The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

FOUR: Drawing the Color Line in Housing, 1915–1930

chapter four Drawing the Color Line in Housing, 1915—1930 A man who is living aright will do his work aright. —henry ford the city that the town fathers once hoped would be a model for clean and decent living—a master plan for municipal reform in an industrial setting—began to split open at the seams in the early twenties. Although Detroit had escaped the large-scale riots that had broken out in other cities , such as in East Saint Louis in 1917 or Washington, D.C., and Chicago in 1919, racial tolerance on the streets of Detroit reached a low by 1925 as white mobs vented their rage over the black “invasion” of “their” neighborhoods .¹ Detroit police shot fifty-five blacks between January and 1 September . At least some of these deaths resulted from execution-style slaughter by the police, according to 1925 Homicide Squad reports.² Walter White, assistant secretary of the naacp, claimed that the Ku Klux Klan actively recruited members among police officers (and court employees), but how successful the effort was is not clear. Police actions, however, often reinforced the mission of the kkk to keep African Americans confined to a racially segregated area of the city.³ The city hailed as Mecca for opening up economic opportunity for African Americans severely restricted opportunities in housing in the 1920s, underscoring the limits of inclusion.⁴ What had been a critical housing shortage throughout Detroit during World War I for white and black residents alike turned into an acute crisis for African Americans in the postwar years. By 1925, citywide practices restricted black newcomers to all-black blocks, creating an urban landscape shaped and bounded by race. While this demographic construct was not unique in American history— earlier forms included reservations for Native Americans and “China- 93 drawing the color line in housing towns” for Chinese immigrants in places like San Francisco—the rise of the black ghetto was a twentieth-century urban innovation.⁵ The black ghetto marked a new phase in residential restrictions by limiting where American citizens could live. Henry Ford’s penchant for social engineering did not, during the twenties, extend to open housing, leaving black Ford workers and their families to sort out ways to cope with the rising tide of exclusion that forced them to spend their Ford wages on inferior housing. The experience in housing diminished hopes for realizing the American dream even as it created an urban area whose very restrictions provided conditions for nurturing self-reliance and self-determination within the generation of black migrants who came of age during the twenties in Detroit. The doubling of Detroit’s black population to more than 80,000 between 1920 and 1925, discussed earlier, meant more people and less available space within the ghetto. Black business and professional men sought housing outside proscribed boundaries, igniting a series of aggressive attacks by white mobs. The racially volatile climate, as Kenneth Jackson points out, was stoked by the Detroit Klan, who seized the issue of neighborhood segregation as a means of breathing “new life into the secret order.”⁶ Ossian Sweet, a physician, and his wife, Gladys, were two of a small number of African Americans who tested the racial waters in 1925. When the Sweets did so and defended their new home with guns, a man from the white mob circling their house was killed. The Sweets were promptly arrested and charged with murder. Politics and housing discrimination intersected in the landmark Ossian Sweet case. Bonds of communal solidarity took root as black Detroiters from all backgrounds realized the depth of white resolve to keep blacks in their place and the need to rely on their own resources to challenge the racial status quo. If 1923 was the year when new coalition politics challenged the balance of power in the courts, and 1924 the year when a new order took the reins of city government, then 1925 was the year when the issue of Detroit’s restrictive racial housing market was tested by black Detroiters. housing patterns: south versus north What was new in Detroit, along with other northern cities during the Great Migration, was the construction of a ghetto for housing blacks, a feature in sharp contrast with patterns established in the nineteenth- 94 drawing the color line in housing century South. Housing was the one area in the South largely beyond the otherwise all-encompassing reach of Jim...