Housing: Part VIII of the Black Conquest of Detroit (Classic Detroit News Propaganda Series)

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

Housing
Realtors’ tactics shaped exodus
By Cameron McWhirter / The Detroit News

DETROIT — Detroit in the 1950s, crowded and cramped as never before or since, became a disordered chess game fueled by racial anxiety, controlled by a small group of white real estate agents and unchecked by government.

Block by block, the city turned quickly from white to black — whenever white real-estate agents decided that it was time — and the suburbs began to develop homes by the thousands for whites moving up and out for good.

Blacks often found the least resistance to purchasing housing or renting from Jews. The victims of prejudice themselves, many Jews were more open to dealing with blacks than other whites. So as the Jewish population moved through the city, out from Hasting Street to the North End, then west through the city and out into the suburbs, blacks followed.

Since the dawn of the 20th century, when blacks from the South began coming to Detroit to work, racial tensions had developed over where they would live. Since the 1920s, whites on some blocks had organized community associations geared toward keeping blacks out.

In 1925, a black doctor named Ossian Sweet and his family moved onto a white street on the east side and were promptly harassed and the house pelted with rocks. After one such assault, Sweet and his family had opened fire on a crowd, killing one man.

In the high-profile murder trial that followed, Sweet and his relatives were found not guilty. But the trial’s publicity exacerbated racial tensions.

In the 1940s, hundreds of thousands more blacks came to Detroit to fill armament-industry jobs. In 1943, riots caused to a great extent by housing tensions led to the deaths of 34 people.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued a postmortem report on the riot, blaming unfair housing practices by whites against blacks. But little was done in the years following to resolve the housing crisis.

Blacks continued to pour into Detroit after the war. Pay was good in manufacturing jobs. And the automobile industry, thanks in part to black activists working to integrate the United Auto Workers, treated blacks more equitably than many other industries.

Black activists such as the youthful pastor C.L. Franklin raised issues about segregation of schools, hospitals and housing.

But few white leaders paid attention. Albert Cobo, the conservative Republican mayor of the city from 1950-57, believed in an unrestrained real-estate market.