Detroit by Scott Martelle

Author:Scott Martelle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2012-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Protest sign near Sojourner Truth homes, 1942. ARTHUR S. SIEGEL. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, FSA/OWI COLLECTION (LC-USW3- 016549-C [P&P] LOT 661)

But being forced to accept black neighbors at gunpoint didn’t change white minds, nor did it do much to undercut black perceptions that, the momentary protection notwithstanding, political and legal interventions in segregation fights would fall on the white side of the color line. Blacks began agitating for a more equitable share of Detroit, both from the public and private sectors.

On April 11, some ten thousand people crowded into the downtown Cadillac Square, near city hall, for an “equal opportunity” rally organized by the UAW and the NAACP. A few weeks later an NAACP Emergency War Conference drew delegates from twenty states who railed against official and unofficial discrimination within the federal workforce and the military. The public and organized agitation by blacks exacerbated white fears.

It didn’t help that Detroit was home to three religious-inspired demagogues who couched their racism in terms of faith: Father Coughlin; Gerald L. K. Smith, a member of the Silver Legion (an American version of Hitler’s Brown Shirts); and the Reverend J. Frank Norris, an early “megachurch” minister who preached a mixture of racial segregation and biblical fundamentalism and who shuttled by train between pulpits at First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and Detroit’s Temple Baptist Church, which didn’t integrate until the 1980s.

By 1943, Coughlin’s influence had dissipated after key members of the extremist Christian Front organization he had been championing were charged with conspiring to overthrow the US government. All those arrested were eventually acquitted or had the charges dropped, but Coughlin’s association with the group helped knock him off the air. Further, in an act of dubious constitutionality, Coughlin was barred from using the US mail to distribute his anti-Semitic and inflammatory Social Justice newspaper after the US attorney general deemed it seditious. His Catholic overseer, Archbishop Edward Mooney, finally muzzled Coughlin completely by ordering him not to speak publicly on political or social issues at risk of being defrocked, though Coughlin remained pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower until he retired in 1966.

Coughlin and his peculiar strains of racism might have been silenced, but his words still echoed in the hearts of those who agreed with him. And Smith and Norris continued to deliver their noxious stew of racism and anti-Semitism, finding scapegoats for the economic crisis in Jewish bankers, communists, immigrants, and blacks.7

The schisms cropped up even within the war machine. In June 1942, only seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and despite a “no strike” pledge by the UAW, three serious wildcat strikes broke out in Detroit factories, each sparked by management decisions to place black workers in jobs previously held by whites. The resistance crossed gender lines. At Hudson, 350 white women walked off their clerical jobs after their bosses hired a handful of black women to join them. With the UAW’s acquiescence, Hudson fired four white men whom they considered the main protagonists of the hate strikes, but the work stoppages continued to crop up across the defense factories.

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