Rethinking the politics of white flight in the postwar city: Detroit, 1945-1980

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 163-198

  Thompson, Heather Ann ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ETHNICITY; INNER CITY AREA; MIGRATION DETERMINANT;

UNITED STATES;

EID: 0032961823     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/009614429902500201     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. Z'ev Chafets, "The Tragedy of Detroit," New York Times Magazine, July 29, 1990, 23.
2. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Summary Characteristics for Government Units and Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas - Michigan.
3. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Local Population Estimates, 1984.
4. Chafets, "The Tragedy of Detroit," 22.
5. Bryan Thompson and Robert Sinclair, Metropolitan Detroit: An Anatomy of Social Change (Cambridge, 1977), 14.
6. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Summary Characteristics.
7. Thompson and Sinclair, Metropolitan Detroit, 54.
8. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1989, 109th ed.
9. Chafets, "The Tragedy of Detroit," 23.
10. Wilbur Rich, Coleman Young and Detroit Politics: From Social Activist to Power Broker (Detroit, 1989), 241.
11. Interestingly, crime in the city of Detroit actually decreased between 1975 and 1979 when whites fled the city en masse (see appendix). But by 1980, the crime rate did begin to escalate dramatically. The increase in the use and trafficking of the drug crack cocaine explains much of this post-1980 rise in crime. Prior to 1965, city drug use was largely confined to heroin. Heroin while highly addictive, was a depressant, and its users tended to be passive addicts who generally withdrew from their surroundings. After 1980, however, a new drug of choice emerged in the city - crack cocaine. While equally if not more addictive than heroin, cocaine was a stimulant. Cocaine addicts (particularly those on crack cocaine) tended to be far more agitated and aggressive than users of virtually any other drug. According to Sergeant Michael Lemon of the DPD (who joined the force in 1972), with the introduction of crack cocaine use after 1980 came a noticeable rise in child abuse, domestic violence, gang violence, and illegal guns in the city. Not surprisingly with addiction and gangs came a rising crime rate. One gang called Young Boys Incorporated, formed in 1979, took over the city's drug trade. With this highly organized gang came an increase in drug-related robberies, assaults, and homicides. Lemon is of the opinion that by 1980, 50 percent of the city's homicides were drug related. Michael Lemon, telephone conversation with author, May 4, 1994.
12. As quoted in Chafets, "The Tragedy of Detroit," 51.
13. Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York, 1990); Frederick Siegel, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (New York, 1984); and Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, 1985). For a more recent, and exaggerated, articulation of this position, see Frederick Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here (New York, 1997).
14. Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York, 1990); Frederick Siegel, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (New York, 1984); and Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, 1985). For a more recent, and exaggerated, articulation of this position, see Frederick Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here (New York, 1997).
15. Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York, 1990); Frederick Siegel, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (New York, 1984); and Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, 1985). For a more recent, and exaggerated, articulation of this position, see Frederick Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here (New York, 1997).
16. Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York, 1990); Frederick Siegel, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (New York, 1984); and Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, 1985). For a more recent, and exaggerated, articulation of this position, see Frederick Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here (New York, 1997).
17. Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers, 102.
18. Siegel, Troubled Journey, 203.
19. Rieder, Canarsie, 77-8.
20. Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers, 92, 118-9.
21. Siegel, Troubled Journey, 265.
22. Siegel, Troubled Journey, 167.
23. Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers, 102.
24. Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers, 101.
25. Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers, 90.
26. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (New Jersey, 1996).
27. Sugrue, The Origins, 267.
28. For one of many dramatic examples of this, see the detailed story of one Easby Wilson's move to all-white Riopelle street. Sugrue, The Origins, 231-3.
29. Sugrue, The Origins, 5, 245.
30. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, 1983).
31. For more on these battles in the city's schools, workplaces, courtrooms, and vis-à-vis law enforcement, see Heather Ann Thompson, "The Politics of Labor, Race, and Liberalism in the Auto Plants and the Motor City, 1940-1980" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1995). Also see Heather Ann Thompson, Motor City Breakdown: The Politics of Race and Liberalism on the Streets and Shopfloors of Postwar Detroit (forthcoming).
32. For more on these battles in the city's schools, workplaces, courtrooms, and vis-à-vis law enforcement, see Heather Ann Thompson, "The Politics of Labor, Race, and Liberalism in the Auto Plants and the Motor City, 1940-1980" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1995). Also see Heather Ann Thompson, Motor City Breakdown: The Politics of Race and Liberalism on the Streets and Shopfloors of Postwar Detroit (forthcoming).
33. Thompson, Motor City Breakdown. 30. For a great deal of interesting information on the African American migration from south to north, as well as many U.S. census statistics on migration, see Marcus E. Jones, Black Migration in the United States with Emphasis on Selected Central Cities (Saratoga, CA, 1980); The Kerner Report: The 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York, 1988 ed.), 12.
34. Thompson, Motor City Breakdown. 30. For a great deal of interesting information on the African American migration from south to north, as well as many U.S. census statistics on migration, see Marcus E. Jones, Black Migration in the United States with Emphasis on Selected Central Cities (Saratoga, CA, 1980); The Kerner Report: The 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York, 1988 ed.), 12.
35. Thompson, Motor City Breakdown. 30. For a great deal of interesting information on the African American migration from south to north, as well as many U.S. census statistics on migration, see Marcus E. Jones, Black Migration in the United States with Emphasis on Selected Central Cities (Saratoga, CA, 1980); The Kerner Report: The 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York, 1988 ed.), 12.
36. Jones, The Kerner Report, 12.
37. As Sugrue notes, "Residents of Detroit's white neighborhoods abandoned their ethnic affiliations and found a new identity in their whiteness." And, as testimony to this, he offers striking evidence of the diverse ethnic backgrounds of the whites who sought membership and participation in homeowners associations formed to combat the desegregation of their neighborhoods. See Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis, 22, 211.
38. Some ethnic white Detroiters, particularly Jews and Poles, did not participate in the violent resistance to black mobility as actively as did other city whites. Indeed, in response to the ugly battles over integrating neighborhoods, in July 1968 the Detroit Archdiocese Priests Conference publicly advocated open housing. Stemming from this, in 1971, a "Black-Polish Conference" was established to further communication between these two groups. This Black-Polish Conference included 16 Board members, 225 members, as well as "4,000 interested persons," who subscribed to the belief that "Blacks and Poles share many problems and . . . by working together we can overcome these problems without losing our ethnic identities." From Donald I. Warren, "Black-Polish Conference Final Evaluation Report," May 5, 1973, The New Detroit Collection, Box 154, Walter Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit. Just as ethnic white support for integrated neighborhoods was extremely rare, so as was working-class activism across racial lines. One key exception to this was again Polish-African American unity, this time against the proposed razing of their integrated neighborhood, Poletown, to make way for a new General Motors complex during the late 1980s.
39. Arthur Kornhauser, Detroit: As the People See It: A Survey of Attitudes in an Industrial City (Detroit, 1952), 69. This is an invaluable survey of 593 men and women, both black and white, between May and August 1951. The group chosen came from a mathematically based representative cross section of the Detroit population. The majority of interviewees were between the ages of thirty-five and forty-four. Eighty-nine percent of the respondents were white, and 11 percent were black. White interviewers questioned white respondents, and black interviewers questioned black respondents. See the introduction and appendix for survey guidelines and controls.
40. Kornhauser, Detroit, 75.
41. Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis, 72.
42. Steve Babson, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (New York, 1984), 158.
43. Kornhauser, Detroit, 62.
44. Kornhauser, Detroit, 102.
45. Kornhauser, Detroit, 33.
46. Kornhauser, Detroit, 100.
47. Kornhauser, Detroit, 21.
48. Kornhauser, Detroit, 122.
49. Kornhauser, Detroit, 122.
50. NAACP, Detroit Chapter, "White Police in Black Communities," in Wilma Hendrickson, Detroit Perspectives: Crossroads and Turning Points (Detroit, 1991), 451.
51. NAACP, Detroit Chapter, "White Police in Black Communities," in Wilma Hendrickson, Detroit Perspectives: Crossroads and Turning Points (Detroit, 1991), 451.
52. NAACP, "White Police," 452.
53. NAACP, "White Police," 456.
54. Kornhauser, Detroit, 176.
55. Cavanagh's electoral victory offers strong evidence of the ongoing struggle waged by both the black and the white communities to shape the postwar liberal agenda. As Sugrue in Origins of Urban Crisis points out of earlier decades in Detroit, "newly empowered Blacks and Whites in Detroit attempted to define and challenge - really to appropriate in their won terms - the New Deal State," 59.
56. "The American Crisis: A Liberal Looks at the Ashes of Dead Dreams and Issues a Manifesto for Survival," The Detroit Free Press Magazine, August 6, 1967. In The NAACP Collection, Part 1, Box 30, Walter Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit, Michigan.
57. B. J. Widick, Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence (Chicago, 1972), 155.
58. "Project Head Start: Questions and Answer Fact Sheet," The NAACP Collection, Part 2, Box 26-1, Series 1.
59. See Allen Matusow, The Unraveling America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960's (New York, 1984).
60. As Sugrue points out, numbers of middle-class blacks were able to move into relatively affluent neighborhoods such as Boston-Edison and Arden Park, but, as he also points out, "more than 80 percent of property in Detroit outside of the inner city (bounded by Grand Boulevard) fell under the scope of racial restrictions," making mobility exceedingly difficult. See Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis, 44, 204.
61. Social Planning Division, Detroit Planning Commission, Employment Conditions in the Model Neighborhood, 1970, July 21, 1970, The City of Detroit City Planning Commission Collection, Box 14.
62. See Detroit Model Neighborhood Household Survey, April-June, 1972, The City of Detroit City Planning Commission Collection, Box 14.
63. Michael Lipsey and David Olson, Commission Politics: The Processing of Racial Crisis in America (New Jersey, 1977), 348.
64. City of Detroit - Total Action against Poverty Application for Funding from the Office of Economic Opportunity - Community Action Program, January, 1965, The NAACP Collection, Part 2, Box 27-7.
65. Charter Revision Commission, Who's on Welfare?, June 11, 1971, The Charter Revision Commission Collection, Box 3. In the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, Michigan.
66. Police Injury Cases, Report, February 19, 1964, The Georgakas Collection, Box 3-1, Walter Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit, Michigan.
67. Ray Girardin, Speech, The Police and the Community, January 17, 1964, The Girardin Collection, Box 10, The Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, Michigan.
68. The Detroit Police Department, 99th Annual Report: Statistical Annual Report for 1964. In the Detroit Police Department, Museum and Archives Unit, Detroit, Michigan.
69. The Detroit Police Department, 102nd Annual Report, 1967.
70. The Detroit Police Department, 110th Annual Report, 1975.
71. The Detroit Police Department, Annual Reports of 1964 and 1967.
72. The Detroit Police Department, Annual Report of 1965.
73. The Detroit Police Department, Annual Report of 1967.
74. See Figure 2.
75. See "Major Crimes by Precinct," Detroit Police Department Annual Report for 1955. In the Detroit Police Department, Museum and Archives Unit. Detroit, Michigan.
76. City of Detroit, Total Action against Poverty Application to the OEO-CAP, January, 1965.
77. See report by Gebhard Long, William Deane Smith, David O. Porter, Delores Weber, and L. L. Loukopoulus, "Detroit Police Department - A Research Report on Previous Studies; Criminal Statistics; and Police Technology, Productivity, and Competence," May 1970. This exhaustive report includes seventy-four pages of text, sixty pages of graphs and tables, and a forty-three-page appendix. In the Kenneth Cockrel/Sheila Murphy Cockrell Collection, Box 37, The Walter Teuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit. Also see Loukopoulus, "The Detroit Police Department," and "The Detroit Police Department-Statistical Section," May 1970, an independent study conducted by the fact-finding team at Wayne State University and its Urban Studies Department, the Charter Revision Commission Collection, and at the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
78. See report by Gebhard Long, William Deane Smith, David O. Porter, Delores Weber, and L. L. Loukopoulus, "Detroit Police Department - A Research Report on Previous Studies; Criminal Statistics; and Police Technology, Productivity, and Competence," May 1970. This exhaustive report includes seventy-four pages of text, sixty pages of graphs and tables, and a forty-three-page appendix. In the Kenneth Cockrel/Sheila Murphy Cockrell Collection, Box 37, The Walter Teuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit. Also see Loukopoulus, "The Detroit Police Department," and "The Detroit Police Department-Statistical Section," May 1970, an independent study conducted by the fact-finding team at Wayne State University and its Urban Studies Department, the Charter Revision Commission Collection, and at the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
79. See report by Gebhard Long, William Deane Smith, David O. Porter, Delores Weber, and L. L. Loukopoulus, "Detroit Police Department - A Research Report on Previous Studies; Criminal Statistics; and Police Technology, Productivity, and Competence," May 1970. This exhaustive report includes seventy-four pages of text, sixty pages of graphs and tables, and a forty-three-page appendix. In the Kenneth Cockrel/Sheila Murphy Cockrell Collection, Box 37, The Walter Teuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit. Also see Loukopoulus, "The Detroit Police Department," and "The Detroit Police Department-Statistical Section," May 1970, an independent study conducted by the fact-finding team at Wayne State University and its Urban Studies Department, the Charter Revision Commission Collection, and at the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
80. Long, et al., "Detroit Police Department," 43.
81. Long, et al., "Detroit Police Department," 27.
82. Long, et al., "Detroit Police Department," 8.
83. Long, et al., "Detroit Police Department," 28.
84. Long, et al., "Detroit Police Department," 3.
85. Long, et al., "Detroit Police Department."
86. Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis, 188, 206.
87. Richard V. Marks, Memo for Commission Information and Action, The Georgakas Collection, Box 4-18.
88. Marks, Memo.
89. Leigins S. Moore, Letter to Rev. Charles Williams, February 19, 1965, The NAACP Collection, Part 2, Box 5-20.
90. Dr. Albert Wheeler, Speech, The Negro Community and City Hall, January 16, 1967, Delivered at the Michigan Civil Rights Commission Conference for Municipal Officials. In The NAACP Collection, Part 2, Box 19-21, Series 1.
91. Wheeler, The Negro Community, 3.
92. The Detroit Police Department, Annual Reports of 1965 and 1971.
93. Detroit Free Press, November 5, 1969.
94. Joseph Darden, Detroit: Race and Uneven Development (Philadelphia, 1987), 209.
95. Detroit Free Press, November 5, 1969.
96. Detroit Free Press, November 5, 1969.
97. Detroit News, November 4, 1969.
98. Detroit News, November 4, 1969.
99. Space constraints prevent me from detailing these cases - New Bethel One and Two, the murder trial and subsequent workmen's compensation trial of black autoworker James Johnson, Jr., and then three trials involving a man accused of attempting to murder several STRESS officers. But, in each of them, city whites knew, as did blacks, that liberal judges, hearing referees, and juries had afforded the defendants unprecedented leeway.
100. As Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh had put it to the Kerner Commission several years earlier, "We must frankly face up to the need to consider and accept a new principle . . . the principle of reparation for long standing injustice dating back to the generations preceding ours. . . . The price that they [blacks] have paid has been incalculable. Now the nation must, I believe, begin to make reparation - for the deeds of past generations, and of our own." See Mayor's Recommendations before Governor Kerner's Committee in Washington on August 15, 1967, The City of Detroit Planning Commission on Community Relations, Series 3, Box 2-19.
101. Detroit Election Commission, Official Canvas of Votes 1953-1978, The Vertical Files of the Sociology and Economics Department, The Detroit Public Library.
102. The New York Times, November 7, 1973.
103. Detroit Free Press, November 7, 1973.
104. Detroit News, November 11, 1973.
105. The New York Times, January 6, 1974.
106. The New York Times, January 6, 1974.
107. The New York Times, January 6, 1974.
108. Detroit News, November 7, 1973.
109. Scholars have made much of the notion that middle-class blacks were as eager to abandon decaying urban centers as their white counterparts were by the late 1970s. This did not happen in Detroit to any significant degree. While there was some black flight, the intense segregation that was maintained in the metro-area suburbs severely discouraged black mobility, and, thus, from 1973 to the present, there exists a noticeable, quite rigid, class structure in the Motor City. This phenomenon is best illustrated in Darden et al., Detroit: Race and Uneven Development. For more on the argument that the black middle class did flee from America's inner cities, see Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How it Changed America (New York, 1991) and William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago, 1987).
110. Scholars have made much of the notion that middle-class blacks were as eager to abandon decaying urban centers as their white counterparts were by the late 1970s. This did not happen in Detroit to any significant degree. While there was some black flight, the intense segregation that was maintained in the metro-area suburbs severely discouraged black mobility, and, thus, from 1973 to the present, there exists a noticeable, quite rigid, class structure in the Motor City. This phenomenon is best illustrated in Darden et al., Detroit: Race and Uneven Development. For more on the argument that the black middle class did flee from America's inner cities, see Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How it Changed America (New York, 1991) and William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago, 1987).
111. Scholars have made much of the notion that middle-class blacks were as eager to abandon decaying urban centers as their white counterparts were by the late 1970s. This did not happen in Detroit to any significant degree. While there was some black flight, the intense segregation that was maintained in the metro-area suburbs severely discouraged black mobility, and, thus, from 1973 to the present, there exists a noticeable, quite rigid, class structure in the Motor City. This phenomenon is best illustrated in Darden et al., Detroit: Race and Uneven Development. For more on the argument that the black middle class did flee from America's inner cities, see Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How it Changed America (New York, 1991) and William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago, 1987).
112. Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis, 78, 149, 245, 266, and see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York, 1985).
113. Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis, 78, 149, 245, 266, and see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York, 1985).