Detroit’s Sojourner Truth Housing Riot of 1942 by Gerald Van Dusen

Author:Gerald Van Dusen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE SEVEN MILE–FENELON HOMEOWNERS IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION (SMFHIA)

An immediate consequence of the Pershing High School meeting was the galvanization of various white interests in torpedoing the black defense housing project. The “spontaneous” creation of the Seven Mile–Fenelon Homeowners Improvement Association had little to do with addressing residential structures, habitation and commercial properties. Its boilerplate bylaws and regulations were merely a cover for its sole obsession: to enlist as many local white residents and organizational entities as “soldiers” in the army fighting federal interference in a local matter. The DHC had, in fact, already located the project at another site—albeit one that needed improvement at some expense to make it habitable. The federal government, and all its various agencies and representatives, had erred grievously, and it would now need to acknowledge the error, correct it and move on. There was an overseas war to be fought, after all. It was almost a matter of Christian faith that this new association was fighting the good fight.

It was fitting that the Seven Mile–Fenelon Homeowners Improvement Association (SMFHIA) conducted its meetings at St. Louis the King Parish Church, pastored by the Reverend Constantine Dzink. Although the SMFHIA was headquartered in a storefront at 19235 Fenelon, its spiritual and moral compass was in the center of the Polish Catholic community at a church presided over by an unabashedly racist and anti-Semitic cleric. Father Dzink was much beloved by his parishioners, and he had no difficulty exerting the spiritual and moral authority that would make their blind participation in protesting the black housing project a given. Once he got his congregation fully on board with resistance to the housing project, he would turn his attention to the USHA. In a letter to Michigander Charles F. Palmer, national director of the USHA in Washington, Father Dzink gave a toned-down version of his normally vitriolic rhetoric:

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