Detroit and the Great Migration 1916-1929, by Elizabeth Anne Martin
Institutions in Detroit:Answering the Call of Migrant Needs
It was not long before Detroit natives, particularly whites, began to notice the numbers of African-Americans coming to the city. A Detroit Free Press editorial in June, 1917 remarked that Detroit was "beginning to have a noticeable increase of dark-skinned toilers. These appear to be performing the hard labor of the community, the class of work that calls for muscular effort and no training. That their numbers are large is quite evident; districts where few of their race have been seen now present many of them to the casual view."[1] Almost everyone took note of the migration and wanted to do something about it--whether it was to round up all the migrants and put them on a train heading south or to accept their presence and attempt to help them adjust to their new environment.
Religion helped many migrants to feel at home in their new environs. Traditionally the spiritual and social center of African-American life, the churches, for the most part, were willing and ready to take rootless migrants under their wings [2]. Some congregations sponsored welcoming committees to meet trains coming from the South and provide immediate assistance to newcomers [3]. Migrants of all denominations sought the comfort of a familiar religion in an unfamiliar place. Church leaders not only helped migrants with spiritual matters but also with practical matters, including employment and housing.[4]The impact of the migration on Detroit's African-American churches was reflected by unprecedented increases in membership of the largest established congregations, as well as the building of many new places of worship. The number of African-American churches in Detroit rose from six in 1916 to over forty in 1926. Almost all of the new churches were composed entirely of newcomers [6].
Non-church-going migrants had a much more difficult time finding help in the early years of the migration than the church-goers did. As a whole, white institutions were not very receptive to the newcomers. When the migration began in earnest in 1916, there were no settlement houses for Blacks, no YMCA branch accessible to them, and very few white-run medical or social establishments that would take Black patrons.[7]. Some white leaders, rather than seek ways to assist migrants, implored African-American community leaders to discourage migration and to encourage migrants to return to the South. They punctuated their pleas with ominous predictions that the move north would lead to "race suicide" for Blacks [8].
In time, however, whites began to realize that thousands of impoverished people living without assistance would be a great drain on the city's prosperity. As a result, some white institutions began to open their doors to African-Americans. A few white settlement houses made room for a few Blacks in the 1920s [9]. A branch of the YMCA opened in the African-American St. Antoine district in 1920 [10]. And as the Black population grew, hospitals that formerly treated only white patients began to provide beds for African-Americans as well [11].
The Detroit Community Union was responsible for allocating most of the private and public funding for African-American causes in the city. Established in 1918, the Community Union was a coordinating council of social agencies--private as well as government-run--that dealt with economic relief, health concerns, and social "uplift" activities. Financing for the private agencies in the Union came from the annual fund-raising campaign by the Detroit Community Fund. Charitable organizations that were a part of the Union were not permitted to seek funds independently. Each of them participated in the Community Fund Drive, and each submitted budgets to the officers of the Fund and the Union who then decided how money was to be distributed among the members. The Union's principal funding channel for African-American programs was the Detroit Urban League [12].
Before the migration, the League's activities were confined mainly to New York and a few other cities. When thousands of African-Americans began streaming north, however, many cities sought, to establish league affiliates to meet the needs of all of the newcomers. At a conference convened by the National Urban League in 1917 to discuss the migration, conferees resolved that organizations should be established to instruct migrants regarding appropriate dress, habits, behavior at the workplace, recreational activities, and every places of worship [15].
From the Detroit Urban League Records, Box 1, Bentley
Historical Library
Those present at the 1917 conference praised the city of Detroit as a national model for the effectiveness of its response to the migration [16]. Eugene Kinckle Jones, director of the National Urban League, had visited Detroit in 1916 to lobby For the opening of an affiliate there. Many long-time African-American Detroit residents had resented Jones and his Urban League because they believed that the Organization created the impression that Blacks required special assistance from whites. Black elites feared that the Urban League's coming was a sign that they were going to lose their accustomed status in Detroit society [17].
Since African American leaders were not supportive of his efforts to establish the Detroit Urban League, Jones turned instead to white community leaders, particularly Henry Stevens, a well-known Detroit philanthropist who served as the chairman of the Urban League board for many years. The second director of the Detroit Urban League later asserted that the League opened in Detroit in response to the migration "due to the fore-sight of Mr. Stevens ... together with some others who had the vision to see what was coming and to he prepared for it by the establishment of an organization which would have information at hand that would he helpful in the adjustment of these newcomers and at the same time to offer assistance in the way of raising the standards which would show in the Detroitizations of these people as soon as possible" [19]. The first Urban League office in Detroit opened in the summer of 1916, with Forrester B. Washington as its director.
Washington set the tone for future work of the Detroit League in a speech at the 1917 conference in which he stressed the necessity of reaching migrants immediately upon arrival in the city. The first week of a migrant's stay, he declared, was "fraught with danger, because in two or three days idling about the city in search of a job the Negro immigrant can come in contact with conditions and people that are positively demoralizing and whose influence may destroy any possibility of his ever becoming a useful citizen of the municipality" [20]. Detroit Urban League representatives tried to meet as many trains arriving from the South as possible. If a League representative was not able to staff a depot at a particular time, African-American red caps and porters passed out cards describing the location and services of the League. Later, League officials were able to persuade the Detroit Police Department to hire a special officer (an African-American) to work with the migrants. The officer distributed League literature and directed migrants to League headquarters. Any migrant who was missed at the station was likely to hear about the League at church front the minister, at a local movie theater that showed lantern slides about the League's activities before every show, or simply by word of mouth on the street [21].
From the Detroit Urban League Records, Box 87, Bentley
Historical Library
To solve the problem of the poor migrant's first week in the city, the League maintained a few beds at its community center and also persuaded some employers to arrange short-term credit for migrants for room and board [22]. Rather than simply a relief organization, however, Detroit Urban League officers, like those of the National Urban League, wanted their organization to serve as a coordinating agency for other organizations in the city dedicated to helping African-Americans. They thought the league should seek "primarily to do preventative and constructive work along social lines among the colored people of the city, to discover those facilities that are lacking and set in motion forces to obtain those facilities [23].
In practice, the Detroit Urban League did virtually everything short of providing direct monetary relief to migrants. Often, instead of the League's seeking the appropriate agency to deal with a particular problem, the relevant agency approached the League and asked it to take over the agency's African-American cases [24]. Public welfare officials sent the League migrants who were stranded in Detroit and could not qualify for welfare because the residency requirement for public relief was one year; judges sent the League probation cases; and the Traveller's Aid Society asked the League to help young African-American boys and girls who came alone to Detroit to find suitable homes, and to help migrants find relatives in the city [25].
The effort of Urban League officials to help all who arrived on their doorstep was commendable, but it exhausted the small staff. The Urban League originally employed only three individuals and never had more than ten workers in the 1920s, but the services that staff provided were incredibly extensive. The Director of the Urban league described a typical day's work in 1924:
A downtown store calls to have us send them an elevator operator.
A factory calls for a group of laborers.
Mrs. X calls to see what steps she should take in regard to having her husband support her and the children.
The Board of Commerce or some other organization calls up to find the number of colored people living in Detroit or to fund the death rate or to find the number of colored people living in a given section.
The Public Welfare calls to find a home for a dependent family.
A family calls to notify us that they have been dispossessed, and to find what assistance we can render.
The court calls to find a home for a young boy whose father has deserted him and whose mother is not in position to adequately care for him.
A school calls asking that a representative from our office come to address them on some phase of the Negro problem.
The Traveller's Aid [Society] calls asking that we give care to a family that has just arrived in Detroit without funds.
A woman calls to find a Boarding home for babies.
A well-to-do woman comes to find the proper steps to take in having a child adopted.
A young man comes to find out if there is an athletic association in Detroit that he can join.
Another comes to find out about a church.
Still another comes to find if there is a literary club to extence [sic] that he can join.
A boy runs away from home and his parents write asking us to locate the boy for him [27].
The League may have offered many of the same services even if there had been no Great Migration. As it happened, however, the League constantly expanded its services in ways that directly or indirectly related to the migration. As of 1922, the director's monthly report to the League's Board included "Migration" as a separate subject in and of itself [28].
Several organizations responded in various ways to the migration of African-Americans to Detroit during and after World War I. Some ignored the migrants. Others realized, unhappily in some instances, that Blacks were coming to stay and that some provision had to be made to meet the needs of poor and uneducated migrants. Still others viewed the task of "Detroitizing" the migrants as a challenge and a responsibility, believing, as the Urban Leaguer did, "that you cannot do much for a man spiritually until you have given him a healthy and wholesome environment. In other words, `you cannot grow lilies from ash-barrels'" [29]. With this in mind, they sought to provide the newcomers with adequate employment, housing, places of worship, and health care. By doing so, they hoped to make Detroit a prosperous and racially harmonious community that would benefit from the presence of the newcomers.