On a warm spring day, a grandmother is able to take her little granddaughter for a walk around the Sojourner Truth Homes without fear or concern following the rioting that occurred in late February. Library of Congress.
Conclusion
THE AFTERMATH
The Sojourner Truth housing controversy did not produce the long-term changes in federal policy for which progressive reformers had toiled. The expectation, in some liberal circles, was that because the riot was a wake-up call, surely federal officials were listening and ready to respond. Now, perhaps, the federal government would take an even stronger stand against discrimination and move—albeit slowly but deliberately—toward desegregation. In Washington, in a sense, officials had learned their lesson from the Detroit housing riot—just not the lesson progressives were advocating.
The neighborhood composition rule, formulated nearly a decade earlier by Secretary Harold Ickes and his associates, was still in play, but now it would need some tweaking. The original rule seemed clear enough: any public housing development, including defense housing, should not alter—but should reflect—the racial composition of the neighborhood in which it was to be built. In other words, projects to be built in formerly white neighborhoods would be exclusively white; in formerly black neighborhoods, exclusively black. If the Detroit experience had taught city planners anything at all, it was that neighborhoods that were previously mixed (typically working-class blacks and whites who needed to live near the factories to which they could walk) would become completely segregated by design, and the design would be formulated locally without federal interference. There would be no residual mix.
After Sojourner Truth, federal officials became keenly aware that the NHA, or any other agency of government, could not select a site and expect things to proceed smoothly without the approval of local residents. The federal government would provide funding and oversight for the housing project while the local housing commission, which was thought to best understand the local community, would be responsible for site and tenant selection as well as construction management. Federal officials left open to interpretation the infuriatingly vague word neighborhood that had been and could be interpreted as a reference to the immediate construction site, the entire square block or a much larger section of the city, such as the east side or the west side. It gave the local housing commissions much latitude in interpreting the desired degree of segregation.
Months after the Sojourner Truth controversy, the DHC had the opportunity to address official federal policy, past practice and future housing initiatives. A joint NAACP-NUL coalition wanted the DHC to conduct an open hearing on mixed occupancy, using data collected on two dozen instances where biracial neighborhoods had worked in cities around the country, but Mayor Jeffries interceded before the request could be made at a housing commission hearing. Furthermore, he requested the Common Council to reaffirm the neighborhood composition rule as official policy. After the council approved the mayor’s recommendation, the DHC was quick to accept it. Jeffries strongly believed that the Sojourner Truth riot was the result of federal bungling; had they followed the recommendation of the DHC in the first place, the controversy never would have occurred. He failed to mention, however, that the Nevada-Fenelon site was the DHC’s second choice.
Racial tensions did not subside after the last of the black defense workers and their families moved into the Sojourner Truth project. While there were no major racial incidents directly attributed to the move-in, the city continued to experience racial unrest on the streets, on the trolley cars and, most significantly, at employment centers.
At the time of his resignation, police commissioner Frank Eaman made clear that NHA director John Blandford had erred in ordering Detroit authorities to proceed with plans to move black defense workers into the project. Though he helped plan and execute the successful move-in, there is no evidence he changed his opinion about the designation of Sojourner Truth Homes as a black defense housing project. John H. Witherspoon was appointed commissioner on June 1 and would be best remembered for presiding over the 1943 race riot in which 34 people were killed, 700 injured and 1,800 arrested. Property damage was estimated at $2 million (approximately $30 million in 2020 dollars). Witherspoon and other city administrators would blame “Negro hoodlums” for the violence, even though 17 of the 25 blacks—but none of the whites—were killed at the hands of Detroit Police. The NAACP would identify far deeper causes, including inadequate housing, employment discrimination and brutality from a predominantly white police force. Witherspoon would resign from the post five months after the riot.
On a warm spring day, a grandmother is able to take her little granddaughter for a walk around the Sojourner Truth Homes without fear or concern following the rioting that occurred in late February. Library of Congress.
In May, the design for a marble plaque to be affixed to the front of the Sojourner Truth administration building was presented for approval of the Detroit Housing Commission. Commissioner Harriet D. Kelly was still so indignant at federal officials for how the commission’s original recommendations were ignored that she moved to strike not only the names of the commissioners but also any reference to the DHC. The other four commissioners were sympathetic to Kelly’s sentiment but prevailed upon her to permit the inclusion of simply “The Detroit Housing Commission” without members’ names.
Congressman Rudolph Tenerowicz would run unsuccessfully for reelection later in 1942. State senator Charles Diggs organized a disgruntled Citizens Committee and UAW leadership to promote former congressman George Sadowski during the Democratic primary. DHC member Reverend Horace White pushed for a black candidate, but Diggs, himself African American, persuaded the anti-Tenerowicz faction that only a white candidate could win. During the campaign, Tenerowicz was portrayed as an anti-black conservative to the First District voters. Sadowski would win both the Democratic primary and the November general election.
Black leaders in Detroit would push local prosecutors to move forward with the cases against Alderman, Sage and Chandler. However, the federal case against the National Workers League took precedence, they were told, though in late 1943, despite a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia indicting Alderman and Sage and a number of others for conspiring with German officials, the cases were ultimately dismissed. Federal prosecutors concluded that there were too many holes in the case to procure convictions against any of the alleged perpetrators of the various conspiracies. Likewise, the local cases were dismissed on similar grounds. After two years of motions and delays, Alderman, Sage and Chandler walked.65
Housing conditions during the war sharpened hostilities among Detroit’s various factions, and the frustrations often boiled over in the war production plants. Throughout early 1943, a series of wildcat strikes erupted in protest over production quotas and hourly pay, which did not keep up with inflation. Occasionally, blacks walked off the job following disagreements with factory foremen and union representatives over job assignments and workplace discrimination. At Packard, personnel director C.E. Weiss, a noted racist who encouraged whites to complain to the union about having to work alongside African Americans, believed he could cripple the UAW from within by strategically placing blacks on the shop floor, where he knew confrontation might occur. On June 6, Packard promoted three black workers to the shop floor, where outside agitators, planted months before, could stir white workers, particularly Southern white workers who resented having to work shoulder to shoulder with African Americans. Twenty-five thousand white Packard employees walked off the job in protest. The UAW ordered its members back to work the next day, but thousands refused to return and picketed outside in the famous Packard Hate Strike. Under pressure from the UAW, the War Labor Board threatened to fire employees refusing to return to work. Thirty of the striking ringleaders were suspended on June 6, and the remaining workers returned to work.
Just two weeks later, racial tension in Detroit reached its apex following two earlier race riots in the United States, one in Beaumont, Texas, in which white shipyard workers attacked blacks following rumors of a black man raping a white woman, and the other in Harlem, New York, where blacks destroyed white property following a rumor that a black serviceman had been shot and killed by a white police officer.
THE 1943 RACE RIOT
Beginning on June 20, 1943, the costliest and deadliest race riot during World War II occurred on the downtown streets of Detroit. Purportedly, a racial conflict on Belle Isle, the nation’s largest city-owned island park, escalated quickly and spread downtown. After federal troops were called in to restore order, the tally of death, injury and property destruction was staggering: 43 killed, 433 injured and millions of dollars in property damage, particularly in areas of black residential concentration. More than 1,800 individuals were arrested for looting and other infractions. Social psychologist Roger Brown, who was a high school student in Detroit at the time, recalled the buildup of tension preliminary to the outburst: African American resentment had deepened not only because of employment discrimination and the worsening wartime housing crisis but also because of particular segregation practices that arose during the war. The Red Cross, for example, barred black donors as early as December 1941 but relented later, reluctantly, by accepting—but segregating—African American blood donations. In the U.S. Navy, blacks were typically given the most menial jobs on board; the Marine Corps would not even accept African Americans. The indignities went on. There were strains for Detroit’s white population as well, especially, as Brown recalled, because
they brought with them a set of ideas concerning the proper treatment of Negroes; ideas bred in a land of stunted opportunities where the Negro had been an economic competitor. These Southern whites were greatly irritated by the necessity of coming in close contact with the Negro at work, in vehicles of public transportation, and in public facilities of all kinds. Some of these Southern whites joined the Detroit police force.66
The specific, immediate event that triggered the riot was lost in the fog of the evening’s chaos, but witnesses suggest that a fight broke out between small groups of whites and blacks. The free-for-all spread to the MacArthur Bridge (or, more popularly, the Belle Isle Bridge), which connected the island to the city, and the violence spread into downtown. Fueling the conflict were unsubstantiated rumors circulating on both sides of Woodward Avenue. Two individuals told a crowd of black patrons at the Forest Social Club, at 700 Forest Avenue, that a mob of whites had thrown a black baby and its mother off the bridge. On the west side of Woodward Avenue, the white side, the riot was inflamed by a rumor that blacks had raped and murdered a white woman on the bridge. Roving black and white gangs perpetrated random acts of violence, such as pulling people from automobiles and streetcars; shooting or beating bystanders; looting shops, particularly along Hastings Street; and generally engaging in guerrilla warfare. Mercifully, there was little arson due to wartime gasoline rationing.
The riot was quelled after President Roosevelt sent six thousand federal troops to patrol Detroit’s streets at the urgent request of Governor Harry Kelly and Mayor Jeffries. In the aftermath, Jeffries praised the police for exercising restraint, even though seventeen blacks (and no whites) were killed at the hands of white patrolmen. The NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall later called the police commissioner’s enforcement policies weak and uneven, as 85 percent of those arrested were black, and white atrocities were largely ignored.
Could one of the worst race riots in American history have been averted? In retrospect, all signs pointed to increased tension exacerbated by specific events such the construction of the Birwood Wall, the controversy and subsequent riot at Sojourner Truth Homes and the Packard Hate Strike just a few weeks before the June riot. Given the federal political realities of the era, desegregation was not a realistic option before or during the war. Significantly more public housing in general and defense housing in particular for African Americans might have mitigated some of the racial tension, but in reality, the major factions of Detroit, Polish Americans and Southern white migrants in particular, were largely implacable with respect to changing their attitudes and behavior at the major employment centers, on the streetcars, in the public parks and elsewhere.
Cars burn near Stimpson Street during the 1943 race riot, June 21. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Eventually, major changes would come. In one of the highly segregated enclaves of Detroit, the West Side, an important housing discrimination suit would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court in 1948 and produce an important civil rights victory for many newly protected groups.
As nearly every African American living on Detroit’s West Side knew, crossing Tireman Avenue and journeying into the white section contained risks, no matter if it involved conducting business or simply paying respects at a funeral service. However, in 1944, Orsell McGhee took the unprecedented step of purchasing a home in just such a white neighborhood at 4626 Seebolt Street, one block north of Tireman. The seller, anxious to move to California, was willing to ignore the racially restrictive covenant attached to the property deed and sell the four-bedroom red brick house to a black family for $8,000. Benjamin Sipes, the next-door neighbor, filed a lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court arguing that the sale violated the deed restriction supported by the 1922 Supreme Court ruling declaring restrictive housing covenants lawful. Sipes’s argument was upheld by both the circuit court and, upon appeal, by the Michigan Supreme Court. The McGhee v. Sipes case was combined with two similar cases involving racially restrictive covenants when it reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The lead case, Shelley v. Kramer, was set in St. Louis, Missouri, with almost identical circumstances. Famed civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, would argue that court enforcement of such covenants violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. On May 3, 1948, the court decided that though “there was no federal prohibition against including restrictive covenants in property deeds, no state or federal court could enforce them.”
As important as this ruling was at the time—ruling racially restrictive covenants to be unenforceable—it would not be until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) that significant inroads would be made in defeating the de facto power of neighborhood homeowners’ associations, real estate brokers and agents and other nefarious organizations from exerting their influence to deter African Americans from establishing homesteads wherever they chose to do so. Ironically, after Shelley v. Kramer was concluded, Orsell McGhee and Benjamin Sipes became best of friends and remained so for the rest of their lives.
In order to counteract potential legal penalties, real estate agents and others who wished to exploit the fears and baser instincts of white clientele used increasingly subtle but no less effective marketing strategies in the years following Shelley v. Kramer. For example, in 1978, a real estate agent distributed the following flier to residents in the Wayne/Westland market area: “Just a note to let you know that we have new neighbors moving in. A new family has recently purchased a home, causing much real estate activity in our area. If I may assist you in any way, please give me a call.”67
The implicit racial scare tactics would have most certainly been understood by white residents well conditioned by over a century of racial discrimination in housing, particularly in the highly segregated metropolitan Detroit real estate market. Almost immediately, most residents would look down the block to see if a black family had moved in.
Entrance to Sojourner Truth Homes, winter 2020. Author’s collection.
Side entrance to Sojourner Truth Homes, winter 2020. Author’s collection.
Two-story unit, Sojourner Truth Homes, winter 2020. Author’s collection.
Today, organizations like the Fair Housing Center of Metropolitan Detroit field real estate purchase and apartment rental complaints, as well as complaints about other forms of housing discrimination in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties. For example, people with disabilities were not a protected class under the original Fair Housing Act, despite the tremendous hardship placed on them by discriminatory housing practices. Unwilling to wait for fair housing law to catch up with the times, the Fair Housing Center initiated its first disability discrimination case under the Rehabilitation Act in 1987, one year before the Fair Housing Act was amended to cover disability.
In 2020, racially motivated housing discrimination is not so blatant as it was in the case of the Sojourner Truth Homes in 1942. But it continues to exist as property managers and real estate developers become more sophisticated with respect to their unlawful practices. Our growing understanding of people’s needs—for example, as our knowledge of mental health evolves, we know that many individuals benefit from emotional support animals and deserve equal access to housing—suggests we still have a very long way to go.