From 1915-1935, Black Detroit underwent a tremendous political transformation. Migrating to Detroit with hopes of a job at Ford, until the 1930s Black Detroit followed the political leadership of Henry Ford and pastors Ford was friendly with. However, after Black Detroiters experienced Henry Ford’s inhumane response to the Great Depression, they began to chart a course of political empowerment vastly different from the anti-union Republican politics of Ford.  

Black Detroiters’ path towards political empowerment began when they broke with the Republican Party and began exploring options with the Democratic Party in the 1930s. At the beginning of the Depression, Frank Murphy, a Democratic judge who declared a mistrial in the cases of the Ossian Sweet defendants, ran for mayor in a 1930 special election and was elected largely from the votes of Catholic immigrants and Black migrants. 

Although Ford started a rumor that Black workers would lose their jobs if the Black vote elected Murphy to a full term in 1931, Black Detroiters played an enormous role in his 1931 campaign. Beulah Young formed Murphy for Mayor clubs and penned articles in favor of Murphy in the Detroit Independent. Black pastors allowed Murphy to speak at churches and thousands of Black Detroiters showed up to hear his campaign speech at Second Baptist Church. A band formed by Black sanitation workers volunteered to play for several of Murphy’s campaign events. 

After Murphy won 55 percent of the primary he faced off with Harold Emmons, Ford’s candidate for mayor. While Emmons had the backing of the city’s Republican elite and the Ku Klux Klan, Murphy won 66 percent of the vote and was re-elected to a full-term as mayor of Detroit. Murphy gave two cabinet positions to Black Detroiters in exchange for their services to him. John C. Dancy was appointed to the House of Correction Commission and Rev. Robert Bradby did behind the scenes work for the Mayor’s administration. 

The following year, Black Detroiters formed a number of Democratic clubs, which together changed Black Detroiters political path in lasting ways. Founded almost solely by Black women, Detroit’s Democratic Club built on the foundation of Murphy’s re-election campaign. Beulah Young, a Black woman journalist who also held a position in Murphy’s administration drew on the Murphy for Mayor Clubs to organize Black Detroiters into Democratic district-wide blocs. Additional Black women Democrats formed the Democratic Whip, a club exclusively for Black women. Mary Belle Rhodes headed up a woman’s auxiliary to the Democratic League, which was organized by Charles Diggs, Sr., Joseph A. Craigen, and Harold Bledsoe. These various Democratic organizations in Detroit resulted in an 88 percent increase in the amount of Black Detroiters aligning themselves with the Democratic Party from 1930-1932.

This new strength of Black Democrats in Detroit was responsible for the election of Michigan’s first Black state Senator; Charles Diggs, Sr. Diggs’ political trajectory was similar to the political development of Black Detroit as a whole. In the 1920s he was heavily involved with the Universal Negro Improvement Association and involved with the Republican Party. It was most likely in the UNIA where Diggs developed a commitment to Black self-reliance that played a role in his switching to the Democratic Party in 1932, and then played a role in his commitment to advocating for the rights of Black people once elected to the senate. He was responsible for “the Diggs Act,” legally known as the Equal Accommodations Act, passed in 1938, which made discrimination in public accommodations by race a misdemeanor. Elected to represent a district made up of Polish and Black Detroiters that was majority Polish, Diggs in many ways was the perfect embodiment of the civil rights-labor coalition. Diggs held his seat until 1944 when he was defeated in the Democratic primary after being convicted for accepting bribes along with 18 other State Senators.  

Following in the footsteps of his father, Charles Diggs, Jr. was elected to the Michigan State Senate as a Democrat in 1951. Diggs was educated at Fisk University in Nashville, TN, and was a student at the University of Michigan Law School when he took the state senate seat vacated by his father. 

The following year Black Detroiters elected the first African American woman in the country to hold a state senate office when they elected Cora Mae Brown to the Michigan State Senate as a Democrat representing the 2nd District. Brown, who had studied with the famous Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier at Fisk University, worked as social worker in the woman’s division of the Detroit Police Department. She ran for office in both 1950 and 1951, losing both times before being elected in 1952. She was elected to represent the 3rd district during her second term. Brown worked in the Senate to increase the fine to business that violated the Diggs Act from $25 to $100. 

The elections of Brown and the elder and younger Diggs created the conditions for an expansion of Black electoral power in the later 50s and the 1960s. 

References:

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

Herb Boyd, Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination, New York, Harper Collins, 2017 

Angela Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2007