The Detroit race riot: a study in violence [reprint ed.] 0306708086

Citation preview

g^OVEcS^

RARY

A STUDY IN VIOLENCE

A Da Capo Press Reprint Series

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND THE ERA OF THE NEW DEAL General Editor :

Frank Freidel

Harvard. University

A STUDY IN VIOLENCE BY

ROBERT SHOGAN AND

TOM CRAIG

DA CAPO PRESS-NEW YORK-1976

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Shogan, Robert. The Detroit race riot. (Franklin D. Roosevelt and the era of the New Deal) Reprint of the 1st ed. published by Chilton Books, Philadelphia. Bibliography: p. 1. Detroit—Riot, 1943. 2. Negroes—Detroit. 3. Detroit—Race question. I. Craig, Tom, joint author. II. Title. III. Series. [F574.D4S5 1976] 977.4'34'04 ISBN 0-306-70808-6

76-1011

This Da Capo Press edition of The Detroit Race Riot is an unabridged republication of the first edition published in Philadelphia in 1964. It is reprinted with the permission of the Chilton Book Company, Radnor, Pa. Copyright © 1964 by Robert Shogan and Tom Craig, Published by Da Capo Press, Inc. A Subsidiary of Plenum Publishing Corporation 227 West 17th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011 All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

THE

1 STUDY III VIOLENCE

II STUDY IN VIOLENCE BY

ROBERT SHOGAN AND TOM CRAIG ghilton books-Publishers A Division if Chitsi Company

Philadelphia and New York

Copyright © 1964 by Robert Shogan and Tom Craig First Edition All Rights Reserved Published in Philadelphia by Chilton Company and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Ambassador Books, Ltd. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-23348 Designed by William E. Lickfield Manufactured in the United States of America by Quinn & Boden Company, Inc., Rahway, N. J.

To ELLEN and BEVERLY

AUTHORS’ NOTE

problems confronting this Republic as it strives to order the relations between the races are unique in their complexity, and no one yet knows exactly how they will be solved. But this book is written in the conviction that understanding of past failures will help in shaping future solutions. The Detroit race riot was chosen as the subject for this case history not only because it was the worst episode of racial vio¬ lence in recent years but also because so many questions about the riot were left unanswered by the official inquiries conducted at the time. The rather cursory report of the special investi¬ gating committee appointed by the Governor of Michigan was only one of many verbal and documentary sources consulted by the authors in seeking to reconstruct the riot and analyze its causes. Every effort has been made to offset bias by balancing the varied sources, one against the other. Serious discrepancies between them are discussed in the text or in the notes at the end of the book. All documentary sources are listed in the bibliography. We wish to make special mention here, however, of Race Riot, by Alfred McClung Lee and Norman Daymond Humphrey, a slim volume published less than six months after the Detroit riot, which served as an important guide to other contemporary accounts. Our book, like many others, would have been impossible to write without the resources of the New York Public Library’s Reference Department. We are also indebted to the Sociology The

vii

viii

Authors' Note

and Economics Department of the Detroit Public Library; to the staff of the Labor History Archives at Wayne State Uni¬ versity Library; and to Miss Isabel Gulick, Mrs. Ellen Terry, and other members of the staff of the Maplewood, New Jersey, Memorial Library. For giving us access to their files and photographs we are grateful to Morgan Oates, Librarian, Charles T. Haun, Picture Editor, and Frank Angelo, Managing Editor, all of the Detroit Free Press; and Robert H. Diehl, Supervisor, Detroit News Reference Library. We want to thank George Edwards and his successor as Detroit Police Commissioner, Ray Girardin, for making records of their department available to us; Lieutenant Colonel John P. Kelly of the U.S. Army and Sherrod East, Director, and Wilbur J. Nigh, Reference Branch Chief, World War II Rec¬ ords Division, National Archives, for their help in finding documents relevant to the Army’s role in the riot; Dr. Edward S. Zawadzki, Wayne County Medical Examiner, for his aid in searching morgue records; Charles Thurston for his maps of Detroit; Richard V. Marks, Director, Detroit Commission on Community Relations; Burt Levy, Assistant Director, AntiDefamation League of B’nai B’rith in Detroit; Arthur Johnson, Executive Secretary, Detroit Branch of the National Associa¬ tion for the Advancement of Colored People; and Jack Casey, Assistant to the Mayor of Detroit, for statistics and background information; and finally and most importantly our editor, Tom Allen, for his patience, enthusiasm and skill.

June,

1964

CONTENTS

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Appendix 1: Appendix 2: Appendix 3:

Authors’ Note. Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal Violent Heritage. First Blood. The Revolt of Paradise Valley . State of Siege . ‘Emergency Plan White’ .... Fallout from Tragedy. In Haste and in Anger . . ‘Mr. Roosevelt Regrets . . Walk to Freedom. A Short Manifesto. Governor Kelly’s Declaration and Proclamation. Field Order No. 2. Field Order No. 2-A.

Appendix 4: Presidential Proclamation

Vll

1 16 34 44~ 54-

66 — 83 98 111 122 138 144 146 149

....

153

Appendix 5: President’s Letter to the Secretary of War

155 157

Appendix 6: Reply to President. Appendix 7: Memorandum on Use of Federal Troops in

....

160

.... Notes. Bibliography. Index .

164 168 185 189

Case of Civil Disorder Appendix 8: Affidavits of Riot Victims

IX

M

ran

MCE RIOT isnniiuuMt

DEMOCRACY’S UNEASY ARSENAL The last Sunday in spring dawned bright and hot. Although

summer was still two days awray on the calendar, the tempera¬ ture had reached 90 yesterday, and today, June 20, 1943, it seemed likely to go even higher. The prospect made Lieutenant Fred Provencher of the Detroit Police uneasy. Provencher was to go on duty that evening and he knew from twenty years' experience that hot weather meant trouble in the streets. Already this spring, Detroit had seen trouble enough. “Every weekend we’d had a small riot between the white and the Negro,” Provencher recalled more than twenty years later. Most of the violence flared in the Negro section on the East Side and most of it, Provencher firmly believed, was started by Negroes. Personally, Lieutenant Provencher had little use for Negroes. “If you locked them up, they just ate free,” he said. “If you shot them, they didn’t have to worry any more.” Many of the nearly three million people who crowded in and around the nation’s fourth largest city during the war were at least dimly aware of the clashes between blacks and whites. But most of them had other things on their minds this Sunday morning. In the solid white suburb of Oak Park, just north of Detroit, Bert Trombley was thinking about his wife and newborn daughter. Tomorrow he would drive to Woman’s Hospital in Detroit to bring them both home. Carrie Hackworth’s thoughts were of her two sons, age eleven and twelve, who were staying with their grandmother 1

2

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

in the South. As this young Negro mother fixed breakfast for her husband Ross in their cramped Detroit apartment, she planned the trip she would make to see the boys during the summer. About two miles to the south of the Hackworth s apartment, in the heart of the Negro ghetto, Moses Kiska also was having his breakfast. Kiska, fifty-eight, worked at the huge Chrysler Tank Arsenal north of the city. The work was steady and the pay was good but Moses Kiska was glad enough for the chance to rest when the weekend came. No one in Detroit needed a day off more than Dr. Joseph De Horatiis. With many younger doctors away in service. Dr. De Horatiis had more patients than time to care for them. He was sixty-four years old, and the burden of his practice was enough to wear down most men half his age. But this Sun¬ day morning the doctor, who made his home with an elderly couple in Northwest Detroit, was up and about early. He was going to spend the day at the home of a friend who had asked Dr. De Horatiis to care for his grandmother while he was out of town. This was the man Detroit Italians called “the good doctor.” When young Joseph De Horatiis came to Detroit in the early 1900’s from the town of Agnone in Campobasso Province in Italy, he was one of the few Italian doctors in the city. He devoted himself completely to his practice and never married. Dr. De Horatiis might easily have become rich, except that he never had been known to send a bill to a patient. Indeed, it was said that he often refused money from the poor and paid the fees of specialists from his own pocket. The war that added to Dr. De Horatiis’ burdens naturally dominated the newspapers this Sunday morning and many Detroiters followed the news closely. Some were concerned about sons or husbands overseas. For Sam Mitchell, a Negro janitor for the Bankers Trust Company, the news stirred mem¬ ories of the war he had fought twenty-five years before. Cor¬ poral Sam Mitchell of the 317th Ammunition Train had been

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

3

under fire in the St. Die and Meuse-Argonne sectors in World War I, then served with the First American Army in the oc¬ cupation of the Rhineland, and eventually received an ex¬ cellent-character discharge. The news of World War II this morning was mostly good. The Americans and British had just won their first major vic¬ tory over Germany in North Africa and now were preparing to invade Sicily. On Saturday, U.S. bombers attacked the island in what the newspapers called “softening-up raids.” Thirtynine enemy planes were reported shot down. London buzzed with rumors that Crown Prince Umberto and Marshal Pietro Badoglio of Italy had arrived in Algiers to ask for peace terms. But anyone who looked beyond the hopeful headlines could clearly see that much bloody fighting remained. In New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the Japanese contested every inch of jungle. Deep in Russian territory, the Germans counter¬ attacked while maintaining their grip on most of the rest of Europe. A second front in France was still only a promise by the Western Allies, one that would certainly cost them dearly to keep. “This is the most critical period of military supply,” Under Secretary of War Robert W. Patterson warned the American people on June 19. “Too little and too late now will cost hun¬ dreds of thousands of lives tomorrow.” Patterson’s warning was prompted by the fact that production for the Army had fallen below schedule in May. For this failure, which he called “the most critical single occurrence in the Army supply pro¬ gram,” Patterson blamed “complacency and over-confidence.” Both management and labor were at fault, Patterson said, citing several strikes in key industries. Even as he spoke, John L. Lewis planned a nationwide walkout of his United Mine Workers to protest the War Labor Board’s refusal to grant the miners portal-to-portal pay. The strike would begin at midnight Sunday, June 20. Patterson also complained about the “tendency of certain manufacturers to devote too much time, thought and energy

4

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

to the design and development of competitive civilian nonessentials.” He mentioned no names but it was not hard to find examples of businessmen who were already looking ahead to postwar production and profits. In Detroit, ten days before, Charles F. Kettering, vice president and research director of General Motors Corporation, had assured the Society of Auto¬ motive Engineers: “We have gotten a great deal of understand¬ ing of many things out of the war and we should be able to put them to use.” As Americans began to take victory for granted, wartime inconveniences and hardships loomed larger in their minds. They tended to vent some of their resentment against the Democratic Party, simply because it was the party in power in Washington. This resentment probably helped account for the victory of a number of Republicans in the previous Novem¬ ber’s elections, among them Harry Francis Kelly, who took the Governorship of Michigan away from Democrat Murray D. Van Wagoner. Actually though, Kelly would have been a formidable cam¬ paigner at any time. The husky Irishman was a bona fide war hero and crime-buster. A twenty-two-year-old law student at Notre Dame when America entered World War I, he quit school, enlisted, and went to France as an infantry lieutenant. He came back with an artificial leg and the Croix de Guerre. Harry Kelly made his political reputation in Detroit in the early 1930’s as a special prosecutor investigating municipal cor¬ ruption and in 1938 his election as Michigan Secretary of State paved the way to the Governor’s office. In Lansing this Sunday morning Governor Kelly was getting ready to leave for the thirty-fifth annual Governors’ Confer¬ ence, which was to start the next day in Columbus, Ohio. According to the New York Times, Kelly and forty-seven other Governors would spend their time discussing postwar planning and wartime food shortages and inflation. In the main address, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, con¬ sidered a strong contender for the Republican presidential

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

5

nomination in 1944, would blame the food shortage on the Roosevelt Administration’s handling of the farm problem. The agenda of the Governors’ Conference illustrated a basic change in America’s mood from the early days of the war. Im¬ mediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor a sense of urgency and high purpose gripped the nation. The government and people of the United States dedicated themselves not only to the defeat of their enemies but also to the world-wide estab¬ lishment of the Four Freedoms proclaimed by Franklin Roose¬ velt—freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. But then, as the shock of the Japanese attack wore off, this lofty idealism faded and by June, 1943, most Americans had returned to their normal, selfcentered preoccupations. What they did not realize was that because of the war many things could never be the same again. In particular, they were unaware of the war’s tremendous impact on the attitudes and aspirations of America’s thirteen million Negroes. For Negro leaders took the early wartime idealism at face value. They re¬ garded the great social and economic upheavals under way as offering long-sought opportunities for their people. And they were determined to exploit these opportunities to the fullest. In 1941, even before America entered the war, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Por¬ ters, called together other Negro leaders to organize a “March on Washington” to dramatize Negro problems and needs. President Roosevelt, seeking to preserve national unity in a time of international crisis, persuaded Randolph to postpone the march by promising federal action. As part of the bargain, Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 8802, which established the Fair Employment Practices Committee. “It is the duty of employers and of labor organizations to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries without discrimination because of race, creed, color or of na¬ tional origin,” the President declared. The FEPC would en¬ force this policy, he explained, by recommending cancellation

6

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

of government contracts with employers guilty of discrimina¬ tion. Negro leaders took great hope from the establishment of the FEPC. But in this, as in many other hopes during the war, they were to be bitterly disappointed. In the first place, the FEPC not only found discrimination difficult to prove but also found the government reluctant to revoke contracts it considered important to the war effort. In the second place, many employers and the southern wing of the President’s own party furiously attacked the new committee, and the Roosevelt Administration began to regard it as a serious political lia¬ bility. In the summer of 1942, the Administration took away the FEPC’s independent status and budget and placed it un¬ der the War Manpower Commission. Walter White, executive secretary of the National Associa¬ tion for the Advancement of Colored People, wrote later: "The conviction in Detroit and other places began to grow that the FEPC was being quietly shelved and that the Gov¬ ernment no longer was insistent that discrimination in em¬ ployment be abolished.” In May, 1943, the Administration re¬ constituted the FEPC as a separate agency, but so far this new group had done little more than irritate some employers who resented its very existence. In June, a War Manpower Com¬ mission survey found that, while use of Negro labor in war plants was increasing, it was still very limited in many indus¬ tries. The Negro’s general frustration was evident at the NAACP’s Emergency War Conference in Detroit during the first week in June. Delegates from thirty-nine states adopted a "State¬ ment to the Nation which condemned the government for permitting job discrimination in the Civil Service, and the United States Employment Service for "aiding and abetting discrimination” by private employers. The delegates called for an end to "the indignities of segre¬ gation and discrimination” for Negroes in uniform. “We hail the Four Freedoms as our war aims,” they declared, "but both

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

7

American Negroes and colored peoples all over the world will justly regard the Four Freedoms as hypocrisy unless the Presi¬ dent acts to end discrimination in the armed forces of our nation/’ These things, and more, the Negro demanded because he believed he was entitled to them. But what the Negro con¬ sidered as a right, the white man often regarded as a threat— to his job or to his whole way of life. The result was increasing hostility between blacks and whites and, during the closing weeks of this spring, frequently violence. In May, the upgrading of Negro shipyard workers at the Ala¬ bama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company in Mobile, Ala¬ bama, started a bloody brawl involving several hundred work¬ ers. Most of the eighty injured were Negroes. But one of the most seriously hurt victims was a white worker who tried to rescue a Negro being beaten by company guards. Early in June, the Los Angeles area was swept by what the New York Times called “open warfare” between servicemen and Mexican and Negro “zoot suiters.” While thousands watched in downtown Los Angeles, bands of sailors hunted down the teen-age zoot suiters, beat them, and stripped them of their long jackets, pegged pants, and pancake hats. CIO President Philip Murray charged that these outbreaks were part of an Axis plot to create racial disunity and demanded a federal investigation. Just this past Wednesday, June 16, a mob of 10,000 whites had roamed through Beaumont, Texas, for fifteen hours beat¬ ing Negroes and burning their homes. Two persons died, scores were injured, and many of the city’s shipyards were closed before Texas Rangers and state troops restored order. Beaumont Police Chief Ross Dickey called it “by far the worst racial trouble Texas has ever had.” The violence started after a white woman complained that she had been raped by a Negro. Later, however, a doctor who examined the woman found no signs of rape. The FBI, which noted that reports of the alleged rape had swept through the shipbuilding center

8

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

with remarkable speed, was looking into the possibility that Axis agents had incited the riot. Soon after the violence, more than 1,000 Negroes quit their war jobs in Beaumont’s shipyards and fled back to their farms. Few white men in Beaumont were sorry to see them go. "The niggers leaving here aren’t local niggers,” Chief Dickey told the New York newspaper PM. “The shipyards and other com¬ panies brought them in from outside. They should never have come here. We don’t want 'em. Nobody ought to bring for¬ eign niggers into this town.” Bad as these riots had been, Negro leaders feared even worse were to come. They were worried about racial tensions in all big Northern industrial centers and they worried especially about Detroit. On June 3, the NAACP’s Walter White, in Detroit for a church dedication, declared: “Let us drag out into the open what has been whispered throughout Detroit for months—that a race riot may break out here at any time.” “It will not happen,” White asserted, “if the decent people of Detroit, who are in the overwhelming majority, will stop avoiding the issue and face the facts.” But calling attention to the issue was precisely what Edward J. Jeffries, Jr., the Mayor of Detroit, was determined not to do. “I think it’s best to work in a sort of subterranean way,” he explained later. “Publicity would only have aggravated the situation and defeated the very thing we sought to accom¬ plish.” Besides, Jeffries felt that Detroit already had received more than its share of bad publicity. The Mayor was in his second term. Only 43, and ambitious, he knew his chances for be¬ coming Governor depended on his making an impressive rec¬ ord at City Hall. When he started his first term in 1940, after serving on the Common Council through the stormy Depres¬ sion years, Jeffries announced one of his main objectives would be the erasure of “Detroit’s bad image as a city of welfare crises and sitdown strikes.” But Jeffries hardly had begun this task when the war brought new criticism of Detroit.

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

9

In August, 1942, Life, in an article entitled “Detroit is Dy¬ namite,” charged that unrest in the city was hurting war pro¬ duction. “Detroit workers . . . seem to hate and suspect their bosses more than ever,” Life reported. “Detroit manufactur¬ ers .. . have made a failure of their labor relations. . . . Too many of the people of Detroit are confused, embittered and distracted by factional groups that are fighting each other harder than they are willing to fight Hitler.” Life found in Detroit “a morale situation which is perhaps the worst in the U.S.,” and it warned: “. . . Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S.” Jeffries was furious. He called Life “a yellow magazine” and the story “scurrilous, with just enough half truths to im¬ press anyone who doesn’t know the facts.” Regardless of what Jeffries said in public, in private he was deeply concerned about the danger of mass racial violence. “I saw signs; I read the papers,” the Mayor said later. “I knew what was going on in other parts of the country.” Actually, Jeffries didn’t have to look any further than De¬ troit’s own suburbs for signs of trouble. On the preceding Sunday, June 13, a racial brawl broke out in Inkster, a village heavily populated with Negro war workers. Fighting started in Inkster Park, a small common in the heart of town crowded with Negroes and whites trying to cool off. Within a few hours the fighting spread among more than 300 Negro and white civilians and 200 soldiers stationed in neighboring Romulus Township. It took most of Inkster’s police force, plus sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, and military police to clear the streets. Then, on Tuesday, June 15, police from three communities rushed to the suburb of East Detroit to help local police stop a free-for-all between Negroes and whites in Eastwood Amuse¬ ment Park. Police blamed the trouble on about 200 white high school students and servicemen who had tried to force about 100 Negroes out of the amusement park. In Detroit itself. Police Commissioner John H. Witherspoon, like Lieutenant Fred Provencher, had noted the numerous

10

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

small-scale clashes between blacks and whites. “There were stabbings, fights, and plenty of other trouble, the Commis¬ sioner recalled twenty years later. Witherspoon, a specialist in tax law, took over the Police Department in 1942. Soon after¬ ward, he started keeping track of the daily reports that bus drivers and streetcar conductors were making to their super¬ visors on minor racial incidents. “There were things like a Negro patting a white woman or shoving and name calling— incidents which wouldn’t require a police run,” Witherspoon explained. “These reports were coming in every day in increas¬ ing numbers.” Trouble was growing at a time when Detroit’s Police De¬ partment was nearly 300 men below strength. “Many of our men had been drafted,” the Commissioner said. “There were plenty of better-paying jobs available, so it was hard to find replacements.” With only 3,400 men to police an explosive city of two mil¬ lion people, Witherspoon turned for help to the U.S. Army. He, Jeffries, and Governor Kelly met a number of times with local Army commanders to discuss bringing troops into the city in an emergency. The nearest unit available for such duty was the 728th Military Police Battalion, camped at River Rouge Park, at Detroit’s western limits. During three practice alerts in the past few weeks, these 500 MP’s had been timed as they piled out of their beds, packed their gear, and climbed into trucks and armored cars. “The military commanders told me that I could get these soldiers into the downtown area in a matter of minutes,” Witherspoon said. “And they promised that, if necessary, they could send more troops from Fort Custer [about 140 miles to the west] in a matter of hours.” The Army, of course, had good reason to take an interest in Detroit’s problems. For the city, probably the most important war production center in the world, was, as it liked to call itself, the “arsenal of democracy.” No one could question Detroit’s right to this title now. In point of fact, however, its manufacturers had had a good deal

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

11

more trouble than they liked to admit in converting their assembly lines from autos to tanks and planes. In the first six months after Pearl Harbor, Detroit turned out only $1.4 billion in war goods—less than the total value of the auto¬ mobiles it would have made in a good half-year in peacetime. The most spectacular example of the difference between promises and production was furnished by the much heralded aircraft plant the government had built for Ford Motor Com¬ pany near the village of Willow Run, thirty miles west of Detroit. The plant sprawled over 974 acres of corn and soybean fields. Its floors covered 3.7 million square feet. It was the big¬ gest bomber factory under one roof in the world, and even be¬ fore construction started Henry Ford had announced it would turn out 1,000 planes a day. It was an absurd boast, as soon became apparent when Ford ran into a number of problems that neither he nor the government had anticipated. The biggest problem was hous¬ ing. By the spring of 1942, when the Willow Run plant began producing parts for B-24 Liberator bombers, there were virtu¬ ally no vacant houses, apartments, or even furnished rooms left in Detroit—which was more than an hour away by car. The little towns in Washtenaw County near Willow Run could accommodate only a fraction of the tens of thousands of workers the plant needed. Most of the workers whom Ford had recruited to work at Willow Run were forced to live under what an investigating committee appointed by Mayor Jeffries described as “deplor¬ able conditions.” They crowded together in trailer camps and shanty towns, many of them without proper sanitary facilities, schools, or police protection. Not surprisingly, the employee turnover rate at the plant was high. Ford was also having technical difficulties he had not fore¬ seen. These stemmed mainly from the need to retool his pro¬ duction line to adjust to design changes ordered by the Army. What Ford had not realized was that war planes, unlike auto¬ mobiles, have to be modified frequently as a result of combat

12

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

experience. Knowledge of these problems was at first limited to government officials and to other aircraft manufacturers who gibed that the plant should really have been called “Willit Run?” But eventually Ford’s failure became a public scandal. On January 30, 1943, the War Production Board stated: “There have been many disappointments in connection with the Wil¬ low Run operation and the plant even now is far from peak production.” Two weeks later, Harry Truman, then chairman of the Senate War Investigating Committee, announced he would investigate Willow Run because there had been so little pro¬ duction at the plant “as to amount to practically none.” In March the New York Times reported that Willow Run had delivered only a “handful” of B-24’s to the Army in 1942, instead of the 500 that had been promised. By then, fortunately, the worst was over. In May, the Detroit District of the War Manpower Commission announced that the production bottleneck at Willow Run had ended. As emergency housing finally began to spring up nearby and Ford management and workers mastered the knack of aircraft pro¬ duction, the plant’s output rose steadily. It was to turn out an average of 340 bombers a month by the end of 1943 and a total of 8,600 by war’s end. Production was climbing at other plants, too. As Life pointed out in March, 1943, the Army had helped cut red tape by shifting its Tank Automotive Center from Washington to the thirty-four-story Union Guardian Building in downtown De¬ troit. From there, procurement officers kept in close touch with hundreds of nearby factories turning out just about every type of military machine that rolled. The war plants saturated Wayne County, which included Detroit, and spilled over into Oakland County to the north and Macomb County to the northeast. Among them was the world’s largest industrial facility, Ford’s 1,096-acre Rouge Plant, west of Detroit in Dearborn. The Rouge was a produc¬ tion world unto itself. Liberty ships came down the Rouge

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

13

River to its docks, unloaded iron ore and coal to feed its blast furnaces and steel mills; when they left their holds were filled with jeeps, trucks, and tanks turned out on the Rouge's as¬ sembly lines. While Chrysler Corporation’s major war role was the opera¬ tion of the $66 million arsenal north of Detroit, where Moses Kiska worked, other Chrysler plants were making anti-aircraft guns, submarine nets, marine engines, ambulances, and weapon carriers. One closely guarded installation delivered 1,000 carloads of equipment to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to help produce the atomic bomb. General Motors Corporation was the nation’s biggest pro¬ ducer of war materials. Its Cadillac factory made tanks and howitzer motor carriages; the Chevrolet gear and axle plant worked on gears for aircraft engines and axles for armored cars; the Fisher Body Division was filling orders for parts for bombers, tanks, and naval gun mounts; and other GM plants were manufacturing everything from armor plate to aircraft flight instruments. In June of 1943 these and other plants in and around Detroit were accounting for about 35 per cent of the nation’s total ordnance needs. They were well on their way toward turning out nearly $10 billion worth of war goods by year’s end. In the process of setting production records the war plants were wiping out unemployment and creating prosperity. Of the 2.8 million persons living in the Detroit metropolitan area, about 700,000 were employed in war production. Their average take-home pay was $61.47 a week, and for many this was more money than they had ever earned, or dreamed of earning. Wartime shortages, however, made it difficult for a wageearner to actually improve his standard of living. For example, although many families now felt they could afford to eat meat more frequently, they had trouble finding any in the butcher shops. The Detroit Free Press women’s pages on this Sunday morning advised housewives how to prepare a meatless main course dinner for four with spaghetti and half a pound of

14

Democracy’s Uneasy Arsenal

American cheese. Another article suggested that Detroiters could provide their own meat supply by raising rabbits in their backyards. Pelts could be saved and made into a fur coat, the story added. Decent housing was even scarcer than meat. On June 19, a Free Press editorial declared: “The need for adequate housing was discussed earnestly last summer, but the parleying accom¬ plished nothing. We came through the winter somehow and— well, here we are again with the same old problem. And it is just as urgent, just as pressing, just as serious as it ever was, if not more so.” Rationing of gasoline and tires created particular hardships in Detroit. In the past nearly all the city’s workers had driven to their jobs in their own cars and the public transportation system was geared accordingly. Now workers were forced either to figure out intricate car-pool arrangements with men who lived in the same neighborhood and worked on the same shift or to try squeezing into the crowded streetcars and trol¬ leys. During 1943 the Department of Street Railways, the cityoperated bus and streetcar system, was carrying two million riders a day, about one-third more than before Pearl Harbor. When they had time to relax, war workers were confronted with a limited choice in a city never noted for recreational and cultural facilities. This hot Sunday many of them headed for the few nearby parks and beaches. About 27,000 of them spent the afternoon at Briggs Stadium where the Detroit Tigers lost both games of a double-header to the St. Louis Browns, 6-3, 5-4. After dark, Detroiters who wanted to get out of their crowded apartments and furnished rooms could go to the movies, some of which ran all night, or to one of the “fly-by¬ night-clubs” which had opened up since the war. These make¬ shift cabarets, where every night was like New Year’s Eve, charged exorbitant prices, partly because they had to pay off the police so they could operate after hours. All in all, to the War Production Board Detroit presented

Democracy's Uneasy Arsenal

15

“a fantastic picture of wartime prosperity and social tension.” To Bert Trombley and Carrie Hackworth, to Joseph De Horatiis and Sam Mitchell and to nearly three million others who lived in the city, the tension often seemed more real than the prosperity. On this Sunday, June 20, a group of “patriotic citizens” expressed their concern over the general restlessness and dis¬ content in full-page advertisements in Detroit’s three major newspapers. “Strikes, slowdowns and work stoppages for any reason only hurt Old Glory and help Hitler,” the advertise¬ ments said. “War tests men’s minds and souls. It unnerves, irritates, digs in and makes mountains in every day living. . . . Let’s keep at our jobs, no matter how distasteful, how distract¬ ing may be the environment.” The ad missed a significant point. While the wartime en¬ vironment aggravated Detroit’s problems, it had not created them. In fact, the crisis that now confronted the city had been building for more than a quarter of a century.

VIOLENT HERITAGE “History is more or less bunk,” Henry Ford had said. “It’s

tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.” Mr. Ford’s views of history often were quoted with approval in the city that revered him. Most people there felt the same way. In the spring of 1943 Detroit rushed headlong through each day, with one eye cocked ambitiously on tomorrow and the main chance. It saw no profit in pondering on yesterday and thus found little time for it. Besides, it seemed as if the auto industry had erased most of the past when it transformed this once sedate community into the world’s biggest factory town. Before the auto arrived, Detroit called itself “the most beautiful city in America” and affected an air of graciousness it liked to trace to its Gallic origins. The French explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded the city in 1701, on the north bank of the river linking Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. This strategic location gave Detroit its name, which means “the strait” in French, and its early importance as a fur trading center and military post. But it also made the settle¬ ment a frequent target for Indian raids, most of them inspired by the British. The raids continued until the British conquered Detroit in 1760, at the end of the French and Indian War. Detroit served the British well as a base of operations during the American Revolution, and they prized the fur trade so 16

Violent Heritage

17

much they clung to the city until 1796, well after they were supposed to leave. The British recaptured Detroit during the War of 1812. Not until 1813 did they leave for good. The city grew slowly until 1825 when the Erie Canal opened Michigan to migration from the East, and then from Europe. The first wave, mostly New Yorkers and New Englanders, had brought Detroit’s population to 10,000 by the time Mich¬ igan entered the Union in 1837. Succeeding waves of Germans, Irish, Dutch, Scandinavians, and Poles kept the population expanding steadily. By the time the Civil War broke out, Detroit’s population of 45,000 included about 1,400 Negroes. Many of these blacks were escaped slaves, for Detroit had been an important station on the Underground Railway and an abolitionist stronghold in the years before the war. By 1863, however, the weariness of many Detroiters with the long, bloody struggle had turned to bitterness against Negroes, whom they blamed for causing the war. On March 6 of that year, following the arrest of a mulatto named William Faulkner for raping a white woman, the bitterness exploded in violence. Federal troops escorting Faulkner to jail fired on a mob of whites who tried to attack the prisoner; one man was killed and several wounded. White gangs then descended on the Negro section, set fire to a score of Negro homes, and beat their occupants, driving some back into the flames. No Negroes were killed but a number were seriously injured. Five com¬ panies of infantry from nearby Ypsilanti rushed in to restore order. Next day, a public meeting of white citizens condemned the actions of the mob and arranged to reimburse Negroes for damage to their homes. Seven years later, Faulkner was ex¬ onerated and released from prison. After the Civil War, Detroit took on increasing importance as a manufacturing center. Its factories turned out railway cars, furniture, stoves, shoes, and steel. In addition, Detroit made bicycles and carriages, and these vehicular trades were

18

Violent Heritage

to have considerable bearing on the city’s future. They helped to provide the skilled mechanics and managers who launched the auto industry and catalyzed the city’s growth. Out of the bicycle and carriage shops, and into the auto¬ mobile plants, came Studebaker, Nash, Durant, Willys, Winton, the Fisher brothers, and the Dodge brothers. Their early factories copied manufacturing techniques developed in bicycle and carriage production. And Henry Ford put together a buggy frame chassis and four bicycle wheels to make his first auto in 1896. The success of this two-cylinder gasoline “quadricycle” en¬ couraged Ford to keep tinkering until he attracted the capital he needed. Then, in 1899, he joined the Detroit Automobile Company as part-owner and chief engineer. That same year, Ransom E. Olds began to assemble the first “merry Oldsmobiles” in a small plant on Detroit’s East Side. During the next ten years, Ford left the Detroit Automobile Company, formed the Ford Motor Company, and developed the almost immortal Model “T.” W. C. Durant united the Olds Motors works with Buick, Cadillac, and Oakland in a combine that was to become the nation’s biggest manufac¬ turer, General Motors Corporation. By the end of the decade, Detroit was well established as the automobile capital of the world. As the auto industry flourished, Detroit strove to make room for the factories and the men who came pouring in to work in them. The city converted once proud residences into room¬ ing houses. It turned its back on the river that gave it its name, pushing outward in haphazard fashion, swallowing some suburbs and surrounding others. Eventually Detroit covered 140 square miles, stretching eight miles north from the river and sprawling twenty miles from east to west. Its borders enclosed two small cities, Highland Park, site of Henry Ford’s first major factory, and Hamtramck, where thousands of Polish immigrants made their homes. No matter how fast Detroit grew, it could hardly keep pace

Violent Heritage

19

with the auto industry and its need for manpower. In 1914, when Henry Ford announced the $5 day, fire hoses had to be used to break up the mobs of job-seekers that stormed his plant gates. Military contracts kept the factories booming through World War I and, during the prosperous postwar years, the auto industry swung into high gear. In the 1920’s Detroit’s population was to reach more than 1.5 million, five times what it was in 1900. “Watch Detroit grow; better still, grow with it,” was the slogan. In some ways, however, Detroit was growing too fast for its own good. To fill their needs, Detroit’s factories had turned to the vast pool of cheap labor in the South. Factory recruiting agents hauled in Negro workers and their families by the train¬ load; Detroit’s Negro population, only 5,000 in 1910, increased eightfold to 40,000 in 1920 and was to triple to 120,000 by 1930. But in the promised land of the $5 day many Negroes found only menial jobs, interrupted by frequent layoffs, and slum housing, often worse than the sharecropper shanties they had left behind. Moreover, in their new environment, Negroes still had to contend with their old foes, the poor white “red¬ necks” who also came streaming up from Dixie. They brought with them a hatred of Negroes learned from birth and, under the pressures of factory town existence, this hatred seemed to intensify. Negroes in Detroit also found new enemies, chiefly among the city’s big, clannish Polish population. The Poles, looked down upon by the more established nationality groups in De¬ troit, took out their resentment against Negroes, whom they regarded as a threat to the economic gains they were struggling to make. The situation in Detroit was made to order for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the sworn enemies of Negroes, Catholics, Jews, and foreigners. The night-riding fraternity of the Recon¬ struction era had been revived in 1915 by a Georgian named William Joseph Simmons, an itinerant preacher and garter salesman turned history teacher. During the 1920’s, the Klan

20

Violent Heritage

thrust out from its temple on Stone Mountain, Georgia, to ride high and ruthlessly over much of the nation, North and South. The KKK, which thrived on hate, flourished in Detroit. No one knows exactly how many white Protestants secretly joined its Klaverns there. But the New Republic later estimated that at its peak the “Invisible Empire” counted 875,000 members in all of Michigan, more than in any other state. Detroit Klansmen concentrated their forces against Negroes who tried to move out of the crowded black belts and into white neighbor¬ hoods. The KKK, sometimes operating through neighborhood “improvement associations,” harassed and terrorized the new¬ comers until they usually fled back into the ghetto. In 1925, a Negro physician, Ossian Sweet, who wanted to move out of the cramped quarters he and his wife shared with her parents, bought a house at the corner of Charlevoix and Garland streets, in a white section on Detroit’s East Side. Even before the Sweets moved, their future neighbors set up the “Water Works Improvement Association” and laid plans to force them out. But Dr. Sweet, who had worked his way through college, medical school and a postgraduate course in Europe, was a singularly determined man. Soon after the improvement asso¬ ciation met, he told police when he would move and made some plans of his own. On moving day, the van that hauled the Sweets’ furniture also carried ten guns and a valise loaded with ammunition, and along with the family came Dr. Sweet’s two brothers and seven of his friends. On the next night a threatening crowd surged around the unlighted house while Dr. Sweet and the others stood watch with their guns. When a volley of stones smashed into the windows the besieged Negroes opened fire, killing one man and wounding another. Police, who had watched the mob gather, promptly arrested everyone in the house. The eleven Negroes, charged with first-degree murder, were defended by Clarence Darrow. They were tried before Judge Frank Murphy, who was to become Mayor of Detroit, Gover-

Violent Heritage

21

nor of Michigan, Attorney General of the United States, and a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Feeling against the defendants ran high in the city. But Murphy, whom Darrow later called “the kindliest and most understanding man I have ever happened to meet on the bench,” made sure they got a fair trial. Because of Murphy, and because of Darrow’s customary eloquence, the Negroes won acquittal from an all-white jury. “The verdict meant simply that the doctrine that a man’s house is his castle applied to the black man as well as to the white man,” Darrow wrote in The Story of My Life. “If not the first time that a white jury had vindicated this principle, it was the first time that ever came to my notice.” But few Negroes were prepared to test this principle as Dr. Sweet had done and few whites were willing to recognize it. The city administration did appoint an interracial committee which investigated the housing situation and cited unsanitary conditions in the Negro slums. The report, however, was pi¬ geonholed. Relations between Negroes and whites grew even worse in Detroit during the Great Depression. The number of auto in¬ dustry employees dropped from about 470,000 in 1929 to 250,000 in 1931, and many of them worked only part time. More than 200,000 men were on relief and thousands more left the city with their families. Whites who remained competed in¬ tensely against blacks even for the less desirable jobs tradi¬ tionally conceded to Negroes, because there was no other work available. From this desperate climate emerged the Black Legion, an organization fully as vicious as the Ku Klux Klan and even more mysterious. Formed ostensibly to help get jobs for Southern whites, the Legion was anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-union. Black-hooded Legionnaires bombed, burned, flogged, and murdered, and most of the time went unidentified and unpunished, so tight was the secrecy that masked their operations.

22

Violent Heritage

Each new member swore his willingness to be torn limb from limb and scattered to the carrion” if he divulged Legion secrets. The Nation described a mumbo-jumbo initiation cere¬ mony, during which the Legion “chaplain ' intoned: Remem¬ ber that our purpose is to tear down, lay waste, despoil and kill our enemies.” Then, while hooded figures pointed revolvers at his heart, the initiate pledged “in the name of God and the Devil ... to devote my life to the obedience of my superiors . . . and to exert every means in my power for the extermina¬ tion of the anarchist, communist, Roman hierarchy and their abettors.” From Detroit the Legion spread into other midwestern cities. Guesses as to its total membership ran as high as six million. Finally, in 1936, the slaying of a Detroit WPA worker led to the conviction of eleven Black Legionnaires for murder. The investigation and trial smashed the power of the Legion, although the bigotry that inspired it continued to fester in De¬ troit. During the late 193CTs, Detroit was torn by the prolonged struggle to unionize the auto industry. In the early years of the decade, despite intermittent waves of strikes and New Deal pro-labor legislation, the industry had remained a citadel of the open shop. There was no place to which the restless auto workers could turn for support except the American Federa¬ tion of Labor, whose craft union approach was ill-suited to or¬ ganizing labor in a mass-production industry. In 1935, John L. Lewis bolted the AFL and formed the Committee for Industrial Organization, which sought to or¬ ganize all workers in one industry into one union, rather than into different craft unions. Lewis quickly gathered the infant United Auto Workers Union into his fold and gave it the support it needed, including $100,000 in cash, to launch a drive against the auto companies. The campaign was carried out in an atmosphere of extreme suspicion and hostility. To keep the unions out, the companies

Violent Heritage

23

resorted to industrial espionage on a vast scale. Herbert Harris, in American Labor, notes that General Motors paid out $419,815 to the Pinkerton Agency over a three-year period, while the detective services provided by Corporations Auxiliary cost Chrysler $72,611 in 1935 alone. Ford maintained its own security system called Ford Service, which was run by ex-sailor, ex-prize fighter Harry Bennett. Nevertheless, the UAW drive gained momentum, fueled by the discontent of the men in the plants. The workers rebelled against layoffs and speed-ups, against the unremitting pressure of the assembly line, and against the indifference of the giant corporations that employed them. The mood of the workers and their families was reflected by two women Harris inter¬ viewed during a sit-down strike against General Motors. “I'd like to shout from the housetops what the company’s doing to our men,” said one. “My husband, he’s a torch solderer; they call ’em welders, but that’s not what he is; he solders. You should see him come home at night, him and the rest of the men in the buses. So tired like they was dead, and irritable. My John’s not like that. He’s a good, kind man. But the chil¬ dren don’t dare go near him, he’s so nervous and his temper’s bad. And then at night in bed, he shakes, his whole body, he shakes.” “They’re not men any more if you know what I mean,” said her companion. “They’re not men. My husband, he’s only thirty, but to look at him you’d think he was fifty and all played out. And unless we have the union things will get worse.” After a series of sit-down strikes, many of them marked by violence, they got the union—at General Motors and Chrysler. Ford was next on the UAW’s list, and it proved the toughest of the Big Three to conquer. “We’ll never recognize the United Auto Workers Union or any other union,” declared Henry Ford in April, 1937. Harry Bennett backed up Ford’s words by building up the strength of Ford Service to the point where some called it the largest private army in existence. Some of

24

Violent Heritage

the hoodlums, boxers, and wrestlers recruited by Bennett soon got an opportunity to display their primitive talents at what has come to be known as the “Battle of the Overpass.’’ On May 26, 1937, Walter Reuther, then a young UAW official, and several other organizers got a city permit to dis¬ tribute union leaflets to Ford workers as they changed shifts. Reuther and the others were on a street overpass leading from a gate at Ford’s Rouge plant in Dearborn when suddenly a crowd of 150 men converged upon them. “One called out that we were on private property and to get the hell off of there,” Reuther testified later at a National Labor Relations Board hearing. “. . . I had hardly taken three steps when I was slugged on the back of the head. I tried to shield my face by crossing my arms. They pounded me over the head and body. ... I was knocked to the ground and beaten. . . . “They picked me up and threw me bodily on the concrete floor of the platform. Then they kicked me again and again. They tried to tear my legs apart. Seven times they raised me off the concrete and threw me down on it. ... I was dragged to the stairway. I grabbed the railing and they wrenched me loose. I was thrown down the first flight of iron steps. Then they kicked me down the other two flights. . . .” The Battle of the Overpass was witnessed by local newspaper¬ men, and their stories and photographs shocked the nation. Less publicized than such violence, but just as effective, was the constant threat of dismissal that hung over the heads of Ford employees who joined the union. To ferret out union members inside the plant, Bennett embarked upon a cam¬ paign of skulking “that was extraordinary even for Ford Service, ’ says Keith Sward in his incisive biography, The Leg¬

end of Henry Ford. “Informers reported scraps of conversation overheard in the mill or in the approaches to the mill,” Sward writes. “While at their benches workers had their overcoats ransacked and their lunch buckets pried into. They were shadowed on their way to the drinking fountain and to the lavatory.” Bennett’s

Violent Heritage

25

agents eavesdropped in taverns and stores and even posed as production workers so they could join the UAW and spy from within. Harry Bennett’s goons and spies were not the only factors that slowed the UAW drive at Ford. The union was beset by a struggle for power among factions of its membership, and its first president, Homer Martin, a former Baptist preacher and a brilliant orator, could not cope with these internal prob¬ lems. Although Martin was read out of the union in 1939 and replaced by R. J. Thomas, the dissension continued. The union also had to overcome considerable apathy among Ford’s Negro workers. The company traditionally had em¬ ployed more Negroes than the other big auto makers; at times nearly 10 per cent of the entire Ford work force was colored. Although they usually were assigned to the lowestgrade jobs, such as sanding and foundry work, the Negroes at Ford felt a certain loyalty to “Uncle Henry,” as they called him. During four years of organizing, the UAW was able to convert many of Ford’s Negro workers to its cause. But, be¬ cause of Harry Bennett’s machinations, the Negro played a tragic role in the showdown between the union and the com¬ pany. In April, 1941, when the UAW finally struck Ford’s biggest operation, the Rouge plant, nearly 1,000 Negroes remained inside the factory walls. Most of them, says Keith Sward, had been imported by Bennett from the South a short time before, and all wore buttons reading “100% for Ford.” The Negroes reportedly had been promised full pay and food to remain inside; those who changed their minds and tried to leave were forced back by Ford Servicemen. Bennett planned to use this captive black army to smash the UAW picket lines or, failing that, at least to create enough violence to justify intervention in the strike by federal or state troops. Prodded by Ford Service, groups of Negroes flocked to the roof of the factory and bombarded the pickets below with bolts and nuts. Several hundred Negroes, brandishing steel

26

Violent Heritage

bars and knives, charged out of the plant through the main gate and hurled themselves against the picket lines. The un¬ ion lines broke, but reformed in time to meet the next assault wave. Irving Howe and B. J. Widick describe what happened in The UAW and Walter Reuther: “This time the pickets were ready and slugged it out with baseball bats, fists and sticks. The battle was brief, bloody and decisive for the lines held and, casualties aside, the union had shown it could close the plant.” Neither President Roosevelt nor Michigan’s Democratic Gov¬ ernor Murray D. Van Wagoner was willing to suppress the strike by force, as Bennett wanted. Instead, Van Wagoner pro¬ posed a compromise settlement which ended the strike ten days after it started. At the NLRB election that followed, Ford employees overwhelmingly chose the UAW as their bar¬ gaining agent. When at last the UAW and Ford sat down to negotiate a contract, the company gave the union everything it bargained for, plus some extraordinary extras, such as the closed shop and the “check off”—the deduction by the com¬ pany of union dues from wages. Even before the UAW completed its conquest of the auto industry, the industry, and the city it dominated, had plunged into what was first called defense production and was soon to become the war effort. The Depression had slowed De¬ troit’s growth; between 1930 and 1940 its population had in¬ creased by only 60,000 to little more than 1.6 million persons, including about 150,000 Negroes. But the stream of workers into Detroit resumed in 1940 as the plants began receiving their first sizable defense contracts. Soon after Pearl Harbor, the stream became a flood. Walter White of the NAACP estimated that in the fifteen months preceeding June, 1943, about 350,000 persons entered Detroit, including about 50,000 Negroes. Almost all of this migration was from the South, the only area in the country with a labor surplus. The new wave of migration stimulated the activities of the variety of Nazi sympathizers and native

Violent Heritage

27

fascists who had been using Detroit as a base of operations since the late 1930 s and early 1940’s. These agitators appealed to Detroit s prejudices with Hitler’s racist theories and si¬ multaneously exploited the desire of many Americans to stay out of war. Probably the most influential of the agitators was Father Charles E. Coughlin, pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in suburban Royal Oak, who developed a nationwide following through his radio broadcasts and his publication Social Justice. Coughlin’s anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi “Christian Crusade” pro¬ voked the censure of the Catholic hierarchy. But ardent Coughlinites hailed him as “the greatest man since Jesus Christ” and “our last bulwark against Bolshevism.” Pearl Harbor did not stop Coughlin and others in Detroit from following the Nazi line. On January 5, 1942, Social Justice published this analysis of the causes of World War II: “. . . Any honest person will concede that Hitler and Hitlerism were protests against the old order dominated by Britain and the United States; were spearheads of a ‘new order’ to over¬ throw imperialism. Because the Axis new order is diametrically opposed to imperial Britain’s and America’s most cherished political, commercial, industrial and financial ideas, the Britons and Americans (through their governments) oppose it.” U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle banned Social Justice from the mails a few months later. But many of Father Coughlin’s views were defended and advanced in the radio broadcasts and publications of the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, a Southern demagogue who had moved to Detroit. Elements of the KKK remained active, too, working closely with Nazi front groups, notably the National Workers League. The League, founded in 1938, had attracted support from such organizations as the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts, as well as the Klan. Its attitude toward the war, and America’s role in it, was expressed by its national secre¬ tary, Garland L. Alderman: “The F. D. R’s, Peppers, Mc¬ Nutts, Churchills, Stalins, Edens, Winchells, Dorothy Thomp-

28

Violent Heritage

sons, Rabbi Wises, Morgenthaus, Carlsons, Hulls, Kaltenborns, fan dancers, movie actors and other warmongers who brought this war to America are not worth the life of one American boy, even if they throw in ‘campaign orator’ Wilkie for good measure.” The Carlson referred to was John Roy Carlson, author of Under Cover, an expose of the activities of Axis agents and native fascists in the U.S. before and during World War II. Carlson, who devoted three chapters of his book to Detroit, called the National Workers League “one of many Nazi-front organizations operating in America. It wasn’t the largest. But its influence was far-reaching, and its work of sabotaging the war morale was effective. It struck at the most vulnerable sector of America’s war effort—Labor.” Masquerading as a Nazi sympathizer, Carlson got a first¬ hand description of the tactics used by the League and its allies from an ex-convict named Tony Bommarito, who worked as an organizer for an “independent” union in Detroit’s war plants. “You begins your work by talking against the Jews and the niggers,” Bommarito explained in gangsterese. “The Jew got us into the war. You tell ’em that. The Jew is keeping labor down by controlling the money. It’s the Jew who hires niggers and gives them low wages.” Bommarito summed up the strategy this way: “You ties in the niggers with the Jew, den you call the Jews Communists. That gets ’em. Catch on, kid?” The hatred fanned by such agitators and by the racist lit¬ erature that flooded Detroit was focused on two traditional areas of conflict—housing and jobs. With the wartime housing shortage, the Negro’s chance of finding a decent place to live was even slimmer than it had been around the time of the Dr. Sweet case; in 1943, the unwritten code of discrimination followed by real-estate agents and landlords, and the threat of white violence forced nearly all of Detroit’s 200,000 Negroes to huddle in a few squalid ghettos. The largest of these took

Violent Heritage

29

in about sixty square blocks on the East Side, bounded roughly by Jefferson Avenue on the south, John R Street on the west, Russell Street on the east, and Grand Boulevard on the north. It was called Paradise Valley. In 1941, the Detroit Housing Commission reported that 50.2 per cent of all dwellings occupied by Negroes were sub¬ standard, and the situation had hardly improved since. Now Negroes were crammed into storefronts and lofts as well as dilapidated apartments. Roofs leaked, stairways crumbled, and sanitary facilities were inadequate. Some 3,500 houses in Para¬ dise Valley had only outside toilets, placed in shacks over holes in sewer mains. Even in normal times, a Detroit housing official estimated that rents in the Negro slums had been running about two or three times higher than in white districts. A five-room shanty, for which a white family might pay $25 a month, would be rented to five Negro families, one room to a family, at $10 to $15 a month each. A rundown flat worth about $10 a month in a white neighborhood brought $25 a month in Para¬ dise Valley. During the war, the exorbitant rents paid by Negroes had climbed even higher. Most Detroit real-estate men fought against proposals for ad¬ ditional public housing which could have alleviated the hous¬ ing shortage for both whites and blacks. And Negroes were excluded from most of the public housing projects that had been constructed. In 1941, the federal government decided to build a housing project for Negro defense workers in a white neighborhood in Detroit. But white residents in the area reacted in much the same way as had the whites who lived in Dr. Sweet’s neighborhood. They formed an “improve¬ ment association,” picketed City Hall, and prodded their Con¬ gressman to attack the proposed project. Under this pressure, Washington’s determination faltered, then collapsed. In January, 1942, U.S. officials announced that whites instead of Negroes would occupy the project, which

30

Violent Heritage

had already been named for Sojourner Truth, an ex-slave girl who traveled through the North preaching on abolition and women's rights. This was too much even for the cautious Mayor Jeffries. He fired off an indignant telegram which helped shame fed¬ eral officials into going back to their original plan. But the government’s vacillation was all the encouragement the im¬ provement association needed. On the February day that Ne¬ gro tenants tried to enter the Sojourner Truth homes, for which they had paid rent in advance, they were attacked by hundreds of white pickets, many of them wielding knives, clubs, and bricks. Negroes fought back with clubs and bricks of their own and police rushed into the battle. The police charged down on the Negro tenants and paid little attention to the pickets. One police inspector admitted: “It would be suicide if we used our clubs on any of them [the whites].” After the rioting had ended, with all the would-be tenants driven off, a young Negro told a reporter: “The Army is going to take me to ‘fight for democracy,’ but I would as leave fight for democracy right here. Here we are fighting for ourselves.” Negro leaders charged that the violence had been instigated by the Ku Klux Klan and the National Workers League. The federal government indicted two leaders of the League on charges of complicity in the rioting but never brought them to trial. Two months after the riot, the first Negroes moved into the Sojourner Truth project. This time they were pro¬ tected by 1,750 city and state police and state troops. Immediately after the Sojourner Truth riot the Federal Office of Facts and Figures (later merged with the Office of War Information) sent a team of investigators to Detroit to look into the city’s racial problems. Their bluntly worded re¬ port was submitted to the OFF, the Federal Housing Admin¬ istration, and the Department of Justice in March, 1942. The report criticized Detroit police who, it charged, “seem bent

Violent Heritage

31

on suppressing the Negroes.” It cited a shortage of housing and hostility between Negroes and Detroit’s Poles as major causes of the city’s racial tensions. Although the report dealt mainly with Detroit, it stressed that similar antagonisms existed in other northern cities and urged prompt, direct federal action. ". . . . If not today, tomor¬ row, this country, or let us say the war effort, will face its biggest crisis all over the North,” the report warned. “. . . . It is beyond local control and extends far beyond Detroit, and unless strong and quick intervention by some high official, preferably the President, is not taken at once, hell is going to be let loose in every Northern city where large numbers of im¬ migrants and Negroes are in competition.” A month later, in April, 1942, an OFF memorandum noted that reports from field personnel indicated that tensions be¬ tween Negroes and whites were rising. The memorandum as¬ serted: "It is fairly obvious that Mayor Jeffries is not able to handle this matter constructively,” and it re-emphasized the need for federal action. Specifically, the memorandum suggested that the federal government should assure both Ne¬ groes and whites of additional housing and at the same time make clear that it would not tolerate racial violence. The memorandum also proposed the appointment of an individual or a committee experienced in handling "group conflict” situ¬ ations to take the lead in solving the crisis. "It is exceedingly urgent that steps be taken in regard to this matter promptly,” the memorandum concluded. "Indica¬ tions are that the morale situation among the Negroes is be¬ coming increasingly worse. And if race riots were to break out in Detroit, the feeling of the Negro that ‘if I must die for democracy, why not here?’ would tend to spread farther over the country.” The OFF report and memo were to remain a secret both to the public and to Detroit officials until the summer of 1943, when excerpts from them were published by the newspaper

32

Violent Heritage

PM. In the meantime, in Detroit, the white resistance was

increasing, not only against efforts to improve Negro housing but also against attempts to advance Negroes on the job. With the demand for war production rising and the draft draining off manpower, many big plants opened their doors to large numbers of Negroes for the first time. And many Negroes, who had been restricted to maintenance work, saw a chance to get less onerous, better paying jobs. The leadership of the United Auto Workers supported the principle of equal opportunity for Negroes, but the sentiment was not shared by all the rank and file. Bigotry was more deeply ingrained than trade unionism among many of the men on the assembly line. Then, too, some union men bitterly recalled the charge of the Negro scabs during the strike at Ford’s Rouge Plant. Detroit plants were frequently plagued by work stoppages and wildcat walkouts staged to protest the granting of better jobs in the plant to Negroes. The most serious of these “hate strikes” hit the Packard plant, during the first week of June, 1943, following the upgrading of three Negro employees. About 25,000 workers, who turned out engines for bombers and for PT boats, were idled. UAW president R. J. Thomas charged that the Klan “or its successor body” was behind the strike. Walter White reported that as the workers milled around outside the plant they were harangued by a southern voice shouting over a loudspeaker: “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a nigger.” The attitude of Packard strikers was reflected in the answers some gave a newspaper reporter who asked them about their reasons for walking out. “After the war is over Negroes will undercut our wage rates and take away our jobs,” one white worker said. Another complained: “We’ve got to teach them our trades so they can grab our places.” Many white workers seemed to believe that nearly all Negroes had syphilis. “The dis¬ eased blood runs out of their fingers onto machines where they work,” one said, “and you catch syphilis if you handle the same machine.”

Violent Heritage

33

Besides cutting into war production, strikes such as the Pack¬ ard walkout contributed to the demoralization of the Negro in Detroit, which the Office of Facts and Figures report had commented upon. More than a year after that report had been issued none of the “constructive steps” it proposed had been taken; nothing had changed, except for the worse. And now, as the report had prophesied, hell was indeed about to break loose in Detroit.

In the Detroit River, half a mile off the north shore where the French first settled, was a body of land about two miles long, one mile wide, and so infested With snakes that the Chippewas and Ottawas called it Rattlesnake Island. Cadillac set the island aside as a common grazing ground, “free from the mischievous savages and depredations of wild animals.” Because the French hauled over a drove of hogs to destroy the snakes the place became known as Isle au Cochon, or Hog Island. Hog Island it remained until 1845 when the name was changed to Belle Isle, in honor of a daughter of former Michigan Governor Lewis Cass. During the American Revolution, when the English ruled Detroit, King George III gave an officer in the garrison a grant to the island. Title to the property passed from one private owner to another until 1879 when the City of Detroit pur¬ chased Belle Isle for $200,000 and set about developing it as a public park. Eventually baseball fields, tennis courts, picnic grounds, a canoe shelter, a skating pavilion, and a bathhouse sprouted on Belle Isle’s 985 acres. On spring and summer weekends, these facilities and the river'breezes attracted tens of thousands of Detroiters. Some took the ferry and others walked or rode over the $3 million bridge that linked Belle Isle to the mainland. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, the island became particularly popular with Negroes because it was convenient to Paradise Valley, the big ghetto on the East Side, because it offered 34

First Blood

35

a cheap way to relax, and because it was one of the few recreation areas around Detroit open to them. As the number of Negroes who frequented Belle Isle increased over the years, many whites chose to seek their recreation elsewhere. But thousands of whites still went there, and some were openly resentful of the growing Negro use of the island. Because of this friction, Detroit police regarded Belle Isle as a potential trouble spot. On July 4, 1940, even before war¬ time crowding aggravated Detroit’s racial problems, mass vio¬ lence had flared there. Police had difficulty with “certain pic¬ nickers” all that day. Inspector Millard Brown later reported. “There were a lot of good colored people on the island and they were loud in their complaints against these roughnecks,” said Brown. “They would not behave and we had to clean them out.” In the evening, after police arrested a young Negro for stealing a canoe, Negroes beat up the white operator of the canoe rental concession. Then about 3,000 Negroes surrounded the police station, hurling rocks and bottles through the win¬ dows and yelling: “Turn him loose.” Police barricaded them¬ selves inside the station until reinforcements arrived to drive off the mob. More than a score of persons, including twelve policemen, were injured. Three years later, on June 20, 1943, with a huge crowd straining Belle Isle’s facilities, the stage again was set for trou¬ ble. By midafternoon, as the temperature hit 91, the island was jammed by about 100,000 persons, the majority of them Negroes. Among them were Aaron Fox and Raymond Thomas, both seventeen, who had been there since noon. At first they tried to go swimming, but the line outside the bathhouse, which could accommodate only 20,000 persons, was so long that they gave up and roamed around the island. About 3:30 p.m., Fox and Thomas, with four friends they had picked up on the way, drifted into a playground where a dice game was going on. There they met two other Negro youths they knew—H. D. Minefield, seventeen, who called

36

First Blood

himself Handsome Harry, and Charles Lyons, twenty, known as Little Willie. Little Willie had a big chip on his shoulder. On the previous Tuesday, while he and Aaron Fox were at Eastwood Amusement Park in East Detroit, a group of white youths had attacked them and chased them out of the park. “Let’s go fight and do like they done to us at Eastwood Park,” Lyons suggested. To demonstrate what he meant, he picked up a stick, walked over to a white boy and hit him with it. The boy ran. Then Lyons approached a group of white men sprawled on the grass and slammed one of them on the foot with his stick. “Time to get home,” he said. “Get going.” The white men glanced up at Lyons and his seven compan¬ ions and fled. Flushed with success, Little Willie led the group through the park, hunting more whites. When they got hungry they broke up a picnic and took the food. When they wanted money they attacked two white teen-agers, Gus Niarhos and Clyde Fields. Little Willie knocked young Niahros down and kicked him. “I ain’t got no carfare. Give me some money,” he demanded. The boy took $2 out of his pocket. Lyons grabbed the money and ran off with his companions. There were other troublemakers on Belle Isle this day, too, and complaints were pouring into the police station on the island. A Negro boy and a white boy scuffled at the pony stand. Two Negro women charged that they had been mo¬ lested by a white man and a woman. Two white men and five Negroes fought over possession of a picnic oven. As eve¬ ning approached and the great crowd prepared to head home, the complaints to police seemed to be increasing. The mounting tension during the night was recorded in the log book kept by Patrolmen Steele and Byers, the crew of Scout Car No. 1, who patrolled Belle Isle on the four-to-midnight shift. At 8:23 p.m., they were sent to stop a fight at the skating pavilion, near where refreshments and picnic supplies were sold. The fight was over when they arrived. But ten minutes later there was another call at the pavilion.

First Blood

37

This time Steele and Byers were met by a sixteen-year-old white youth named Earl Blaylock, who had been having a bad day. When Blaylock got to Belle Isle, about 4 p.m., he hoped to rent a bicycle or go horseback riding. But all the bikes and horses were in use, so the youth strolled to the lighthouse near the eastern tip of the island. It seemed to be the only place on Belle Isle that wasn’t crowded and Blaylock sat there for hours, watching the freighters plow through the chan¬ nel between the island and the Canadian shore. About 8 p.m., he hiked to the pavilion near the other end of the island, where he bought a hot dog. As Blaylock walked away from the stand, he crossed through three lines of people, most of them Negroes, waiting to buy refreshments. As he started to leave the pavilion, Blaylock said, a group of Negroes surrounded him. One complained: “You pushed through rough” and demanded that he apologize. Blaylock refused and the Negro hit him in the jaw, sending him sprawling down the pavilion steps. When Blaylock got up, another Negro hit him and knocked him down again. The youth stumbled away from the pavilion toward a nearby bus stop, but a Negro followed him, hit him on the head with a pop bottle, and fled before police arrived. Steele and Byers put Blaylock in their car and cruised around the island, hunting for the men who had attacked him. They couldn’t find them, so they took Blaylock, whose head was cut, to the station house. From there he went to Receiving Hospital, the big municipal hospital in downtown Detroit. Blaylock was only the first of several hundred casualties the doctors and nurses at Receiving would see in the next twentyfour hours. Scout Car No. 1 hardly had delivered Blaylock to the station house when it was dispatched to a bus stop where long lines of people were waiting, none too patiently, for transportation home. In the crush to board one of the buses, James Wilson, an eighteen-year-old Negro, pushed against a white boy. The boy’s mother, Mrs. Anna Peterson, shoved Wilson away and

38

First Blood

pulled her son onto the bus. Wilson followed them on, Mrs. Peterson told the officers, hit her on the shoulder, and called her “a son of a bitch.” Wilson claimed that Mrs. Peterson called him a “goddamn nigger.” Steele and Byers arrested Wilson for using profane language and took him to the station house. A few minutes later, at 9:10 p.m., Scout Car No. 1 sped to the ferry dock. Negroes and whites had been jostling each other as they tried to get on the boats until finally the disgusted attendant slammed the gates and refused to let anyone board. Steele and Byers prodded the crowd into orderly lines so that service could resume. Their next call, about 10:15, sent them back to the skating pavilion where they found Gus Niarhos and Clyde Fields, the two boys who had been beaten up by Little Willie Lyons and his gang. Steele and Byers took the boys to the station house, gave them first aid, and then started driving them to their homes on the mainland. As it headed across the Belle Isle Bridge, Scout Car No. 1 ran into a massive traffic jam. It seemed as if almost everyone who had come to the island this hot, muggy day had waited until after 10 p.m. to go home. “The cars were stalled on the bridge, moving slowly if at all,” one motorist who was there recalls. “And they were blowing their horns. People just sat in their cars, sweating and blowing their horns.” The bridge also was jammed with pedestrians, since many people preferred to hike the half-mile to the bus stops on the mainland rather than try to get on the buses leaving Belle Isle. After one crowded bus passed by the stop on the island where Little Willie Lyons and his companions were waiting, they joined the throng walking over the bridge. Part way across, Lyons bumped into Joseph B. Joseph, a white man, who was walking close to the rail of the 12-foot¬ wide sidewalk. “Where do you think you’re going, you white sonovabitch?” Lyons shouted. Then, Joseph said, Lyons knocked him down, and the other Negroes kicked him. One

First Blood

39

yelled: ‘Let’s throw him over the bridge.” Joseph scrambled to his feet and started running back toward Belle Isle. He ran almost into the arms of two sailors, who were sta¬ tioned at the Naval Armory on Jefferson Avenue, a few hun¬ dred yards from the mainland end of the bridge. Sailors from the Armory frequently had been involved in brawls with Ne¬ groes in recent months and just the day before two sailors had been attacked and beaten by a gang of Negroes. Now, one of the sailors on the bridge told Joseph: “We saw what happened to you. The nigger jumped you.” He blew a whistle for help and cried: “Let’s go kill that nigger.” At this moment, Joseph caught sight of Scout Car No. 1 slowly making its way back to the mainland with Lyons’ two other victims, Niarhos and Fields. Joseph ran to the car, told his story to Patrolmen Byers and Steele, and rode with them the rest of the way over the bridge, looking for his attackers. But they were unable to find Lyons and his companions. Either the gang had already fled to the mainland or else were submerged in the free-for-all breaking out on the bridge. The fighting had been touched off by a series of brawls much like the one involving Lyons and Joseph. For example, two teen-age girls, one white, the other Negro, bumped into each other on the bridge, cursed each other (“You black bitch,” said one; “You bastard,” said the other) and began pounding each other with their fists. Soon about 200 Negroes and whites, many of them sailors, were fighting and more Negroes and whites were rushing to join in. About 11 p.m. Gladys House, a young Negro woman who was walking home from Belle Isle with her date after an eve¬ ning of canoeing, saw several white men chasing a Negro boy. “At this time I didn’t realize what was going on, so I stepped aside to allow the crowd to pass us,” Miss House said later. “We then continued to walk across the bridge when suddenly the mob realized that we were colored also and began to ap¬ proach us saying, We don’t want any niggers on Belle Isle.’ “About this time they began to attack us. The mob told us

40

First Blood

to run, but we were unable to because my escort is a victim of osteomyelitis since a mere child, making it necessary for him to wear a special made shoe. At this time several white girls began to beat me on my head with their fists while the white mob of boys jumped on my escort and began kicking and beating him in his face until he had fallen to the ground.” She shouted for help. A nearby policeman, trying to un¬ tangle the traffic jam, heard her, led the couple away from the mob to his scout car, and drove them over the bridge. Before Gladys House was taken to Receiving Hospital for treatment of the bruises on her head, she noticed “several hundred white people standing at the mainland entrance to the bridge, waiting to attack Negroes as they came along.” By 11:20 p.m., police estimated that about 5,000 persons, most of them white, were swarming through the area near the mainland approach. Many of them were waiting for buses and some were just curious. But others were looking for trouble —and found it. The rioting spread swiftly from the bridge entrance at the intersection of Jefferson Avenue and Grand Boulevard to Ga¬ briel Richard Park, near the Naval Armory on the east, to Helen Avenue, one block to the west, and to Lafayette Street, four blocks to the north. If any of the rioters had guns they weren’t using them; but many of them wielded knives and others armed themselves with sticks and stones. This was the situation which confronted a white teen-ager named Hal Cohen, who was returning home from his job at a Belle Isle hot dog stand. For young Cohen the first hint of trouble had come earlier that evening, back on the island. “I remember that it was a busy day,” Cohen said years later. “We closed up about 10 o’clock, but it was later before we got the last customers out. A colored guy came in, looking like he’d been in a fight. His clothes were messed up and he was cut a little around the face. He asked me if a policeman was there. I told him the cop had just left and the colored guy left in the direction I pointed.

First Blood

41

“A colored boy, my age, helped me finish sweeping up the place and we left together. It must have been after 11 o’clock. We were walking along the bridge and as we got near Jefferson I could see a crowd milling about on the east side, just below the building they used for a bus station. It was a white crowd, mostly young sailors in summer whites. They were in a circle, facing inward, but I had no idea what was going on. “The next thing I knew, the colored boy took off running. He cut across the grass near the approach to the bridge head¬ ing for Jefferson, and going west. I didn’t get it. Next thing, about three or four white men detached themselves from the crowd and took off after him, but he had too big a head start. “I stood there a minute and saw police officers directing traffic at the bridge. Suddenly, a patrol car pulled up near the bus station, some cops got out and jumped into the mob. In a few seconds they came out with a couple of Negro men. They put them in the back of their car and drove off.” Hal Cohen got on a bus and went home. He never worked at Belle Isle again. By midnight, police had rushed seven lieutenants, ten ser¬ geants and 166 patrolmen to the scene from other precincts. Scout cars blocked off the entrance to the bridge from the mainland, and paddy wagons began hauling away Negroes and whites who had been arrested. Among the prisoners were four Negro youths, George Booth, J. W. Walker, Robert Parsons, and Robert Gordon, who had left Belle Isle headed for a going-away party in honor of Gor¬ don, who was to be inducted into the Army the next day. Police stopped their car as they came off the bridge and searched them. According to Thurgood Marshall, then chief NAACP counsel, who investigated the case, the only “weapon” the officers found was a small penknife. Nevertheless, the four were charged with disturbing the peace and, instead of going into the Army, young Gordon later was tried, convicted, and

42

First Blood

sentenced to ninety days in jail—before his family even knew what had happened to him. By 2 a.m., police had arrested twenty-eight Negroes and nineteen whites and had driven off most of the crowd around the bridge. Since the trouble had started on Belle Isle earlier in the evening, eight whites and five Negroes had been in¬ jured. But none of them was seriously hurt and police felt relieved that they had apparently been able to put down an incipient race riot with relatively little bloodshed. Trouble, however, was just beginning. For, as the big crowd around the bridge scattered, word of the violence spread into other areas of the city. What had actually happened was bad enough. But as might be expected, those who carried the news indulged their imaginations to make things sound even worse. Particularly vicious were the rumors that reached the Forest Club, a popular Negro hangout at the corner of Forest Avenue and Hastings Street, about three miles from the Belle Isle Bridge, in the heart of Paradise Valley. Twenty years later. Patrolman Jesse Stewart, who was one of Detroit’s forty-three Negro policemen in 1943, recalled what happened in the club. Stewart, a graduate of the University of Michigan who had been on the force since 1940, was off duty and out of uni¬ form. “Earlier in the night I had taken my wife to visit a friend who lived near the club,” Jesse Stewart remembered. “I didn’t want to sit listening to two women talking, so I walked up to the cloakroom of the club. It was a big building; it had a roller rink, dance hall, and bowling alley. There was no bar inside the place, but Jake’s bar was adjoining, at the cor¬ ner. There were about 700 people there that night, most of them young. There were two bands, Louis Jordan and LeRoy Smith.” Soon after midnight, as Jesse Stewart chatted with a friend in the checkroom, some of the Negroes who had been at the Belle Isle Bridge began drifting into the club. At first there were just whispers on the floor. Then, as the band finished

First Blood

43

a number, a man leaped on the stage, seized the microphone from the orchestra leader, and identified himself as Sergeant William Fuller, a Negro police officer. There are several versions of what the man on the stage said. But Joseph Jamar, the club’s nineteen-year-old janitor, who was standing only a few feet from the stage, claims he heard him shout: “There’s a riot at Belle Isle. The whites have killed a colored lady and her baby. Thrown them over the bridge. Everybody come on. There’s free transportation outside.” As an official fact-finding committee reported later: “Pan¬ demonium broke loose!” Jesse Stewart, still in the checkroom, remembers: “All of a sudden a great rush of people started coming out. They were all talking about the woman and her baby being thrown off the bridge and how they were going to get there right away.” Stewart said he searched vainly for the man who had made the announcement. Then, because he was in civilian clothes, he went home, as did Negro Patrolman William Williams, who had been spending his night off in the Forest Club. (Months later, both men would be convicted by a police trial board of neglect of duty and suspended from the force for four months.) Whoever the man on the stage was, he was not Sergeant Fuller. The sergeant, as he later testified, was home all night. Moreover, there was not a shred of truth to the story about whites throwing a Negro mother and baby off the bridge. In fact, no one at all had been killed at Belle Isle. But none of the dancers at the Forest Club paused to ask any questions. In their rush, they clogged the exits from the club and some even climbed out the windows, so eager were they for revenge.

4

THE REVOLT Of PARADISE VALLEY The man on the stage in the Forest Club had promised free

transportation to Belle Isle, and the dancers in the ballroom probably expected a fleet of autos to be waiting outside. As they soon found out, however, no such arrangements had been made. As they also learned, even if there had been sufficient transportation, it was impossible to get near Belle Isle. Two teen-agers, Alphonse Webb and Curtis Gibbs, who were in the crowd which charged out of the club, boarded a streetcar headed for the island. But they hadn’t gone far before an¬ other youth yelled in the window that police had barricaded the bridge and blocked off traffic on approaching streets. Webb and Gibbs went home, but most of the others in the crowd milled around on the street in front of the club. Frus¬ trated at being kept from Belle Isle, they began to take venge¬ ance where they could. X^t the corner of Forest and Hastings one youth picked up a rock, aimed at a passing white motorcyclist and knocked him off his bike./The motorcycle crashed and burst into flames. The sight seemed to spur the mob on. It surged west to Beaubien Street, north to Ferry Avenue, and east to Oak¬ land Avenue, rlerej^ gang of twenty Negroes stopped a street car, stoned.sbuyhite^passengers, and beatlBrixiTihrcoMncto and motorman withTtheiroiTTar useT~in^^switching the car fron

JOS. CAMPAU

Detailed view of principal riot area.

The Revolt of Paradise Valley

45

/ When policemen tried to break up a Negro mob stoning another Oakland Avenue trolley, the Negroes hurled stones at the police, too.yPatrolman Irwin Hasse fired at the ground in tront of"the mob, he said, but the bullet ricocheted, striking one of the Negroes in the stomach. -At 1:30 A.M.,~~tHe Department of Street Railways discon¬ tinued service on its Oakland Avenue line and later rerouted all its trolleys jjfcramk the Negro area. But white pedestrians and. motorists^jipaware of the rioting, continued to venture into Paradise Valieva-many of them on their way to or from warier— In the early hours of the morning, Hyman Schwartz, who ran a grocery in northwest Detroit, and his teen-age son Ar¬ thur climbed into their old Dodge and headed for the Eastern Market, a big produce market on the East Side. They took their usual route through the Negro section. As they crossed Hastings Street someone hurled a brick through the car’s open window, striking Hyman Schwartz on the head. He skidded to a stop, turned around, drove home and went to bed with a headache. Others, less fortunate, streamed into the emergency room at Receiving Hospital. The first knifing victim was Paul Haaker, a white man, who was stabbed in the chest by a Negro at Al¬ fred and Hastings Streets at 1:40 a.m. The first person to be killed was another white man, John Bogan, twenty-eight, who had been knocked unconscious and left lying on Brush Street where a taxicab accidentally ran over him. He died at 4:50 a.m. Not long after midnight, while police were still breaking up the riot arouhcTfhe BelleMsfe Bridge,-police headquarters on Beaubien Street began getting reports on the new violence around the Forest Club. Because of the fighting at the bridge, pOlice^officials had kept on duty the shift which normally quit work at midnight, giving them two platoons of men to work with. Soon many of these extra officers were on their way to Paradise Valley.

46

The Revolt of Paradise Valley

One of the first to arrive was Lieutenant Fred Provencher, who was just finishing his normal shift at headquarters. I went out with a sergeant and we broke up a mob on Hastings Street/’ Provencher, now retired, still remembers. “I saw one Negro who looked like he had a knife, so I ran after him for a few blocks. But when I caught him, there I was, alone and in uniform, with a whole crowd of Negroes around me. An old Negro got between me and the crowd and said: ‘Mr. Lawman, you run!’ I felt like shooting somebody,” Pro vencher recalled, “but I didn’t have any shells. I had to get out of there, so I got out.” With knives flashing and rocks flying through the air, some officers regarded all Negroes on the streets as hoodlums and treated them accordingly. About 12:30 a.m., as James Towns¬ end Lee, a Negro bar owner, was walking on Hastings Street, a scout car pulled up to the curb alongside him. “Where are you going, nigger?” one officer asked. “I replied that I was going home,” Lee later related. “Just about that time two more carloads of policemen drove up. These officers got out of the car and began to beat me. They hit me over my right eye with their night sticks; they kicked me in the groin. . . . The officers said to me: ‘Why don’t you run, nigger?’ One officer said to the others: ‘We damn near killed that nigger. Let’s go down and get somebody else.’ ” —John Lewis, a Negro soldier home on pass from Fort Custer, had a similar experience later that morning. “I was fully dressed in my Army uniform,” Lewis said, “and as I walked through Brush Street to the corner .of .Brewster, I saw a num¬ ber of officers dimempg a crowd ofjpeople. I kept right on walking and, as I reached the corner, I was grabbed from behind by an offieerM was jtruck over the head with a Blunt instrument of someJdnch My head was sphtlin3~Hwas~dazed and fell to the street “I lie there for a while, bleeding and too weak to rise,” Lewis continued, “when one woman came to my assistance and bound my head with cold towels and tried to support

The Revolt of Paradise Valley

47

me while hailing cars to get someone to take me to the hospital. . . . “After a little effort I succeeded in getting two United States mail carriers to stop their car to pick me up. These gentlemen drove me to the Parkside Hospital where my wound was treated, after which I was allowed to return to my home. The whole matter was so sudden that I was unable to identify any of the officers and I had no idea why they hit me. My uniform was practically ruined and I was forced to take it to the cleaners before I could wear it again.” By the time a Negro named Ephraim Ashley came home from his aircraft assembly job at the Briggs Plant in the after¬ noon, he had heard about the rioting. Ashley walked over to the corner of Hastings and Farnsworth Avenue to talk things over with a friend. “It was quiet. I mean that I didn’t see any fighting or any¬ thing,” Ashley recalled years later. “We were standing there talking when all of a sudden about six cops in one of those open cars pulled up to the curb and they yelled at us to get off the street. “I guess I didn’t start moving very quick. Not fast enough anyway. A couple of the officers got out of the car. One of them had a night stick in his hand. They all had guns. The one with the night stick started beating on me, while the others just stood around or sat in the car and watched. When I went down on the sidewalk they stopped and then they went away. — “I was bleeding pretty good. I got up and I walked all the way down to Receiving Hospital [about two miles]. But when I got there, there was a whole lot of people there, Negro and white, all bleeding all over the place, and nobody paid any attention to me, so I walked to a Negro hospital. I got two or three stitches in my head, and they bandaged up my arm and I went home. I didn’t report it to anybody. “Who would I report it to?” Ashley asked. “The police?” Whatever hatred the police displayed for Negroes, the Ne-

48

The Revolt of Paradise Valley

groes returned with interest. Some blacks even turned against officers of their own race, such as Patrolmen Jesse Stewart and William Williams. Both men had been home sleeping after their night at the Forest Club, when, like the rest of the 8 a.m. shift, they were called in early. Stewart and Williams escorted nurses going to work at Children’s Hospital, located in the riot area, and tried to break up the mobs forming along Hastings Street. About 7:30 a.m., while they were leading a Negro rioter to a patrol wagon, they were mobbed by about 100 Negroes who knocked them down and tried to grab their nightsticks. .—""’Two white officers rushed up, revolvers drawn. A Negro named Carl Singleton threw a piece of concrete at them, then turned and ran. When Singleton kept running, after the offi¬ cers shouted at him to halt, Patrolman Harold Poole shot him in the back. Singleton died before reaching the hospital. -—-Singleton was the second Negro to die in the rioting. The first, Sam Johnson, thirty-three, was a victim of nothing so much as his own greed. He hurled a rock through a store window so he could break in. But as he entered, a piece of plate glass fell and pierced one of his legs, severing an artery. He died from loss of blood. Negroes had started breaking windows soon after mid¬ night and eventually they smashed every store front on Hastings, the ghetto’s main shopping street, from Adams Av¬ enue north to Medbury Avenue, a distance of about two miles. About 8 a.m., Sergeant Floyd Noot led a squad of ten patrol¬ men to the corner of Hastings and Division Streets, where more than 200 Negroes were crowded around a men’s clothing store. The windows were broken and suits and coats were strewn around the street. Police began carrying the garments back into the store and breaking up the crowd. Most of the Negroes backed off. But William Hardges, a twenty-three-year-old former amateur boxing champion, re¬ fused to move and a policeman pushed him toward the patrol wagon. Suddenly Hardges broke loose, grabbed Patrolman

The Revolt of Paradise Valley

49

Ernest Hartwick’s gun and shot Hartwick and Sergeant Noot. It was the last thing Hardges ever did. Four policemen opened fire at once. Nine of their bullets riddled Hardges body and two others struck down Robert Davis, another Negro in the crowd, killing him also. Both the wounded officers recovered. Many Negroes who smashed store fronts seemed mainly to be venting their hatred of the white store owners. According to Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP, an official of the Detroit Merchants Association reported little stealing at first. But the shattered glass and twisted grates made larceny too tempting for some Negroes roaming the streets and they did not long resist. One of the first to be arrested for looting was Little Willie Lyons. He was picked up in a drug store on Hastings near Hendrie Avenue at 2:30 a.m., about six hours after he had robbed Gus Niarhos on Belle Isle. By mid-morning, Hastings Street was overrun by thieves. T. John Wood, a reporter for the Michigan Chronicle, a Ne¬ gro newspaper, watched them work. "From a tavern on Has¬ tings near Livingston I saw men with arms full of liquor bottles run from the building while just a few doors below two men carried a quarter of beef through the smashed open front of what, until Sunday night, had been a grocery store,” Wood wrote. “In a few brief seconds two more men were seen leav¬ ing the place with whole sides of bacon while others helped themselves to more supplies. “Near Livingston Street one man had a push cart loaded with merchandise that had been taken from a nearby store. Up near Frederick Avenue another virtually went into busi¬ ness, selling the loot to anyone who had change in his pocket. Men and boys ransacked pawn shops, liquor stores and taverns while women helped themselves from the shelves of grocery stores. Many brought baskets and bags and leisurely chose their supplies.” About 11

a.m..

Patrolman Albert Jenkins, looking for loot¬

ers in a Beaubien Street butcher shop, opened the door to

50

The Revolt of Paradise Valley

a storeroom and found Anderson L. Ford. The Negro charged at him, brandishing a meat cleaver, Jenkins said, and he shot him dead. About the same time, only a few blocks away at St. Antoine and Montcalm Streets, Roy Jackson was in a grocery store throwing cans of food to other Negroes standing outside. Patrolman Raymond Miller broke up the crowd, fired a warn¬ ing shot into the building, and ordered Jackson to come out. Jackson came out running and headed north on St. Antoine. Miller ordered him to stop, then shot and killed him from thirty feet away. Three hours later, Sergeant Harold Schimmer and Patrol¬ man Ronald Conklin flushed three Negroes from a food mar¬ ket on Warren Avenue near Brush Street. The looters jumped out a window and ran, ignoring orders to halt. Two escaped, but Conklin shot the third man, Percy L. Peoples, in the back. Peoples fell dead in the street. Herschel L. Richey, editor of Racial Digest, a Negro maga¬ zine published in Detroit, witnessed this shooting and heard a Negro bystander shout: “We’ll even that up later, copper.” Within a few minutes after police left with Peoples’ body, Richey reported, hoodlums broke the windows of every neigh¬ borhood store owned by a white and were hurling bricks and bottles at every passing car with a white driver. One stone crashed through the window of a truck driven by John Frailich and struck Frailich square in the head. “He made the mistake of stopping and getting out of his truck,” Richey wrote. “Half surprised and half angered, he cringed and held up his hands in a pathetic gesture as several mis¬ creants advanced toward him with bricks in their hands. He ducked as a brick was thrown at him from a distance of only three feet. “He then left his truck, a fat, comic, tragic figure running up the street. As he neared the corner, a shot from some unseen source felled him, only a few feet from where the store looter had been shot by the police. When the police

The Revolt of Paradise Valley

51

arrived a few minutes later, there was no one near him. The man was dead.” To prevent such attacks, police had been ordered to divert all traffic from Paradise Valley. But John Frailich was only one of a number of white motorists who either were not stopped by police or, if they were, still insisted on driving into the Negro area. About 10 a.m., a patrolman stopped Dr. Joseph De Horatiis’ car on Warren Avenue near Hastings. The Italian physician was headed west, through the riot area, on his way to a patient’s house. “Better not go into that section, doctor,” the officer warned. “I have to see a patient and I am going to see him,” the doctor replied. He drove on two more blocks beyond Hastings to Beaubien, then turned north. About a half mile from where the police¬ men had stopped the doctor, a tall, light-skinned Negro hurled a rock through the open window of his car. The car swerved and slammed into a utility pole. The Negro raced over and crashed another rock down on the doctor’s head as he slumped unconscious over the wheel. Then the Negro fled. Mr. and Mrs. Paul Grier, a Negro couple who lived nearby, heard the car crash into the pole. “My husband and I left the house to see what had happened,” Mrs. Grier said later. “On our way to the scene we met a man coming from the corner. This man had blood stains on his shirt and hands. Someone said to this man, ‘Did you get him?’ He replied, ‘Yes, we got him all right.’ ” Dr. De Horatiis died three hours later. When reporters told Mrs. Vincent Giuliano, with whose family the doctor made his home, she said: “If he had known those who killed him he would have forgiven them.” Bert Trombley also had an important reason for going into Paradise Valley. He wanted to pick up his wife and newborn daughter at Woman’s Hospital, situated in the heart of the Negro section. Before starting out, he checked with the police and was told that the neighborhood near the hospital was

52

The Revolt of Paradise Valley

safe to enter. What the police did not realize, however, was that as soon as they had cleared one group of rioters out of an area, another mob often moved in behind them. When Trombley pulled up at Brush Street and Hancock Avenue, a gang of Negroes surrounded his car and one tossed a brick through the window. From a fifth floor window in the hospital, Dr. W. E. Johnston, who had just finished an operation, happened to be looking down on the scene in the street. “They dragged Trombley out,” the surgeon later told Jack Pickering of the Detroit Free Press. “One man held him while another stabbed him. It was the most gruesome thing I ever saw. In fact, I saw the knife thrust and knew right then what had happened. “I could see it going into his heart.” When Trombley tried to protect himself, the Negroes slashed his hands. They threw him down, kicked him, then finally picked him up and shoved him across the street toward the hospital. As Trombley stumbled forward, barely conscious, a nurse and an intern raced to the door to meet him. Now unconscious, he was carried to the operating room. Within five minutes after the knifing, Trombley was getting a transfusion of plasma and Dr. Johnston was sewing up the inch-long slash in the top of his heart. Dr. Johnston said the wound seemed to have been made by a hunting knife, six to eight inches long, which also had pierced Trombley’s lung. Once these critical wounds were closed, the operating team worked upon the lesser injuries. An opening in Trombley’s scalp was sutured and then, one at a time, the severed tendons in three fingers of one hand and the thumb and one finger of the other were stitched together. The newspapers the next day reported that Trombley was not expected to live. It turned out, however, that the swift action of the doctors and nurses had saved his life. One month after the attack, he went home from the hospital. A few hours after Dr. Johnston had operated on Trombley, he had to call for a police escort to get safely home himself.

__

The Revolt of Paradise Valley

53

The Negro gangs needed no provocation to attack. Their victims were stoned, beaten, and stabbed simply because of the color of their skin. —Th-is afternoon, Carrie Hackworth, the young Negro mother who was looking forward to seeing her two sons, was relieved that they were far away from the riot that raged near her apart¬ ment. But she worried about her sister, who lived a few blocks away. Carrie Hackworth and her husband, Ross, drove over to visit the sister, then headed back by a roundabout route to avoid trouble. But trouble seemed to be everywhere. About a block from the sister’s home, a Negro who thought light-skinned Carrie Hackworth was white, heaved a brick at her head. It crushed her skull, severing an artery. She died three hours later in Receiving Hospital. During the day, Negro mobs had stoned white workers out¬ side the Aeronautical Parts Company, at St. Aubin and Kirby Avenues, about half a mile to the east of Paradise Valley, and the Chevrolet Gear and Axle plant, on Plolbrook Avenue, one mile to the north. And about seven that night, police spotted Negroes looting a clothing store on Holbrook. When Patrolman Ralph Morton walked inside, a Negro rushed at him from behind a clothing rack, swinging a four-foot length of pipe. Morton fired a burst from his submachine gun and Henry Wood died with six bullets in his body. , For the most part, however, Negro hoodlums kept within the boundaries of the ghetto, and it was probably fortunate for them that they did. The violence in Paradise Valley was only part of the race war that engulfed Detroit this day. While the Negro was the aggressor on his home grounds, the situa¬ tion was reversed in some other neighborhoods where white mobs had established their own reign of terror.

STATE Of SIEGE While the mob was pouring out of the Forest Club into Has¬

tings Street late Sunday night, a smaller group of Negroes, in the all-night Roxy Theater at Temple and Woodward Av¬ enues, was watching the beginning of a double feature. There was a musical, Something to Shout About, with Don Ameche and Janet Blair, and a drama. White Cargo, with Hedy La¬ marr and Walter Pidgeon. The Negroes in the audience were only a few blocks away from Paradise Valley, yet for three hours they might as well have been in another world. When the show was over, however, they were suddenly and brutally brought back to reality. As they filed out of the Roxy in the early hours of Monday morning, gangs of whites roaming along Woodward Avenue attacked and beat them. Like the Negroes in the Forest Club, the whites had been stirred up by a rumor—-that Negroes had raped and murdered a white woman on the Belle Isle Bridge Sunday night. This tale, spread by white rioters chased from the bridge by police, was just as false as the story about the drowning of a Negro mother and her baby. But to the night-shift workers gath¬ ered in the all-night restaurants on Woodward, it sounded convincing enough. By 3 a.m., any doubts they might have had were swept away by the first reports of Negro violence in Paradise Valley. Not numerous enough to challenge the Negro mobs in the ghetto itself, the whites turned instead on the Negro patrons of the Roxy and the Colonial, another all-night theater on Woodward a few blocks south of the Roxy. Police were called 54

State of Siege

55

and, according to official reports, entered the theaters to warn the Negroes and guarded the exits to protect them. But a white instructor at Wayne University, who had stopped for coffee at a neighborhood cafeteria, gave a different account of the police role. “There were police scout cars right nearby, but they didn’t do a goddamn thing,” he later told a news¬ paper reporter. “One of the Negroes was just a mess—God, you’ve never seen anything like it in your life. I told a cop to put him in the back of my car. The cop looked at me funny and I told him again to do it. He brought him over to the car and said: ‘Okay, nigger lover, get going, quick.’ ” “I should have choked him,” said the teacher. “But I didn’t. I drove the Negro up to Vernor Highway and got him into a Negro cab. The back of my car is stained with that Negro’s blood.” Instead of protecting them, Negroes complained, police seemed mainly concerned with chasing them away from the theater, and some policemen even attacked them. Edward Grace told NAACP investigators that, as he was leaving the Roxy, he saw policemen beating another Negro on the side¬ walk outside. According to Grace, one officer turned to him, snapped: “Get going,” and slammed him on the back with a blackjack. Another policeman yelled at Grace’s wife, Wini¬ fred: “Didn’t you hear him say get going?” and raised his arm as if to hit her with his nightstick. The Graces fled back into the theater and stayed there, behind locked doors, until about 5 a.m. when the theater manager helped them and other Ne¬ groes slip out a side door. Meanwhile, many whites remained on the street, waiting. Detroit was planned so that its principal thoroughfares fanned out from the downtown area like the spokes of a wheel. Woodward Avenue was the main spoke. Lined with shops and offices, it was the most heavily traveled street in the city. Daylight, the whites knew, would bring more Negroes to Wood¬ ward Avenue. About 8 a.m., on the west side of Woodward, near Vernor

56

State of Siege

Highway, some 250 whites were scattered in small groups, talking about what had happened the night before. Almost casually, they began throwing stones at cars carrying Negroes. The stones bouncing off the cars and smashing windows seemed to stir them into a frenzy. They started running up and down on Woodward, over a three- or four-block area, hurling larger stones at the cars. A Negro driver, who ducked his head to avoid a rock, rammed his auto into a safety island at a streetcar stop. When he staggered out, dazed, eight or ten white men kicked and beat him. He broke away and stumbled east across Woodward toward Paradise Valley. The gang let him go, but rocked his car until it tipped over. One man took off the gas tank cap, let some gas run out, stepped back and tossed a lighted match. The car went up in a blaze and the mob’s frenzy increased. The crowd scrambled through alleys, gathering more stones and chunks of metal. One Negro raced his black Lincoln Zephyr north on Woodward through a hail of rocks, then swung east on Stimson Avenue, headed for Paradise Valley. As he slowed for the turn, about fifty whites surrounded his car. They pulled him out, dragged him behind a billboard, and beat him. After he stumbled away, his face bleeding and his clothing torn, the mob started to turn his car over. Two mounted policemen charged up and drove the mob away. But as soon as the policeman rode off, the whites surged back to the car and tipped it on its side. Within seconds, the Lin¬ coln was wrapped in flames thirty feet high. Before the day was over, about twenty Negroes were to have their cars destroyed in this way. Others barely escaped. From less than ten feet away, a white man tossed a stone through the open front window of a car but missed the Negro soldier who was driving. The mob chased the car for a while, then gave up after someone shouted: “He’s a soldier. Let him go.” Robert Hubbard, headed downtown to pick up his wife, stopped for a light at Woodward and Alexandrine Avenues. A gang of whites jumped on his running board and smashed

State of Siege

57

his windows with pipes and bricks. Hubbard rammed into the car in front of him, pushing it far enough forward so he could squeeze around the corner and escape. As he made the turn, Hubbard said later, a policeman on the corner shouted: “You ought to know better than to come up here. Get out and stay out.” Police who tried to arrest white rioters often were over¬ whelmed by the mob. When a white youth hurled a rock at a Negro riding in a bus, four officers grabbed the youth and pulled him into a police car. But a mob of whites, shouting: “Let him go,” jammed around the car and refused to move until the police released their prisoner. By midmorning, the white gangs, now more than 800 strong, swarmed around the streetcar stops on Woodward Av¬ enue, waiting for trolleys carrying Negroes, whom they dragged off and beat. Occasionally, some white passengers managed to protect the Negroes from the mob. As one trolley headed up Woodward, a white woman and her daughter, returning home from a shopping trip, noticed a frightened Negro sitting near them. “He was scared; I could see it plain,” the woman said later. “He looked at us and looked, so I motioned him to come over to our seat. He came over kind of crouched down and we let him push himself under our seat and we covered him. Then the car stopped and center doors opened and somebody shouted: ‘Any niggers inside?’ Somebody stuck his head in the door, took a look and said to the crowd: ‘No there ain’t no niggers here!’ And then we went away. It hap¬ pened again a couple of blocks later. We rode that way over to near Grand Boulevard and then he crawled out and ran away into the street.” Trying to avoid the mob, the streetcar motormen began passing their regular stops in the area. But the gangs then forced the cars to stop by grabbing the trolley ropes which dangled from the backs of the cars and yanking the trolley poles off the overhead wires. One motorman, whose car was stopped by a gang of fifty

58

State of Siege

whites, grabbed a switch bar and blocked the car s front door with his body. "He just stood there, looking mad as hell,” re¬ called Robert Madigan, a reporter for the Detroit Times, "holding that switch bar up, waving it and telling those men they weren’t going to get on his car. By God, he scared them back.” Usually, however, the mob surged through the front door of the trolleys while the Negroes piled out the center door or climbed out the windows in the back and ran for safety. Some made it. But most climbed out right into the mob. One Negro jumped off a streetcar at Davenport Street, on the west side of Woodward and sprinted across the street with a gang of whites at his heels. He was backed against a wall when a policeman forced his way through the crowd and ordered the whites to move on. One man shouted: “You’re one of us, why don’t you just walk away and not get hurt?” The officer pulled his gun, cocked it, and pointed it right at stomach level. "Get back on the other side of Woodward,” he said. "I’m not kidding.” The crowd moved back slightly, and the policeman told the Negro: "Run like hell.” He fled into Para¬ dise Valley. Earlier that morning, when Sam Mitchell left home for his job at the Bankers Trust Company downtown, his wife begged him not to come home for lunch because of the rioting. “That’s all right,” Mitchell told her. “There’ll be plenty of policemen along the way to protect me.” But around noon, when Mitchell headed home aboard a Woodward Avenue streetcar, most of Detroit’s Police Depart¬ ment had been committed to the Negro section. There were only a few officers on Woodward to cope with the growing mob of more than 2,000 whites. When Sam Mitchell’s streetcar reached Eliot Street, about eight blocks south of where he normally got off, a gang of whites yanked the trolley rope halting the car. "The motorman refused to open the doors,” Mitchell said later, "but a man with a crowbar pried them open and they pulled me off.

State of Siege

59

The minute I got to the street, I felt something hit me in the ribs.” Mitchell thought at first he was shot; he realized later that he had been stabbed in the side. Bleeding and screaming, he ran toward the sidewalk, where he saw two policemen, Patrol¬ men Paul Gyetvai and Edward Marohnic. They grabbed him, led him into the middle of Woodward Avenue, and started walking. Presumably they were trying to get away from the mob. But for Sam Mitchell the next few minutes must have been the worst he had endured since the Meuse-Argonne. As the police marched him down Woodward Avenue, holding his arms, whites in the mob took turns rushing up and hitting him. One of his attackers, George Miller, thirty-one, an ex¬ convict and convicted counterfeiter, was caught in the act of striking Mitchell by an alert Free Press photographer. The picture later helped send Miller to jail for ninety days. The two patrolmen said later that they couldn’t protect Mitchell because they literally had their hands full holding him up. But, Mitchell said, he was able to walk by himself, even though he was bleeding. Indeed, he was strong enough to break away from the officers. “I ran south on Woodward with the crowd chasing me,” Mitchell said. “A scout car drove up at last and I shouted for help again. The officers pulled me inside, pushed the mob back with their car and took me to Receiving Hospital.” He was discharged two days later. To prevent the mob from stopping their cars, motormen be¬ gan cutting the trolley lines off near the top where no one could reach them. The white gangs then had to settle for Negroes in automobiles or on foot. Hundreds of women had joined the mob packed along the sidewalks. Most of them were just spectators but some served as lookouts. When they caught sight of a Negro they shouted: "There comes one,” and men converged on him from all di¬ rections. Usually they beat their victim and let him stagger away before police arrived.

60

State of Siege

In midafternoon, when Robert Madigan tried to find a phone to call the city desk at the Times, he discovered that al¬ most all the stores on Woodward Avenue had been closed be¬ cause of the rioting. “I had to run two or three blocks west of Woodward to find a telephone, then run back,” he said years later. “It was hot as the devil. I remember my suspenders faded right into my shirt and ruined it.” When Madigan returned he noticed a lone Negro walking north, on the east side of the street. A gang of whites saw him too and charged after him. “I guess he panicked, because he ran the wrong way, west across Woodward, instead of east toward the Valley,” Madi¬ gan said. “They caught up with him in a cinder parking lot and started kicking him and beating him with their fists. I thought for sure they were going to kill him, but they finally stopped and backed away. “The Negro got to his feet. His face was smashed, covered with blood. He was dazed and didn’t know what to do. I grabbed his arm and guided him back to Woodward and onto a streetcar safety zone in the middle of the street.” One white man on the curb yelled at Madigan: “Get away nigger lover, or you’ll get the same thing.” The Negro sat down on the iron grating of the safety zone, looked up at Madigan and told him: “You better go.” Madigan backed away and the white man who had yelled walked out and kicked the Negro in the face. “That got cheers from the crowd on the curb,” Madigan said. “A lot of them were women. Then the police came up and helped the Negro over to the east side of Woodward.” Hunting more Negroes, some white gangs swept south on Woodward toward the heart of downtown Detroit. On the way, one group encountered Harold E. Bledsoe, a Negro law¬ yer and former assistant state attorney general, as he was leav¬ ing his office, near Grand River Avenue. “I was trapped,” Bledsoe said later. “There wasn’t any use in running. I did the only thing I could—looked defiantly at the mob. They

State of Siege

61

veered away from me suddenly and I was congratulating my¬ self on my formidable appearance when I noticed Hinton [John W. Hinton, a Negro court bailiff] behind me with his hand on his hip.” Hinton was wearing his uniform and pistol belt. “If it hadn’t been for him,” said Bledsoe, “I probably wouldn’t be here now.” At Cadillac Square, in the shadow of Detroit’s City Hall, hundreds of whites milled around, chasing and beating Ne¬ groes as they walked out of stores or waited for streetcars. About fifty whites had marched downtown, two abreast, behind an American flag seized from a sidewalk standard on Woodward. As they paraded through the square, a soldier and sailor ran up to their leader and wrested the flag from him. “This is what Hitler likes best,” the soldier shouted. At least a few other whites shared the soldier’s feelings. A white clergyman and his son patrolled Woodward in their car that afternoon, stopping when they saw a Negro being at¬ tacked. The minister would rush into the midst of the mob, quoting the Scriptures, the U.S. Constitution or, as he said later, anything else that came to mind. While he preached, his son helped the Negro victim into their car and drove him to a hospital. An elderly Catholic priest who tried to aid a Negro family surrounded by a white gang was shouldered out of the way. “You better get out of here, Father,” one man said. “I’m a religious man myself, but we’re up against a situation here that religion can’t solve. You’ve no business here.” The priest tried to reason with the man but then suddenly came the cry: “There goes one—let’s get him!” And the mob set off after another Negro. On the northeast corner of Woodward and Mack, a tall, slim youth mounted an auto bumper and tried to make a speech. “This is no way to act when our country is at war,

he told

the mob. One man yelled: “Aw, shut up,” and another shouted: “Let’s get him, too.”

62

State of Siege

The youth climbed down from his perch and stood on the corner shaking his head. The white mob’s fury seemed to feed on reports of Negro violence in Paradise Valley, some of them wildly exaggerated. "They just killed fifteen white men over on Hastings,” a Free Press reporter heard someone shout. Another false story had the Negroes murdering a twelve-year-old white girl. Carloads of armed Negroes were rumored to be on their way from Chi¬ cago to join the riot. According to another version of this story, several truckloads of Negro soldiers had gone AWOL from Fort Custer and were heading for Detroit. In point of fact, the Army reported later, five members of a Negro Quar¬ termaster battalion tried to seize ammunition and trucks and go to the aid of their families in Detroit. They were arrested and thrown in the stockade before they could leave the post. Many in the mob on Woodward Avenue were armed with clubs, pieces of pipe, and stones. Some wore bandages, ap¬ parently covering wounds they had received earlier in the day. One man, his shirt shredded nearly in ribbons, stalked up and down Woodward, bragging that he had "killed one of them at 2:30 this morning.” When police started hurling tear gas bombs to drive the gangs back to the curb and keep the avenue clear for traffic, a roar of indignation went up. The mob taunted the police with shouts of "Just like Germany! Just like Hitler!” One white man heaved a brick at a patrolman, knocking him down. A police sergeant and four patrolmen formed a flying wedge, tore a hole through the crowd with their night¬ sticks, and seized him. By late afternoon Woodward Avenue was littered with bro¬ ken glass, sticks, bricks, rocks, overturned cars, and empty tear gas shells. “The street,” one reporter said, "looked just like a battlefield.” While most of the white mobs roamed downtown and along Woodward Avenue to the west of Paradise Valley, some gangs formed to the east, on the other side of the ghetto. One of

State of Siege

63

these groups ambushed a Negro minister, the Reverend Henry Powers, his father-in-law, and his twelve-year-old son. The minister was on his way to pick up his wife who worked at a war plant. About 6 p.m., as he approached the intersection of Forest Avenue and Chene Street, about a mile east of Para¬ dise Valley, his car was bombarded by bricks and stones. He ducked his head, lost sight of where he was going, and smashed into a parked car. When his son and father-in-law stepped out into the street, they were immediately attacked by the whites who had stoned the car, Powers later told the NAACP. But when he shouted that he was a minister, “not looking for any trouble,” the crowd fell back and let them alone. “The police were on the scene during the entire time of the trouble,” Powers said. “They informed me that these whites were doing the same thing to me and my family that the Negroes were doing to the whites on Hastings Street. The officers did not try to scatter the crowds.” The police took them all to Receiving Hospital, where the minister’s father-inlaw and son were treated for their injuries. About this time, Moses Kiska and Robert Hicks, workers at the Chrysler Tank Arsenal, were on their way home from the plant by trolley. The two Negroes were afraid to get off at their usual stop because they heard white gangs were roam¬ ing nearby. They stayed on the trolley until they reached Mack Avenue and Chene, only a few blocks from where the Reverend Powers had been attacked. While they waited in the safety zone for another trolley to take them on the last leg of their journey, an auto with several white youths sped by. Hicks saw a rifle sticking out the window and heard a shot. Moses Kiska fell with a bullet in his stomach. He died four hours later in Receiving Hospital. Between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m., the same hour in which the Powers family was attacked and Moses Kiska was mortally wounded, Detroit Police records show that more than forty other persons were injured in the rioting. Most of them, like

64

State of Siege

most of those who had been injured earlier, went to Receiving Hospital. Here was reflected the full horror of the day. Since early morning, the hospital’s two hundred nurses and sixty doctors and interns had gotten little, if any, rest. In six emergency operating rooms, alternating surgical teams worked continuously throughout the day. On the ground floor, a doc¬ tors’ lecture hall had been hastily converted into a ward with ten beds crowded into it. But with patients coming in at the rate of one about every two minutes, there was room and time enough only for the most seriously injured. The rest waited in the admitting room, where there were not even enough chairs for all of them to sit dov/n. Leaning against a wall for support, Walter Wietrzychowski tried to wipe away the blood that streamed into his eyes, while he talked to a Detroit News reporter. “I was just walking to the cleaner’s shop to pick up my pants,” he said. “A Negro struck me with something. He struck me three times as I tried to run away. I don’t know what this is all about. ... I wish they could stop this blood so I could see.” A few feet away, a Negro victim, Wallace Chestnut, wras just as bewildered. He had ripped his hand leaping over a fence to escape a white mob. “They started chasing me,” he said. “I don’t know why.” Chestnut stared at his hand and shrugged his shoulders. “They’re too busy here,” he said. “There’s lots of folks hurt worse than I am. I guess I’ll go home and put some turpentine on my hand.” Nearly all the riot victims, both white and black, had been attacked while they were alone, or with just a few companions. Except for the brief skirmish on the Belle Isle Bridge late Sunday night, there had been no clashes between big gangs of Negroes and whites. All day Monday, the Negro and white mobs had avoided such a confrontation, the Negroes for the most part staying within Paradise Valley, the whites outside. But toward evening, the white gangs on Woodward grew bigger and bolder. One group of 300 men suddenly rushed east along Eliot Street, past John R Street, the block east of Wood-

State of Siege

65

ward, into the black ghetto. From his office on Eliot Street, a Negro staffer on the Michigan Chronicle saw them coming, ran out the back door, vaulted a fence into an alley, and fled. Police halted the mob at Brush Street and pushed them back. But now from Vernor Highway north for about ten blocks thousands of whites surged along the edge of Paradise Valley .jeering and hurling stones at Negroes. All that stood between them and tens of thousands of blacks was a weary, harassed line of Detroit police.

‘EMERGENCY PLAN WHITE’ At 12:30 p.m. Monday, the phone rang in the Washington

office of Brigadier General Archer L. Lercfi, Assistant Provost Marshal General of the United States Army. Brigadier General Edward S. Greenbaum, executive officer to the Under Secretary of War, was calling about the Detroit race riot and he was highly agitated. “The first story we got was 90,000 people yesterday . . .” Lerch interrupted. “How many?” “Ninety thousand,” Greenbaum repeated. “A whole gang of them there and started by one fight.” “Ninety thousand?” “Ninety thousand, yes, were out there at some big celebra¬ tion or what not. Something started and the fuse was set off there and up until now four have been killed, 186 injured, 300 of them jailed and stores smashed open. And from what I got by telephone from Industrial Personnel here, was that the thing seemed to be very serious and was still going on and the Governor has been requested by the Mayor to take action, something about troops. Now this may be exaggerated some¬ what. I got it from a Lieutenant here in Industrial Personnel, who has been in touch by telephone with their fellows in the Third District. I just thought you ought to know about it if you haven’t heard anything on it.” “Well, I’ve just sent for Colonel Reese [Lieutenant Colonel Franklin W. Reese],” Lerch said. “Oh, Military Intelligence is 66

'Emergency Plan White’

67

on the telephone now with Colonel Reese, giving him the dope on it.” “All right,” said Greenbaum. “If you get anything that you think we ought to know, will you let me in on it?” “That’s right, we’ll keep you in touch with it,” Lerch prom¬ ised. “Gosh, that seems like a lot of Negroes though, 90,000. Okay.” Aside from a few brief press dispatches, General Greenbaum’s call was the first report of the riot received by the Pro¬ vost Marshal General’s office, which functions as the Army’s police department. The confusion it reflected would persist throughout the day, in Washington and in Detroit. This confusion developed despite the fact that both civilian and military authorities had been promptly informed of the urgency of the situation. At 1 a.m., even before rioting had erupted on Woodward Avenue, Police Inspector Fred W. Stephan reported to Commissioner Witherspoon that the vio¬ lence in Paradise Valley was getting out of control. Soon, arrested rioters were streaming into Detroit Police Headquarters on Beaubien Street. The Military Police had an office in the building, and the MP’s, watching the prisoners come in, realized that a major race riot had broken out. At 3 a.m. the MP commander notified an aide to Colonel Au¬ gust M. Krech w’ho, as commander of District No. 1, Sixth Service Command, was the highest-ranking military official in Detroit. Bv 3:35, Colonel Krech had alerted the 728th Mili¬ tary Police Battalion at River Rouge Park and was on his way to meet Mayor Jeffries and Commissioner Witherspoon in the Commissioner’s office. Part of the meeting was spent reviewing the procedure for obtaining federal troops, a subject which had been discussed at a number of previous meetings. This procedure, as it was described a week later by Jeffries and Witherspoon, seemed quite simple. “When the situation demanded it, I was to ask the Governor

68

‘Emergency Plan White’

for troops,” Jeffries said. “The Governor was to phone Gen¬ eral Aurand [Major General Henry S. Aurand], commander of the Sixth Service Command in Chicago. He was to give the order, by phone, to Colonel Krech in Detroit and Colonel Krech was to bring the troops in.” Witherspoon added: “I was given to understand that the matter had for some time been cleared with the Governor and with the Sixth Service Command in Chicago and that the Military Police Battalion located here [the 728th] could be alerted and detailed to any location in the city within a period of 45 minutes, that addi¬ tional troops, if necessary, could be secured within a period of a few hours.” The extensive Army records studied by the authors make no mention of the specific formula worked out with Detroit civilian officials for obtaining troops. But American history offered ample precedent for the use of federal soldiers to assist civil authorities. Over the years, the Regular Army and the Federalized National Guard had been called on scores of times to protect federal property or to put down civil disorders stem¬ ming from such problems as labor disputes and racial tension. Moreover, in 1943, as Assistant Secretary of War Robert A. Lovett later wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, each Army Service Command had on file “a constantly revised secret plan, known as ‘Emergency Plan White’ . . . stating in detail the action to be taken in case of domestic disorders.” The emergency plans varied somewhat from command to command. But the general rules were set down in Army Regu¬ lations 500-50. These regulations explained that the use of troops to aid civil authorities derived from Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees to the states federal protection against invasion and domestic violence. This broad constitutional power had been spelled out in greater detail by various federal statutes, which AR 500-50 summarized. The regulations stated that the President had the power to use troops, with or without the request of local authorities, to enforce federal laws or to protect the civil rights of U.S.

‘Emergency Plan White'

69

citizens. The regulations also stated that the President could send federal troops to the aid of a state government upon the request of the legislature or of the governor. When state offi¬ cials sought the aid of federal troops, their request was to be forwarded to the President for his consideration. If the Presi¬ dent granted the request, he was then to issue a proclamation to “command the insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within a limited time.” AR 500-50 cited an exception to this rule which seems par¬ ticularly significant in view of what Jeffries and Witherspoon understood to be the procedure for obtaining troops. In Sec¬ tion III, Paragraph 5B, the regulations state: In case of sudden and unexpected invasion, insurrection, or riot, endangering the public property of the United States. ... or other equivalent emergency so imminent as to render it dangerous to await instructions requested through the speediest means of communication, an officer of the Army may take such action before the receipt of instructions as the circumstances of the case and the law under which he is acting may justify, and will promptly report his action, and the circumstances requiring it, to the Adjutant General, by telegraph if possible, for the information of the President. If these fine legal points were raised during the early morn¬ ing conference in Witherspoon’s office they escaped the atten¬ tion of the Commissioner and the Mayor. Witherspoon later stated: “I was never at any time, up to and including the 4 a.m. conference of Monday morning, advised that a presi¬ dential proclamation was necessary [for the use of troops].” Problems about the procedure for getting military assistance did not arise for several hours. For, when the conference in Witherspoon’s office ended about 7 a.m., the Mayor and Com¬ missioner had decided, for the time being at least, not to ask for such assistance. . . . At that time there appeared to be a considerable cessation of serious rioting,” Witherspoon ex¬ plained later. “It was thought, at this time, that the situation was under control.”

70

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But what the Mayor and the Commissioner had taken to be a tapering off in the rioting turned out to be merely a pre¬ dawn lull; as the morning wore on, the violence increased. Detroit’s 3,400 policemen were ordered to work in shifts of twelve hours, instead of eight, giving Witherspoon more than 2,000 men to deploy at one time. Several hundred auxiliary police were called to direct traffic and handle other routine jobs to free more regular officers for riot duty. State Police Commissioner Oscar C. Olander promised to rush 150 troop¬ ers into the city. Yet all of this, Jeffries began to realize, was not nearly enough. “Police Commissioner Witherspoon and I knew at 9 a.m. that we needed more manpower and needed it quickly,” the Mayor said later. “We saw then that mechanically the Police Department was unable to cope with the problem. It could not meet adequately the dispatches for more men, more am¬ bulances, more incidents, to quell.” Now, Jeffries decided, he wanted the Army. At 9:40 a.m., the Mayor telephoned Governor Kelly, who had arrived at the Governors’ Conference in Columbus. “I told him the situation was rapidly getting out of control and we had to have more manpower,” said Jeffries. “This was the procedure we had agreed upon.” As the next step in this procedure, Kelly called Sixth Service Command Headquarters in Chicago about 11 a.m. and talked to Colonel John Davis, General Aurand’s chief of staff. When Harry Kelly hung up the phone he believed he had done all that was required of him to get Army help. But Colonel Davis apparently interpreted their conversation differently. An Army report issued a few days later said the Governor’s call was merely “in regard to a possible request for the use of Federal troops in Detroit.” (Authors’ italics.) Davis, of course, promptly informed his chief, and Aurand grabbed an old Army textbook on aid to civilian authorities and tried to size up the situation. The forty-nine-year-old Au¬ rand seemed the very model of a modern American major

‘Emergency Plan White’

71

general. At West Point, at the Command and General Staff College, at the Army War College, he had been carefully groomed to deal with most military problems. Sometimes, Aurand knew, it was best to act boldly. But the crisis develop¬ ing in Detroit required, he felt, very special and delicate han¬ dling. While Aurand leafed through his textbook and thought things over, he did what he could to get ready. He ordered the 701st Military Police Battalion at Fort Custer to join the already alerted 728th Military Police Battalion at River Rouge Park. Two provisional Military Police battalions—one at Custer and another at Selfridge Field, an air base about twenty-five miles north of Detroit—were directed to get ready to move as soon as possible. Brigadier General William E. Guthner, Aurand’s director of internal security, was told to fly to Detroit to take command there, “in the event that the Governor of Michigan requested Federal troops.” (Authors’ italics.) Meanwhile, no one in Detroit seemed able to restore order without troops. This sense of futility was evident at an emer¬ gency meeting of the Detroit Citizens’ Committee, an inter¬ racial group formed after the 1942 Sojourner Truth housing riot. The meeting was held at noon in the Negro branch of the YWCA. Mayor Jeffries was escorted by three police cars as he drove through Paradise Valley to get there. The Mayor might have saved himself the trouble. When he arrived, he was criticized for not preventing the riot from starting and for not stopping it after it had started. One union leader told him that the people of Detroit wanted to see him "take a stand, for once in your life.” The committee, however, was by no means agreed as to exactly what the Mayor should do. Alfred Pelham, a Negro member, tried to persuade the other Negro leaders to call for a declaration of martial law. But one of them, the Reverend Horace J. White, feared that martial law might make things worse for Negroes. During the morning, White had toured Paradise Valley in

72

‘Emergency Plan White

a sound truck, pleading with Negroes to stop the violence. Now, he suggested the use of Negro auxiliary police to patrol the area. Jeffries doubted whether this would do any good, but finally decided it could not do any harm. As it turned out, however, the idea almost caused a great deal of harm. When the meeting ended, the minister took his proposal to Commissioner Witherspoon who agreed to use about 200 Negro auxiliaries whom White would recruit. But evidently some police officials were not informed of this agreement. Later in the afternoon, officers at headquarters heard that a mob of Negroes was marching down Beaubien Street to attack them. The police passed around shotguns and tear gas bombs and prepared for battle. Fortunately, before any shots were fired, some officers realized that the “mob" was made up of White's volunteers. The Negro auxiliaries were issued Civil Defense armbands and helmets and sent out to “do what they could," as Wither¬ spoon put it. But with no authority to make arrests and armed only with the power of persuasion, they accomplished almost nothing. The rioting had passed the stage where persuasion could be effective. Detroit needed an overwhelming show of force, and for this Witherspoon and Jeffries still looked to the Army. They did not yet fully realize how bogged down the Army was in legal and administrative problems. Not long after Gov¬ ernor Kelly's phone call. General Aurand had asked Washing¬ ton for authority to call on a full infantry division, without artillery, in addition to the Military Police battalions already alerted in Michigan. His request was passed on to Colonel James M. Roamer, director of intelligence for the Army’s Gen¬ eral Staff Corps. Roamer talked things over first with the War Department Operations Plans Division, then with Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, commander of all Army Service Forces, and later with Major General Allen W. Gullion, the Army’s Provost Marshal General.

‘Emergency Plan White’

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“It comes closer to being an Emergency Plan White than anything we’ve had yet,” Gullion told Roamer. Then Roamer raised a question that was to prove crucial to the Army’s role in Detroit. “Now, can we use troops in there without the President’s authority?” he asked the Provost Marshal. “We can,” Gullion told him, “and Aurand thoroughly un¬ derstands this, too.” The Provost Marshal noted that Aurand had once sent troops to a Chicago plant (apparently during a violent strike). “This is the principle he followed: That he’s interested in the protection of the war effort and of these plants and that he can’t use troops to save life. He’s not going in there to keep white people from killing black peo¬ ple or vice versa but he will go in there to prevent the plant from being damaged,” Gullion explained. “Now that’s the ground on which he can use troops. And if incidental to pro¬ tecting the plant he saves life, well and good—but that’s not what he’s in there for.” Later that afternoon, the Army put the pragmatic principle General Gullion had outlined into practice, but only in one limited instance. The Provost Marshal General’s office in Wash¬ ington received an urgent request to protect a Detroit firm called J. T. Wing Company, and Colonel Reese called Sixth Service Command to pass on the request. Reese talked to Colonel O. G. Miller, one of Aurand’s staff officers, and ex¬ plained that the Wing Company had a store on Detroit’s East Side, near the riot area. The store served as a retail outlet of the Defense Supplies Corporation for selling pistols, shotguns, and rifles to state and local police departments and plant se¬ curity forces. “They have approximately one-third of their stock right there in that store in Detroit amounting to about 4,800 weapons,” Reese said. “They are worried about that and they have asked the local police for some protection to prevent anybody from breaking in there and getting away with those weapons. They

“4

'Emergency Flan White'

say that they have been told by the local police that they are sorry but they haven't the men to give them and they can't help them out. So the Defense Supplies Corporation has called us and asked us to see if we can make some arrangement to place a guard around the store. “I think." Reese added, “that their anxiety is well founded." "You want us to make arrangements to place a guard there, is that it?" Miller asked. "Yes sir, that is the idea. I think that will be highly ad¬ visable. Colonel. Now I don't know that I don't want to make any suggestions, but I believe that probably Colonel Krech down there is familiar with the situation and might be able to take care of it immediately if you get in touch with him." Miller called Krech at once. By > p.m.. less than two hours after the Defense Supplies Corporation had made its original request to the Provost Marshal General, MP's were guarding the M ing store. In general, however. W ashington was reluctant even to make suggestions about the situation in Detroit. As General Lerch. the Assistant Provost Marshal General, told Colonel Roamer in midaftemoon: ". . . We should just stand by in Washington and supply the help when the Service Commander asks for it without tying him down by any instructions or anv direc¬ tions. Because as soon as we give him any instructions or di¬ rections we’ll furnish him with a first-class alibi if things go wTong. And he should be left a free hand until he asks for something and when he asks for something we should be ready to give it very promptly.” But without guidance from Washington, officials in Detroit seemed uncertain what to do. At 5 p.m. Monday, local com¬ manders of the Army Air Forces. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard met with Colonel Krech in Detroit's Federal Building to discuss the situation. In a few minutes, Mavor Jeffries walked in with Governor Kellv, who had just flown in from Columbus. Both men were grim. Jeffries said he feared "a great deal of trouble and fighting

‘Emergency Plan White’

75

during the night unless large numbers of men were mobilized for all-night patrol duty.” The Mayor added “that the popu¬ lace of Detroit was fearful for the safety of their families.” Governor Kelly asked for “all available manpower that could be mobilized to help in maintaining law and order in De¬ troit.” While Kelly and Jeffries were talking, the meeting was in¬ terrupted by shouts from the street below. They all rushed to the windows in time to see a white mob chasing a lone Negro along Fort Street. His clothing torn, his face bleeding, the Negro reached a police car just ahead of his pursuers and fell into the arms of two patrolmen. The mob milled around the car briefly, then turned back toward Woodward Avenue. Soon after the discussion in Colonel Krech’s office resumed. General Guthner arrived from Chicago to represent General Aurand. According to the Army, General Guthner “reviewed the situation with Colonel Krech, evaluating all available in¬ formation and preparing tentative plans for the disposition of federal troops, should they be required.” But a fact-finding committee appointed by Governor Kelly to investigate the riot later had more to say about GuthneFs mission. Guthner was sent to Detroit, the committee asserted, “with instructions to declare Federal martial law upon his ar¬ rival. Ln route, General Guthner, in looking over Army reg¬ ulations, discovered that he had no authority to declare Fed¬ eral martial law, nor did the Commanding General in Chicago have any right to order this, but that the President of the United States was the only person who could declare Federal martial law.” As Mayor Jeffries remembered it, Kelly then talked on the phone to General Aurand in Chicago. Aurand repeated what Guthner had told them: “Federal martial law was necessary” before federal assistance could be given. Jeffries later explained what martial law, as he understood it, would involve: “All laws, city and state are suspended; the courts suspend operation, the Common Council has no more

76

‘Emergency Plan White’

authority; the Police Department ceases operation; the State authorities of all kinds suspend operations in the area. In fact, the Army commander in charge rules the area exclusively in all respects. Civil rights and functions are temporarily and completely abrogated.” The legal complications aside. Governor Kelly was worried about what people might think. He told Aurand that he wanted to avoid giving the rest of the nation the impression that “things have gotten so bad that we would have to call in the federal authorities and have the federal authorities declare martial law.” As a matter of fact, the Army regulations dealing with the use of troops to put down domestic disturbances within a state did not even mention the politically unnerving words “martial law.” Nor did they require that civil authority be suspended. On the contrary, while the regulations stressed that federal troops could not be directed to act under the orders of civilian officials, they stated: “Persons not normally subject to military law taken into custody by the military forces inci¬ dent to the use of troops contemplated by the regulations should be turned over to the civil authorities. Punishment in such cases belongs to the courts of justice and not to the armed forces.” Jeffries and Kelly, then, were laboring under a misconcep¬ tion. Either they had seriously misunderstood what Guthner and Aurand had told them, or the Generals had seriously misunderstood the Army regulations, or there was misunder¬ standing on both sides. In any event, as much as Detroit needed the Army’s help, the Governor was unwilling to ask for martial law to get it. Not yet, anyhow. At 4:30 p.m., he and Jeffries walked out of Colonel Krech’s office. They immediately checked on the riot situation, and the Mayor was shaken by the reports of increasing violence. “I informed the Governor,” he said, “that I did not care what

‘Emergency Plan White’

77

we had to do or what we called it, but we had to have more manpower on the streets of Detroit." The only remaining source of manpower, aside from the Army, were the State Troops, a volunteer organization set up in Michigan, as in other states, to replace National Guard units called into federal service during the war. On paper at least the State Troops made up an impressive force of about 2,000 men. Earlier in the day, Kelly had ordered their mobil¬ ization. Now, their Adjutant General, Le Roy Pearson, figured he could have at least 1,000 men ready for action in Detroit in a few hours. To clear the way for their use, Kelly went on the radio at 6 p.m. and declared “a state of emergency.” He proclaimed “the necessity for the armed forces of the State of Michigan to aid and assist, but in subordination thereto, all duly con¬ stituted civil authorities in the execution of the laws of this State.” The proclamation covered, not only Wayne County and Detroit, but also Oakland and Macomb Counties to the north of the city. Within this area the Governor banned the sale of liquor, closed all amusement places, prohibited crowds or public gatherings, and imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on “all persons not having important business or going to or from work.” Jeffries followed the Governor on the air with a plea for order, stressing the riot’s effect on the war effort. “Our ene¬ mies could not have accomplished as much by a full-scale bombing raid,” the Mayor declared. “I appeal to the good citizens of Detroit to keep off the streets, keep in their homes, or at their jobs.” But what Jeffries and Kelly said had little effect on the vio¬ lence in Paradise Valley and on Woodward Avenue. The loot¬ ing and killing continued. About 6:30 p.m., a scout car pulled up at a Hastings Street tailor shop that was being ransacked by Negroes. When officers entered the store, Ernest James, twenty-six, swung at one of

78

‘Emergency Plan White’

them with a handsaw. Patrolmen Carl Sine and Edwin Spindler opened fire and James fell dead with a bullet in his neck. Seven other Negroes in the store were arrested. A few blocks to the west, white gangs pressed against the police, barring their advance into Paradise Valley. They set fire to a Negro house on the corner of Adelaide and John R Streets. On Edmund Place and Watson Street, between John R and Brush Streets, they sent bricks and stones crashing through the windows of Negro houses while the Negroes hurled bricks and stones back at them. Into this crossfire walked Frank Crossman, a sixty-eight-yearold white man who lived on Watson Street, on the edge of the Negro ghetto. A stray brick cut his scalp. The old man was X-rayed at Receiving Hospital and released. Two days later he suddenly lost consciousness and died, of a fractured skull. A few blocks south, on Vernor Highway, hundreds of whites surged past John R toward Brush, stoning homes on their way. A Negro ran into the street brandishing a rifle and some of the whites fell back. The Negro fired two shots and missed. Suddenly the whites turned and charged and the Negro fled. A police car heading west on Vernor stopped, and two offi¬ cers jumped out. From a parking lot next door to the Frazer Hotel, a Negro rooming house at the southwest corner of Vernor and Brush, Homer Edison, a twenty-eight-year-old Ne¬ gro, aimed his shotgun and squeezed the trigger. Patrolman Lawrence Adams, thirty-four, dropped to the ground, shot through the groin. His partner, Patrolman Howard Wickstrom, shot Edison in the chest. Edison was killed almost instantly; Adams died ten days later, after tetanus developed from his wound. Other police rushed up and more shots rang out, apparently coming from the Frazer Hotel itself. Within a few minutes fifty Detroit and state policemen were raking the six-story building with pistols, deer rifles, shotguns, and machine guns. After they had poured in 1,000 rounds of ammunition and dozens of tear gas bombs, the return fire ceased and the ten-

‘Emergency Plan White’

79

ants stumbled out. Surprisingly, only one was seriously wounded. The rest were lined up against the hotel wall. Even as police searched their rooms, intermittent shooting continued else¬ where on the block. As darkness fell, it seemed that Mayor Jeffries’ worst fears for the city would be realized. “The great mob on Woodward Avenue was practically out of control,” he said later. “Our police force was behind barricades on Brush Street to keep the white mobs from invading colored residential areas. At the same time, Negro hoodlums were sniping at our police officers from ambush. We needed desperately more manpower.” About 8 p.m., after returning from an inspection trip along Woodward, Jeffries called for the Michigan State Troops on whom he had been counting heavily to meet the crisis. But this inexperienced organization was not nearly ready for such a test. The Mayor, who had hoped for 1,000 men, learned that only thirty-two were available. And even this number lacked transportation to take them to the riot areas. Now Detroit’s sole hope of preventing disaster that night rested with the Army. Fortunately, the Army at least was pre¬ pared. About 5:30 p.m., shortly after Kelly and Jeffries had walked out of Colonel Krech’s office, General Aurand called General Somervell in Washington to discuss the riot. Since that call, Washington had been increasingly active in shaping the Army s role in Detroit. Somervell quickly briefed Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Lieutenant General Joseph T. McNarney, Deputy Chief of Staff, then called General Gullion and Colonel Roamer to his office. The three men went over the list of Military Police units which Aurand had assembled in the Detroit area; these totaled more than 2,500 men. In addition, responding to Aurand’s re¬ quest for a division, Operations Plans Division had made avail¬ able the Second Infantry at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. The difficulty, as Somervell soon realized, was not a short-

80

‘Emergency Plan White’

age of troops, but rather the legal obstacles to their use. Somer¬ vell discussed this problem with Gullion and with Major Gen¬ eral Myron C. Cramer, the Army’s Judge Advocate General and top legal officer. Then he ordered the drafting of a presi¬ dential proclamation extending federal aid. Gullion and Lerch drew up the proclamation about 7:30 p.m., following a sample form in the Emergency Plan White in their files. They took the draft to Somervell’s office, made some minor changes, and, about 8 p.m., phoned Aurand in Chicago to read the brief document to him. Aurand was instructed, however, not to issue the proclamation until it was signed by the President. As to what happened next in Detroit, once again the mili¬ tary and civilian versions differ. According to Governor Kelly he suddenly received word from the Army that a method had been found where troops could be brought into the city with¬ out the necessity of martial law. General Guthner’s official report puts it this way: “Because the situation was now out of control of the civilian authorities, Governor Kelly from his headquarters at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, called Colonel Krech at 9:05 p.m. and said he was com¬ ing over to headquarters, District No. 1, to request federal troops for the suppression of the riot.” About fifteen minutes later, when Kelly arrived at Guthner’s headquarters, Guthner was talking to Aurand in Chicago. Guthner handed the phone to the Governor who repeated his request for troops. At 9:25 p.m., Aurand ordered Guthner to send the Military Police battalions into action. Once the Army moved, it moved swiftly. Even before Gen¬ eral Aurand’s decisive order, the 701st Military Police Battalion, which had raced from Fort Custer to River Rouge Park, was shifted to Fort Wayne Ordnance Depot, about five miles closer to downtown Detroit. Now, two companies of the 701st, about 350 men, rolled into Cadillac Square and broke up the crowd there. Bayonets fixed and rifles at high port, they marched north on Woodward to Forest Avenue, sweeping the white mob before them. “The greater portion of the 10,000 to 15,000

‘Emergency Flan White’

81

people milling around on Woodward were not rioters in a true sense but were adding to the general confusion,” General Aurand noted later. “The crowd was readily dispersed.” Having cleaned up Woodward, the 701st sent patrols on foot and in jeeps probing to the east, into Paradise Valley. Along Vernor Highway, where not long before the siege of the Frazer Hotel had ended, they joined up with D Company of the 728th Battalion from River Rouge Park. Vernor, and the other cross streets leading into the ghetto, Aurand reported, “had been infiltrated by rioters armed with clubs, bricks, stones and other missiles with the avowed intention of invading 'Paradise Val¬ ley,’ beating up the Negro population and destroying it by fire. . . . The real problem involved cleaning the cross streets of the bands of inflamed rioters who were actually firing shots and throwing missiles, and opposing Negro bands.” The rioters cursed the soldiers and stoned them, but the MP’s forced them back with tear gas grenades and rifle butts. The troops showed, said Aurand, “remarkable restraint, ex¬ cellent judgment and firm demeanor.” About forty-five minutes after he ordered General Guthner to drive the rioters off the streets of Detroit, General Aurand called Washington and reported that the troops were in ac¬ tion. He asked permission to issue the presidential proclama¬ tion. But Somervell told him to wait until Governor Kelly made a formal request for troops to the President. By this time, Somervell and Gullion had gone to Secretary Stimson’s home with their final draft of the proclamation. Gul¬ lion had called Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, New York, where the President was entertaining Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and read the text of the proclamation to Grace Tully, the President’s secretary. Now, Roosevelt was waiting to hear from Kelly. The phone number, Somervell said, was POughkeepsie 6500. While Roosevelt waited for Kelly’s call he corrected his copy of the proclamation which, presidential aide William Hassett noted in his journal, was “full of errors” made in transcribing Grace Tully’s notes. Aurand called Guthner in Detroit and asked him to have

82

'Emergency Plan White’

Kelly phone the President at once. But it took Guthner some time to locate the Governor. By 11:55 p.m., Kelly had called, and the Army had the situation in Detroit under control. Hassett called Somervell, told him the President had signed the proclamation, and read the text back for verification. The Presi¬ dent listened, Hassett wrote, and “called attention to the wrong words, and they were so wrong as to make the text meaningless. It was a strange looking hodgepodge when the corrections had been made in pen with no opportunity for re¬ typing before the President signed it.” Roosevelt pointed out, somewhat facetiously, that he did not have the Great Seal of the United States with him in Hyde Park. But he “guessed” the proclamation was legal anyway, because he did have two witnesses. The long bloody day had ended. But Detroit, and the na¬ tion, had just begun to feel its effects.

Beaten by Negro hoodlums, seventy-year-old Sam Falk waits his turn at Receiving Hospital. Police remove Dr. Joseph De Horatiis’s body from the car in which he was stoned to death.

Rioters turn over a car on Woodward Avenue after chasing its Negro driver.

The same car goes up in flames while whites who set it afire watch from the sidewalk.

A mob of whites turns over another Negro’s car. Note the laughing woman in the center of the crowd. (Detroit Free Press)

This Negro who was pulled off a streetcar is being tripped by the rioter at left as he tries to escape.

Whites close in on another Negro in front of an all-night movie on Woodward Avenue.

A policeman tries to protect a Negro cornered by a white gang on Woodward, near Mack Avenue.

This desperate tug of war ended with the Negro being pulled off the streetcar and beaten.

One of several unknown white heroes of the riot tries to persuade the mob not to attack Negroes on the street car. (Detroit Free Press)

A victim of the mob lies cringing on the street. (De¬ troit Free Press)

Hoodlums beat him bloody before these two white youths came to his aid. (Detroit Free Press)

A Negro passenger pulled off trolley and beaten by group of whites.

George Miller slaps Sam Mitchell while police lead the wounded Ne¬ gro along Wood¬ ward Avenue.

Negroes driven from the Frazer Hotel line up with their hands in the air while they wait for police to search them. Troops of the 701st Military' Police Battalion assemble on Woodward Avenue after clearing Detroit’s main street of rioters. (Detroit Free Press)

Hunting snipers on June 22, police and soldiers searched this apartment house iust off Brush Street in vain. (Detroit Free Press)

Arrested rioters file through Police Headquarters on their way to jail. The pic¬ ture reflects the fact that the vast majority of riot prisoners were Negroes. (Detroit Free Press)

strewn among the litter on the sidewalk.

Damage was relatively minor in this dilapidated section of Paradise Valley. Looters spared the radio repair shop whose owner had written “colored” on his windows. (Detroit Free Press)

Detroit Mayor Edward }. Jeffries, Jr. (Detroit Free Press)

Michigan Governor Harry F. Kelly. (.Detroit Free Press)

The Walk to Freedom, looking north on Woodward Avenue from the Detroit River. (Detroit News)

FALLOUT FROM TRAGEDY night, after General Gullion read the presidential proclamation over the phone to Hyde Park, Secretary Stimson had asked him: “Who is this man Guthner in command up there?” Sunday

“Well he’s an old soldier of the 6th Cavalry and a Regular,” Gullion told him. “Then he went into the Guards and he’s been Chief of Police and Chief of the Fire Department at Denver. . . . He’s okay.” In Detroit, this old soldier now faced the toughest job of his career. The two MP battalions had smashed the big gangs of rioters before midnight. But sporadic stoning of cars and looting continued, and at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday two city police¬ men shot to death Edmund Willis, a thirty-nine-year-old Ne¬ gro they found ransacking a grocery on Hastings Street. The General feared widespread violence might break out again at any moment. He was under orders from General Aurand to cooperate closely with civilian authorities and not to interfere with civil functions “when they can be successfully employed.” But Aurand had added significantly: “The measure of your authority is what necessity dictates.” Guthner swiftly divided Detroit into four areas to be patrolled by the 728th, the 701st, and the provisional battalions from Fort Custer and Selfridge Field. To reinforce these units, the 9th Infantry Regiment of the Second Division was on its way from Camp McCoy. When it arrived Guthner would com¬ mand a force of 5,000 men, the like of which Detroit had not seen in eighty years, since the city’s first race riot in 1863. 83

84

Fallout from Tragedy

The troops bivouacked at Grand Circus Park, on the lawn of the main library on Woodward Avenue, and at high school athletic fields around the city. In full combat gear, they cruised the streets in jeeps, scout cars, and trucks. Their orders: Load your guns and don’t take anything from anybody.” The city they patrolled Tuesday was sullen and tense. The police switchboard was flooded with reports of violence, most of them false. Police continued making arrests, for disturbing the peace and violating the Governor’s riot proclamation, and the Wayne County Board of Supervisors authorized the Sheriff to buy additional food for the 1,000 extra prisoners in county jail. When the number of prisoners rose over 1,800 —overflowing the county jail as well as the city jail—police set up bullpens in the armories. Thirty schools which had closed during the rioting Monday reopened, but few students returned; at one East Side school attendance dropped from 2,000 to sixty. The downtown streets were almost deserted, the bars were closed, and the Governor canceled the baseball game at Briggs Stadium and the horse racing at the State Fairgrounds. Paradise Valley was spattered with blood and littered with broken glass and ruined merchandise. The black mob had spared a few shops owned by Negroes who had chalked colored on their windows. But almost every store in the ghetto owned by a white had been smashed open and ransacked. Bits of clothing fluttered from the jagged edges of broken shop win¬ dows, steel grills ripped from store fronts lay twisted on the sidewalk and clothing dummies hung from door frames and utility poles. Inside Ben’s Shoe Store, the New York Times reported: “Not a shoe or slipper remained on the shelves. The floor was ankle deep in crushed shoe boxes and discarded oxfords. In the middle of this mess stood Ben, weeping. ‘Fif¬ teen years of hard work; and now look at me.’ ” Negroes suffered along with storekeepers because the loot¬ ers had cleaned out the Valley’s food supplies and wrecked its grocery stores. Until the end of the week, when stores re-

Fallout from Tragedy

85

opened and food deliveries were resumed, many Negroes went hungry. Few dared to leave the comparative safety of the ghetto to buy food in white neighborhoods or even to go to their jobs. The Office of War Information estimated that Negro absen¬ teeism from war plants on Tuesday ran between 50 per cent and 90 per cent. The Negroes were afraid, not only of white hoodlums but also of city and state police. . It seems that a great many Negroes harbor deep resentment and hatred toward the Detroit Police Department charging that the police had used unnecessary force and engaged in police brutality’ often without any provocation in dealing with mem¬ bers of the colored race,” General Guthner noted in his Com¬ mander’s Estimate of the Situation. “A great many colored people,” Guthner added, “resent the fact that the Detroit Police order colored people off the streets at curfew time but permit the white people to remain on the streets in the same neigh¬ borhood.” Shortly after curfew Tuesday night, a State Police car stopped several Negroes outside the Negro YMCA on Elizabeth Street. While the police were searching them, one of the residents of the “Y,” Julian Witherspoon, shouted something that sounded like “Heil Hitler!” Trooper Ted Anders walked over to Witherspoon who, An¬ ders later said, reached into his pocket as if to grab a gun, then fled up the YMCA steps. As Witherspoon dashed into the building, Anders fired. The bullet smashed through the door glass, striking Witherspoon in the side. With pistols drawn, the troopers piled into the “Y” after Witherspoon. The Negroes in the lobby said they were lined up against the wall with their hands in the air. “Shoot any of them that move because we have plenty of bullets left,” one trooper snapped. For forty minutes, while Witherspoon lay bleeding on the floor, the troopers searched the Negroes and ransacked desk drawers and lockers. When one resident complained: “It’s a shame we law-abiding citizens have to be

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Fallout from Tragedy

treated like Fascists/’ a trooper hit him with his club. Finally the troopers called an ambulance and Witherspoon was taken to Receiving Hospital, where he eventually recovered. That same night more than 500 whites roaming the streets near Perrien Park, east of Paradise Valley, stoned passing Ne¬ gro motorists and chased some of them through the park on foot. Police needed help from a detachment of fifty MP s to break up the mob. No one was seriously injured, but thirty white youths were arrested, including five who were carrying blackjacks and loaded rifles in their cars. The violence cast a shadow over the graduation Wednesday night of twenty-nine Negroes and their white classmates at Northeastern High School, across the street from Perrien Park. During the ceremony, eighty Detroit policemen patrolled outside the school while eight MP’s guarded the auditorium. The commencement address, delivered by Walter Reuther, then a UAW vice president, was tinged with bitterness. “The most tragic thing I know,” Reuther told the 270 seniors, “is that the same time you youths are graduating, soldiers in armored cars are patrolling the streets of Detroit with guns made here in the arsenal of democracy.” But, wrote Lyford Moore of the Detroit Free Press: “It was well that the soldiers were there. Otherwise, it is hardly likely that all the graduates would have reached their homes.” When the students walked outside after the ceremony, Moore reported, they were confronted by several hundred whites gathered in the park across the street. The mob began pushing through police ranks, closing in on the Negro graduates. Just then, four truckloads of soldiers rolled up to the school, “as if in answer to a Negro mother’s prayer,” Moore wrote. Marching five abreast, with bayonets fixed, the troops drove the mob back from the school while the Negro students and their families hurried home. Moore’s dramatic account of the graduation angered both General Guthner and Police Commissioner Witherspoon. Guthner told General Aurand that the Free Press story was

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“a bare-faced lie” and "very bad for Detroit.” Aurand advised him to call in Detroit newspaper editors “and just give them hell for inaccurate reporting.” Witherspoon told the Detroit News that the trouble involved nothing more than about twenty teen-agers following some graduates when they left the school building. The soldiers had just “happened along,” and hadn’t even left their trucks, the Commissioner said. “There was no occasion for any arrests and were no attempts to start riots at any time,” he insisted. But this wasn’t the way things had looked to Walter Reuther, who had watched from a window in the school principal’s office. Said Reuther: “Anybody who says the soldiers did not come down the street on foot forcing the mob along ahead of them . . . with their bayonetted rifles, or who says the troops were not needed and did not break up the mob, is just crazy.” Before the soldiers arrived, Reuther had been “amazed” to see police permit large numbers of whites to gather in vio¬ lation of the Governor’s riot proclamation. “We saw the hood¬ lums drifting through the police all through the park,” Reuther added, “and we all agreed that the cops were not even at¬ tempting to break up the mob that was forming.” While Reuther criticized Detroit Police for being too lax in handling whites, General Guthner was trying to get them to ease up on Negroes. “They’ve been very handy with their guns and clubs and have been very harsh and brutal,” Guthner told Aurand on Thursday. “I asked both [State Police Com¬ missioner] Olander and Witherspoon if they didn’t think it was time to admonish their men to ease off and make their job better. “They have treated the Negroes terribly up here,” he added, “and I think they have gone altogether too far, as that kind of treatment of course will keep this thing going longer than if they get back to normal. If they want everybody else to get back to normal, the police will have to get back to normal themselves.” Normalcy was slow to return to Detroit. Although Governor

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Kelly began easing restrictions and the Army tapered off its patrols, Guthner sensed a continuing “undercurrent of un¬ rest and ill feeling.” Scattered gangs of whites and Negroes continued to stone cars and occasionally battle each other. “There is bitter feeling between Negroes and the young hoodlum element of the Polish population in Detroit,” Guthner noted. “This element on several occasions 'razzed’ Federal troops on patrol for in¬ tervening in the riot and have called the patrolling troops ‘nigger lovers.’ ” Indeed, on Saturday night, June 26, Guthner reported, a carload of Polish youths had threatened to beat up a soldier. Despite this resentment, Governor Kelly wanted very much to keep the Army in Detroit. On June 28, he called General Somervell to tell him so. “I’m trying to get the Police Depart¬ ment augmented, state troops brought up,” the Governor ex¬ plained. “I would like to feel, just between you and I, for whatever is necessary I can keep at my request this emergency order in here, where without having to go through any further orders . . . there will be on the job, until we get clear out of the woods, the troops that are within the state.” “I think so, Governor,” Somervell reassured him. “You asked the President for these troops and he gave them to you.” “He said he’d allow them to remain here until I asked for them to go,” Kelly acknowledged. “Now between you and I, you’re very much interested in Michigan—you know how im¬ portant it is from war manufacturing, etc. I know what we’re into here—bottled up right at the start. I know all of our racial problems. I do feel as though, jointly, we should face it for a few weeks together.” Kelly feared that the Fourth of July weekend would bring a new outburst of violence. When the holiday passed unevent¬ fully, the Army made plans to pull the 9th Infantry Regiment out of the city. But Kelly was still worried. He wrote Presi¬ dent Roosevelt that the presence of federal troops was “es¬ sential to the continued maintenance of law and order in this

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area.” Roosevelt responded by ordering that two Military Po¬ lice battalions remain available for duty in Detroit until he himself decided to release them. As an uneasy peace settled upon the city, it took the time to examine its wounds. Measured either in blood or money, the toll was staggering. Detroit buried thirty-four riot victims—twenty-five Negroes and nine whites. At least 675 others, including seventy-five policemen, were hurt. Some only needed first aid. But 416 required treatment at Receiving Hospital. These were nearly evenly divided be¬ tween the races—219 whites and 197 blacks. Property losses, from looted merchandise, ransacked stores, and burned autos, totaled about $2 million. The Detroit Times called the riot “the worst disaster which has befallen Detroit since Pearl Harbor.” In fact, it was a disaster for the entire nation. Though the rioters had not invaded the war plants, damage to production was severe. Jo¬ seph D. Keenan, vice chairman of the War Production Board, estimated factory absenteeism in Detroit on June 21 and June 22 at one million man-hours, a figure greater than the total hours lost in the whole country because of labor disputes dur¬ ing the first two months of the year. No one could compute statistically the most extensive dam¬ age of all—the riot’s impact on men’s minds and spirits over the world. Detroit had shamed the nation, and many of its citizens shared in the guilt. “There were at least 100,000 persons at the rioting scenes,” Mayor Jeffries said. “They saw what hap¬ pened. Many of them were cheering spectators to lawlessness and violence.” Axis propagandists rubbed America’s nose in the blood on Woodward Avenue. The German-controlled Vichy radio told Frenchmen that the riot illustrated “the internal disorganiza¬ tion of a country torn by social injustice, race hatreds, regional disputes, the violence of an irritated proletariat, and the gang¬ sterism of a capitalistic police.”

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The Japanese used the riot to remind the Chinese of race prejudice among their American allies. “It is a singular fact/7 sneered Radio Tokyo, “that supposedly civilized Americans in these times deny the Negroes the opportunity to engage in respectable jobs, the right of access to restaurants, theaters or the same train accommodations as themselves, and periodically will run amuck to lynch Negroes individually or to slaughter them wholesale—old men, women, and children alike—in race wars like the present one.77 Along with shame, the riot left a wake of bitterness around the country. “We better be frank about this,77 said Louis Marin, editor of the Negro Michigan Chronicle. “The race riot and all that have gone before have made my people more nation¬ alistic and more chauvinistic and anti-white than they ever were before. Even those of us who were half-liberal and were willing to believe in the possibilities of improving race relations have begun to doubt—and worse, they have given up hope.77 This sense of despair increased the threat of violence in other cities. On June 22, the Army’s Sixth Service Command asked Washington to rush 12,000 tear gas and smoke grenades and 10,000 12-gauge shotgun shells to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, “for use in the event of disorders in Chicago.77 While the Army prepared for the worst, white and Negro leaders in Chicago tried to head off trouble. The Chicago Defender, the city's most influential Negro newspaper, bla¬ zoned across its front page the hopeful slogan: “It Can’t Hap¬ pen Here.77 Police were ordered not to try to settle fights be¬ tween Negroes and whites on the streets, but rather to take troublemakers to the station house and break up crowds that gathered at the scene. More positively. Mayor Edward J. Kelly appointed an interracial committee to find ways to improve housing conditions, expand recreation facilities, and curb job discrimination for the city's 300,000 Negroes. Harlem was worried, too. Negro City Councilman Adam

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Clayton Powell warned: “The riots of Detroit can easily be duplicated here in New York.” Characteristically, New York City Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia reacted to the threat by dramatizing the issue. On June 23, in a statement published by the Negro newspaper The Amsterdam News, the Mayor sought to calm Harlem's nerves with this stern promise: “If any white man provokes or instigates assaults against a Negro or Negro group I will protect the Negro group and prosecute the white man; if any Negro group provokes and instigates assaults against a white man I will protect the white man and prosecute the Negro.” In his regular radio broadcast, the following Sunday, LaGuardia urged all New Yorkers to be skeptical of racial rumors and reminded them of the city’s melting pot tradition. “I will not permit, as long as I am Mayor of this city, any minority group to be abused by another group,” the Mayor promised. “I will maintain law and order in this city and I will afford protection to anyone who is attacked as I will prosecute any¬ one who does the attacking or the provoking.” The New York Police Department had sent E. M. Butler, its assistant chief of detectives, and Lieutenant Emanuel Kline, its highest-ranking Negro, to Detroit immediately after the riot. They talked with Detroit police, inspected the riot area, and reported their findings to LaGuardia. Thus, in some ways New York was prepared for the crisis it faced Sunday, August 1. That night, a Negro soldier visiting his mother in a Harlem hotel scuffled with a white policeman who was arresting a Negro woman in the lobby. The soldier grabbed the policeman’s night stick and the policeman shot him. Although the wound was not serious, word flashed through Harlem that a Negro soldier had been slain while his mother watched. Thousands of Negroes then swarmed into the streets, attacking policemen, pulling fire alarms, smashing windows, and looting stores.

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LaGuardia immediately cut off all traffic to the riot area, which covered most of West Harlem, from Fifth Avenue on the east to Eighth Avenue on the west and from 110th Street on the south to 155th Street on the north. Then the Mayor rushed to the scene. Along with several Negro leaders, he toured the district for three hours, pleading for order. At 1 a.m. Mon¬ day, LaGuardia broadcast an explanation of the “very unfor¬ tunate incident” in the hotel and urged everyone “to please get off the streets and go home to bed.” He was followed by two Negro leaders. Dr. Murray Yergan, president of the National Negro Congress, and Ferdinand Smith, secretary to the Na¬ tional Maritime Union, who made similar appeals. But some rioters were too obsessed with larceny to respond to words. These, the police subdued through sheer weight of numbers. LaGuardia had held all police on duty at midnight, when shifts normally change, then sent the entire reserve to West Harlem. In addition to more than 5,000 regular police, 1,500 civilian volunteers, most of them Negroes, were patrolling the streets, wearing Office of Civil Defense armbands and carry¬ ing night sticks. The Army sent six truckloads of MP’s to clear the area of soldiers. LaGuardia continued making radio appeals through the day. On his fifth broadcast, at 10:25 p.m. Monday, he announced: “The situation at this moment is definitely under control.” Then the Mayor did what he had been begging everyone else to do for twenty-four hours. He went home to bed. Five men died in the Harlem riot, all of them Negroes. More than 400 Negroes and about forty policemen were injured. The loss from looting and destruction of property totaled more than $5 million. It had been a terrible day for New York; yet, as Negro leaders were among the first to point out, it could have been a good deal worse. Most important, the rioting had been confined to one sec¬ tion of the city and limited to Negroes. No white gangs formed in New York, and, even while the violence in Harlem was at its worst, Negroes traveled throughout the rest of the

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city without being bothered. The NAACP commended LaGuardia and the police for “the fairness and intelligence with which they handled the situation.” Even the militant Adam Clayton Powell remarked: “The police have acted most ad¬ mirably. They have proven themselves as New York’s finest.” No one, white or black, could defend the actions of the Negro mob in Harlem. The NAACP itself called the outburst “a wild, senseless, criminal action.” But the NAACP added: “Let those who would criticize Harlem realize that it alone is not to blame.” At the root of the trouble, Negro leaders said, were grievances about exorbitant rents and high food prices in Harlem, and intense resentment of discrimination against Negroes in the armed forces. “The mistreatment of Negro soldiers, particularly in the South, is a terribly sore point with Negroes,” said the NAACP. “Had it been a Negro civilian, however prominent, who was shot, there would have been no riot.” This was the last of the riots which marked the spring and summer of 1943. During this tragic season, racial violence had spanned the country, from New York to Los Angeles, from Detroit to Beaumont. It was the worst such period the na¬ tion had endured since the World War I era. Then, too, ten¬ sions between Negroes and whites had exploded in a num¬ ber of cities around the country. Most terrible of all were the riots that rocked the state of Illinois, first in East St. Louis, then in Chicago. In 1917, East St. Louis, a factory town across the Mississippi from St. Louis itself, was swollen with Negro migrants from the South. The crowded Negro section, called Black Valley, served as a center for vice, promoted and practiced by whites. Within its borders, said a special Congressional committee which investigated the riot, East St. Louis permitted “every offense in the calendar of crime” and “every lapse in morals and public decency.” Vice flourished so freely, the committee noted, that in a high school in the nearby town of Brooklyn “24 out of 25 girls who were in the graduating class went to

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the bad in saloons and dance halls and failed to receive their diplomas.” In addition, East St. Louis was seething with hatred of the Negro migrants, because many of them had been used to break strikes at the meat packing plant and other local fac¬ tories. On July 1, a Sunday night, a gang of whites piled into an auto and roared through Black Valley, spraying bullets into Negro homes. Negroes quickly loaded their own guns and opened fire on the next car that came along. It was a police cruiser, and their bullets killed one officer and wounded another. Word of the shooting spread as thousands of persons viewed the riddled squad car in front of police headquarters. By Monday morning, mobs of both races raged through town, plundering, burning and murdering. Negroes shot down whites; whites hanged Negroes from telephone poles. A two-year-old Negro child was shot and thrown into a doorway of a burning building. The police force, demoralized by corruption, was of little use. “They fled into the safety of cowardly seclusion,” said the Congressional committee, “or listlessly watched the depreda¬ tions of the mob, passively and in many instances actively sharing in the work.” Five companies of the Illinois National Guard, about 1,400 men, who began arriving Monday, did as much to hinder as to help the situation. Of Colonel S. O. Tripp, who com¬ manded the militia, the committee had this to say: “He was ignorant of his duties, blind to his responsibilities and deaf to every intelligent appeal made to him.” His men, seven of whom were court-martialed for their conduct during the riot, “seemed moved by the same spirit of indifference or cowardice that marked the conduct of the police force. As a rule they fraternized with the mob, joked with them and made no seri¬ ous effort to restrain them.” The violence ended Monday night, not so much because of any action by the police or militia, but rather because the

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rioters seemed to have exhausted themselves. By then, at least thirty-nine Negroes and eight whites had been killed. Even this disaster failed to stem the tide of Negro migra¬ tion to the North, which swelled as the war boom gained momentum. Just as thousands of Negroes came to Detroit to work in its auto factories during those World War I years, other thousands poured into Chicago to work in its stockyards. The mixture of discontent and hope that drove them from their homes was revealed in the pleas for help they scribbled to Negro welfare groups and newspapers in Chicago. . . I am a poor woman and have a husband and five chil¬ dren living and three dead one single and two twin girls six months old today and my husband can hardly make bread for them in Mobile,” a Negro mother wrote in 1917. “. . . . My husband only get $1.50 a day and pays $7.50 a month for house rent and can hardly feed me and his self and children. I am the mother of 8 children 25 years old and I want to get out of this dog hold because I don’t know what I am raising them up for in this place and I want to get to Chicago where I know they will be raised and my husband crazy to get there because he know he can get more to raise his children. . . .” The Negro population of Chicago jumped to nearly 110,000 in 1920, from about 45,000 in 1910, with almost all of this increase coming between 1916 and 1919. The great majority of the newcomers did, in fact, get more to raise their children, because jobs were plentiful, even after the war. Housing, however, was another matter. The black ghettos were filled to overflowing, but Negroes who moved into white neighborhoods risked having their homes bombed or burned. And Negroes who tried to use schools or parks outside the black belt frequently were attacked by gangs of hoodlums. One hot Sunday afternoon, in Chicago, hundreds of Ne¬ groes and whites flocked to a popular beach on Lake Michigan. The beach was segregated by an imaginary boundary line which both races long had observed. But, on this day, July 27, 1919, some Negroes wandered over the line into the white

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area. The whites drove them off with a volley of stones; the Negroes tossed stones back at the whites. Whites spotted a young Negro, Eugene Williams, swimming in the “white sec¬ tion” of the water and threw stones at him. For a while, the frightened youth clung to a piece of driftwood and paddled around, trying to dodge the stones. But as the barrage con¬ tinued he grew exhausted. Finally, he lost his hold on the wood and drowned. When police arrived, Negroes demanded the arrest of the whites who had stoned young Williams. The police refused. The crowds of Negroes on the beach grew larger and angrier; one man pulled out a gun and fired into a group of whites. He was shot and killed by a Negro policeman. The city blew up. Negro mobs on the South Side stabbed five white men and shot another, within a few hours. To the west, white gangs beat, stabbed and shot more than a score of Negroes. On Monday, about 1,500 Negroes surrounded an apartment house, the hiding place of a white man who had shot a Negro boy. Police fired pointblank into the black mob, killing four and wounding several others. White gangs burned Negro homes and shot down Negroes from cars while Negroes sniped at their autos from ambush. By Tuesday, the rioting, which had spread into the Loop itself, was aggravated by the coincidence of a street car strike; this forced men to walk to and from their jobs, leaving them vulnerable to the gangs roaming the streets. On Wednesday, Illinois Governor Frank O. Lowden sent in 5,000 state militia. Perhaps just as important was the fact that it rained. The violence began to subside and finally ended on Saturday, August 2. The seven days of rioting took the lives of twenty-three Negroes and fifteen whites, injured 500 more and left 1,000 homeless. Less than a month after the riot ended, Governor Lowden appointed a twelve-member interracial commission “to study and report upon the broad question of the relations between the two races.” The commission staff spent more than a year

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holding hearings and conducting research, then issued a 672page report on the riot and its background. The report sug¬ gested, among other things, establishment of adequate recrea¬ tional facilities for whites and blacks, opening more schools in Negro areas, and the development of better, unsegregated housing for Negroes. The commission issued this challenge to conscience: “The moral responsibility for race rioting does not rest upon hood¬ lums alone, but also upon all citizens, white or black, who sanction force or violence in interracial relations or who do not condemn and combat the spirit of racial hatred thus expressed.” Theriots in East St. Louis and Chicago showed the rest of the nation only too clearly how racial tension could lead to mass violence. But by 1943 the lesson had been forgotten. The Detroit race riot had presented another disastrous example of failure in solving racial problems. How much could be learned from it would depend on how thoroughly and honestly it was examined.

IN HASTE AND IN ANGER 1942 and 1943, while racial problems worsened in Detroit, local and national officials had taken little public no¬ tice. Then came the race riot. This could not be ignored, and suddenly Detroit received a flurry of attention. Most of the investigators, however, were hurried and superficial. Indeed, some made pronouncements about the riot without bothering During

to look into it at all. In Mississippi, the Jackson Daily News found Eleanor Roose¬ velt “morally responsible” for the riot. “It is blood on your hands, Mrs. Roosevelt,” the News declared on June 22. “You have been personally proclaiming and practicing social equal¬ ity at the White House and wherever you go, Mrs. Roosevelt. In Detroit, a city noted for the growing impudence and inso¬ lence of its Negro population, an attempt was made to put your preachments into practice, Mrs. Roosevelt. What followed is now history.” In Washington, Representative John E. Rankin of Mississippi who defended bigotry as vigorously in the House as Theodore Bilbo from the same state did in the Senate, declared: “Detroit has suffered one of the most disastrous race riots in history. This trouble has been hastened by the crazy policies of the so-called Fair Employment Practices Committee in attempting to mix the races in all kinds of employment.” Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts, Demo¬ cratic majority leader, quickly cut off debate. The situation, McCormack snapped, “is bad enough without making it 98

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99

worse.” But McCormack couldn’t silence Representative Mar¬ tin Dies of Texas, chairman of the House Un-American Ac¬ tivities Committee, then known simply as the Dies Committee. This group had been described by Representative John Coffee as “the creator of internal confusion, hubbub and disunity” and “a platform from which Jew baiters, crackpots and totalitarians identified with fascist organizations spouted their nau¬ seating nostrums.” Now, Dies planned to take his committee to Detroit to investigate the race riot. At the root of the trou¬ ble, Dies contended, were Japanese-Americans who, after being released from internment camps on the West Coast, had in¬ filtrated Detroit’s Negro population to spread hatred of the white man and disrupt the war effort. But many in Detroit regarded the Japanese as less of a threat than Dies himself. “Magnavox Dies says he ‘has evidence’ that Japanese agents fomented the trouble in Detroit,” said the Free Press. “There have never been over a half hundred Japanese in this community—and the FBI has case histories of all of them and has been watching them. ... For the good of Detroit, the welfare of the nation, and the progress of war production, we wish the Texan Don Quixote would play horse in somebody else’s back yard.” Said Mayor Jeffries, urging that Dies stay away: “The Dies Committee can offer us noth¬ ing but more confusion.” There already was plenty of confusion in Detroit. On the day after the riot, Lester B. Granger, executive director of the National Urban League, declared that the Detroit riot, and the riots in Mobile and Beaumont that preceded it, “were part of a deliberately conceived, nationally directed plan to slow the war effort by instigating racial conflict.” But the very same day, John S. Bugas, FBI chief in Detroit, said he had no evidence the riot was planned or organized by Axis agents or anyone else. “Do you think that the 200 kids, boys between the ages of fourteen to eighteen, who stopped street cars, pulled off Negroes, and pummeled them were acting on orders?” Bugas asked. “I don’t.”

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In Haste and in Anger

A special committee, appointed by Governor Kelly to in¬ vestigate the riot, quickly agreed with Bugas. The committee, made up of Michigan Attorney General Herbert J. Rushton, State Police Commissioner Oscar C. Olander, Wayne County Prosecutor William E. Dowling, and Detroit Police Commis¬ sioner Witherspoon, announced on June 25 it had found “no evidence of subversive activities in connection with the riot.” The Governor himself declared that “the whole thing is sociological and we’ve got to establish by scientific investiga¬ tion what sort of maladjustments bring about such a situation.” Kelly directed Dr. C. F. Ramsay, of the State Department of Social Welfare, to prepare a set of “sociological” ques¬ tionnaires to be used in interviewing jailed rioters. In two days, after 340 rioters had been interviewed, Ramsay announced that few were recent migrants to Detroit, and most had steady jobs and were eager to get back to work. All reported “no dis¬ crimination in their school or employment experience.” Twenty years later, a white social worker named Agnes McCreery described the conditions under which these rioters were interviewed. “The men were being held in the armory,” Miss McCreery remembered. “They sat on one side of a long mess table, social workers across from them. I do not recall a single white prisoner. We had a list of questions to ask each man and most of them such safe points as birthplace, education, work, when they came to Detroit. “I remember my surprise at how cooperative they were in talking,” Miss McCreery recalled. “I thought then it was a combination of their need to talk and of our much vaunted case work skill. Now I think it was more likely the soldiers in the background—the near background—and the Southern Negro’s compliance with the wishes of the white.” Under far different circumstances, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People also was interviewing Negroes about the riot. On June 24, NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall set up an emergency office in the Elizabeth Street YMCA, where Julian Witherspoon had been shot, and

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began collecting dozens of affidavits charging police with bru¬ tality during and after the riot. Two private investigators, one white and one Negro, were hired to follow up leads in the affidavits. What deeply rankled the NAACP was that seventeen of the twenty-five Negroes who died in the riot had been killed by police. Many members of the Police Department, Walter White charged, “were in sympathy with the mobs.” Nor was the NAACP alone in criticizing the Detroit police. In a joint state¬ ment, fourteen leaders of national groups, including the Na¬ tional Urban League, the YMCA, the YWCA, and the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, deplored the “out¬ rage” in Detroit and cited eyewitness accounts that “Negroes have been victimized by police in the name of law and order as well as by lawless mobs.” The Free Press demanded to know “why more drastic action in subduing the mobs was not taken earlier. It was as plain as Monday’s blazing sun that the situation was out of hand by midmorning.” The first official reaction to such criticism came the week after the riot, when Commissioner Witherspoon and Mayor Jeffries reported to the Common Council. “. . . The policy of the Department for some time has been to treat all alike,” said Witherspoon on June 28, “to avoid discrimination, to at¬ tempt in every manner to gain respect and to avoid at all costs any incident which would provide the spark to set off a serious race riot.” Indeed, the Commissioner implied, the police had bent over backward so far that “some have accused the De¬ partment of having a kid glove policy toward the Negro.” The Commissioner said that “some have advocated a ‘shootto-kilP policy in handling the riot. Such a procedure might have terminated the riot at an earlier hour, but I am sure that it would have been with a far greater loss of life. ... If a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy was right, my judgment was wrong.” His department was 280 men below authorized strength, Witherspoon reminded the Council. “When the riots spread across the city we just did not have enough police to go around.

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In Haste and in Anger

I do not believe that there is a police department in the United States, even though equipped with a full complement of men sufficient in number for all normal routine police du¬ ties, that would be of adequate strength to handle a serious race riot with its own force.” Because of this manpower shortage, Witherspoon said he had counted on getting the assistance of federal troops in an emergency. He stressed that military authorities had assured him that troops could be obtained quickly and simply when he needed them. But, he added: “It subsequently developed that the information I received was incorrect. At first we were advised a declaration of federal martial law was necessary in order to obtain federal troops, and subsequently that this was unnecessary, but in any event a presidential proclamation had to be issued.” Under the circumstances, the Commissioner said, the De¬ partment had done itself proud. It had “upon the most diffi¬ cult day in its history, with the rioting of thousands occurring in many sections of the city, with mob psychology rampant, with murder in the hearts of many, demonstrated rare cour¬ age, efficiency and acted with good judgment.” In Washington, the next day, General Somervell picked up his copy of the Army digest of press reports and read that Witherspoon had “blamed Army authorities for delay in bring¬ ing sufficient federal troops into the city to halt last week’s bloody race riot.” In a boiling rage, Somervell got General Lerch, the assistant Provost Marshal General, on the phone, read him the item and snapped: “Now what the hell do we do with a case like that?” “Well that certainly isn’t true,” said General Lerch, “because we couldn’t bring Army troops in until we got a request from the Governor and we didn’t get a request from the Governor until that night. ... I think the thing to do is to give them—the press a correct story and possibly answer it from your office. We’ll prepare it over here and send it over.”

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103

But Somervell wanted more direct action. “I wonder if it wouldn’t be quicker to call the Governor up and ask him to give this guy the devil,” he said. If Somervell did in fact call Governor Kelly, it did him little good. On the very next day, June 30, Mayor Jeffries joined Witherspoon in placing most of the blame for the delay in the arrival of troops on Army red tape. . . Considerable discussion had been had and considerable thought had been given to getting the regular troops into Detroit long before the riots occurred,” Jeffries told the Common Council. “But now you know that despite all these discussions . . . that the formula for getting the Army troops here quickly broke down and for one reason and for one reason alone. We—and I include Governor Kelly and Colonel Krech—could not get the neces¬ sary Army order to pry the troops loose when we wanted it.” Next time, if there was a next time, the Mayor promised that violence would be dealt with faster than before. “The respon¬ sible authorities at all three levels of government, city, state and federal, were greenhorns in the area of race riots, but we are greenhorns no longer,” Jeffries said. “We are veterans. I admit we made some mistakes, but we will not make the same ones again.” Like Witherspoon, Jeffries had praise for the Detroit police. “The Police Department role in the riot needs no defense,” the Mayor said. “On the whole it was splendid and at times magnificent . . . our Police Department is not geared to fight the civilian population. No Police Department in the na¬ tion can successfully fight against its civilian population when they decide to take the law in their own hands.” Witherspoon had denied charges of police brutality. Jeffries attacked Negroes for making such charges. “. . . I am rapidly losing my patience with those Negro leaders who insist that their people do not and will not trust policemen and the Police Department,” the Mayor declared. “After what hap¬ pened, I am certain that some of these leaders are more vocal

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in their caustic criticism of the Police Department than they are in educating their own people to their responsibilities as citizens.” Jeffries’ comments drew a bitter reply from Dr. James J. McClendon, president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP. “Citizens become educated to ‘their responsibilities as citi¬ zens’ only so far as they are treated as citizens,” McClendon wrote the Mayor. “Killings, vile name-callings, wanton, unneces¬ sary arrests of colored citizens, inspire no regard for a Police Department which spoke to some of our citizens as ‘niggers.’ ” McClendon acknowledged that the Mayor had just ap¬ pointed a twelve-member interracial committee to help reduce racial frictions in Detroit. But he. was skeptical about what the committee might accomplish. For Detroit had set up such committees before, as far back as 1926, following the Dr. Sweet case. But city officials had done nothing about their recom¬ mendations. JTToday we have a new committee,” McClendon told the Mayor. “Its report can be written now. The question is whether you will do anything after you receive it.” ^Along with a number of other Detroiters—white and Negro —McClendon believed that no committee could help solve Detroit’s racial problems unless the city first laid bare the basic causes of the race riot. This exposure, they argued, could only be accomplished by a grand jury, which would have the au¬ thority to subpoena witnesses, the resources to conduct an intensive investigation, and the prestige to command atten¬ tion to its findings. A grand jury investigation had first been proposed June 23 by R. J. Thomas, then UAW president. The idea won the immediate support of the Free Press: “A special grand jury to investigate the riot is not only desirable; it is absolutely necessary,” the newspaper declared. “The first step to a cure of this hideous community disease is a complete diagnosis.” But opposition developed quickly. On June 25 Governor Kelly s fact-finding committee advised the Governor it saw no

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need for him to appoint a grand jury. A few days later, De¬ troit’s Common Council defeated a proposal by Councilman George C. Edwards, a twenty-eight-year-old former UAW organizer, to pass a resolution urging the Wayne County Cir¬ cuit Court to impanel a grand jury. The Council heeded the words of Commissioner Witherspoon, who argued: "No one has one shred of proof now that the riot was planned or in¬ spired. Possibly at some later date such evidence will develop and a grand jury could be called.” Grand jury supporters refused to give up. They insisted a grand jury was needed not only to probe the causes of the riot but also to find the killers of some of the riot victims. On July 26, with thirteen of the thirty-four riot deaths still unsolved, three members of the Mayor’s Interracial Committee called on Prosecutor Dowling to ask his support for a grand jury investigation. Dowling not only turned them down, he exploded with irritation. The target of the prosecutor’s wrath was one of the Inter¬ racial Committee’s Negro members, the Reverend George Ba¬ ber. The minister told Dowling that some Negroes had in¬ formation about the riot they would present only to a grand jury. "What do you do with this information, if you have no confidence in your government?” Dowling asked. "We turn it over to the NAACP,” Baber replied. Dowling jumped to his feet, Baber said, pounded the table and shouted. "Why do you turn it over to the NAACP? They were the biggest instigators of the race riot. If a grand jury were called, they would be the first indicted. You people have no confidence in the law enforcement agents, but turn your information over to a trouble-making organization like that.” Dowling later denied making the threat—after the NAACP threatened to sue him for libel. The NAACP also accused the prosecutor of "nonfeasance, misfeasance and malfeas¬ ance” and asserted: "Dowling’s intemperate outburst reveals one of the reasons for the riot—the miserable failure of law

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enforcement officials to do their job and their attempt to ex¬ cuse their dereliction by blaming trouble on those who have pleaded for years that laws be enforced.” The public name-calling stirred bitter feelings. The Reverend Horace White told the Interracial Committee: ‘‘I went down among the Negro people after those stories [about Dowling’s charges] came out. It was as if a bomb had been dropped. The situation is what it was just before June 21.” Mayor Jeffries was worried enough to ask the Common Coun¬ cil to petition the City’s Recorder’s Court system for a grand jury investigation of the riot. The Mayor said he didn’t believe a grand jury would actually learn anything more than con¬ ventional agencies could. Its value, he explained, would be mainly psychological, to still any public doubts that everything was being done to find the causes of the riot. The Council tabled the Mayor’s proposal until the Gover¬ nor’s fact-finding committee made its final report on the riot. Said Councilman William A. Comstock: “I don’t like the idea of continuing this controversy by creating a grand jury to keep it alive.” For all official purposes, the controversy ended August 11 when the Governor’s committee concluded that “the ordinary law enforcement and judicial agencies have thus far adequately and properly dealt with the law violators.” These agencies, of course, were headed by the committee members themselves— Witherspoon, Dowling, State Police Commissioner Olander, and Attorney General Rushton. The committee’s 8,500-word report placed most of the blame for the riot on Detroit’s Negroes. It described in great detail attacks by Little Willie Lyons and other Negroes on whites at Belle Isle June 20. The report said these attacks had “in¬ flamed smouldering racial tensions.” Even so, it stressed that the worst of the riot would have been avoided except for the episode at the Forest Club. Leo Tipton, a thirty-five-year-old Negro who ran the club checkroom, was named as the man

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who announced the drowning of a Negro mother and child, sending hundreds of Negroes storming into Hastings Street. The report cited Police Department statistics to show that “the Negroes in Detroit, who constitute less than 10 per cent of the population, commit more than 71 per cent of the major crimes.” As further evidence of Negro aggression, it presented summaries of numerous minor clashes between blacks and whites aboard buses and street cars in the months preceding the riot. “Irresponsible” Negro leaders and Negro newspapers were condemned for creating unrest in Paradise Valley. Negro news¬ papers emphasized that “the struggle for Negro equality at home is an integral part of the present world wide struggle for democracy,” the report complained. “Editorially and other¬ wise these papers repeatedly charge that there is no more democracy here than in Hitler’s Europe, or in Japan, and loudly proclaim that a victory over the Axis will be meaning¬ less unless there is a corresponding overthrow in this country of the forces which these papers charge prevent true racial equality. — “Perhaps most significant in precipitating racial tensions ex¬ isting in Detroit is the positive exhortation by many Negro leaders to be ‘militant’ in the struggle for racial equality,” the report concluded. “Such appeals unfortunately have been commonplace in the Negro newspapers; can it be doubted that they have played an important part in exciting the Negro people to the violence which resulted in Detroit on June 21?” The Free Press called the report a “whitewash” that was “largely drawn up by Police Commissioner Witherspoon, the apple-cheeked boy scout Mayor Jeffries placed in charge of the Police Department. . . . With Commissioner Witherspoon furnishing most of the evidence, it is hardly conceivable that he would suggest an investigation of himself and his Depart¬ ment.” But on August 19, when Jeffries again asked the Common

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Council to petition for a grand jury, he was again turned down. Further investigation of the riots was left to the "ordi¬ nary law enforcement and judicial agencies.” Of the 1,893 persons arrested during the riot and in the succeeding few days, 711 were soon released without facing any formal charge. Of the rest, 662 were charged with mis¬ demeanors and 520 with felonies, mainly carrying a con¬ cealed weapon, breaking and entering, and looting. Most of them were convicted and given a few months in the workhouse or a few years in prison. None of them received the attention given to Leo Tipton, when he was arrested six weeks after the riot and accused of stampeding the crowd at the Forest Club. Prosecutor Dowling called Tipton the "key figure” in the riot and a "chief inciter” of the violence. As Dowling explained it, the story Tipton told about the drowned mother and child was concocted by Little Willie Lyons. Lyons had rushed over to the club from Belle Isle, Dowling said, and persuaded Tipton to broadcast the story over the public address system. Tipton and Lyons were charged specifically with “rioting” and tried together. Their defense was handicapped by the fact that Tipton already had been virtually convicted by the Governor’s fact-finding committee. Then too, they faced an all-white jury; two Negro veniremen had been dismissed by the prosecution on grounds that they could not give an im¬ partial verdict. More than a score of Negroes who had been in the Forest Club on June 20 testified for the prosecution. Most said they had heard the fateful announcement, although only a few could positively identify Tipton as the man who made it. The prosecution built its case against Lyons on testimony that he had been seeking revenge because white youths had chased him out of Eastwood Amusement Park before the riot. Said Assistant Prosecutor Edward Elsarelli: “Little Willie is respon¬ sible for the darkest day in Detroit’s long history, just because he was paying off a grudge.”

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To embarrass the prosecution, the defense brought out that Tipton was one of the 200 Negroes called in as auxiliary police during the riot and had even received a mimeographed let¬ ter from the Police Department thanking him for his help. In explanation, Commissioner Witherspoon testified that al¬ though he knew some of the auxiliary police “might not be of good character,” he preferred to have them with the police, rather than against them. The defense also pointed out that a Negro youth named Fred McClellan, who testified against Lyons, had been com¬ mitted to Wayne County Training School for several months in 1942 because he was feeble-minded. Another prosecution witness was under probation on a charge of statutory rape. This was not enough to sway the jury, however. Both Lyons and Tipton were convicted October 22 and given the maximum sentences—four to five years in prison. In the next few months, Prosecutor Dowling concentrated on trying to clear up two unsolved riot murders. On January 28, 1944, Aldo Trani, seventeen, was convicted of shooting Moses Kiska while Trani and two other white youths were driving through the East Side. Trani was sentenced to 5J4 to 15 years in prison for conspiracy to commit manslaughter; his two companions drew shorter sentences. A few weeks later, Aaron Fox, an eighteen-year-old Negro, was convicted of stoning to death Dr. Joseph De Horatiis in Paradise Valley. Fred McClellan, the feeble-minded youth who testified against Little Willie Lyons, also testified against Fox. Fox was sentenced to 7^ to 25 years in prison for seconddegree murder. Much of the evidence against both Trani and Fox had been gathered by the same man. Detective Sergeant Charles Buckholdt of the homicide squad, a fact that was to have consid¬ erable bearing on the fate of both convicts. After two years in prison, Fox won acquittal at a new trial when a key witness testified Fox was not even on the street while Dr. De Horatiis was attacked. Recorder’s Judge Joseph A. Gillis charged that

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Buckholdt had known about this witness during the first trial but had ignored him. Fox’s acquittal paved the way for a new trial for Trani. At his first trial, Trani had testified that Buckholdt and his part¬ ner, Sergeant Delbert Raymond, had pressured him into mak¬ ing a false confession. The detectives had outlined their the¬ ory of the killing and urged Trani “to tell the prosecutor all that.” Otherwise, Trani testified, he was warned he would be left in the Juvenile Detention Home, which was packed with Negro prisoners. “I would not want to be in your shoes when those colored fellows in Juvenile find out what you did,” Trani said Raymond told him. After Fox’s retrial, Trani’s lawyers argued there was now good reason to question the tactics used by Detective Buck¬ holdt to get convictions and Wayne County Circuit Judge Sherman D. Callender agreed. “I think opportunity should be given to work out an adjudication in this case comparable to that worked out in the Fox case,” the Judge declared. He added that “such opportunity should be given to all persons sentenced under the riotous conditions that existed two years ago.” Trani eventually was granted the right to a new trial, but by then his two co-defendants had completed their sentences and were serving overseas with the Army. A new trial seemed impractical, so in January 1947, three years after the original conviction, the prosecution agreed to dismiss the charges. The outcome of these cases reflected the manner in which the entire race riot had been investigated. In its eagerness to turn its back on June 21, 1943, Detroit made only a hasty attempt to solve the killings that marked that day or to find the reasons for the violence. It is far too late, more than twenty years after the fact, to determine exactly how all the riot vic¬ tims died. But it is still possible to try to understand why.

‘MR. ROOSEVELT REGRETS. . .’ In its investigation of the Detroit race riot, the Governor’s fact-finding committee found exactly what it was looking for —evidence that Negroes were to blame for the riot. But the committee left much ground uncovered and many questions unanswered. Its report dwelled on the activities of Negro hood¬ lums, but barely mentioned the white gangs which roamed along Woodward Avenue. It pointed out the high Negro crime rate so that it “may receive the public attention and construc¬ tive social measures it deserves,” but it offered no hint of what these measures should be. Striking back at Negro leaders who criticized the way the riot had been handled and investigated, the committee con¬ tended that “militant” appeals for racial equality had roused the Negro masses to violence. The charge was unfair and un¬ reasonable. In their drive for racial equality, Negro leaders relied not on violence but on law. For they were convinced of the justice of their cause and, besides, they well knew that if they resorted to force they would soon be crushed. The revolt of Paradise Valley was not a civil rights dem¬ onstration. Rather it was the black man’s ugly reaction to the frustrations of living in a white man’s world.