dynamite. On June 20, blacks and whites clashed in minor skirmishes on Belle Isle. Two young blacks, angered that they had been ejected from Eastwood Park some five days previously, had gone to Belle Isle to try to even the score. Police began to search cars of blacks crossing to Belle Isle but they did not search cars driven by whites. Fighting on the island began around 10 p.m. and police declared it under control by midnight. More than 200 blacks and whites had participated in the free-for-all.

Rumors began to fly.

Leo Tipton and Charles (Little Willie) Lyons told a black crowd at the Forest Social Club, 700 Forest, that whites had thrown a black woman and her baby off the Belle Isle Bridge. More than 500 angry and fearful patrons swarmed onto the street. The angry crowd moved to Woodward, near Paradise Valley, breaking windows and looting stores.

Nearby, just west of Woodward in an area inhabited by southern whites, another rumor swept the neighborhood--blacks had raped and murdered a white woman on the Belle Isle Bridge.

An angry mob of whites spilled onto Woodward near the Roxy Theater around 4 a.m., beating blacks as they were getting off street cars.

At least six Detroit policemen were shot in the melees, and another 75 were injured.

Woodward was the dividing line between the roving black and white gangs. Whites took over Woodward up to Vernor and overturned and burned 20 cars belonging to blacks, looting stores as they went. The virtual guerrilla warfare overwhelmed the 2,000 city police officers and 150 state police troopers. A crowd of 100,000 spectators gathered near Grand Circus Park looking for something to watch.

A white mob moves up Woodward looking for trouble in the early hours of the 1943 riot. At least two overturned cars can be seen in the background.

The first death was a white pedestrian killed by a taxicab. Later four white youths shot and killed Moses Kiska, 58, a black man who was waiting for a bus at Mack and Chene.

The white Detroit police officers who patrolled Paradise Valley considered all blacks on Hastings Street looters. They reportedly told bystanders to "run and not look back." Some were shot in the back running from police.

Disregarding police warnings, a white doctor, Joseph De Horatiis, entered a black neighborhood on a house call. Within moments he was hit with a rock, pulled from his car and beaten to death by rioters. A monument to the Italian physician was dedicated in 1946 at East Grand and Gratiot.

A black man coming off a bus on Woodward was beaten by a white mob in front of four policemen who made no effort to protect the victim or arrest the whites.

Mayor Edward Jeffries Jr. and Governor Harry Kelly asked President Roosevelt for help in restoring order. Federal troops in armored cars and jeeps with automatic weapons moved down Woodward. The sight of the troops with their overwhelming firepower cooled the fervor of the rioters and the mobs began to melt away.

The toll was appalling. The 36 hours of rioting claimed 34 lives, 25 of them black. More than 1,800 were arrested for looting and other incidents, the vast majority black. Thirteen murders remained unsolved.

A white mob overturns a car belonging to a black man on Woodward. The whites running at right are chasing the driver.

Five black men received 80-day jail terms for disturbing the peace. Two were acquitted. Twenty-eight were charged and convicted on various charges including concealed weapons, destruction of property, assault, larceny. There was little arson, due to gasoline rationing, but more than a few cars were overturned and torched.

Tipton and Little, the two blacks linked to the original rumor, were sentenced to two-to-five years for inciting a riot.

The city's white police force was criticized for its "restraint" in dealing with the black rioters, despite the fact that only blacks -- 17 of them -- were killed by police.

Police Commissioner John H. Witherspoon defended his force and his refusal to issue shoot-to-kill orders, saying hundreds could have been killed. "All of those killed would not have been hoodlums or murderers--many would have been victims of mob psychology or innocent bystanders. If a shoot-to-kill policy was right, my judgment was wrong."

Mayor Jeffries praised the police and said he was "rapidly losing my patience with those Negro leaders who insist that their people do not and will not trust policemen." The mayor asked the Rev. White to search for 200 qualified Negroes to join the police force.

Thurgood Marshall, then with the NAACP, assailed the city's handling of the riot. He charged that police unfairly targeted blacks while turning their backs on white atrocities. He said 85 percent of those arrested were black while whites overturned and burned cars in front of the Roxy Theater with impunity while police watched.

"This weak-kneed policy of the police commissioner coupled with the anti-Negro attitude of many members of the force helped to make a riot inevitable," Marshall said.

Despite Detroit's history of problems, the Seal of the City of Detroit offers hopeful and timeless mottoes: "Speramus meliora" (We hope for better things) and "Resurget Cineribus" (It will rise from the ashes.)  [source:  Detroit News, 1999]

The Promised Land II: By Nicholas Lemann

"The Promised Land II," by Nicholas Lemann (Vintage Press, 1992):Before World War II, the cotton planters of the Delta were absolutely opposed to black migration to the North. Hortense Powdermaker, enumerating the whites’ "creed of racial relations" in 1939, wrote that one of its main tenets was, "Negroes are necessary to the South, and it is desirable that they should stay there and not migrate to the North."

Whites kept the black school system in Mississippi inferior in part because they didn’t want sharecroppers’ children to have career options beyond sharecropping. Senator James K. Vardaman once said that educating the black man "simply renders him unfit for the work which the white man has prescribed, and which he will be forced to perform . . . the only effect is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook." In the 1920s, Clarksdale was supposed to become the site of a new black college called Delta State, but the white planters succeeded in having it moved to the town of Cleveland, fifty miles away, because they didn’t want new opportunities for blacks opening up in town.

The Hopson Plantation in the Mississippi Delta

The relocation of Delta State was a well-remembered story in black Clarksdale, and there were lots of rumors about other enterprises the planters had kept out.As late as the early 1940s, the owners of the King & Anderson plantation, an enormous spread of seventeen thousand acres just west of Clarksdale that was reputed to be the largest family plantation in Mississippi, sent two of their white managers to Chicago to see if they could get some of the sharecroppers who had left to come back home. The managers first met with John H. Jackson, the pastor of the magnificent yellow-brick Olivet Baptist Church, which was well on its way to becoming the largest black congregation in America. Jackson is probably best known now for having been the leading enemy of Martin Luther King within the black Baptist church; when the city of Chicago changed the name of South Parkway, the boulevard on which Olivet stands, to King Drive after King’s death, Jackson changed the address of the church to Thirty-first Street so he wouldn’t have to have King’s name on his letterhead. In the 1940s Jackson was willing to entertain two white plantation managers, but he said he couldn’t urge members of his flock to move back South until conditions for blacks improved there.

The King and Anderson Plantation sharecropper's children deprived of education

Then the managers held a long meeting with former King & Anderson sharecroppers in an apartment on the South Side. The managers announced that the plantation had undertaken a series of reforms, including electrifying sharecropper cabins and providing sharecroppers with regular written statements of their accounts so they would not be surprised at the settle. The former sharecroppers said they already knew all that, along with all the other recent news from the plantation; the Mississippi-Chicago grapevine was very active. They complained about having been swindled on King & Anderson and other plantations, and about having been abused, degraded, and beaten by plantation managers and policemen. They showed no interest in coming home.

King and Anderson Plantation in the Mississippi Delta

When the managers got back to Clarksdale and told the owners of the plantation what had happened, the owners arranged a meeting in Clarksdale to discuss the situation. After the meeting, the white leaders of Clarksdale asked the black leaders of Clarksdale to draw up a list of grievances, which they did. No good jobs. Cheating at the settle. Lynchings. Being denied the courtesy titles of "Mister" and "Missus." Poor schools. No hospitals. No sidewalks, gutters, or garbage collection in the black neighborhoods. Confronted with all this, the whites did nothing; the list of grievances could have been resubmitted virtually intact in the early 1960s.

King and Anderson Plantation sharecroppers

When word got around about the demonstration of the mechanical cotton picker on the Hopson plantation, though, the attitude of the whites toward black migration changed almost instantly. A plantation didn’t need hundreds of field hands any more; a handful would do. It didn’t matter if sharecroppers moved to Chicago. In fact, it helped to solve the problem of where the sharecroppers would go after their jobs were abolished.

Besides, the more far-sighted whites in the Delta had begun to detect a slight crumbling in the citadel of segregation. The New Deal was a generation old by now, and while politically it represented an accommodation between Northern liberals and Southern segregationists, the Delta’s planters perceived Franklin Roosevelt as a threatening figure. During his reign, various critics of the sharecropper system who at least raised segregation as an issue had emerged, and millions of Northern blacks had been recruited into the Democratic coalition. World War II had exposed thousands of young black men from the Delta to places where segregation didn’t exist, and, having fought for their country, they seemed to feel entitled to things they didn’t have in Mississippi. In Greenville, just after the end of the war, four black veterans went to the county courthouse and said they wanted to register to vote. The registrar said they hadn’t paid their poll tax for 1944. They came back with the money the next day, and the next, and the next, and every day they got a different excuse. Finally they filed a complaint with the FBI in Washington, and two agents came down to Greenville, interviewed the veterans, had them sign a complaint, and got them registered.

The implications of blacks voting were not happy ones for Mississippi whites, especially in the Delta, which was three-quarters black. In 1935, there were more black people living in Coahoma County alone than in the states of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada combined. Most middle-aged whites had been raised on their parents’ and grandparents’ horror stories about life during Reconstruction, when blacks were enfranchised. By the 1940s, the school-desegregation issue had reached the notice of white planters, as well as Aaron Henry. A few civil rights activities had started to pop up here and there. All in all, the idea of getting the numbers of blacks and whites in the Delta a little closer to equilibrium began to seem attractive to whites on Political as well as economic grounds. The best, the only, means to that end was black migration to the North. As Aaron Henry puts it, "They wished we’d go back to Africa, but Chicago was close enough."

On the Hopson plantation, the idea of a looming civil rights crisis was very much on the mind of the Hopson family; it gave a new urgency to the long-running efforts to get the mechanical cotton picker ready for full-scale production. Howell Hopson’s brother Richard, who ran the plantation office, wrote a long, impassioned letter to the local cotton industry association in April 1944, a few months before the public demonstration of the picker, which makes clear the plantation’s thinking on the picker’s political implications. He wrote (via registered mail – an indication that he meant to make an important statement): "I am confident that you are aware of the acute shortage of labor which now exists in the Delta and the difficult problem which we expect to have in attempting to harvest s cotton crop this fall and for several years to come. I am confident that you are aware of the serious racial problem which confronts us at this time and which may become more serious as time passes." After a little more discussion, he arrived at the solution: "I strongly advocate the farmers of the Mississippi Delta changing as rapidly as possible from the old tenant or sharecropping system of farming to complete mechanized farming….Mechanized farming will require only a fraction of the amount of labor which is required by the share crop system thereby tending to equalize the white and negro population which would automatically make our racial problem easier to handle.

Within a few years after the end of World War II, the mechanical picker was coming into general use on the plantations, and the share-cropper system was ending. Usually a plantation would build up its stock of machines until it had enough to harvest the whole crop, and then it would announce to the sharecroppers that it was switching over to an all-day-labor system to handle the shopping, which was still done by hand. One by one the plantation commissaries were closed down. The more established and paternalistic planters, such as King and Anderson and the Stovalls in Clarksdale and the Percys in Greenville, allowed their sharecroppers to stay in the cabins if they wanted to, but not to make a crop of their own.

A lucky few got salaried jobs as tractor drivers; the rest who stayed had to work as day laborers, get jobs in town, or retire. Some planters forced their sharecroppers out by informing them that the garden spots they used for raising vegetables and keeping livestock would now have to be plowed over and planted to cotton. The smaller and rougher planters simply kicked out their sharecroppers and lift them to fend for themselves. Often, when a sharecropper family left, the planter would bulldoze the cabin and grow cotton where it had stood. Sharecropper cabins were understandably not in demand as housing. If the cabin wasn’t on arable land, it usually just sat unoccupied, slowly sagging and giving way to vines. The Delta today is dotted with nearly spectral sharecropper cabins, their doors and windows gone, their interior walls lined with newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s that once served as insulation. They are humbler than what you’d ordinarily think of as the ruins of a vanished civilization, but that is certainly what they are.

Evicted sharecropper on the side of the highway

The sharecroppers who left the plantations sometimes moved directly to Chicago. More often they settled first in the town of Clarksdale, either in preparation for the second phase of their migration or to become day laborers and continue to work in the cotton fields. Day labor as a large scale employment base was doomed in the long run, though, because in the late 1950s the cotton planters embarked on a second phase of their industrial revolution that was just as significant as the introduction of the mechanical picker: the development of chemicals that killed the weeds between cotton plants so reliably as to make hand chopping unnecessary. Within ten years, virtually all the former sharecroppers had to find some entirely new way to live.

Mass evictions of sharecroppers

The white people in the Delta were well aware that a massive displacement of people was under way, and that it would have enormous consequences – not necessarily for them, since the consequences would be played out largely in the North. Writing in 1947, David Cohn issued the following dire prediction, which, to say the least, did not rivet the attention of a nation that was consumed with resuming a normal life after the war and wasn’t inclined in any case to pay much heed to jeremiads issued by an obscure Southern apologist:

Evicted Southern Sharecroppers

The coming problem of agricultural displacement in the Delta and the whole South is of huge proportions and must concern the entire nation. The time to prepare for it is now, but since we as a nation rarely act until catastrophe is upon us, it is likely we shall muddle along until it is too late. The country is upon the brink of a process of change as great as any that has occurred since the industrial Revolution….Five million people will be removed from the land within the next few years. They must go somewhere. But where? They must do something. But what? They must be housed. But where is the housing?

Mass evictions of sharecroppers

Most of this group are farm Negroes totally unprepared for urban, industrial life. How will they be industrially absorbed? What will be the effect of throwing them upon the labor market? What will be their reception at the hands of white and Negro workers whose jobs and wages they threaten?

There are other issues involved here of an even greater gravity. I f tens of thousands of Southern Negroes descend upon communities totally unprepared for them psychologically and industrially, what will the effect be upon race relations in the United States? Will the Negro problem be transferred from the South to other parts of the nation who have hitherto been concerned with it only as carping critics of the South? Will the victims of farm mechanization become the victims of race conflict?

There is an enormous tragedy in the making unless the United States acts, and acts promptly, upon a problem that affects millions of people and the whole social structure of the nation.
A few years earlier Richard Wright, who viewed the situation from the completely different perspective of a black man, a migrant to the North, and a Communist, sounded an uncannily similar, and similarly unheeded warning:

Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city; we were barely born as a folk when we headed for the tall and sprawling centers of steel and stone. We, who were landless upon the land; we, who had barely managed to live in family groups; we, who needed the ritual and guidance of institutions to hold our atomized lives together in lines of purpose; we, who had known only relationships to people and not relationships to things; we, who had had our personalities blasted with two hundred years of slavery and had been turned loose to shift for ourselves – we were such a fold as this when we moved into a world that was destined to test all we were, that threw us into the scales of competition to weigh our mettle.

(continued....)

An interview with Nick Lemann

Nick Lemann talks about "The Promised Land", a book about the migration of African-Americans from the South to northern cities, which is being made into a documentary film for the Discovery Channel

The Northern Migration of Sharecroppers in the 1920s

After Reconstruction, the transitional period immediately following the Civil War, a slow and steady stream of African Americans began leaving the South for the North and the West. A bigger exodus, known as the "Great Migration," began with World War I. Increased mechanization in farming left sharecroppers with little to do. But with its booming cotton economy, the Mississippi Delta still attracted a steady influx of migrants from the rest of the South. At its inception, sharecropping in the Delta held the promise of a decent standard of living and independence. In theory, with a good harvest, everyone stood to make money.

In reality, planters exploited the system to their advantage, and sharecroppers often wound up in debt at the end of each year. With no income during the off season, croppers were forced to buy food, clothing and other necessary supplies on credit from the plantation commissaries. Prices were exorbitant, goods were shoddy and debt piled up. When harvest time came around, tenants were often forced to sell their share of the crop directly to the plantation at below market prices. After the harvest, the tenants often failed to earn enough to cover their debts. While Delta planters enjoyed great prosperity, their tenants were stuck in an endless cycle of debt. As plantations consolidated and centralized, what little opportunities for advancement the croppers once had slipped away. Entrenched in poverty, sharecroppers began heading north for industrial jobs.

Grinding poverty was not the only reason African Americans left the Delta. In the 1920s, the threat of racial violence loomed over the South. The law in the Delta had never offered much protection for African Americans. But with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the violence and intimidation only intensified. In fact, there were far fewer lynchings in the Delta than in the rest of the state, but this provided little solace for the Delta African American community, who still lived in fear of mob violence and lynchings.

Migration was also spurred on by the lack of educational opportunities in the Delta. While the Percy family had ensured that African Americans in Washington County had access to decent education, this wasn't the case in the rest of the Delta. White school boards seldom hired enough teachers for African American students, and the teachers they did bother to hire were almost never college graduates. In one county, there were only three teachers for a population of 350 students. During the harvest season matters only got worse. Across the Delta officials refused to open schools until every last bit of the harvest had been brought in. At times, schools didn't open for the year until mid-November.

After the Great Flood of 1927, there was less reason than ever to stay in the Delta. Homes were destroyed, possessions were gone and crops were ruined. One Greenville sharecropper put it succinctly when he explained that he had to "get my famaly out of this cursed South land -- down here a Negro man is not good as a white man's dog."

Leaving, however, was easier said than done. Delta planters' fortunes depended on African American labor, and they were determined to keep tenants on their plantations. While some offered better conditions to induce sharecroppers to stay, others resorted to intimidation and brute force to keep tenants from leaving. Tenants wishing to leave generally slipped away under the cover of darkness, not telling anyone of their plans, lest word spread to the plantation house. Train stations were guarded and African Americans found on trains were pulled off and sent back to their plantations. To escape, croppers fleeing the Delta often walked 10 or more miles to board a train in another town.

For African Americans, the favored destination was Chicago. From 1920 to 1930, the African American population exploded in Chicago, increasing from 109,458 to 233,903 residents in just a decade. The Great Migration of people was accompanied by a musical migration; Delta blues music travelled to Chicago and put down new roots in the city. Although the North was no promised land, conditions were better for African Americans, and migrants who left seldom returned.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/peopleevents/e_sharecroppers.html