Pre-1865 Among African Americans who moved to Detroit from the American South before the end of slavery were
George and
Richard DeBaptiste. They attended classes taught by Rev. Samuel H. Davis, the pastor at the Second Baptist Church in the city.
Marcus Dale attended the African Methodist Episcopal church led by Rev.
John M. Brown and others. In the days before the Civil War began, Detroit was an important site on the
Underground Railroad, in which local people aided the passage of fugitive slaves to freedom. Its location just across the river from Canada, where slavery was abolished in 1834, made it a destination for many seeking freedom. Although Michigan was a free territory, some refugee slaves wanted to go over the border to Canada to prevent being captured by slavecatchers. Others settled in Detroit. Local blacks involved in the Underground Railroad work included
Samuel C. Watson (who later opened a drug store in Detroit),
William Whipper, Richard and George DeBaptiste, and others. William Lambert,
Laura Haviland, and
Henry Bibb were also involved. Many Detroit African Americans served in the
American Civil War (1861–1865). The
102nd Regiment United States Colored Troops of Michigan and Illinois was recruited in large part in Detroit. Blacks in Detroit had to face rising tensions from ethnic whites before and after the
Emancipation Proclamation was issued in January 1863. A Democratic Party paper,
The Detroit Free Press, supported
white supremacy and opposed President
Abraham Lincoln's handling of the war. In addition, it consistently presented issues of the day as problems due to competition with free blacks, projecting threats to white men's power and forecasting worse labor problems if the mass of slaves were freed. In March 1863, a
race riot broke out in Detroit. Catalyzed by the arrest of a
mixed-race man for allegedly molesting a white girl, a white mob attacked blacks and their neighborhood, resulting in two deaths (one, white and one black), numerous people injured, 35 houses and businesses destroyed, and more than 200 people left homeless. As a result, the city established its first full-time police force.
1865-1890 After the war, African Americans formed an important political block in the city, led by Watson,
George DeBaptiste,
John D. Richards, and
Walter Y. Clark. Saginaw's
William Q. Atwood was an important figure outside Detroit who influenced the city's African-American politics as well.
1890-1929 Before
World War I, Detroit had about 4,000 Black people, 1% of its population. In the 1890s, journalist and founder of the black paper,
Detroit Plaindealer,
Robert Pelham Jr. and lawyer
D. Augustus Straker worked in Detroit and throughout the state to create branches of the
National Afro-American League. The pair were active, in part through the league, in supporting Blacks in legal trouble. Pelham was also an important figure in the league at a national level. The first major period of Black growth occurred from 1910 to 1930, during the economic expansion in the auto industry. Due to the war effort in World War I, many men enlisted in the armed forces, and employers needed workers. They recruited African Americans from the South, who were also on the move as part of the first
Great Migration. They sought more opportunity and a chance to leave behind the oppression of the Jim Crow South. From 1910 to 1930, the Black population of Detroit increased from under 6,000 to over 120,000, as the city developed as the fourth largest in the country. By 1920, of Michigan's Black residents, 87% were born outside of the state, and most of those came from the South. Because landlords began to restrict access to housing, Black residents were forced into small districts, which became overcrowded as the population grew. T. J. Sugrue, author of
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, wrote that the first geographic racial divisions between Whites and Blacks developed during the Great Migration. Around the 1920s and 1930s Black people working in
Henry Ford's factories settled in
Inkster because they did not want to commute from Detroit and they were not allowed to live in
Dearborn. Whites resisted even middle-class blacks moving into their neighborhoods. In 1925 the State of Michigan charged physician
Ossian Sweet with murder after he used a shotgun to kill a white man who was part of a mob trying to force him to leave his newly purchased house, located in a mostly white neighborhood. Sweet was acquitted of his charges.
1930-present During the
Great Depression, the population stagnated. The increase in population had strained city schools and services for all residents.
Housing Crisis Competition in employment and housing spheres increased social tensions in the city. Insufficient housing opportunities for African Americans led to a polarized political and economic landscape. The government attempted to ease the housing pressure by building projects for working-class families, but whites resented placement of these projects in their neighborhoods. As a result, black housing was allocated in deeply impoverished areas that regressed into further dangerous and disease filled locations. Since Black individuals were forced to take low-earning jobs, the density of Black families in this area known as "Black Bottom" increased, and further exacerbated its destitute living conditions. Federal housing policies effectively stymied the progress of African Americans in the city of Detroit, and, consequently, housing shortages disproportionately targeted African American citizens. African Americans in Detroit were systematically shut out of the housing market due to structural racism. This hindered their ability to accumulate generational wealth, putting generations of African Americans at a disproportionate economic disadvantage.
Redlining Residential segregation was prevalent as structures of
disinvestment amplified hypersegregation along both racial and economic lines. In 1935, the
Federal Home Loan Bank Act (FHLB) commissioned 239 lending maps for the
Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the
Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to document and evaluate what neighborhoods throughout the country were lending risks. Many areas of Detroit were
redlined as a result of being designated "high risk" neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that were graded as hazardous for lending were primarily composed of minority groups, and these redlined neighborhoods illustrated the ways in which economic inequality disproportionately targeted African Americans. Citizens residing in these neighborhoods were denied loans by lending institutions, and consequently they were unable to purchase or fix homes. Since black individuals were not able to leave their impoverished neighborhoods and were not able to improve their homes through loans, the concentration of poverty within black bottom increased. Such policies worsen the condition of black housing solely on the basis of race. These covenants ensured the maintenance of racial homogeneity in white neighborhoods and their use was incentivized by early federal housing policy that awarded higher ratings to racially homogeneous neighborhoods. By 1940, 80% of Detroit's residencies abided by
racial covenants, and thereby restricted black housing to historically impoverished and dangerous areas on the basis of race.
Public Housing Despite these discriminatory policies, the federal government did attempt to help improve housing access to those they disproportionately disadvantaged. The
Wagner-Steagall Act was passed in 1937 to subsidize local public housing agencies. However, public housing efforts throughout the 1940s were met with opposition from several parties. Suburban governments and community groups concerned with racial homogeneity resisted public housing projects. Real estate developers also opposed public housing projects as they believed that these projects threatened their private enterprises. This strong opposition from local forces in Detroit undermined public housing efforts and solidified spatial barriers of race. There were, however, pro-public housing groups, the most important being the
Citizens' Housing and Planning Council (CHPC). The goal of this organization was to improve environmental conditions in slums by replacing suboptimal living and sanitary conditions with more adequate housing for African Americans. This reform aimed to ameliorate poor living spaces and construct a cleaner environment that was more conducive to public health and morale. Having Detroit's city leadership in the 1940s and 1950s attribute redevelopment and renovation with destroying "dangerous" parts of the city made black bottom especially vulnerable to displacement. The CPC subsequently failed to provide adequate resources for relocation to the black families whose homes and neighborhoods were destroyed. This resulted in the movement of displaced African Americans into already inadequate and overcrowded housing in disproportionately black neighborhoods. This displacement and disappearance of black communities resulted in the disappearance of black culture and tradition. Systematic discrimination in housing contributed to volatile race relations in the city of Detroit.
Opposition from Homeowner Associations After the decision of Shelly v. Kramer banned racial covenants, efforts to keep neighborhoods segregated were propelled by Homeowners associations. Members from white concentrated neighborhoods organized and used grassroots activism to prevent integration from sullying the “high character” that their white dominated neighborhoods provided. These associations flexed their agencies in a number of ways. Through the use of mutual reciprocal legal agreements, homeowners associations maintained racially specific language to bar black people from obtaining loans in white populated areas. Further, homeowners associations leveraged the ownership of the homes in their neighborhood to safeguard sales to black individuals. Associations such as the Plymouth Manor association required its members to only contract with approved real estate brokers that would guarantee that loans and property would only be sold to white individuals. The legal power of the Homeowners associations was furthered when entering into administrative positions with Mayor Albert Cobo. Cobo opted to have several members of homeowners associations counsel zoning and urban development policies which attempted to further enforce de facto segregation within Detroit. Racism within housing was therefore still intact after it was federally banned through these extralegal loopholes that were spearheaded by white homeowners associations. The actions of the homeowners associations reflected the deep cultural ties that Detroiters developed within their neighborhoods. Historians have previously connected homeowners associations’ efforts to prevent integration to be tied to the sense of identity within the segregated neighborhoods in Detroit. This incentivized real estate and mortgage bankers to sell homes to individuals they believed were likely to miss mortgage payments. Single black mothers on welfare were often targeted for this reason. From 1950 to 1970
de facto racial segregation in the Metro Detroit area increased. Those white people who were more established economically moved out of the city to newly developed suburbs, which often were divided by class and income levels. In that period black growth in the suburbs averaged 2.7%, while in previous decades it had been 5%.
Demographic Changes and Suburbanization By 1970 Detroit and six other municipalities,
Ecorse, Highland Park, Inkster,
Pontiac,
River Rouge, and
Royal Oak Township, had higher than average black populations. The six suburban municipalities with higher than average black populations held a total of 78.5% of the suburban black people in the tri-county area. During this suburbanization period, many middle-class blacks also moved from Detroit to Southfield. Suburban development and growth increased among all populations, and blacks became more widely distributed. By 2000, blacks in the six suburban municipalities that had held the great majority in 1970 made up only 34% of the blacks in the suburbs. As of 2002, a total of 90% of the black population in Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland counties resided in Detroit, Highland Park, Inkster, Pontiac, and Southfield. and the black population in
Warren from 2000 to 2010 increased from 4,000 to 18,000. By 2011 black suburbanization had increased across the area, as blacks settled in more different localities. ==Institutions==