Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America

10. “We Cannot Wait for Understanding to Come to Us”: Community Activists Respond to Violence at Detroit’s Northwestern High School, 1940-1941

Chapter 10 “We Cannot Wait for Understanding to Come to Us” Community Activists Respond to Violence at Detroit’s Northwestern High School, – Karen R. Miller On Tuesday, February , , racial tensions that had been brewing on Detroit’s West Side exploded into violence at the area’s high school. Three hundred white and black youths participated in a racially charged “fracas” outside Northwestern High School. Six young men and one policeman were injured, and eleven people were arrested. The Michigan Chronicle, one of Detroit’s black weeklies, reported that gangs of white youths had gathered around the high school that afternoon, waiting for students to be let out of their classes. Soon after school was dismissed, one African American and one white girl “engaged in a fistic fight.” Their brawl “ignited sparks,” and instantly black and white youths “began hurling snow balls, bricks and sticks at each other.”1 Activists from neighboring black churches and civil rights groups responded to the violence at Northwestern by mobilizing members of community -based organizations that they had been building over the previous few years. They worked to draw parents, students, and neighborhood residents into these groups and ultimately into a larger effort to push the city and the school board to respond to their concerns. These relatively new community-based organizations developed more confrontational and grassroots political styles than most prominent African-American leaders and organizations had maintained throughout the s. Younger black activists, who had become community and labor leaders during the early s, had been refining their ideas about protest and civil rights and  building political coalitions to fight together against police brutality, for union recognition, workers’ rights, and equal access to welfare and city resources . The clashes at Northwestern High School were an opportunity for this newer group of activists to develop leadership and build support for their increasingly popular approach to organizing and local politics. In fact, the political networks and organizational style that these groups used and continued to develop were part of a move toward a new kind of activist style upon which the city’s civil rights movement would ultimately be built.2 Community activists’ responses to the Northwestern riots helped solidify and expand the political networks upon which Detroit’s larger Black Freedom movement would be built during the s and into the s. The men, women, and young people who participated in these organized responses to discrimination and violence were part of what Angela Dillard calls an “emerging civil rights community.”3 The city’s labor movement and recent fights against police brutality had drawn activists fighting for racial equality into closer alliances with the white and black Left. This article explores how members of Detroit’s “emerging civil rights community,” alongside students from Northwestern High School, organized responses to the mounting violence and persistent discrimination that African Americans faced in their neighborhoods and schools during the early s. Furthermore, it shows that the disturbances at Northwestern High School were among the first in a series of clashes to which community activists responded and through which they began to build a more clearly defined and more grassroots movement for racial justice in Detroit. Recently historians have produced a number of studies that have exposed the mechanics through which white residents worked to maintain segregation and sustain their political dominance in the urban North during and after the Second World War. These studies have done an excellent job exploring white intentions and examining strategies that white citizens used to mobilize political power. However, they have paid little attention to black resistance and have even suggested that African Americans were effectively politically immobilized by racial clashes instigated by white city residents. Detroit has served as an important case study for scholars interested in the history of white racism. The Origins of the Urban Crisis, by Thomas Sugrue, has attracted considerable attention for its nuanced and well-researched portrait of white Detroiters’ organization against integration and black political power. However, Sugrue’s story, which begins in  k a r e n m i l l e r  and ends with the city’s famous rebellion of , sheds little light on grassroots black activism in the city. In fact, it portrays African Americans largely as victims of white racism; Detroit’s black community, the book suggests, had little meaningful political power.4 This portrait stands in sharp contrast to recent scholarly work that has highlighted...