Added Young: “I can assure you I have had no part in the hanging or bombing of Negroes in the South. I have not been responsible for firing a person from his job for what I think are his beliefs, or what somebody thinks he believes in, and things of that sort. That is the hysteria that has been swept up by this committee.” Young’s testimony revealed a verbal style deeply grounded in African American oral traditions, reflecting the creative use of language heard daily on Hastings Street’s corners, in Mississippi’s juke joints, in Sunday sermons, and in beauty shops and barbershops across black America.4
Coleman Young, all too aware of the broader political climate, never thought his testimony would have any effect on the committee itself. Pugnacious by nature, he simply would not—perhaps could not—let statements he so deeply disagreed with pass unchallenged. But the tone and texture of his testimony had another intended purpose. Since the late 1930s, Young’s political activity sought every opportunity to challenge attitudes of both blacks and whites concerning the place of blacks in American life. He knew that the dimensions of room 740 were limited, but he was acutely conscious of the radio microphones. Unwittingly, the congressman had given Young a platform far broader than he had ever had before, and unlike some witnesses, he grasped it enthusiastically. His vision of justice and democracy, lofted across the airwaves, infiltrated the homes, shops, and workplaces of Detroiters, black and white. Many in both communities sharply disagreed with him, as the helpful testimony of black leaders Edward N. Turner and Shelton Tappes before the committee indicated. But Young’s words and uncompromising demeanor challenged many, in black Detroit particularly, to question accepted categories and beliefs. In this way the unwilling, and by inference, un-American witness and the self-righteous, and by their very definition, American committee members oddly joined together to further the political education of black Detroit.5
Harry Kincaid was one of many who listened. Twenty-six at the time, born and raised in the small town of Ruby, in Leflore County, Mississippi, Kincaid had arrived in Detroit after finishing high school in 1945. Staying with an uncle until drafted into the military, he served two years in the Army and then returned to Detroit. An intelligent and curious man who possessed ambitious visions of future possibilities for himself and his people, he returned south in 1948 to attend Southern University in Louisiana. Three semesters later he was back in Detroit, a member of Second Baptist and, as a worker at the Packard Motor Car plant, a member of the United Auto Workers as well. By 1951, he began attending New Bethel’s services after Second Baptist had finished, where he heard something in C. L. Franklin’s preaching he found sorely lacking in A. A. Banks’s sermons. With the same restless curiosity an inspired Kincaid listened to the broadcasts of Young’s testimony the following February. That was the moment, he thought, “when a lot of people [first] were attracted to him . . . [and] along the way a lot of us respected him for his standing up and learned more about his past activities.” Later in 1952, when Harry Kincaid left Second Baptist and formally joined New Bethel, his curiosity and emerging political consciousness found a nurturing political home.6
Others had similar reactions. Marc Stepp, a Kentucky native who joined the United Auto Workers at a Detroit Chrysler plant in 1942, pointed to the hearings as the source of the respect he held for Young, despite their many political disagreements. Grace Lee Boggs, an Asian American woman married to a black man, understood from her new friends and neighbors when she arrived in Detroit in 1953 that “Coleman Young had just become a hero in the black community.” For many black Detroiters, Young’s challenge proclaimed at its core that “if being for human rights makes me a Communist, then I’m a Communist.”7
They were far from alone, though a quick investigation by a visitor to Detroit about this time might have reported that blacks had little interest in political issues. There were no elected black officials; political commentators in the Michigan Chronicle might be dismissed as self-interested elites; and the majority of residents appeared resigned to long work weeks punctuated by Saturday night revels and Sunday morning atonements. But that would be misleading. Just below the surface skimmed by such a hasty inspection surged varied black voices struggling to integrate the rural southern tones of their first language with the staccato, machine-driven rhythms they experienced daily on the Motor City’s streets and in its gritty workplaces. Recalled Boggs: “In barber shops, on front porches, at funerals and weddings, folks testified from their own personal experience, wondering collectively why white folks were so inhuman and usually concluding that it was because they were more interested in material gain than in human relations.” Opinions varied and sharp debates, often accompanied by ritualistic insults (“the dozens”) delivered with an improvisational verbal skill that belied the lack of formal education, were the norm. Such exchanges were a form of entertainment, to be sure, but they also encouraged exploration of ideas that could transform individuals.8
Black southern migrants swelled Detroit’s African American population by more than 600 percent between 1920 and 1950, and most arrived with their hopes for industrial jobs etched on their farm-weathered faces. At its best, migration initially shocked one’s sensibilities. “Chicago, here I come,” Muddy Waters remembered anticipating as he left Mississippi. But his initial reaction to the city emerged in a much lower register: “That big empty city, here I am, little lost black boy in it.” Margaret Branch, at a far younger age, experienced her own confusion. She came to Detroit at age eleven from the same North Memphis neighborhood where C. L. had preached monthly during the late 1930s. North Memphis had no sidewalks, indoor plumbing had just recently been made mandatory for new construction, and she had never bathed in anything but a portable tin tub. Outside, the family’s chickens patrolled the backyard. Detroit was so strange, even when the difference was most welcome. As she met other youngsters, the concern with style stunned her. “Everybody laughed at me” at first, thought her “a country looking bumpkin.” Down home, she had one pair of shoes for the year; in Detroit, all but the most poor usually did better than that.9
As impressive as the black percentile increase was, the actual number of whites who migrated was nearly double that of African Americans. Whites of every background, heavily from the South and from small, midwestern towns, accounted for 70 percent of the city’s population increase during these decades. These men and women brought with them dominant American attitudes about race, including a fierce commitment to segregation in both public and private life, and their attitudes resonated with those of many native-born white Detroiters at every economic level. Despite the numerical disparity, whites’ anxieties mushroomed in the face of the continued black migration. For their part, blacks watched with anger and dread as more and more white southern men patrolled their neighborhoods in the blue police uniforms that all too often provided the officers a license to act beyond the law. Detroit’s police “had always been cruel” toward blacks, hotelier Sunnie Wilson wrote of this era. Their overt “racial animosity” he thought a consequence “of a leftover Southern hatred for blacks” that the many southern-born patrolmen “were raised on . . . and they fought to maintain a sense of superiority.”10
Detroit was not the Deep South, but it was also anything but a promised land for its black residents. Arthur Johnson, the southern-born executive secretary of the Detroit NAACP, recalled on arriving in Detroit in 1950 that “I felt, number one, that the air was a bit freer in Detroit. . . . But I soon came to realize that this was only a kind of surface thing, that race was as much a daily factor in the lives of African Americans here in Detroit as in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi.” The culture of race played out differently in each region, but in both, the majority of whites found it inconceivable that black people had any demands on the democratic process worthy of attention.11
Two events occurred in Detroit during the war years that took the measure of the white majority’s attitudes. In 1942, city and federal authorities had restricted the new federal housing project,
the Sojourner Truth Homes, for black occupancy only. Situated in northeast Detroit, close by the black middle-class enclave of Conant Gardens, the Sojourner Truth buildings sat amid a large Polish Catholic parish, St. Louis the King. From the initial discussions of the project, the parish pastor, Father Constantine Djiuk, had organized resistance to any thought of black residents in the neighborhood. On many a Sunday he preached of how “we have the Jews and Niggers making a combination [in the city elections],” even as those same Jews “cheat the Niggers worse than they used to cheat the Polish peasants who trusted them.” On February 28, moving-in day at the Sojourner Truth Homes, members of St. Louis the King, augmented by irate whites from other areas and armed with bats, clubs, pipes, and some firearms, had attacked the first trucks to arrive that morning, packed with the new residents’ worldly possessions. Over the next two days, police had largely watched as whites attacked blacks; but when blacks massed to retaliate, the police had moved in force against them. Of the 220 people arrested, 109 were held for trial—all but three of them African Americans. By May, black residents assigned to apartments were finally able to occupy their homes, but the pattern of events in 1942 would be repeated across the next decades in numerous Detroit neighborhoods. Black Detroit’s need for additional housing beyond Paradise Valley encountered intense violence from whites adamant in defense of their neighborhood. Often, as at St. Louis the King, they invoked divine law as justification. The police, unless directly ordered by superiors, usually intervened to support white protesters.12
A year later, well into spring 1943, “hate strikes”—work stoppages by unionized white workers who refused to work alongside unionized black workers in the auto industry—had continued to exacerbate racial tensions already rubbed raw in the intense struggle for housing in this crowded, rigidly segregated city. These feelings erupted at the one place in the city where large groups of blacks and whites jostled shoulder-to-shoulder seeking amusement and relief from the summer heat. On Sunday, June 20, a fight had broken out between black and white youth at Belle Isle, an island in the Detroit River accessible by a footbridge from Grand Boulevard East. White sailors had joined the fray, and within hours rumors spread through both races of a black woman and her baby thrown off the bridge and of white girls raped by black youth. The city had imploded, and over the following two days thirty-five people died, among them twenty-five blacks and a white policeman. Nearly seven hundred were injured, and more than $2 million of property damage had occurred. State and federal troops had occupied the city. Black soldiers in a segregated unit at a nearby Army base, armed and concerned for their families and friends, had commandeered trucks to take them to Detroit. They were stopped at the gates of the base, their five leaders arrested by military police, and the city had slowly simmered down to its normal levels of segregation and its attendant tension.13
The 1943 riot taught different lessons to different groups within Detroit. While the presence of white southerners on the police force was troublesome for blacks, the efforts by some post-riot commentators to blame the violence on recent white southern migrants, the “hillbillies,” created a convenient scapegoat to obscure just how widely accepted racist attitudes were within white Detroit. More than 65 percent of Detroit’s police force was from the Midwest, not the South, and the persistent resistance to black neighbors came from almost every Euro-American ethnic group. With some important exceptions, the June riots had brought a rededication to segregation in neighborhoods and in public areas such as restaurants, hotels, and Olympia Stadium, a rededication that had the support, active or implicit, of clergy, businessmen, elected politicians, and most congregants of white Protestant and Catholic parishes. Those with means continued to flee to the surrounding suburbs. Those whites without such means, or just stubborn, remained to fight black expansion politically and in the streets as well.14
Black Detroiters, however, had learned a different lesson from the experience. Most realized that to organize armed resistance, other than in self-defense, was near suicidal. Even when defending themselves, the costs would be high. Some, including those involved in the union movement or with the local NAACP, appreciated the power of government action. The hate strikes, for example, had ceased as the result of joint action by the national office of the United Auto Workers and the federal government. To force public debate over equal treatment in employment, housing, schools, and public safety, however, would require the political mobilization of a black population that was ever remaking itself through continued migration.15
Some black Detroiters had been active in electoral politics since the 1920s, with but limited success. Then, the legacy of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation remained strong and bound most black voters to the Republican Party. The alternative, a national Democratic Party controlled to a large extent by the same white southern racists black migrants had left behind gladly, offered little. During the 1930s, however, that began to change as the social programs enacted by the New Deal under Roosevelt won over many whites and blacks alike. Locally, three black political activists—lawyers Henry Bledsoe and Joseph Craigen and mortician Charles C. Diggs Sr.—organized black voters for the Democrats in 1932. Attracted to Roosevelt’s policies, these men also opposed the Republican governor’s defense of state contractors who refused to hire African Americans. Diggs was elected as a Democrat to the Michigan Senate in 1936, as was Reverend Horace White a few years later. Although the Democratic Party now drew more strength from black voters, Republicans still garnered significant black votes, particularly in city elections, into the 1940s. Anti-Democratic sentiment remained strong, and many blacks had profoundly ambiguous feelings about the United Auto Workers’ presence in local Democratic politics. Racism by rank-and-file white unionists, and the relegation of those blacks hired to the most dangerous and least remunerative jobs, affected the political thinking of many.16
The 1945 municipal elections for mayor and Common (City) Council marked a new turn in black electoral activity. In the months preceding the primary that August, white neighborhood associations throughout the city organized home owners to sign restrictive covenants, agreeing never to sell to blacks. The well-organized white residents of Detroit’s Southwest neighborhood, near Ford’s Rouge River plant, arrived thirty-five hundred strong at City Hall in March and successfully prevailed upon the Common Council to reject plans for a black housing project in their area. In this atmosphere, African American leaders and activists joined with UAW leaders to create a slate of candidates for the coming election. Meeting at the Lucy Thurman YWCA in Paradise Valley, they selected Richard Frankensteen, a UAW vice president, as their candidate for mayor and endorsed three men for Common Council, one of whom was Reverend Charles A. Hill, pastor of Hartford Avenue Baptist Church. No black American had been elected to the city’s governing body since 1918, when the system of citywide elections for each council seat replaced the more decentralized, district-based selection process. African American political and religious leaders had earlier agreed to sponsor but one nominee—Hill—in a concerted effort to break the council’s all-white composition.17
Both Frankensteen and Hill did well in the light voter turnout for the August primary. Frankensteen outpolled the incumbent mayor, Edward Jeffries, by some fourteen thousand votes, and Hill placed ninth among eighteen finalists chosen to contest for the nine council seats in the November election. But the primary proved to be the high point of their campaigns. The election’s dominant issues revolved around race and the control of neighborhoods, and white Detroit organized effectively at the polls to defeat any candidate deemed sympathetic to black needs. A low black turnout hurt too, and both Frankensteen and Hill lost decisively. Renewed efforts nonetheless followed. In 1947, Hill ran again, with Coleman Young as his campaign manager, as did three other black candidates. All four lost. The following year, Hill ran once more, managed this time by George W. Crockett, the Florida-born, University of Michigan-trained lawyer who settled in Detroit in 1943. Running as a Democr
at who supported Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s former vice president and then a third-party presidential candidate, Hill faced fierce attacks for alleged Communist leanings. He lost yet again, as he would in 1949 as well. No black candidates for council won election during these years, regardless of their political positions.18
By 1951, when Hill ran and lost for the fifth time, Charles J. Wartman, then the city editor of the Michigan Chronicle, published a two-part series on the question: “Can Negroes Gain Seats in Common Council?” Wartman understood the racism at work in the city, as he did the barrier created by the citywide electoral system. He recognized as well how a black candidate’s identification with white union leadership often generated opposition, even among black union members. Yet these were not in themselves the crux of the persistent electoral failures. “Hundreds of thousands of eligible Negro voters are still staying away from the polls in droves,” he argued, and most of them were not even registered to vote. Wartman blamed the leadership “of the Negro community [that] has not stimulated the Negro sufficiently where politics are concerned.” The destructive competition between Detroit whites and blacks, he continued, where one group fears “that the presence of another group threatens them,” could not be overcome by a complacent black electorate.19
However instructive the articles were, Wartman’s focus on the role of black elites blinded him to the swirling crosscurrents that coursed through black Detroit. Southern migrants arrived in successive waves, and it proved difficult to weave a collective political consciousness quickly amid the unceasing motion of migration. White Detroit’s violent reactions made it only more so. Complicating this process even further were the multiple allegiances black Detroiters held. Church membership alone, the focal point for so many, itself offered a series of options, with competing denominational affiliations, preaching styles, worship rituals, and understandings. As the one institution that collectively celebrated fundamental elements of African American culture, however, the church remained, with all its variations, the closest thing the city had to a mass black organization, complete with an interdenominational ministerial alliance. Certainly, far fewer blacks were in the union movement, although their influence within their own community exceeded their numbers. In the union hall, they learned important skills for organizing people, making public presentations, and calling and running meetings. They also learned to be artful navigators, maneuvering among white union members, the more liberal national leadership, and other blacks who, because of the prevalent racism, doubted the entire undertaking. In these and other groups, moreover, there were as well veterans, men who had risked their lives for American democracy and who were determined “not to be second class citizens.” These veterans, Marc Stepp recalled of his and his friends’ attitudes, returned to the Motor City, saying: “No, we aren’t going to do that anymore, that’s all. You screwed up my dad [following World War I], you aren’t going to screw me up.”20
Singing in a Strange Land Page 17
