Having organized successfully to desegregate the United Auto Workers (UAW), Black workers in Detroit had a highly developed set of organizational skills that allowed them to effectively organize after the Second World War. Following the war, Black Detroiters were prepared to fight for the equality at home that they had fought for overseas. While some organizations that had existed before the war made tremendous contributions to this struggle, new more radical organizations also emerged. At the center of this Black organizing was a liberal labor-civil rights coalition.

 Because the city eliminated ward-based elections in favor of at-large local elections—likely to prevent Black voters from electing their own representatives to the city’s common council—Detroit’s Black activists were forced to form coalitions with other groups. Because so many Black Detroiters were members of the United Auto Workers in the immediate postwar period, an alliance with labor made plain sense. As the 1945 municipal elections neared, Black communities and the UAW worked to create and support a slate of labor candidates. 

 To construct this slate, the Detroit chapter of the National Negro Congress and other Black organizations drafted the Rev. Charles Hill to run for city council. Hill had long been the pastor at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, had been a member of Mayor Jefferies Interracial Committee, was active in the 1941 Ford strike, was involved in activism around the Sojourner Truth Housing Project, and was sympathetic to the city’s Left. These experiences and commitments led the Political Action Committee of the UAW-CIO to endorse Hill and make him part of a slate of white labor candidates, including Richard Frankensteen for Mayor, and Hill, George Edwards, and Tracy Doll for the city’s Common Council. 

 The CIO-PAC and Black organizations campaigned in both Black and white neighborhoods to elect the whole slate. Frankensteen appeared in Black neighborhoods and uplifted Hill. However, when he appeared in front of solely white audiences, he was much less vocal about his endorsement of Hill. Despite these inconsistencies, support for the labor-civil rights slate was so strong that each candidate advanced to the second round of elections after the primary. 

 Sensing the threat that the labor-civil rights coalition posed to his power, Mayor Jefferies preyed on fears that the slate was communist and would force the city to end racial segregation by adopting open housing laws. Jefferies red-baiting and racist fear mongering worked. Jefferies won the election but the labor-civil rights slate did well. For mayor the slate received 44 percent of the total vote, 61 percent of votes in polish precincts, 71 percent in Italian precincts, and 90 percent in Black precincts. These high numbers of votes for the labor-civil rights coalitions amongst precincts that would have never supported a slate with Black candidates only a few years prior gave Black Detroiters reason to believe a coalition with labor could be useful. 

 Despite its usefulness, this coalition was difficult to maintain because of growing conservatism within the country and especially because of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against communism. In Detroit, some of the most effective organizers in the UAW and some of the white organizers most committed to civil rights were also members of the Communist Party. As anti-communism spread throughout the country, the UAW purged communists from its ranks, which also made it harder for Black Detroiters to use the UAW as a consistently progressive ally. In response, Black Detroiters typically embraced a liberal integrationist approach to politics working in concert with the UAW or took the path of radicalism, joining and creating revolutionary organizations.   

 Liberal Black activists became involved with the NAACP, with the Urban League, but largely used the UAW as their political vehicle. The Detroit NAACP and Urban League chapters organized for both open housing and for increased employment for Blacks in Detroit. Although the passage of Executive Order 8044 increased the number of Black workers in auto plants enormously, Blacks still had a difficult time finding decent work outside of the city’s plants. The Urban League organized campaigns to get Blacks hired in grocery stores and department stores downtown, as did the NAACP. Despite these campaigns, many Black Detroiters grew increasingly frustrated with these liberal organizations leading the membership of the NAACP to plunge to 5,162 in 1952 from a height of 25,000 during World War II. Those who rejected liberal politics in favor of more radical alternatives became active in the Socialist Workers Party, Correspondence, and the Communist Party.

 References:

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

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