Black History In Detroit : From GM To Motown: Take A Journey Through Motortown's Past.

____________________________________

Most of African-Americans migrating north were leaving their farms
and things of that nature, for a, supposedly, brighter future in the north.
____________________________________

It's right around here that some mention of the people and the dynamic of Detroit needs to be introduced. Detroit was primarily white, a mix of mostly Italian and Irish, but there were some African Americans as well that made the migration north after emancipation, but contrary to beliefs about the North, Detroiters and a lot of midwesterners didn't like the sudden influx of African Americans and a lot of them just kept on going to a friendlier and more humane atmosphere in the, then, British-ruled Canada.

Detroit has been a racist and segrated town, pretty much, since day one. Blacks and whites never really got a long, and things only got worse when Ford started to turn the ex-fur trading down at the bottom of the Great Lakes into the industrial capital of the universe. Ford knew that a cheap automobile needed a cheap labor, and believing that blacks were inferior to whites, he put his game-face on and started courting local churches and ministries and their preachers and created a steady migration of "church-going, family blacks".

Most of African-Americans migrating north were leaving their farms and things of that nature, for a, supposedly, brighter future in the north. Most of them never found it, but instead they found plight, famine, disease, racism, and a life worse than they ever imagined. Detroit's problem with racism began as soon as Ford starting bringing the blacks from the south. The whites on the line didn't like the "darkies" coming in and stealing "their" jobs, but it was Ford, himself, who was actually bringing them up from the south on the promise of a new life, and steady work. In the shops (the slang term for the assembly lines), blacks and whites got along, but when the whistle blew at the end of the day all of that changed. It was like some kind of social Jekyll and Hyde. They lived in different neighborhoods, they drank in different bars, they drove different kinds of cars, and because segregation was still constitutional they shopped in different stores, and essentially built up a life and a marketplace inside of their own communities.

The communities that were developed came up all over the city. There was one place that most of the African Americans were stuck living in, "the black bottom", "the black hole" or the more sarcastic term that is used most often historically when referring to the pre-1950s black community in Detroit, "Paradise Valley". The Paradise Valley, on all accounts was a hell of a place, and it was named this because it was no paradise and because there was nothing green about it, no trees, or anyting –it was neither a valley, nor a paradise; but this mere strip of land on the east side of the city became the home to thousands and thousands of migrant African Americans. These short history lessons here are important when illustrating the artistic climate throughout Detroit's history. The Paradise Valley, while one of the saddest, most impoverished, and depressing areas of the city was also a hotbed for entertainment and artistic activity, with movie-houses, and some of the first jazz clubs to come up in the north. The 1930s, 40s, and 50s saw all of the jazz greats come through Detroit. Jazz wasn't chic in those days, it wasn't about good music to smoke a cigar to, it was a rogue rhythmic music, much like Hip Hop is today. Arts and entertainment in the African American community was quite possibly the only escape there was.

In other parts of the city and the surrounding suburbs there were other entertainment and cultural happenings, but for the most part, Detroit was about making money. Detroit was about mass production. Shop-weary workers found their escape in the bottle at the local watering holes, and wherever else they would go. For most of Detroit's history it's been artistically and culturally stifled, that is with the exception of the black communities. The black communities, no matter how impoverished, were always rich in culture and the arts. Possibly the saddest commentary is that the Detroit Symphony Orchestra couldn't even find a stable home in Detroit, shifting about here and there, building to building for nearly fifty years, before finally coming back to the original and acoustically perfect Orchestra Hall after almost fifty years of being, essentially, on the street. There are a variety of other ensembles in and around the area namely a Detroit chapter of the New York City-based Pro Musica that, in its early years, featured debut works by Maurice Ravel, and Bela Bartok with the composers performing, as well as a variety of other legendary composers, often with great performers of the time on the stage.

____________________________________

The first large-scale race riot that Detroit would experience happened
on a very hot day in 1943 and lasted for quite some time.
There were almost 10,000 people brawling in the street.
____________________________________

For many years, as Detroit's population grew, the city blossomed financially and the outer limits of the city began to grow as well, pushing beyond the original city limits many times. Unfortunately though, as the population grew, the rift between black and white grew as well. Perhaps you find yourself asking why I keep bringing up the race issue? With Detroit, there has only been one sustaining constant throughout most all of its history, and that's been racism. Racism defined Detroit for many years, and in a lot of ways still does. In fact it was racism that led to Detroit's near-demise, but I have some more history to go through before I get to that. As the population grew the city grew, but unfortunately there wasn't adequate housing, and the blacks were stuck in the decrepit Paradise Valley by racist neighborhood associations and realtors, while the whites segregated themselves into a variety of enclaves all over the city.

The first large-scale race riot that Detroit would experience happened on a very hot day in 1943 and lasted for quite some time. There were almost 10,000 people brawling in the street. Nothing changed as the whites were let go and it was the racist Detroit cops that detained blacks only, who hadn't even been the instigators to begin with. The whites actually went into Paradise Valley looking for trouble, as the blacks were not allowed to go near the white neighborhoods, much less go there and cause general havoc, but that was the racial climate of Detroit at the time.

Things didn't get much better after World War II. Blacks and whites alike were coming home from war ready to start their lives and families. Many people came to the city in the hopes of finding the same prosperity that had alluded those that came before them, but still they came. With a labor-shortage in most of the 1930s and 40s, little housing had been built and whites and blacks were both without homes. But it was the blacks that were still forced to live in the Paradise Valley, while the whites were helped into governmental housing projects that were sprouting up all over the city.

Things only got worse for the African Americans when city renovation plans showed that a new expressway would be going right through the heart of Paradise Valley, thus displacing many of the inhabitants to wherever they could find a place to go. No consideration to these people's live and well-being was given and they were forced out onto the street. These actions, for obvious reasons, did little to improved the racial rift that existed in Detroit and in fact made things worse.

Around the time all of this was going on, not too far away from where it was going on, about five miles down the road there was a little record company just getting started, and a young Berry Gordy was trying to make one of his first incarnations of Motown Records into the next big something.

As the 1950s came to a close and the 1960s began, a tumultuous time was on the horizon, both for Detroit and the rest of the world. Racism and equality were main themes, and housing was still a huge problem in Detroit, but little was done. The blacks were pushed into new slums and some of the projects, but with the 1960s came a new problem. As many of the factory workers were promoted into the car companies and the companies grew new positions were created, and they moved up the ladder. This led to more income, mostly for whites, but some blacks as well. This continued into the mid 1960s.

At this time Motown was huge and on top of the charts, but they were an individual phenomenon. It's hard to say if Motown really was "Detroit", although many people would like to believe this. But my question is this "if Motown represented Detroit, why, then, did the company move to Hollywood in the early 1970s?" Detroit's a long ways away from L.A.!

As the 1960s moved on, tension was in the air racially, socially, politically, and every other way for that matter. It was on a very hot and steamy night in July of 1967 that really made things take a turn for the worse for a city that was rich in industry but very poor in community. There are a dozen different stories as to what caused the first waves of the Detroit riots of 1967, but one thing's for certain –the damage that was done scarred the city for decades. Here's a snippet that I've taken from Thomas J Sugrue's masterful book The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit: "On July 23, 1967, in the middle of a summer heatwave, the police decided to bust a 'blind pig,' an illegal after-hours saloon on Twelfth Street in the center of one of Detroit's largest black neighborhoods. Arrests for illegal drinking were common in Detroit, but usually the police dispersed the crowd and arrested a handful of owners and patrons, taking the names of the remainder: On the steamy July night, they decided to arrest all eighty-five people present and detained them- hot, drunk, and angry- outside the saloon until reinforcements could arrive. By four in the morning, an hour after the bust, nearly two hundred people, attracted by the commotion behind the blind pig, had gathered to watch the proceedings. As the arrestees shouted allegations of police brutality, tempers rose. The crowd began to jeer and to throw bottles, beer cans, and rocks at the police."

"By 8:00 A.M. a crowd of over three thousand had gathered on Twelfth Street. The riot raged out of control until it was suppressed by a combined force of nearly seventeen thousand law enforcement officers, National Guardsmen, and federal troops. After five days of violence, forty-three people were dead, thirty of them killed by law enforcement personnel. Altogether 7,231 men and women were arrested on riot-related charges. The property damage, still visible in vacant lots and abandoned buildings in Detroit, was extensive. Rioters looted and burned 2,509 buildings."

Truly, if you drive through Detroit today it looks like the worst that the urban blight has to offer. There are remnants of the riot still visible all over the city. There have been multiple documentaries made on the mass of abandoned buildings throughout Detroit. Detroit in many places is a ghost town. Areas that were once populated by Detroit's citizens have now been claimed back by nature, and woodland fields in the densest parts of the city are quite normal.

This is to say nothing of what the psychological status of the city was after this. Not too long after the 1967 Detroit riots did the city begin to experience, what's known locally, as the great white flight, where the whites of the city couldn't get out fast enough, moving mostly to the outlying suburbs on their handsome automotive incomes. This continued well into the 1980s and left Detroit in a state of great disarray. The 1970s and 1980s weren't a very good time for the city, both because of poor city management, as well as fiscal, legal, and social problems. As for culture in this period, there wasn't any! The Detroit Symphony Orchestra had been out of the city for years. There were little or no sports teams in the city, itself, with the exception of the Tigers, and there was little or no draw to the city.

It was in this time that the rift between black and white grew too its worst point. Blacks, measuring at 82% of the population of Detroit based on the published 2001 census reports came to represent the population of Detroit-proper, whereas the suburbs were where the whites and a lot of the corporate money was. After the 1967 riots many businesses that had been in Detroit for years moved out, therefore there was no longer a reasonable economy in the city either. And with this we can't forget that during the 1970s and 1980s
the automobile industry was at an all time low with the imported Japanese cars coming into the market, and thousands of jobs being cut every week. By the mid 1980s things were as bad as they could get. Blacks, almost exclusively, dominated Detroit-proper, which for the most part was let go and only a handful of people lived above the poverty level, in fact most lived far below it. While this was the climate of the city in the mid 1980s, the suburbs and the whites, who almost exclusively dominated them thrived, and the economy swelled under Reaganomics.

Contempt for both sides of the street was common, and oft-spoken, particulary there was the hostile quote made by Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, who foolishly said in a hot-headed statement that "Whites can stay north of Eight Mile Road and we'll stay here!" Eight Mile Road divides the city and the suburbs on most all sides. Coleman Young, who was the crooked mayor of Detroit for almost twenty years drove the city into the ground. When he was done in the early 1990s he had stolen everything that wasn't nailed down.
Coleman Young is one of the biggest reasons why the city was in shambles for as long as it was. And his often crooked, double-dealing ways weren't exactly the invitation that suburb-living business owners wanted to hear to get them back in the city.

Things started to turn around though, after Coleman Young left the office, and Dennis Archer came in. Dennis Archer, who has decided not to run again for Mayor, has been the best thing that Detroit has ever seen. All eyes are on Detroit to see where the city is going to go.

In 1989 the Detroit Symphony Orchestra came back to the Orchestra Hall after a fifty year leave. Sometime after that renovations began on the Detroit Opera House. When Dennis Archer started working with people in Washington he had the "Tax-Free Renaissance Zones" established in various parts of the city and began to establish a rapport with the entrepreneurer's, decision-makers, and business-owners outside of the city trying to bring people back to Detroit.

Over the last 10 years many things have changed for the better in Detroit. The area, overall, is seeing a lot more racial integration than it ever has in the past, and the fertile economy of the 1990s brought some relief to the poverty that the city had been stuck in through the 1970s and 1980s. Businesses are moving back into the city, culture and arts organizations are moving out of the suburbs, or are at least taking a chance with a more urban location while maintaining their foothold in the suburbs.

One blow that really hurt Detroit in 2000 was the city being relegated out of a major city status when the census revealed that the population had fallen below one million people. Nevertheless the city is on the grow and a small group of Generation X-ers are taking their college degrees and suburb roots to the city. Armed with a love for art, the inspiration of our Detroit, and not much money (which by the way, is great because rent is cheap), the city is being reborn.

There have always been a couple of clubs and things of that nature in Detroit, but not many, as most of them were in the suburbs. But the last ten years has seen many impoverished area be taken over by small arts communities, consisting of musicians, writers, visual artists, and the like. For many years the city of Detroit, was seemingly, without a future. Many asked the question what would happen to this huge mass of land where a city once was, but thankfully the city has slowly, very slowly, almost unnoticeable coming back. Well, coming back is probably not the best verbiage, because it will never be what it was, and in my personal opinion, I can't say that anybody wants it the way that it was, but the city is being reborn and beyond all of the PR hype the city is experiencing a bit of a renaissance.

There's no question that parts of the city, many parts in fact, are still very dangerous and hostile, but things are different now. The dynamic in Detroit is different now. The city is growing spiritually, and almost away from its industrial roots. Culture was never something that Detroit had a lot of. The big money-makers in Detroit usually got their culture from New York, Chicago, or somewhere further abroad, but certainly they never went to Detroit.

When Detroit's split from it's industrial past is complete, and I can't say that a complete split will ever occur, because it's the foundation of our city, but if it ever occurs we'll experience a renaissance unlike no other. In 2001, small art galleries went up all over the city in old and abandoned buildings where the rent was cheap, if there was any rent at all, made it livable and comfortable. The same can be said of small performance venues/ spaces, as well as bars, library, museums, and a cornucopia of culturally significant things that are now popping up on a grassroots level. Also there's a new Detroit Tiger's stadium in the heart of the city, and next to that is a new Detroit Lion's stadium. The Detroit Opera House is in full swing. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra has been back in the city for over ten years, and in full swing in a completely refurbished Orchestra Hall. Multiple old theatres, such as the the State Theatre, the Fox Theatre, as well as Music Hall have also been refurbished and are regular stops for touring bands and performers from all over the world. There are also quite a lot of festivals concerned with arts, culture, and the blending of the other ethnicities that make Detroit the unique melting pot that it is. In sum, the future is wide open for Detroit. And as a resident in the region all that I can say is, it's sure nice to have a future again.

This website: Copyright © 2002 Dream World Media, LLC. / Urban Mozaik Magazine. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in Urban Mozaik Magazine are not necessarily those of Urban Mozaik Magazine and the publisher cannot be held responsible for them. This website/publication, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.