measures in the years before the riot.
Racial segregation In the early 20th century, when African Americans migrated to Detroit in the
Great Migration, the city experienced a rapidly increasing population and a shortage of housing. African Americans encountered strong
discrimination in housing. Both racial covenants and unspoken agreements among whites kept black people out of certain neighborhoods and prevented most African Americans from buying their own homes. The presence of
Ku Klux Klan members throughout Michigan furthered racial tensions and violence.
Malcolm X's father, Earl Little, was killed in a streetcar accident in 1931, albeit X stated in his autobiography that he believed the
Black Legion, a more radical breakaway of the Klan, in
East Lansing was involved. In addition, a system of
redlining was instituted, which made it nearly impossible for black Detroiters to purchase a home in most areas of the city, effectively locking black residents into lower-quality neighborhoods. These discriminatory practices and the effects of the
segregation that resulted from them contributed significantly to the racial tensions in the city before the riot. Segregation also encouraged harsher policing in African American neighborhoods, which escalated black Detroiters' frustrations leading up to the riot. Patterns of racial and ethnic segregation persisted through the mid-20th century. In 1956, mayor
Orville Hubbard of
Dearborn, part of
Metro Detroit, boasted to the
Montgomery Advertiser that "Negroes can't get in here...These people are so anti-colored, much more than you in
Alabama."
Recent reforms The election of Mayor
Jerome Cavanagh in 1961 brought some reform to the police department, led by new Detroit Police Commissioner
George Edwards. Detroit had acquired millions in federal funds through
President Johnson's
Great Society programs and invested them almost exclusively in the
inner city, where
poverty and social problems were concentrated. By the 1960s, many black people had advanced into better
union and professional jobs. The city had a prosperous black
middle class; higher-than-normal wages for unskilled black workers due to the success of the
auto industry; two black
Congressmen (half of the black Congressmen at the time); three black judges; two black members on the
Detroit Board of Education; a housing commission that was forty percent black; and twelve black representatives representing Detroit in the
Michigan legislature. The city had mature black neighborhoods such as
Conant Gardens. In May 1967, the federal administration ranked housing for the black community in Detroit above that of
Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and
Cleveland.
Nicholas Hood, the sole black member of the nine-member
Detroit Common Council, praised the Cavanagh administration for its willingness to listen to concerns of the inner city. Weeks prior to the riot, Mayor Cavanagh had said that residents did not "need to throw a brick to communicate with City Hall." There were still signs of black disaffection, however; In 1964,
Rosa Parks, who had moved to Detroit in the late fifties, told an interviewer: ''"I don't feel a great deal of difference here [from Alabama]...Housing segregation is just as bad, and it seems more noticeable in the larger cities."''
Policing issues The
Detroit Police Department was directly administered by the
Mayor. Prior to the riot, Mayor Cavanagh's appointees, George Edwards and Ray Girardin, worked for reform. Edwards tried to recruit and promote black police officers, but he refused to establish a
civilian police review board, as African Americans had requested. During the trial to discipline police officers who were accused of resorting to brutality, he turned the police department's rank-and-file against him. Many whites believe that his policies were "too soft on crime". In 1965, the Community Relations Division of the Michigan
Civil Rights Commission undertook a study of the police, published in 1968. It claimed that the "police system" was at fault for racism. The police department was accused of recruiting "
bigots" and it was also accused of reinforcing bigotry through its "value system". According to the results of a survey which was conducted by President Johnson's
Kerner Commission, prior to the riot, 45 percent of the police officers who were working in black neighborhoods were "extremely anti-Negro" and an additional 34 percent were "
prejudiced". In 1967, 93% of the force was still white, although 30% of city residents were black. Incidents of police brutality caused black residents to feel at risk. They resented many police officers who they felt talked down to them, addressing men as "boys" and addressing women as "honey" and "baby." Police conducted street searches on groups of young men, and single women complained about being called
prostitutes for simply walking on the street. The police frequently arrested people who did not have proper identification. The local press reported several
questionable shootings and beatings of black citizens by officers in the years before 1967. After the riot, a
Detroit Free Press survey showed that residents reported police brutality as the number one problem they faced in the period leading up to the riot. Black residents complained by stating that the police did not respond to their calls as quickly as they responded to the calls which were made by white residents. They believed that the police force profited from
vice and other crimes which were committed in black neighborhoods, and the press's accusations that the police force was
corrupt and linked to
organized crime weakened their trust in the police force. According to Sidney Fine, "the biggest complaint about vice in the
ghetto was prostitution." The black community's leadership thought that the police did not do enough to curb white
johns from exploiting black women. In the weeks leading up to the riot, police had started to work to curb prostitution along Twelfth Street. On July 1, a prostitute was killed, and rumors spread that the police had shot her. The police said that she was murdered by local
pimps. Detroit police used
Big 4 or
Tac squads, each made up of four police officers, to patrol Detroit neighborhoods, and such squads were used to combat
soliciting. Black residents felt that police raids on after-hours drinking clubs were racially biased actions. Since the 1920s, such clubs had become important parts of Detroit's social life for black residents; although they were established during
Prohibition, they continued to exist because black people were not served in many Detroit bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues.
Employment and unemployment In the postwar period, the city had lost nearly 150,000 jobs to the suburbs. Factors were a combination of changes in
technology, increased
automation, consolidation of the
auto industry,
taxation policies, the need for different kinds of manufacturing space, and the construction of the
highway system that eased transportation. Major companies like
Packard,
Hudson, and
Studebaker, as well as hundreds of smaller companies, went out of business. In the 1950s, the
unemployment rate hovered near 10 percent. Between 1946 and 1956,
GM spent $3.4 billion on new plants,
Ford $2.5 billion, and
Chrysler $700 million, opening a total of 25 auto plants, all in Detroit's
suburbs. As a result, workers who could do so left Detroit for jobs in the suburbs. Other middle-class residents left the city for newer housing, in a pattern repeated nationwide. In the 1960s, the city lost about 10,000 residents per year to the suburbs. Detroit's population fell by 179,000 between 1950 and 1960, and by another 156,000 residents by 1970, which affected all its retail businesses and city services. By the time of the riot, unemployment among black men was more than double that among white men in Detroit. In the 1950s, 15.9 percent of blacks were unemployed, but only 6 percent of whites were unemployed. This was partially due to the union seniority system of the factories. Except for Ford, which hired a significant number of black workers for their factories, the other automakers did not hire black workers until World War II resulted in a
labor shortage. With lower seniority, black workers were the first to be
laid off in job cutbacks after the war. Moreover, black labor was "
ghettoized" into the "most arduous, dangerous and unhealthy jobs." When the auto industry boomed again in the early 1960s, only
Chrysler and the Cadillac Division of General Motors assembled vehicles in the city of Detroit. The black workers they hired got "the worst and most dangerous jobs: the
foundry and the body shop." A prosperous, black educated class had developed in traditional professions such as
social work,
ministry,
medicine, and
nursing. Many other black citizens working outside manufacturing were relegated to service industries as
waiters,
porters, or
janitors. Many black women were limited to work in
domestic service. Certain business sectors were known to discriminate against hiring black workers, even at
entry-level positions. It took picketing by Arthur Johnson and the Detroit chapter of the
NAACP before
First Federal Bank hired their first black
tellers and clerks.
Housing developments and discrimination was in charge of assigning ratings of "A" (green) through "D" (red) to all of the neighborhoods in major U.S. cities based on the conditions of the buildings, the infrastructure and most importantly, the racial composition of the area. Residents of a neighborhood with a "C" or "D" rating struggled to get loans, and almost all neighborhoods with any African American population were rated "D", effectively segregating the city by race.
Black Bottom and Paradise Valley (located on Detroit's lower east side, south of
Gratiot) were examples of African-American neighborhoods that formed as a result of these government restrictions. Examples of city projects for housing include the massive Gratiot Redevelopment Project, planned as early as 1946. It was planned eventually to cover a site on the lower east side that included Hastings Street – the center of Paradise Valley. Other public housing projects also resulted in more tension between white and black people in the city. Although it seemed positive for working-class individuals, the negative effects can still be felt today. Projects like
Sojourner Truth were erected in 1941 to account for the unfair bias against African Americans in their housing search. However, it ended up concentrating the African Americans in areas where city whites did not want them, only furthering the racial tension in the city. Bolstered by successive federal legislation, including the 1941, 1949, 1950, 1954 versions of the
Housing Act and its
amendments through the 1960s, the city acquired funds to develop the
Detroit Medical Center complex,
Lafayette Park, Central Business District Project One, and the
Chrysler Freeway, by appropriating land and "clearing slums". Money was included for replacement housing in the legislation, but the goal of urban renewal was to physically reshape the city; its social effects on neighborhoods was not well understood. Jewish residents had moved to the suburbs for newer housing, but they often retained business or property interests in their old community. Thus, many of the blacks who moved to the 12th Street area rented from
absentee landlords and shopped in businesses run by suburbanites.
Crime rates rose in the 12th Street area. By 1967, distinct neighborhood boundaries were known, whether visible (as the case on
Eight Mile and Wyoming), or invisible (as the case of Dequindre Road). After the riot, respondents to a
Detroit Free Press poll listed poor housing as the second most important issue leading up to the riot, behind
police brutality. At the same time, middle-class families were leaving the district, and the numbers of low-scoring and economically disadvantaged students, mostly black, were increasing. In 1966–67, the funding per pupil in Detroit was $193 compared to $225 per pupil in the suburbs. Exacerbating this inequity were the challenges in educating disadvantaged students. The Detroit Board of Education estimated it cost twice as much to educate a "
ghetto child properly as to educate a suburban child". According to Michigan law in 1967, class sizes could not exceed thirty-five students, but in inner-city schools they did, sometimes swelling to forty students per teacher. To have the same teacher/student ratio as the rest of the state, Detroit would have to hire 1,650 more teachers for the 1966–67 school year. In 1959, the Detroit School Board passed a
bylaw banning discrimination in all school operations and activities. From 1962 to 1966, black organizations continued to work to improve the quality of education of black students. Issues included class size, school boundaries, and the ways in which white teachers treated black students. The Citizens Advisory Committee on Equal Educational Opportunities reported a pattern of discrimination in the assignment of teachers and
principals in Detroit schools. It also found "grave
discrimination" in employment, and in training opportunities in
apprenticeship programs. It was dissatisfied with the rate of
desegregation in attendance boundaries. The school board accepted the recommendations made by the committee, but faced increasing community pressure. The
NAACP demanded
affirmative action hiring of school personnel and increased desegregation through an "open schools" policy. Foreshadowing the break between black
civil rights groups and
black nationalists after the riot, a community group led by Rev.
Albert Cleage, Group of Advanced Leadership (GOAL), emphasized changes in textbooks and
classroom curriculum as opposed to integration. Cleage wanted black teachers to teach black students in black studies, as opposed to integrated classrooms where all students were held to the same academic standards. In April and May 1966, a
student protest at Detroit Northern High School made headlines throughout the city. Northern was 98% black and had substandard
academic testing scores. A student newspaper article,
censored by the administration, claimed teachers and the principal "taught down" to blacks and used
social promotion to graduate kids without educating them. Students walked out and set up a temporary "Freedom School" in a neighborhood church, which was staffed by many volunteer
Wayne State University faculty. By May
sympathy strikes were planned at Eastern, and Rev.
Albert Cleage had taken up the cause. When the
school board voted to remove the principal and vice principal, as well as the single police officer assigned to Northern, whites regarded the board's actions as capitulation to "threats" and were outraged the "students were running the school". City residents voted against a school-tax increase. Under the Cavanagh administration, the school board created a Community Relations Division at the deputy
superintendent level. Arthur L. Johnson, the former head of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP, was hired in 1966 to advance community involvement in schools, and improve "intergroup relations and affirmative action." Black dominated schools in the city continued to be overcrowded as well as underfunded.
Retail stores and services Customer surveys published by the
Detroit Free Press indicated that blacks were disproportionately unhappy with the way store owners treated them compared to whites. In stores serving black neighborhoods, owners engaged in "sharp and unethical
credit practices" and were "discourteous if not abusive to their customers". The NAACP, Trade Union Leadership Council (TULC), and
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) all took up this issue with the Cavanagh administration before the riot. In 1968, the
Archdiocese of Detroit published one of the largest shopper surveys in American history. It found that the inner-city shopper paid 20% more for food and groceries than the suburbanite. Some of the differences were due to economies of scale in larger suburban stores, as well as ease in transportation and delivery of goods. Shortly after the Detroit riot, Mayor Jerome Cavanagh lashed out at the "
profiteering" of merchants and asked the city council to pass an anti-
gouging ordinance. == Events ==