Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION In 1963 the Michigan Chronicle, Detroit’s major African American weekly paper, invited its readers to pause in the midst of the city’s ongoing civil rights struggles to take stock of the past and re›ect on the contributions of an earlier generation. In a multipart series, the paper considered the contributions of labor organizers and union members, especially those within the United Auto Workers, Congress of Industrial Organizations (UAW-CIO), and of the heads of race improvement organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. Last, the Chronicle dedicated one installment of the series to three ministers: the Rev. Horace A. White, pastor of Plymouth Congregational (now UCC) Church; Fr. Malcolm C. Dade of St. Cyprian’s Episcopal; and the Rev. Charles A. Hill of Hartford Avenue (now Memorial) Baptist. Accentuating the experiences of this ecumenical trio, all of whom were early supporters of industrial unionism, the article positioned them as part of a generation that laid the foundations for protests in later periods. “Present Negro leadership in Detroit,” the article proclaimed, “is a direct descendant, an offspring of Negro leadership that was born of necessity during the foggy gloom of the depression years and that later matured into a formidable and militant vanguard of Negro progress. There are many grandparents who insist that Detroit is ahead of other northern cities in race relations because of ‘the dedicated and sterling leadership’ of Negroes a quarter century ago.”1 This volume helps construct a narrative about what activism in the 1960s owed to that of the 1930s. In myriad ways, activists in places such as Detroit (i.e., northern, urban, and industrial) managed to sustain a record of progressive political activism over the course of three decades. Like other studies of what social movement theorist Aldon Morris calls “local movement centers”—interlocking networks of resources, strategically placed activists, effective tactics, and strategies of protest developed out of indigenous traditions on a local, as opposed to national, level— Faith in the City seeks to account for patterns of change and continuity from the 1930s to the 1960s.2 Detroit’s range of strong indigenous traditions linking civil rights and labor makes it a particularly rich site in which to situate such a study. The early labor-based struggles in which Hill, White, and Dade played a role do not constitute merely a “prehistory ” of the modern (and national) post–World War II movement. Rather, as the Michigan Chronicle article suggests, those struggles in defense of the rights of labor were an integral in›uence on the contours of political protest in later periods.3 Moreover, the labor movement provided Detroit’s Black activists, both inside and outside the unions, with organizational power and experience that was virtually unmatched by any other African American urban community. The 1963 Chronicle article acknowledges that Reverends Hill and White, along with Father Dade, ‹rst came to the attention of a broader public via their support of industrial unionism, especially during the 1941 Ford Motor Company strike: “The trio marched with other union leaders in front of the plant on Schaefer Road; they appeared at the plant gates to talk with workers, and they were threatened at public meetings for espousing ‘radical views.’” In assisting in the cause of labor, community and religious activists learned lessons about organizing both within the Black community and across racial and ethnic lines. So, too, did Black workers. As union activist Robert “Buddy” Battle expressed his sense of the connection between labor and the Black freedom struggle after World War II, “Having been union leaders for many years we thought we had the know-how to change the situation. And after twenty years of existence, we didn’t feel we had to wait any longer.”4 Some have argued that the postwar movement in the South was so unique that it is best viewed as a discrete phenomenon. In Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom, for instance, Richard H. King insists that the “recent emphasis on the movement’s ideological and institutional continuity with the past tends, wrongly, I think, to minimize what was different , even unique about the civil rights movement of the 1954–68 period.”5 I do not believe that the movement should be so bounded, either temporally or, for that matter, geographically. 2 FAITH IN THE CITY In arguing for a certain...