Detroit and the Great Migration 1916-1929, by Elizabeth Anne Martin
The Migrationand Relations
Between the Races in Detroit
As much as African-American migrants attempted to behave in a manner acceptable to natives, their social and economic progress in Detroit really depended to a large degree on the white community's acceptance of them. Before the migration, white citizens had never considered race relations a problem in Detroit. As long as Blacks knew their "place," whites felt comfortable with the presence of African-Americans in their city [1]. Ugly race prejudice began to surface, however, when large numbers of Blacks expecting equality began coming to the city. In Detroit, as in many northern cities in the twentieth century, "The Northern man who once denounced the South on account of its treatment of the Blacks gradually [grew] silent when a Negro [was] brought next door" [2].
Whites responded to the influx of "uncivilized" Blacks with restrictive covenants and segregation. A large iron drain separated Blacks and whites in the cafeteria of one of the largest factories in the city. Some employers hung signs to designate "white" and "Black" bathrooms [3]. Many public school teachers believed that Black children were inferior to whites and should be seated accordingly in the classroom [4].
Evidence of such racial discrimination shocked migrants who had hoped for fair treatment in the North. One man related the bitter irony of the situation: "We sang the 'Star-Spangled Banner,' in old Second Baptist Church Sunday, packed to the walls with folks from Georgia, their voice gave me an inspiration and tears rolled down from my eyes to see the sincerity of my people in their belief that America was the land of the free and a home of the brave. Fifteen minutes after I left the church a Greek refused to serve me a dish of ice cream; when I protested, he called a policeman. Neither had been in America long enough to speak good English, but he told me to move on or he would run me in" [5].
The presence of white migrants from the South intensified racial tension in Detroit. White Southerners, who had also moved north in search of jobs, "promptly procced[ed] to air [their] opinions about thc race situation to [their] northern neighbor. This northern sap," an African-American news editor remarked, "has been reading Joe [sic] Chandler Harris or the very Reverend (Heaven save the mark) who wrote The Leopards Spots, or the Birth of a Nation, or attending the variety theaters and listening in on a Mammy song or 'Take Me Back to Dear Old Alabama.' This Northern sap, I say, promptly permits himself to become inoculated with the virus of RACE PREJUDICE and the result is a situation even worse than that encountered in the very darkest jungles of southern Nordicism" [6]. Factories reported clashes between Black workers and white foremen from the South [7]. The southern influence was so strong that the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) began to surface in Detroit in the mid-1920s. A cross-burning vigil in July 1925 drew a crowd of more than ten thousand. The chief speaker, a Klan leader from Tennessee, called on his audience to demand that Blacks be confined to designated areas of the city [8].
Most educated, upper-class whites denied any association with the KKK. They exhibited their prejudices in other ways, however. In 1923 the Detroit Board of Commerce referred to the migration as the "too-rapid influx of Negroes" and asserted that the city had reached its "saturation point" for African-Americans [9]. A series of articles on the migration in the business-orientented Detroit Saturday Night referred to Blacks as "big shipments from the South," the St. Antoine district as "Darktown" and Blacks who tried to move into white neighborhoods as "colonizers," implying that African-Americans were invading white territory in the city [10].
As the migration progressed, Blacks became convenient scapegoats for the everyday frustrations of life. It was perhaps not surprising that whites blamed migrants and other Blacks for all that was wrong with the city because many Black Detroiters did the same. African-American elites believed that they had to apologize for the "uncivilized" behavior of the migrants. Instead of condemning the broad generalizations whites were making about Blacks, many African-Americans acted as if whites were justified in using stereotypes of migrants as a basis for discrimination against all Blacks.
Although some African-Americans excused the discriminatory behavior of whites, other Blacks fought back. The Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began in the 1920s to step up its efforts to fight the growing racial discrimination in Detroit. Lawyers hired by the NAACP litigated cases regarding the right of Blacks to have access to public facilities such as pools and the right of African-American students to participate in the same school activities as whites. The NAACP's most important effort to combat racial discrimination during the decade was the aforementioned 1925 trial of Ossian Sweet [11]. That trial brought the issue of racial prejudice to the forefront of public attention. Although NAACP lawyers won major cases, however, discrimination against African-American migrants as well as long-time residents continued to increase [12].
From the St. Matthew's and St. Joseph's Episcopal Church Records,
Box 3, Bentley Historical Library
Police discrimination against Blacks was a major issue of conflict between the races during the migration. The Detroit Urban League took the lead in trying to negotiate with the Police Department for better treatment of Blacks. John Dancy wrote Detroit's police commissioners to complain about the brutal tactics and verbal harassment practiced by some officers in the field [13]. In 1926 and 1927 more African-Americans were killed by police in Detroit than in any other two cities in the country combined. More African-American men had been "shot down in the streets [of Detroit] without a reasonable excuse than [had] been lynched in the entire South, during the same period," according to the Detroit Independent, an African-American newspaper [14].
Police officials responded to accusations of this sort by claiming that more African-Americans were being shot because more of them were committing crimes. Commissioner James Inches told Dancy in November 1920 that two policemen had been killed and five wounded by Black men in the preceding month. He also noted that although Blacks constituted only 7 percent of the population, they had been found guilty of committing 31 percent of the felonies [15]. In 1923 a newsman informed Dancy that one half, of all crimes in the city were "directly traceable" to Blacks [16].
Whites and Black elites alike blamed migrants for the high Black crime rates. They attributed disorderly conduct, lack of respect for officers of the law, concealed weapons, and promiscuity to the rural southern backgrounds of the migrants [17]. Some Black citizens, however, refused to condone the police treatment of Blacks in the city. When concerned African-Americans asked Commissioner Inches to examine the records of policemen assigned to the St. Antoine beat, he found that a majority of East Side officers were former southerners. He replaced these men with northern-born officers and then in 1920 issued "General Order #102," which informed commissioned officers that the commissioner had received a number of complaints from African-Americans about police mistreatment and instructed the officers to ensure that their men did not use abusive language in speaking to citizens of any race or nationality [18]. Fewer shootings occurred From that time until 1925, when the KKK appeared in the city and began trying to recruit police officers into the Klan. From January through August of that year, the police shot fifty-five Blacks [19].
Dancy urged that more Black officers be hired to patrol the St. Antoine District. He pointed out that cities that had hired Black officers to patrol Black neighborhoods had had much success in bringing down Black crime rates [20]. He formed a committee of representatives of various Black community organizations in 1923 to develop a plan of action to secure the hiring of more African-American police officers. Despite the efforts of the committee, however, as of 1926, only fourteen out of three thousand police officers in Detroit were African-American [21].
Dancy often had to badger white-run organizations like the police department to look closely at racial issues. At a meeting of the Advisory Board of the Michigan Department of Labor and Industry's Division of Negro Welfare and Statistics, Dancy railed against the tone of the reports of county representatives about the status of race relations in their communities. "The delegates," he charged, "were attempting to color their reports to show conditions to be better than they actually were." He recommended that "we face the facts squarely, whether they hurt or not" [22].
For the most part, Dancy tried to avoid conflict with whites. As he put it, he "bent every effort towards building up as cordial a relationship as possible between the races. This, with no sacrifice of manhood, but with a spirit of mutual welfare and understanding. Attitudes cannot always be measured, but we do believe that much good has come through the efforts that have been put forth by this organization and the strong people who make up the board [23]. Dancy was proud that African-American board members worked alongside white representatives from the Detroit Board of Commerce, the Employer's Association of Detroit, the Recreation Commission, the Board of Health, and the Police Department. He hoped that ties to these organizations would create relationships that would result in a more favorable view of Blacks in Detroit's white community [23].
The Urban League, sponsored several social events in an effort to "bring the races together." Adopting a suggestion of Eugene Kinckle Jones, director of the National Urban League, Dancy recruited popular African-American spiritual singers to perform for mixed audiences in Detroit [24]. He encouraged the exhibition of African-American art and the development of a theater troupe that travelled about the city putting on skits and plays about African-American subjects. He recruited Black authors to speak and promoted their works among readers of both races, maintaining that "the reading of a powerful novel in which the human qualities of another race are made appealing acts like a powerful social cement to bind together hitherto unconnected fragments of a social body" [25]. Dancv's efforts to raise white awareness of the achievements of African-Americans were not, however, always successful with whites, many of whom continued to believe that Blacks had certain inherent traits. Reacting to a play performed by Dancy's theater troupe, the educational director of the Detroit Community Union remarked, I think the players did very, very well--true art--The play I'm not so keen about--Get one that portrays some of the happy fine traits of the Negro" [26].
Sometimes Dancy had to let whites know that African-Americans were offended by the stereotypes whites had of them [27]. At one League board meeting, when members discussed some caricatures of African-Americans that had appeared in at recent issue of the Saturday Evening Post, a white hoard member stated that he saw nothing wrong with the cartoons and that "Negroes were entirely too sensitive and were quick to resent anything that was said of them, mainly because they were of Negro descent" [28]. Dancy reminded the members that "a great majority of colored people abhorred that sort of thing in as much as they were always depicted in the worst possible fashions" [29].
Examples of the condescending attitudes of institutions that served the migrants, such as the Visiting Nurses Association, and the Board of Health, have already been noted. All these organizations proudly boasted of their work among African-Americans, all the while emphasizing the separateness of the two races and the superiority of the white race to the African-American race. Derisively summing up the situation in a 1927 letter to Dancy, Forrester Washington remarked: "Apparently, working among the `brethren' has its thrills these days" [30]. Even in their more generous moments, white philanthropists in Detroit revealed their racial prejudice. In his memoirs, Dancy admits having been discomfited by the realization that the establishment of a YMCA in the St. Antoine district was less an act of unconditional generosity than an effort to keep Detroit's YMCAs "separate but equal" [31]. "This building," a speaker at the structure's dedication declared, "should serve as an expression to you colored people of the interest and cooperation we white folk have in you and inspire you to make of this building one dedicated to the purpose of developing a race of men and boys of Christian character" [32]. The use by whites of words such as "you" and "we" to differentiate Blacks from themselves was a common reaction to the migration by the white community [33].
As much as Washington, Dancy, and other Blacks despised the condescension of their benefactors, they generally found it necessary to submit in silence. Indeed, what "usually happened" during the great migration to Detroit was that African-American community leaders had to play the roles of negotiators, compromisers, and even humble servitors in order to keep wealthy white benefactors happy and impoverished African-American migrants employed. The Urban League depended for its financial support on white philanthropists like Henry Stevens and white-run organizations such as the Community Union. Black members of the League board, consequently, sometimes had to temper their ambitious goals for the organization in deference to its white benefactors. At a board meeting during the recession of 1921, for example, Dancy reported that League officials were planning to meet with the Department of Public Works to complain that the department was discriminating against Blacks by hiring them only as garbage men. Stevens "took issue" with the report, asserting that the League's Function was not to combat discrimination but merely to help Blacks find more jobs. Despite the protest of another board member, Dancy eventually changed the description of the purpose of the meeting from "to show that Blacks [were not] being treated fairly" to "jobs were being sought for colored men" [34].
Whenever there was a conflict between whites and Black elites, Blacks usually retreated. They felt themselves constrained by the limited resources of the African-American community to preserve cordial relations between the races in the hope of gaining support for Black causes from the wealth in the white community. Though Black elites were often humiliated by the subservient position they had to assume, they did what they believed would best serve the interest of their community. Many migrants probably owed their jobs, homes, recreation facilities, and hospitals to the conciliatory behavior of men like Dancy.