INTRODUCTION

On April 29, 1942, just five short months after the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s impassioned request of Congress for a declaration of war against Japan, Detroiter Walter Jackson, a short, wiry, thirty-five-year-old former UAW-CIO shop steward, prepared for the battle of his life. “We are here now, and let the bad luck happen,” Jackson told an on-scene reporter. “I have only got one time to die and I’d just as soon die here.”¹

Jackson was not talking about confronting the Germans on the battlefields of Europe or the Japanese on the islands of the South Pacific. The “enemy” he was about to confront was a large group of fellow Americans—white Americans—hellbent on preventing him, his family and other African American defense workers from moving into a defense housing project on the northeast side of Detroit.

Just six weeks earlier, violence had erupted at the housing project as two hundred black families were forcibly prevented from their scheduled move-in by a large mob of pickets, protesters and outside agitators, whereupon forty individuals were sent to local hospitals and more than two hundred others were arrested and jailed.

The story of the Sojourner Truth Housing Riot of 1942 is a wartime story fought on the homefront, on the streets of Detroit, the true “Arsenal of Democracy.” The incident occurred at a time when the White House and officials from various federal agencies were preaching racial unity to counter Nazi claims of Aryan superiority.

Initially described in the media as a “neighborhood squabble,” the controversy accelerated quickly to become a citywide political scandal whose resolution would eventually land in the lap of federal officials, where the problem had originated. The controversy would reveal the extent to which the federal government was complicit in segregating urban America and expose the degree to which much of Detroit’s politics, its policies and its programs were influenced by internal factionalism.

A CITY OF FACTIONS

At the outbreak of World War II, Detroit was an industrial city of 1.7 million residents. Nearly half of its population had arrived in the previous two decades and were less likely to identify with the city than they were with a religious community, cultural organization or labor union.

Polish Catholics represented the largest single bloc, with over 250,000 residents, not counting the Polish enclave of Hamtramck, a city within Detroit with approximately 50,000 Polish residents. The Polish were typically devout Catholics, filling the pews of thirty-five Polish neighborhood churches.

Approximately 200,000 Southern whites constituted the second-largest group of Detroiters, bringing with them their own indigenous Southern attitudes toward race and religion.

More than 100,000 African Americans settled in Detroit during the first wave of the Great Migration. In 1940, there were 149,000 black residents of the city, and by the end of the 1940s, that number would more than double.

The rest of Detroit’s population was made up of long-established ethnic whites (Germans, Italians, Yugoslavs, Bulgarians, Syrians, Irish and others), eastern European Jews, established African Americans and Canadians.

The best illustration of how these various factions interplayed would be in the auto plants, now converted to war production, where unions representing workers targeted management for improved wages and working conditions but internally struggled with members having various agendas: ethnic Catholics who formed as much as 50 percent of union membership and who were seeking to flee poverty yet preserve their ethnic heritage, the communists with their socialistic agenda and goal of workers’ control over industry, the African Americans who were seeking redress over constant abuse and employment discrimination, the National Workers League and elements of the Ku Klux Klan who were attempting to sow division among the union rank-and-file and exclude what they perceived as undesirables.

BOOMTOWN OR BUST

Detroit in the 1920s and ’30s was a city of economic feast or famine. The 1920s saw the city become wealthy from the mass production and sale of automobiles by forty-three different auto manufacturing companies. To accommodate its burgeoning workforce, the city accelerated its program of annexing land in all directions, increasing its size in one ten-year period (1916–26) by 70 square miles, or one-half its size. In 1926, the city was forced to end this program owing to state legislative action and by surrounding communities incorporating as cities to avoid being absorbed by Detroit. The city now occupied 139 square miles but continued to grow its population each year as tens of thousands of Southern migrants flooded into the city in search of factory employment.

By the end of the 1920s and for much of the next decade, Detroit struggled to stay on its feet as the Great Depression took hold. Guardian and First National, Detroit’s two largest banks, were liquidated. Auto sales declined by 75 percent. Tens of thousands of residents were thrown out of work. Many families owed their survival to federal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, with its sixty-one camps in Michigan employing over ten thousand young men. By the end of the 1930s, Hitler had annexed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia. After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, France and Great Britain declared war. Despite initial declarations of neutrality, the United States would soon be plunged into the Second World War.

EMPLOYMENT GROWTH

Roosevelt and other administration officials knew that complete recovery from the Great Depression would not come about by engaging in another major war. National economic recovery from the Great Depression was far from complete, for double-digit unemployment lingered throughout the 1930s, and by 1939, it hovered around 17 percent. Full participation in any war effort would merely temporarily trade improved employment numbers for a substantial increase in the national debt. (Time would prove Roosevelt’s prescience, as nearly 17 million unemployed found work in the various war industries, but the national debt spiraled from $49 billion in 1941 to $260 billion in 1945.) In other words, there was no illusion, from a strictly economic perspective, that World War II would pull the country out of Depression. More importantly, especially following the domestic suffering endured during the Great Depression, few families wanted to send their boys across the ocean to a faraway war.

After France fell to Germany within six weeks during the summer of 1940, Great Britain now stood alone as the only major power confronting the Nazi menace. Roosevelt believed the war would soon be at our doorstep and we needed to be prepared for that eventuality. National polling began to reflect American fears that we would of necessity be drawn into the war, yet we were not fully prepared to commit to any more than helping Great Britain in their darkest hour.

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” FDR stated on December 29, 1940. “For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.”

Sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt prepares to deliver an address to the nation. Library of Congress.

FDR would go on to call for the mass production of guns, ships, tanks and other war materiel to support Great Britain as part of a lend-lease program. Hermann Goering, one of the primary architects of the Nazi police state, scoffed at such a claim; America was, in his estimation, capable of manufacturing only refrigerators and razor blades. United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther countered by saying, “England’s battles, it used to be said, were won on the playing fields of Eton. America’s can be won on the assembly lines of Detroit.”² If FDR could envision what needed to be done, Reuther knew how it would be done.

FDR knew he would need industrial innovators to fulfill his promise to the American people that the country would be prepared when the time came. Based on the recommendation of longtime adviser Bernard Baruch, FDR asked Detroit’s General Motors president William Knutsen to come to Washington to head up the Office of Production Management. His expertise in management and mass production was exactly what would be needed in order to outpace the enemy in the production of military hardware. (After the war, Knutsen could say, “We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the likes of which he had never seen nor dreamed possible.”)

Sixteen million Americans joined various branches of the armed forces. Minority participation was significant. All citizens, regardless of racial or ethnic origin, were equally subject to the draft and enjoyed the same rate of pay. Among the minorities in uniform were Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians and Native Americans. African Americans were an especially important source of manpower for the American military, as two and a half million registered for the draft and over one million were inducted through Selective Service by December 31, 1945. Black inductees constituted approximately 11 percent of all registrants liable for service.

Another twenty-four million Americans worked in factories on the homefront to supply these troops overseas. Cities big and small across the nation responded by transforming themselves almost overnight into centers of armaments production. Shipyards in Boston, Richmond, Mobile and San Diego turned out so much tonnage that by 1943 they had replaced all Allied ships sunk since the beginning of the war in 1939.

As the war raged on, Detroit became the embodiment of FDR’s “Arsenal of Democracy.” The city constituted 2 percent of the nation’s population, yet it accounted for 10 percent of the nation’s war materiel output. Having begun the retooling as early as February 1941, Detroit’s auto companies were in high gear by the time the country formally entered the war. Detroit assembly lines would produce tanks, amphibious “duck” trucks, airplanes, radar units, bombsights, fighter plane engines, aircraft propellers, marine engines and many millions of bullets. Cadillac converted from automobile to tank production in fifty-five days. FDR had vowed the country would produce 60,000 planes by the end of 1942. Ford promised and delivered one 56,000-pound B-24 Liberator (capable of flying 300-plus miles per hour) every hour. By the end of the war, Willow Run had produced 4,600 units of what would become the world’s most-produced multiengine heavy bomber in military history.³

William S. Knutsen, former president of General Motors, sifts through notes as he prepares to speak before a congressional subcommittee in his capacity as chairman of the Office of Production Management. Library of Congress.

Once again, Detroit became boomtown. In the first six months after Pearl Harbor, Detroit made $1.4 billion in war materiel, likely more than it would have made in automobile manufacturing during the same period in peacetime. By 1943, the city was expected to produce $12 billion in war goods, according to estimates by the Office of Production Management.

Jobs were plentiful, and wages were good. Given the shortage of young white males in the workforce, newly available positions on the factory floor were gradually filled by white women and minorities, particularly black men and women. These new employment opportunities and this newfound economic stability encouraged many African Americans to believe they might now be integrated into society and enjoy the same economic mobility enjoyed by the people they replaced. By 1940, nearly 12 percent of Ford line workers were black. However, because of factionalism, workplace tensions escalated between groups, and none suffered the sting of abuse and discrimination more than African Americans.

Black servicemen examining a grounded fighter plane in Germany. Library of Congress.

Factory worker at Briggs Manufacturing, Detroit, Michigan. Library of Congress.

Factory worker at Briggs Manufacturing, Detroit, Michigan. Library of Congress.

RACIAL SEGREGATION IN DETROIT

In 1940, no city in the United States was more racially segregated than Detroit, and even today, the Detroit metropolitan area remains deeply segregated. To understand this phenomenon, one must revisit real estate transactions conducted in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. “Covenants,” that is, binding agreements between buyer and seller, are normal elements to be found within the language of property transactions. Restrictive covenants, too, are often embedded in the language of the deed to the property and “restrict” what property owners can and cannot do with the purchased property. For example, to buy into a new suburban subdivision, the purchaser might be required to honor a homeowners’ association requirement that no fences be constructed between individual properties, thus creating an aesthetically pleasing green belt in the backyards of property owners. Racially restrictive covenants, however, began to appear sporadically during the final decade of the nineteenth century, first in Massachusetts and California. The covenant bound the new homeowner to restrict any future sale in such a way as to exclude, for example, African Americans from purchasing the land, perhaps for a specific period or, perhaps, into perpetuity. Such a covenant might read as follows: “Hereafter no part of said property or any portion thereof shall be occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race, it being intended hereby to restrict the use of said property against occupancy as owners or tenants of any portion of said property for resident or other purposes by people of the Negro or Mongolian race.”⁴

The Great Migration of blacks from the South beginning around 1910 deeply concerned white property owners nationwide who were averse to any form of integration. Baltimore mayor Barry Mahool summed up the prevailing attitude by suggesting, “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidents of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.”⁵ While the Supreme Court (in Buchanan v. Warley) ruled “racial zoning” within municipalities unconstitutional in 1917, it left open private agreements, such as restrictive covenants. Thus, within a few years, with the organizational support of the real estate industry, racially restrictive covenants proliferated within deeds of sale, not only when property exchanged hands between one buyer and one seller but also within large-scale real estate developments. One estimate suggests that at least 50 percent of all residential property deeds in the United States had racially restrictive covenants by 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled (in Shelly v. Kramer) that such covenants were “unenforceable.” The damage had been done, but now the problem was finally resolved. Or so it seemed.

In Detroit, like Chicago and many other big cities, it has been estimated that outside the inner city, 80 percent of residential property deeds contained racially restrictive covenants. Before 1948, this left very few areas for blacks to rent or purchase property. Compounding the housing problem created by these restrictions, the African American population more than doubled between 1940 and 1950 (from 149,119 in 1940 to 300,506 in 1950). In 1940, blacks represented 9.19 percent of the city’s population. However, ten years later, the effect of the Great Migration could be felt dramatically as blacks now constituted 16.25 percent of the population—and they were a constituency that would increase significantly in both number and percentage in the years ahead.

If housing was a serious problem for Southern whites arriving by the thousands each month before, during and after the war, it was an absolute crisis for black migrants. Several factors were in play. First, when black migrants arrived at the city limits, they were given few immediate housing options. Most had limited financial resources, typically not enough to purchase a home. However, regardless of their financial condition, there were only six areas of the city receptive to black renters or homeowners not subject to the conditions of racially restrictive covenants: Black Bottom, Paradise Valley, North End, Westside, Conant Gardens and Eight Mile–Wyoming. Furthermore, these areas were not socioeconomically equal. Conant Gardens and Westside were two established middle-class black communities with a high percentage of property owners. Here you could find civil servants, teachers, accountants and so on. For economically disadvantaged black migrants arriving from the South, housing options were thus further restricted, and most found themselves settling into the overcrowded and dilapidated rental units found within Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. Despite these squalid conditions, blacks had few other choices and also had to bear the brunt of unscrupulous landlords who knew the demand was so great they could ignore requests for desperately needed repairs to these flats and apartments and still charge exorbitant rent.

While racially restrictive covenants were mainly responsible for racial segregation in the big industrial centers such as Detroit, the effects were further exacerbated by policies and programs that were created before World War II. Following the election of FDR in 1932, a series of New Deal programs and projects were created in response to the dire economic conditions precipitated by the Great Depression. Among the many agencies created were the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Home Loan Bank Board. The FHA was designed to stabilize the housing market by providing insurance on loans tendered by the banking and loan industry. Similarly, under the supervision of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was authorized to provide new mortgages on an emergency basis to homeowners at risk of losing their homes due to foreclosure.

In 1935, HOLC began deviating from its original mission to assist homeowners avoid losing their homes to foreclosure and, for the next five years, developed a City Survey Program designed to assess risk levels for long-term real estate investment and to stabilize the appraising industry. HOLC agents traveled the country to gather data from local realtors and appraisers in more than two hundred cities. Particular neighborhoods within a city such as Detroit were graded thusly: A, Green, Best; B, Blue, Still Desirable; C, Yellow, Declining; and D, Red, Hazardous. Although the term redlining was not coined until the 1960s, it clearly applied in 1940 to neighborhoods with minority occupants, which were considered high risk for mortgage lenders.⁶

For blacks without significant resources, substandard housing and living conditions became a self-fulfilling prophesy. The Eight Mile–Wyoming neighborhood was a case in point. Prospective black homeowners had tried for years to obtain bank financing to construct standard housing. Because banks were unable to secure FHA backing, owing to the hazardous designation determined by HOLC, loan applications from African American settlers in the area were rejected wholesale. And since banks charged private contractors who were willing to build in the area higher interest rates, few residents were able to afford these professional services. Instead, many residents built walls of whatever malleable materials they could find. And still others constructed shacks, piece by piece, as lumber was purchased and scrap material became available locally.

In 1941, a real estate developer had approached the FHA with plans to develop the property west of the black Eight Mile–Wyoming enclave for an exclusively white clientele, only to have his application for federal insurance on loans rejected because the proposed project bordered this hazardous neighborhood, as defined by HOLC’s City Survey Program. The FHA was reluctant to insure bank loans on such properties because racially mixed areas, the agency reasoned, were likely to stir confrontation, lead to violence and jeopardize the fiscal soundness of the investment. Undaunted, the developer approached the FHA a second time with a new proposal: he would construct a wall, six feet high and one foot thick, between the hazardous neighborhood east of the wall and the proposed new development. The FHA agreed to the compromise.

Over the years, efforts to further isolate the community, under the guise of protecting property values, would surface. For example, in 1953, Jewish real estate developer Harry Slatkin proposed extending the wall just south of the African American community in a direction perpendicular to the existing wall to further separate the African American community from his Jewish clientele, who were moving in a northerly direction. He would promote the development as “one of northwest Detroit’s last and most fashionable residential areas.” When the city building department rejected his permit request, he was undeterred. A six-foot-high solid wood fence, six blocks in length, was erected. Eventually, Slatkin’s fence deteriorated to the point that it had to be removed. The concrete segregation wall, however, stands to this day.

SUBSTANDARD CONDITIONS IN THE SEGREGATED NEIGHBORHOODS

As Southerners migrated to Detroit, housing became the most critical issue for white and black workers. By 1942, 98.7 percent of all dwelling units in Detroit were occupied (85 percent was considered the housing danger mark). One often had to travel fifty miles to find decent housing to rent. The housing situation was particularly critical for African Americans in this highly segregated industrial center. With the second wave of the Great Migration taking place, housing was in such short supply that people doubled up and lived in cramped quarters, in garages, in carriage houses, in attics, in tents and too often on the street. An average of 10,000 job seekers entered Detroit each month during the early war years. By 1943, Detroit’s population had increased by more than 400,000 as a direct consequence of the Great Migration from the South. There was no more land to be annexed and fewer and fewer places to construct housing.

Not only was housing in short supply, but it also was frequently substandard. In 1940, the U.S. Census Bureau undertook to measure for the very first time the nature, extent and condition of the country’s housing stock. It found that 45.7 percent of houses in the United States were considered substandard, which was defined at the time as housing that lacked complete plumbing facilities or was dilapidated. Poor housing conditions were thus a nationwide problem, but conditions in black neighborhoods, such as on the lower east side of Detroit, were particularly acute. Most structures in the residential areas were built in the nineteenth century; however, the problem was not the age of the structure. It was the degree of neglect by unscrupulous landlords who felt no compunction to remedy defects when the demand for accommodations—almost any kind of accommodations—was so great.

Poster promoting public participation in the 1940 census, the very first to assess the condition of American housing. Library of Congress.

Living room in substandard apartment building after sustaining fire damage. Note the coal-burning stove in the middle of the room. Library of Congress.

From today’s perspective, a much clearer picture of substandard housing brings into focus the conditions many African Americans suffered in their quest for safe, clean, affordable housing during the war years. To meet any reasonable living standard, a dwelling should provide access to basic needs: a clean, dry place that reduces exposure to harsh weather, physical injury and communicable diseases and infections; a safe place with functioning utilities such as water, sewer, gas and electricity; and a secure place to rest and relax, as well as to store food, clothing, medications and items of personal hygiene. Few homes in the largest black neighborhoods met this standard.⁷

Contemporaneous measures of substandard housing—certainly the ones applied in the 1940 census—do not do justice to the broad range of environmental issues that affect the health and welfare of inhabitants of such dwellings. Today we have a much clearer picture, thanks to the research findings reported by the World Health Organization, the National Centers for Disease Control and organizations such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. To understand life in the segregated black neighborhoods, particularly in the overcrowded lower east side, that is, Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, it is useful to overlay a modern template of substandard conditions.⁸

A leading cause of chronic illness in the United States is allergies. Respiratory conditions such as asthma—the most common chronic disease among children—often develop or are exacerbated by conditions found in substandard housing. Leaking roofs, poor ventilation, dirty carpeting and pest infestations can lead to mold, dust mites and other allergens. Respiratory illnesses and some types of cancers can be traced to exposure to tobacco smoke, pollutants from faulty heating systems, natural gas cooking and asbestos dust released from insulation around boilers, furnaces and pipes.

Deteriorating paint in older homes, found in the nineteenth-century structures on the lower east side, is the primary source of lead exposure for children. Generally, homes built before 1978 often contain lead-based paint and lead in the plumbing system. Particularly in older homes, children ingest paint chips and inhale lead-contaminated dust. Housing can also be a source of exposure to various carcinogenic air pollutants.

Three young boys share a bed in a house in substandard condition. Library of Congress.

Bedroom in substandard house, with deteriorating and missing wall board to protect residents from the elements. Library of Congress.

Child plays on mound of debris in backyard of dilapidating housing structure. Library of Congress.

Older homes are not inherently less safe or conducive to physical injury. However, if these homes are not properly maintained, as in the case of homes and apartment buildings in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, individuals are one slip or fall or burn from an emergency room visit. Unintentional home injuries naturally tend to be highest in the youngest and oldest age groups. Poorly maintained homes may have stairs in disrepair, loose or missing handrails, slippery surfaces—particularly in the kitchen and bathroom—inadequate lighting, missing or damaged window locks and guards and uncarpeted or concrete floors.

Fire- and scald-related injuries were a constant concern in the buildings on the lower east side. Practical, inexpensive smoke detectors were not widely available until well after World War II, and they would be less likely found in poorly maintained housing. In 1915, an individual had a one in ten chance of perishing in a house fire; a century later, the odds improved to one in one hundred. Scald burns and scald-related deaths tend to occur in such high-risk groups as children younger than four years and older persons with physical or mental disabilities. Scalds are associated with the lack of anti-scald devices for showerheads and faucets and defective water heater thermostats.

Toilet bowl in basement of substandard housing. Library of Congress.

Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior who promulgated the infamous neighborhood composition rule, reads communications in his office in Washington, D.C. Library of Congress.

Defects can be found even in homes originally built to code but not properly maintained. In the Eight Mile–Wyoming community, however, homes were not built to code. They were built by sweat equity, neighbor helping neighbor construct structures that would provide shelter from the elements, no matter the number or kind of defects in construction. When the FHA denied their residential loan, these urban settlers of the 1920s and 1930s made do with what materials were available and what construction skills they possessed, creating dangerous, potentially life-threatening living conditions. At the same time, on Detroit’s near east side, in the enclaves of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, African American residents were occupying poorly maintained houses and apartments. High rents absorbed so much of residents’ income, owing to landlords exploiting the demand for housing in any condition, that funds were frequently unavailable for medical care, prescriptions and fresh food.

Acknowledging the need for safe, affordable housing for the defense plant workers, the Division of Defense Housing recommended the construction of one thousand government-financed family units, with two hundred of these units, on the recommendation of the Detroit Housing Commission, set aside for black occupancy. However, after dismissing the DHC’s first recommendation, federal officials unilaterally decided on the second recommendation, a sparsely settled mixed neighborhood of twenty acres on the city’s northeast side. Five city blocks to the northwest of this site at Nevada and Fenelon Streets was Conant Gardens, a subdivision of proud, middle-class black homeowners. The immediate community was served by Pershing High School and Atkinson School, both enrolling substantial numbers of black students. Polish immigrants had settled the area as well, though the largest concentration was due east, around St. Louis the King Church, less than a mile from the proposed housing site.

Storefront featuring current issues of the Pittsburgh Courier, America’s largest and most influential weekly black newspaper of the era. Library of Congress.

The problem created by the selection of the DHC’s alternative site for black defense workers at Nevada and Fenelon was the application of the “Neighborhood Composition Rule,” promulgated in 1933 by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Roosevelt knew that if he wanted to pass New Deal legislation, he had to appease largely segregationist Southern Democrats who voted as a bloc 85 percent of the time. The rule simply stated that new government-sponsored and -financed public housing should respect the racial composition of the existing neighborhood. If the neighborhood was white, new housing would remain white; if black, it would remain black. If mixed, theoretically it could remain mixed. However, in practice, new public housing in “mixed” neighborhoods was rarely, if ever, formally designated as mixed. Instead, local housing officials would establish the project as white or black, further segregating existing communities. Such was the case with the Sojourner Truth housing project.⁹

For the better part of a year, Detroit’s major racial and ethnic factions argued over the efficacy of the Sojourner Truth defense housing project as a white or black project principally because of its location. It soon pulled in a variety of additional stakeholders, including the Division of Defense Housing Coordination, the Detroit Housing Commission, the Metropolitan Council of Churches, the Archdiocese of Detroit, the fiery pastor of St. Louis the King Parish, Conant Gardens Homeowners Association, local real estate developers, the newly established Fenelon Homeowners’ Association, Mayor Jeffries, the UAW and last—and apparently least—the black defense workers for whom the project was originally designed. When Detroiter Walter Jackson declared his willingness to die rather than continue to be treated as a second-class citizen in such a matter as defense housing, he spoke for many African Americans throughout the nation.

As the Sojourner Truth housing controversy heated up in late fall of 1941 and extended into 1942, the U.S. military was forced to strategize for a war on two fronts: against Japan in the Pacific theater and against the Germans and Italians in Europe. For many African Americans, however, the concept of a war on two fronts soon conveyed a completely different meaning: conquering our enemies overseas while simultaneously defeating racism and discrimination at home.

One week after Pearl Harbor, the Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read black newspaper in America, made the following front-page entreaty: “We call upon the President and Congress to declare war on Japan and racial prejudice. Certainly we should be strong enough to whip them both.” The sentiment galvanized a national campaign during the war’s first winter. On February 7, 1942—two months to the day after Pearl Harbor—the newspaper announced a national campaign to obliterate racism at home at the same time it defeated its enemies overseas. The “Double V” referred to the popular “V for Victory” slogan found in store and gas station windows across the nation. The second V, overlapping the first, represented the African American objective of achieving victory against discrimination and segregation on the homefront.¹⁰

On the homefront, many African Americans were troubled by a war propaganda machine that openly denounced the doctrine of Aryan race superiority on the one hand but made segregation an official policy of the federal government on the other. The hypocrisy was palpable.

In Detroit, Sojourner Truth Homes would prove to be a test case of American ideals.