Know Your Price - Andre M. Perry

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she talked about Floyd the person, the exchange seemed to drift into a conversation about Detroit. Given the trauma Grandma Doris experienced in Detroit, you’d think she would avoid conversations about the Motor City. To Grandma Doris, despite it being the backdrop for much suffering, Detroit also represented a sacred land full of opportunity that attracted Black folks with its promise of freedom. Detroit may have been a painful place for Grandma, but it was a place she could claim for her own.

      Grandma Doris represented a people’s unrequited love for Black-majority cities. Many of us are unquestionably committed to Black-majority cities, but that love is not reciprocated by public policy. Considering the devaluation of our lives and property, my family’s losses reflect an abject failure of policy to protect us against discrimination. History shows that policy proactively degraded us. The extent of White residents, politicians, and employers’ efforts to make conditions as difficult as possible for Black people to thrive in Detroit reveals how today’s $156 billion in losses is rooted in antagonistic policies and people bent on debasing our lives and property—in the past and present.

      “There’s never been a place designed for Black people to live in large numbers,” said comedian D. L. Hughley in an interview on VLAD TV, an online video and news website run by DJ Vlad. “The only place they build for niggas to live was jail, was prison.”4 The history of White antagonism toward Black people in Detroit, including my family members, makes Hughley’s point.

      Blacks relocated to Detroit largely from the South in two waves of the Great Migration: first after World War I and later with the coming of World War II, seeking jobs in the auto capital of the world. The rapid migration of Blacks who already had limited options where they could live created a severe housing shortage. In anticipation of grants from the federal government, the Detroit Housing Commission in 1941 approved two housing developments—one for Blacks and one for Whites—to provide some relief for a growing Black population. However, the federal government rejected Detroit’s plan to build homes for Black folk while allowing a development for Whites. Intense protests ensued from housing advocates, resulting in a single development for Black occupants that was to be named Sojourner Truth Homes in honor of the nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist.

      Soon before the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA) planned to open the housing units, on February 27, 1942, a mob of dozens of White residents participated in a cross burning at the site. The next morning, approximately 150 White dissidents blockaded the lot to prevent Black residents from moving in.5 Chronicled in the book Black Detroit by City College of New York historian Herb Boyd, Blacks retaliated by driving two cars through the gang. What ensued is now known as the Sojourner Truth riot, which ended with police placing the Black residents under protective order. To allow for time to calm a tinderbox situation, the National Housing Agency took two months to ready themselves for another effort to move Black tenants, who were given temporary housing, into their permanent homes in Sojourner Truth. The mayor deployed 1,000 police officers and had 1,600 National Guard troops to assist and eventually clear the way. The many physical disputes and police envoys highlight the degree to which Whites fought to show that Black people didn’t belong in Detroit.

      While racist Whites tried to make housing insecure for Black people, they also applied aggressive tactics in the workplace. In 1941, during World War II, car manufacturers had to convert assembly lines that made cars into lines that produced tanks. The war demanded more workers—regardless of race—to produce enough war machines. Before and immediately after World War II, Blacks were relegated to service work like janitorial services or given dangerous jobs in the foundries, pouring melted metals into castings.

      A worker described working in the foundry in the early twentieth century in an oral history project cited in a 1979 Journal of Negro History article:

      As I looked around, all the men were dirty and greasy and smoked up. They were beyond recognition. There were only three or four Whites. These were Polish. Negroes told me later they were the only ones able to stand the work. Their faces looked exactly like Negro faces. They were so matted and covered with oil and dirt that no skin showed. My friend and I went home discussing how it was that they could say everyone was free with equal rights up North. There was no one in the foundry but Negroes. We didn’t believe those men wanted to be in the foundry.6

      Blacks were most often excluded from the assembly lines because White laborers refused to work with them, limiting the amount of quality jobs available for Blacks. Frank Hadas, a Ford engineer during the period, described in an oral history project cited in a 1979 Journal of Negro History article on how employers justified putting Blacks in inferior roles and dangerous positions in the early twentieth century. “You could have them on some dirty, rough job where there wouldn’t be many Whites to complain against them,” said Hadas. “But if you tried to mix them in the assembly lines or any place else where Whites predominated and hung their coats touching those of the Whites you know, ‘that nigger is poison;’ you couldn’t do that.”7 Again, the federal government intervened. Apparently, when it comes to winning wars, patriotism had little patience for racism.

      In 1941, Navy Secretary Frank Knox attempted to squelch racial harassment that may have slowed production. Knox issued warnings to White employees who refused to work with African Americans, according to Boyd. Refusals were to be seen as being disloyal to the government and the war efforts. Knox proclaimed that those who refused to work with Black laborers would be subject to dismissal and banishment from other wartime production jobs.8

      Civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and unions like the United Auto Workers fought alongside the federal government to eradicate employment discrimination in the factories. People knew then, as they do now, that many problems in Black communities stem from a lack of job opportunities. In 1943, the preeminent scholar W.E.B. Dubois recommended in his column in the Amsterdam News these crime reduction strategies: employment at a livable wage, the eradication of African American illiteracy by 1980, healthcare for all people, and a social security system that included eliminating unemployment.9 Today we know that those who are out of the labor force for reasons that generally are not socially acceptable (such as retirement and disability) and who also are not looking for work are much more likely to commit burglary and robbery, according to a 2016 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology by researchers Gary Kleck and Dylan Jackson.10

      A national Black labor movement led by A. Phillip Randolph pressured the auto industry for greater inclusion in the 1940s. Organizers put enough pressure on President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943 that he issued an executive order to get more Blacks hired in the factories, resulting in the hiring of more than 75 thousand Black Detroiters, highlighting the role the federal government could play today in improving employment outcomes.11

      While labor organizers helped Black Detroiters acquire housing and jobs, victories for equity didn’t assuage hardline prejudicial attitudes of White residents, and back then they were the majority in the city: 91 percent in 1940; 84 percent in 1950; and 71 percent in 1960. The attitudes that fueled racial tensions in the 1940s and 1950s helped motivate White people to move out of Detroit. And the federal government’s housing and transportation policies facilitated those desires. White Detroiters abandoned Detroit at the expense of Black residents’ assets rather than make it a place everyone could call home.

      The establishment of the interstate highway system in 1956 literally paved the way for White flight to the suburbs. Freeway construction, most notably the Edsel Ford Expressway, which was completed in the 1950s, also known as I-94, tore through predominately Black neighborhoods. Black businesses and homes were seized through eminent domain polices. More than 2,800 properties were removed for that project alone, debilitating Black wealth and economic growth. Detroit’s population dropped from 2 million to approximately 1.5 million during the 1960s when Whites moved to the suburbs, taking their tax dollars and discretionary incomes with them.

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