Before World War II, the housing situation for Black Detroiters could be characterized by an increasing demand for housing and an increasing resistance towards integrated neighborhoods amongst whites. Consequently, the masses of Black residents were forced to live almost exclusively in a small, overcrowded, working-class neighborhood called Black Bottom on the Lower East Side. This segregation was maintained, in part, by a real estate practice called restrictive covenants. 

Although federal law made it illegal to separate sections of cities by race after 1917, because whites resisted the idea of Black neighbors, real estate agents and developers developed restrictive covenants as a way to continue selling houses. As the citywide demand for housing increased due to the migration of Blacks and whites from the south, developers wrote racially restrictive clauses in property deeds regarding who could own homes. Working in tandem with developers, real estate agents then used the existence of these covenants as a selling point for homes. One ad described a development as made up of “the kind of people you would be glad to have next door.” 

The demand for racially restricted housing among whites was partially driven by the movement of Black Detroiters beyond Black Bottom, a practice that often exploited Black residents and accelerated the creation of racially restricted neighborhoods. For example, although it was false, because whites largely believed that Black neighbors lowered property values, real estate agents would tell white homeowners that a Black “invasion” was coming and whites would rapidly sell their homes to agents below market value. Real estate agents would then sell these homes to Black Detroiters at a higher than market price. Whites would then move into racially restrictive developments to avoid losing money on their homes in the future. 

Other whites prevented Black Detroiters from moving into their neighborhoods through violence. In 1925, violence flared in Detroit when a Black doctor named Alexander Turner who was head of surgery at Dunbar Memorial Hospital tried to move into Tireman that June. White residents greeted him by throwing rocks and smashing windows. In July, Vollington Bristol also tried to move into Tireman. From July 7th-9th he fought white mobs of over 2,000 people gathered in front of his house with shotguns, revolvers, and rifles. Bristol was able to fight for three nights because Black Detroiters, also armed, gathered to fight the whites. After exchanging gunfire on the 9th, nineteen whites and twenty-four Blacks were arrested. The following day the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross of Bristol’s lawn. 

This violence made national news when, in September, Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family into the Garland neighborhood. During the Sweet’s second night, a white mob threw rocks through the Sweet’s windows. As the mob grew more hostile, gunshots were fired from inside the house, resulting in the death of one white man and the injury of another. Sweet, his wife, and nine other Black Detroiters were charged with murder. With legal support from the national NAACP, charges were dropped against three defendants before trial and the trial of the remaining eleven resulted in a mistrial.  

At the height of World War II, the resistance of whites to integrated neighborhoods combined with a severe housing shortage resulted in similar violence at the opening of a housing project named the Sojourner Truth Homes. Designed as a public housing complex for Blacks, the two hundred-unit complex was built in the Seven Mile-Felon neighborhood because it was close to Conant Gardens, a middle class Black neighborhood. However, when plans were announced, Black and white residents opposed the project’s construction. Despite this initial unity, middle class Black residents of Conant Gardens quickly dropped their opposition to the project when the racism of their white counterparts became clear.

In response to white pressure, protest, letter writing, and lobbying city council members, the Federal Housing Authority switched the racial designation of the project three times. Meanwhile, union activists and public housing advocates organized to maintain Black people’s access to the project. With only one other project in the city allowing Black residents, Sojourner Truth became a major site of conflict. 

When the first Black families moved in February 1942, both white opposition and supporters of Black Detroiters gathered at the site and by the end of the day more than 1,000 people were in the streets. Fighting erupted, forty people were injured, 220 arrested, and 109—all Black—were held for trial. In the wake of what has come to be called the Sojourner Truth riot, the Detroit Housing Commission created a policy to guarantee that the construction of new public housing would “not change the racial pattern of the neighborhood” in which it was to be built. 

According to historian Thomas Sugrue, white racists considered this policy a victory and learned a valuable lesson from the struggle. “After the Sojourner Truth incident and the Detroit Riot of 1943, white community groups learned to use the threat of imminent violence as a political tool to gain leverage in housing debates. City officials, desperately hoping to avoid racial bloodshed, had no choice but to take seriously the specter of civil disorder.”

References:

Beth Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2012

Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005

Richard Walter Thomas, Life for Us is What We Make it: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915-1945, Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1992