Insurrection by Hawa Allan

Author:Hawa Allan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

ON JUNE 21, 1943, PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT ISSUED A proclamation under the Insurrection Act “directing Detroit rioters to disperse.” Roosevelt made this proclamation at the request of then-governor of Michigan Harry Kelly, resulting in the dispatch of around six thousand federal troops to patrol the streets of Detroit and enforce an imposed curfew. The inciting incident—which escalated into a three-day brawl that left thirty-four people dead, more than six hundred injured, and about two million dollars in property damage—occurred on the Saturday evening of June 19, 1943, at the Eastwood Amusement Park, where a group of young white men harassed two black men. The following Sunday evening, on an island off the coast of Detroit called Belle Isle, the same two black men were set upon by another group of whites, who had decided to avenge the altercation from the previous night.

This confrontation then spread, coopting larger groups of black and white day-trippers as the melee continued across the bridge connecting the island to the city of Detroit. By late that evening, several hundred people were embroiled in the racially divided fighting, which had been fueled by the dissemination of false rumors—of a white mob having thrown a black mother and child into the Detroit river, a story that circulated among black residents, and of black men raping white women, broadcast among white residents. In the meantime, white and black crowds marauded through the streets of Detroit, attacking each other and, by early the following morning, looting city storefronts.

After the federal cavalry was called in, the riot was calmed and the damage assessed. Where city and state commissions reviewed the data and concluded that the riot was caused by Negro youths and “outside agitators” who had recently migrated to Detroit, the NAACP issued a report drafted by Walter White and Thurgood Marshall, which painted a more nuanced portrait. Citing the recent influx of migrants to the city, a hub of the World War II manufacturing economy—half a million people in the three years preceding the riot—as well as fierce competition for lucrative jobs in federally funded wartime factories, the NAACP report detailed the long-brewing dissension between black and white Detroiters. Of those who partook in this Great Migration from parts of the South, about forty to fifty thousand at the time were Negro migrants. Roosevelt’s executive orders barring racial discrimination with respect to federal jobs were scarcely enforced, contributing to an environment where the KKK proliferated and influenced local unions to resist the employment of black laborers—who, given their surplus in a discriminatory labor force, often occupied the position of scabs willing to work during strikes.

While the conclusions of city and state riot commissioners relied upon data showing that black residents made up the majority of police arrests, they overlooked reports that police officers themselves had been involved in the riots—often dissolving into the white mob, and shooting and beating black rioters themselves, ignoring white laypersons who were doing the same. In support of this proposition, the NAACP report

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