Detroit '43 (Part 4 of 4)
A study of the race riot in wartime Detroit that took place in the summer of 1943. This paper was originally written in April of 2018.
We in the south sympathize with you, but any trouble in the North is of your own making, because you do not know the negro. Our only trouble with mobs is for rape, and that has become a rare thing… Atlanta has the finest type of negro, and respected by the whites. You should make a trip here to see their pretty homes, schools and colleges, churches and how they have improved in the last thirty years… We are proud of our negro with ambition to be a good citizen. Both white and colored are working constantly to better the lower type… They are free to do their best in their own way, and not cramped by having whites tell them, “We are running this show.” — A Letter to Mayor Edward Jeffries from W.P. Clark (June 26, 1943)
“THE NEGROES STARTED IT”
The report released by the Governor’s fact-finding committee in August of 1943 had been eagerly awaited by both black and white officials in hopes of bringing some closure to the riot. However, upon its release the NAACP’s Executive Secretary Walter White stated that it “solves nothing, further embitters Negroes, and destroys any lingering vestige of confidence in the law enforcement authorities.”1
Not only did it completely exonerate the police department without conducting the grand jury investigation that had been called for, it also contained a concluding section used to editorialize and assign primary responsibility for the riot to its black offenders and to the African-American press. That final section initially began with a conciliatory tone, lamenting racial animosity “both white and Negro,” but then it abruptly shifted its focus on the second page:
Where have these young hoodlums been told they have a license to lawlessness in their “struggle to secure racial equality”? ... Who has exhorted them violently to overthrow established social order to obtain “racial equality”? … Who charges by their news stories and their editorials that all law enforcement agencies are anti-Negro, brutal, and vicious in the handling of Negroes, and bent upon their persecution?2
The report then answers its own question by citing an article by Dr. Warren Brown, Director of Negro Relations for the Council of Democracy, entitled A Negro Looks at the Negro Press. This piece was published in both the Saturday Review of Literature and Reader’s Digest on December 19, 1942, framed as a biting critique of the African-American press by “one of its own.”
“So important does this committee believe this article to be,” the Governor’s report states, “that a copy of the artile [sic] is appended to this report.”3 This same article was also cited in the FBI’s Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States as support for the conclusion that “the Negro press is a strong provocateur of discontent among Negroes… the sensational is foremost while true reportorial material is sidetracked.4
The controversy over the Warren Brown article had erupted several months prior to the Detroit riot, and due to Brown’s decision to publish his condemnation in the white press instead of taking his concerns directly to the African-American press (which few whites ever read) it forced black commentators around the country to give this article more attention than it really deserved.
Although Brown asserted that “‘the boys (the Negro press) had grossly misunderstood his article” — and although some African-American commentators actually gave credence to some of his criticisms — his rhetoric was often needlessly inflammatory in describing the black community as divided between “Negroes and sensation-mongering Negro leaders.”5 Moreover, Brown’s article appears to be directed very specifically at the smaller and more fringe African-American newspapers, as only less-circulated publications were cited and he acknowledged there were also many black newspapers “edited with exceptional skill and high ethical standards.” Even so, he did not make this difference clear to his white readership when he accused the African-American press of conducting a “drive to embitter and unbalance [the Negro], which begin during the Depression under Communist auspices.”6
Though some commentators in the African-American press, such as Walter White, were far more moderate in responding to Brown’s article, the majority responded with a disconcerting level of hostility. The Chicago Defender even launched a national campaign to have its readers mail handkerchiefs to Brown — a gesture meant to symbolize his status as an “Uncle Tom” — urging its readers to “join this campaign to make this lowly quisling appreciate the wrath of Negro people against turncoats.”7 The animosity among black readers even turned toward Eleanor Roosevelt for being “duped into endorsing” Brown’s article in her My Day column, and for “criticizing the editorial policy of the Negro press in wartime.”8
Walter White was disappointed enough by the article to resign his own position on The Council for Democracy, which he and Brown both served on at the time. However, White also noted that “there is just enough truth in some of the charges made against the Negro press by Warren Brown … to make his articles dangerous to the point of being menacing.”9 White does not shy from rebuking Brown, but he emphasized his hope that “Brown’s assertions will be treated by the Negro press and by Negroes themselves with cold analysis rather than heat.”10
Unfortunately, the majority of African-American responses were palpably heated, and the ‘cold analysis’ of the Governor’s fact-finding committee was merely utilized to direct blame on its critics rather than accepting any blame itself. The committee’s report is remarkably shameless in placing responsibility for the riot squarely on the black community. At one point, the report states, “This committee feels that the fact that the Negroes in Detroit, who constitute less than 10% of the population, commit more than 71% of the major crimes is one the public should know.”11
This unambiguous reading of the police department’s own statistics certainly did not account for any racial prejudice in its officers’ conduct (as evidenced by their conduct and arrest record during the riot). City and state officials had started to resent feeling under siege over the issue of police brutality. Thus, when the fact-finding committee discovered that it was a group of black youths responsible for the initial, inciting altercations on Belle Isle, they grappled onto the narrative that (in the words of Mayor Edward Jeffries), “The Negroes started it.”12
Of course, if one accepts the notion that the actions of Aaron Fox and Charles Lyons on Belle Isle were responsible for all of the whites who formed enormous mobs around Woodward Avenue, then one has to assume that whites were equally responsible for the actions of Fox and Lyons. This is because on June 15th an “incipient race riot” between “several hundred teen-age zoot-suit battlers” at Eastwood Park took place after some 200 white youths, and white servicemen, forcibly ejected all blacks from the park and attacked those that refused to leave.13 The police arrested 18 youths and put 10 on trial — and it was telling that all of those arrested were white.14
Fox and Lyons were among those who were attacked in Eastwood Park that day, and they both directly cited that incident as motivating their actions the following Sunday at Belle Isle. Lyons reportedly told his accomplices that they should “go fight and do like they done to us at Eastwood Park.”15 Therefore, if the violence of thousands of white rioters could be blamed on the actions of Lyons and Fox, then the actions of Lyons and Fox could just as easily be blamed on those whites at Eastwood Park. Herein lies the problem with relying on the “they started it” excuse when dealing with one specific event in the context of a wider and ongoing conflict.
Furthermore, it would be difficult to believe that any of the white rioters were even aware of the actions of Fox or Lyons when they started attacking black citizens in the streets that day. After all, many whites were under the impression the inciting incident of the riot was when a white woman was accosted by a black man on Jefferson Avenue.16 A rumor which was spread among several whites, and one that appears to be just as unsubstantiated as the rumor spread among several blacks about the black woman and her baby being thrown from a bridge.
While we were up north, Detroit had a terrible racial riot. It was beyond belief. There were fires, people being shot, and looting was wholesale. When we came home, we knew we had to leave Detroit, for it was not safe to live there anymore. As we, of course, by this time were living in a Negro neighborhood, this certainly added to the misery. We decided to sell with quite a bit of apprehension, for Ivan was not at all well, but we did go ahead with it. — From the Diary of Berta Dolores Chatfield-Atkinson (Detroit Resident)
“SINGLE VICTORY”
The fact that rumors played such a significant role in fueling the riot is indicative of how the narratives we tell ourselves can often be even more affecting than the evidentiary record. Both hatred and fear gave the rumors going around during the riot the power to set violent conflict in motion — and many of the narratives that help fuel these rumors dominate race relations to this day.
Black Detroiters today still tell stories of how local municipalities used to recruit police officers from down South during the Great Migration because they felt they “knew how to manage” African-Americans — even though there is no evidence to substantiate that this was ever done in Detroit’s police departments.17 White Americans today continue to spread tales of vicious criminality by blacks as an everyday occurrence (and as just being a part of their nature) just as they did in 1943. One white woman wrote to Mayor Jeffries asking him, “How would you feel if a Negro came up to Mrs. Jeffries and told her not to scream because if she did he would cut her head off?”18
It is true that some of the rumors that proliferated in these years contained some elements of truth; and certainly there were actual occurrences of both violent crimes and police brutality. Which is exactly why it was so easy for the exaggerated or fabricated incidents to be so easily believed. “To say that I see it really happen,” one black resident said when discussing police brutality in Detroit, “you heard about it more than you would really see it. It was just stories throughout the neighborhood.”19
Even decades before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, whites were already perpetuating the “welfare queen” narratives about blacks “looking for handouts.” In fact, many even perpetuated it as far back as during Reconstruction (right after slavery had just ended). Whites during WWII complained that “Negroes have been encouraged to come here by the hundreds and… if they spend all their money, as they are most certainly doing, the City of Detroit will take care of 240,000 of them through the Welfare Department.”20
Likewise, the African-American press would end up being as determined to blame the 1943 Detroit riot on a fascist conspiracy as the FBI would be twenty years later in attempting to blame the 1967 Detroit riot on a communist conspiracy.21 (For the record, neither of these claims were true.) These types of narratives were easier for the public to wrap their heads around than the complexities and nuance of what actually happened. They provided simple answers to complex questions. As a result, these were the memories that ultimately became concretized in the city’s consciousness, and you can still hear them recited in Detroit today.
Inherent prejudices also made it easy to apply these narratives to an entire group of people instead of only holding the individuals responsible for their own actions. A one-sided view of the riot pushed men like Mayor Jeffries away from civil rights and toward “appeals to bigotry” in order to win elections.22 As Jeffries told a friend during the 1945 mayoral campaign, “[I’m] getting murdered in the black wards and in the racist white wards… I might lose this election, but I am not going to lose it both ways.”23
The destruction caused by the looting of white-owned businesses in Detroit’s African American neighborhoods originally benefitted the city’s black merchants. As many of the white owners — most of whom had never lived in the black neighborhoods to begin with — pulled out, the black merchants moved in and found that they “just can’t get the supplies as fast as the people want them.”24 As the position of black residents in the city grew, white residents responded by leaving for suburban neighborhoods outside the city. Many of these white residents blamed Detroit’s crime and decay on black citizens; and as a result, they would fiercely (and successfully) protest any attempts by black residents to move into their increasingly affluent neighborhoods in the suburbs.25
“One of the tropes in the city and the false narratives is the idea that white flight began after 1967,” said African-American Detroit resident Marsha Music, who grew up during this period. Her family was living in Detroit when city officials, in a scramble to stop the hemorrhaging of the city’s white residents, razed the famous African-American neighborhood of Black Bottom leaving behind “a big empty space like we see big empty spaces all over the city today.” Black residents were forced to move with the promise that “new and better housing” would be built for them, but Music contends, “That was not the idea. They were really trying to figure out a way of how to maintain a population of whites.”26
Although the 1943 riot is not the singular cause of these issues, it certainly was the most dominant factor in increasing the racial divide in Detroit during this critical period in the city’s history. A period which was a significant chapter in the steady and ongoing transition between the accepted white supremacy of America’s past, and the growing will of African Americans to fight back through their own Civil Rights movements.
African Americans had learned some harsh lessons after World War I, so by the time of the second World War, they demanded equality and justice in a way that was unprecedentedly forceful and uncompromising. Unfortunately, the results in Detroit were seen as disastrous by the powers that be, causing the city’s leaders to become increasingly dismissive and resistant to such demands. Meanwhile, all of the city’s residents were left disillusioned by the events of the war years, and so those that were able to flee (primarily whites) would light out for greener pastures in the burgeoning suburbs. While those that were forced to remain behind (primarily blacks) dealt with the repercussions of “urban renewal” policies that helped to set the stage for the next riot in 1967.
“Attack Detroit Riot Report As Biased,” The Chicago Defender, August 21, 1943.
Also, the opening quote is from: Papers of Mayor Jeffries, Burton Historical Collection, Box 8, Letter to Mayor from W.P. Clark, June 26, 1943.
Dowling, William. Report by Michigan Governor’s Committee to Investigate the Detroit Race Riot, August 11, 1943, Part III, 2-3.
Dowling, Report by Michigan Governor’s Committee, Part III, 3.
Hill, Robert A. The FBI’s RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States During World War II. Boston: Northeastern University Press. 1995, 415.
Alfred A. Duckett, “Warren Brown Pleads Negro Press Just ‘Misunderstood’ His Article: Bandanas For Brown,” The Chicago Defender, February 6, 1943, 9.
Warren Brown, “A Negro Looks at the Negro Press,” Saturday Review of Literature, December 19, 1942; as cited in Anthony Platt, The Politics of Riot Commissions, 1917-1970 (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1971), 224.
Warren Brown, 225.
Sherman Briscoe, “No Priorities On Hankies For Quisling ‘Uncle Tom’,” The Chicago Defender, January 16, 1943, 7.
Charley Cherokee, “National Grapevine,” The Chicago Defender, January 16, 1943, 15. Harry McAlpin, “Who Is Warren Brown, Ph.D.?” The Chicago Defender, January 16, 1943, 1.
Although there were numerous references in the African-American press to this particular My Day column, this author was unable to find any copies of the actual column that mentioned Warren Brown. It is possible Eleanor Roosevelt spoke of him in a different editorial or piece.
Roi Ottley, “The Negro Press Today,” Common Ground, Spring 1943, 11-12.
“White Quits Council Over Brown Story,” The Chicago Defender, January 23, 1943, 5.
Walter White, “People and Places: Warren Brown’s Charges,” The Chicago Defender, January 16, 1943, 15.
Dowling, Report by Michigan Governor’s Committee, Part III, 5.
Jeffries and Capeci, Detroit and the Good War, 78.
“Police Clubs Quell Youths in Zoot Fight,” Detroit Free Press, June 16, 1943, 1.
“Trial Faced By 10 Youths in Park Riot,” Detroit Free Press, June 17, 1943, 3.
Dowling, Report by Michigan Governor’s Committee, Part I, 3.
NAACP Detroit Branch Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Operative Wilson Report, 3 and 12-13.
Also, the opening quote is from: Berta Dolores Chatfield-Atkinson (quoted from her diary by her grandson Jim Aho), “Jim Aho” Detroit 67, Detroit Historical Museum, September 30, 2016, https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/items/show/417
Conrad Mallett Jr., “Conrad Mallett, Jr.” Detroit 67, Detroit Historical Museum, June 20, 2017, https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/items/show/563
Dominic Capeci, in response to my own email query to the author, March 2, 2018.
Papers of Mayor Jeffries, Burton Historical Collection, Box 8, Letter to Mayor from Mrs. Patrick Morgan.
Muriel Earl and Albert Colbard, “Muirel Earl and Albert Colbard, June 29th, 2016.” Detroit 67, Detroit Historical Museum, June 29, 2016, https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/items/show/350
Papers of Mayor Jeffries, Burton Historical Collection, Box 8, Letter to Detroit News from John Kirby, June 21, 1943.
“The Riot Report,” Chicago Defender, August 28, 1943, 14.
Hill, The FBI’s RACON, 141.
Malcolm W. Bingay, “Good Morning: Dirty Politics,” Detroit Free Press, November 7, 1945, 26.
Jeffries and Capeci, Detroit and the Good War, 16.
“Colored Business Booms as Result of Detroit Riot,” Detroit News, July 17, 1943. Courtesy of The Burton Historical Collection.
Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), Origins of the Urban Crisis, 78.
Marsha Music, “Marsha Music, September 21st, 2015.” Detroit 67, Detroit Historical Museum, September 21, 2015, https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/items/show/267