The Great Migration North to Detroit

In what was the largest internal migration of any group in American history, the Great Migration saw six million African Americans migrating from the South to the North drawn by improved economic opportunities and hopes of a better life. Black Americans were also escaping segregation and discriminatory "Jim Crow" laws in the South.

Another factor for the diaspora was the release of the movie Birth of a Nation in 1915 which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as a heroic force protecting the purity of white womanhood against sexually aggressive freed slaves after the Civil War. The D.W. Griffith film opened to nationwide protests and demonstrations.

"Birth of a Nation" still. The Black man was played by a white actor in blackface.

 

After a private screening, President Woodrow Wilson released a public statement calling the film "Unfortunate." With the film's general release, the South experienced a resurgence of KKK domestic terrorism driving more black Americans North. Most of the migrants were unskilled laborers and service industry workers--not rural farm workers.

From 1910 through 1929, Detroit experienced the fastest growing African American population in the United States--a 611% increase. During the same period, New York City had a 66% increase and Chicago had a 148% increase. Blacks settled primarily on Detroit's lower east side in minority isolated neighborhood called Black Bottom--originally named by the French for the dark, fertile soil found there. The area adjacent to Black Bottom became Paradise Valley--famous for its jazz clubs.

Black migrants found fierce competition for living space in Detroit's worst neighborhoods which became segregated slums. Living conditions in Paradise Valley and Black Bottom were bleak with the oldest wooden dwellings in the city--many dating back to the 1860s. Fire was a constant hazard. The buildings were owned by white absentee landlords and were poorly maintained. Old hotels and row houses were subdivided into small apartments and boarding houses to increase profits--many without plumbing facilities.

Thinking they had left "Jim Crow" laws enshrining segregation and racism behind, blacks found that in Detroit they were confined to "red lined" neighborhoods backed by real estate covenants preventing them from moving into Detroit's established white neighborhoods or suburbs. Blacks found that racial discrimination and white supremacy were entrenched in the North just as they were in the South.

But there was a significant distinction between the North and the South for blacks in this era. In the South, white people didn't mind living in proximity with blacks. The plantation culture depended upon it. But white people didn't want to work next to blacks. The North was the opposite. White people tolerated working with blacks, but they didn't want black people in their neighborhoods.

The assembly line

Early on, black women overwhelmingly worked in domestic service jobs. Eventually, clerk positions opened up in the retail industry for them. Black men worked in the service industry at hotels, restaurants, passenger trains, and public works. The jobs paid little, offered no fringe benefits, and provided no chance for advancement. Labor shortages during World War One opened up good jobs in shipyards, foundries, steel mills, auto factories, and meat packing. Unskilled black laborers took the most undesirable and dangerous jobs wherever they were employed.

Henry Ford

When Henry Ford announced the Five-Dollar Day in 1914, he also ramped up the hiring of blacks to fill vacancies in the Highland Park Plant. Employee turnover was a problem, and black workers were willing do jobs others would not. This set many black workers on the road to modernity. Beginning in the 1920s, Dodge and Packard began recruiting black workers too.

With improved economic conditions, a black inner city culture developed catering to the needs of African Americans. Churches, markets, bakeries, barber shops, hotels, beauty parlors, clinics, jazz clubs, and adult entertainment developed. But every white and black Detroiter knew where the color lines were and woe to him that crossed them.

The high cost for African Americans penetrating the color line in Detroit is exemplified by the Dr. Ossian Sweet affair in 1925. As a youth in Bartow, Florida, Ossian witnessed the lynching of a black man in 1911. The angry white mob strung up the man while he pleaded for his life. The vigilantes doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. The crowd cheered when the flames enveloped him. Traumatized, the Sweet family moved to Detroit as part of the Great Migration. 

Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife Gladys

 

Ossian Sweet managed to secure an education and attend medical school at Wilberforce Academy in Ohio. Between semesters he worked in Detroit as a bellhop at several hotels--one summer he was a vendor at Bob-Lo Island Amusement Park. Dr. Sweet and his family were part of a new demographic--upwardly mobile, black Americans. As a young doctor at Dunbar Memorial Hospital, Sweet wanted to escape the confines and squalor of Detroit's minority-isolated inner city. Dr. Sweet bought a home on Detroit's east side in an all-white, working-class neighborhood.

When word spread of the purchase, whites viewed the incursion into their neighborhood as a violation of their "sacred" real estate covenant. The day the Sweet's moved in, a mob of "neighbors" assembled outside their home on September 8th, 1925 and cursed them with racial slurs. On the second day, the crowd grew to several hundred angry whites. Dr. Sweet and his family were joined by Sweet's two brothers and seven other friends--no doubt for a house warming get-together and a show of moral support. The hostile mob surrounded the house and started throwing rocks and bricks through the windows.

The sound of shattering glass terrorized the group and prompted Ossian's brother Henry to fire two shots at the mob--the first above their heads and the second into the crowd. Leon Breiner took a bullet and died. The Detroit police were conspicuous by their absence until the call went out that a white man had been shot by a black man. Everyone in the Sweet home was arrested, taken to jail, and tried for conspiracy to murder.

Clarence Darrow

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) retained the best lawyer in the land--Chicago civil liberties attorney Clarence Darrow. The first trial lasted four weeks and ended in a mistrial. The second trial focused only on Henry Sweet--the shooter. The prosecution pushed for a murder charge, but the defense insisted that a man's home was his castle, and he had every right to defend it. Henry Sweet was acquitted.

The Sweet trials were a referendum on race relations and segregation in Detroit ushering in a new era of political activism. But the graphic incident showed the risk of violating the city's red-lined neighborhoods. When it became clear to whites that black people were breaching their segregated neighborhoods, growing numbers of white Detroiters began to relocate to the expanding suburbs north, south, and west of the city in a demographic shift known as white flight.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Great Migration slowed during the Depression but picked up again with the coming of World War Two. The Selective Service took many white and black males out of the work force to serve in the military. The war represented a turning point in black employment prospects. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order #8802 creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) mandating nondiscrimination in defense industries and government jobs. Industrial work began to eclipse service employment for black men. By the end of the war, African Americans held 8% of defense jobs, up from 3% before the war. Despite the gains for black men, black women were still relegated to domestic work and low wages.

The United States Congress debated making the FEPC permanent, but Southern legislators cut off funding and shut down the program in 1946. It took another twenty years before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established to address many of the same issues.

World War II helped transform Detroit's social geography. Several distinct black communities emerged based on income, occupation, and status within black Detroit. Many African Americans fortunate enough to flee the crowded city center left as soon as they could; the rest were left behind to bear the brunt of being trapped in the city's worst housing. Detroit's shifting racial borderlands became battlegrounds for the future of the city. This racial frontier put blacks on a collision course with their white counterparts.

"Detroit Lost Neighborhoods: Black Bottom and Paradise Valley"
https://fornology.blogspot.com/2016/01/detroits-lost-neighborhoods-black.html

Zug Island Novel Gets Facelift

July 2017 marked fifty years since the Detroit Riot left its indelible mark on American history. Anyone who experienced this week of bloodshed and arson can never forget it--43 reported deaths, 7,000 arrests, 4,000 injuries, 2,500 buildings looted or burned to the ground, 5,000 residents left homeless, 16,682 fire runs, and a river of fire ten blocks long.

Zug Island: A Detroit Riot Novel tells the story of two young men, one white and one black, who push the boundaries of race as they explore each others culture. Set in 1967 against a backdrop of industrial blight and urban decay, Jake Malone and Theo Semple get a crash course in race relations as they stumble in and out of rhythm on Detroit's mean streets discovering the face of racism comes in every shade of color.
 
Kirkus Reviews, a publishing trade magazine, said of Zug Island, "The novel is tightly written with a dramatic plot, well-rounded characters, and clear insights into social history. An engaging, dynamic story that grapples intelligently with the themes of race, class, and morality."

My award-winning, revised 2nd edition has a new cover and includes several enhanced scenes. Since writing Zug Island in 2011, I've learned more about the Detroit communities of Delray, Black Bottom, and Paradise Valley, and this edition reflects that. Also new is a segment on the Algiers Motel murders conspicuous by its absence from my first edition. 

Paperback copies and all five ebook formats are available online from Amazon and B&N. Zug Island Amazon Site

"Kosher Nostra"--Detroit's Purple Gang Origins

Russian immigrants waiting on Ellis Island.

Detroit's slums were the breeding ground for crime and violence when waves of European immigrants settled in the city between 1881 and 1914. The Purple Gang members were second-generation Jewish-Americans of Russian and Polish descent. Their Hastings Street neighborhood was on Detroit's Lower East Side known as Black Bottom. These young men were born into poverty and received little education barring them from desirable jobs. Mob life offered them everything but respectability.

Street punks waiting for some action.

Before they were known as the Purple Gang, they were part of a neighborhood mob of delinquent youths who became thieves, pickpockets, and shakedown artists primarily in the Eastern Market area just north of their home turf. Under the mentorship of older neighborhood gangsters--Charles Leiter and Henry Shorr--the Purples began to commit armed robbery, hijacking, bootlegging, loan sharking, kidnapping, extortion, and murder for hire. Soon, gang members ran gambling rings, speakeasies, and a numbers racket (lottery) among Detroit's black population.

Purple Gang members avoiding a press photograph at the 13th Precinct police station.

The Purple Gang was exceptionally violent and ruled the Detroit underworld from 1927 until 1935. Authorities estimate that the gang murdered over 500 members of rival bootlegging gangs during Detroit's bloody turf wars. They were virtually immune to police interference because of payoffs to city officials and local beat cops. When known Purple Gang associates were arrested, witnesses were terrified to testify against them.

The Purples came about through the merging of two groups--Oakland County's Sugar House Gang led by Leiter and Shorr, and a mob of Jewish street hoods led at that time by nineteen-year-old Sammy Coen, who assumed the alias Sammy Purple. Detroit detective Henry Gavin claimed the gang was named after Sammy. Once the police tagged the group as the Purple Gang, the press took up the drum beat. Gang members hated the label. There are several urban legends about how the gang's name came about, but Henry Gavin's explanation is the most credible.

Canadian liquor being smuggled on the Detroit River.

The gang grew into manhood with the emergence of Prohibition. Three years before the Volstead Act and national Prohibition became the law of the land, Michigan passed the Damon Act in 1917 prohibiting the sale of liquor within the state. Henry Ford supported and financed the movement because he wanted a sober workforce, but the Damon Act was declared unconstitutional in 1919.

By the time the whole country entered Prohibition with the Volstead Act in 1920, Detroit was already a haven for bootleggers and hijackers of Canadian liquor shipments. Detroit was the gateway for the illegal distribution of alcohol to larger cities like New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. By the mid-1920s, Detroit was home to an estimated 25,000 illegal drinking establishments called speakeasies which were full-service bars. For people who couldn't afford cafe society, blind pigs developed which sold liquor by the shot in private homes and after-hour businesses.

Legend has it that a church in Walkerville, Ontario installed a neon cross on their steeple to signal bootleggers that a shipment of booze was coming across. The neon beacon could be seen through the fog which was when the boats would leave. Pint bottles were developed so they would sink in case bootleggers had to ditch them in the Detroit River. Fifth-sized bottles would often wash up along the shoreline.

The four Kaminski brothers grew up in Delray on Thaddeus Street. They would hang out along the river and watch the rumrunners try to outrun the Coast Guard. If a shipment was in danger of being seized, the "Little Jewish Navy"--as they were called--would throw the booze overboard to ditch the evidence. The brothers knew the river currents and would dive in to retrieve as much product as possible--then sell it. Seems like virtually everyone in Detroit was in the liquor business.

Boats were used on the water, and trucks were used on the ice to transport booze.

Seventy-five percent of the liquor smuggled into the United States during Prohibition passed through Detroit. The Purple Gang's liquor, gambling, and drug trade netted the gang hundreds of millions of dollars annually providing the "grease" to make hefty payouts to city officials and police who agreed to look the other way. Turf wars were inevitable, and it wasn't long before Detroit streets ran with the blood of would-be rivals. The Purples became overextended and began to import hoods from New York and St. Louis to work as "muscle" for the gang.

Unlike the Italian-American gangs who pioneered organized crime, the Purples were a loosely structured gang with shifting allegiances that came together and drifted apart when the need arose. After Sammy Purple's leadership, Raymond Bernstein ruled the gang until his murder conviction. Ray's soft-spoken brother Abe became the boss thereafter.

Author Robert A. Rockaway wrote in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies (2001), "Italian gangsters tended to involve (cross-generational) family members in their criminal activities. With the Jews, it was that one generation, the children of immigrants, and it ended with them." As a postscript, the Purple Gang reigned over Detroit's underworld for only five years. Most of the gang were either gunned down or died in prison.

My next post will cover the rise and fall of the Purples in Detroit.

*** 

Part Two: https://fornology.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-rise-and-fall-of-detroits-purple.html 

Detroit's Lost Neighborhoods--Black Bottom and Paradise Valley

If suburban Detroit residents were asked what they know about Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, most of them would be clueless. Both of these African-American neighborhoods were paved over in the early 1960s in the name of urban renewal. Rather than upgrade housing and services in those established neighborhoods, city fathers--in league with the Federal Highway Commission--cut an unnecessary 1.06 mile long swatch for Interstate 375 through the heart of these black neighborhoods. The Walter P. Chrysler Freeway is the shortest stretch of Interstate in the state of Michigan.

The Savoyard River ran through the area known as Black Bottom (Fond Noir). The fertile land was named by the original eighteenth century French land grant owners. The area was notable for its dark, rich topsoil. In 1827, the river became part of the Detroit sewer system and was bricked over, covered with fill dirt, and built over. The place name initially carried no racial connotation.

In the twentieth century, Hastings and Antoine Streets were the commercial backbone of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. After World War I, the established Jewish community began to vacate the area moving west and north of downtown Detroit. Blacks migrating from the South seeking opportunity and factory jobs moved into the aging and inexpensive neighborhood along Hastings Street. In time, African-American entrepreneurs moved into vacated businesses and opened doctors' offices, churches, infirmaries, bakeries, grocery stores, clothing stores, barber shops, beauty salons, bowling alleys, restaurants and hotels serving a vibrant, self-contained, segregated community.

The red-line boundaries for the racially isolated community were east of Brush Street, west of the Grand Trunk railroad tracks, south of Gratiot Avenue, and north from the Detroit River. In 1919, jazz composer and musician Jelly Roll Morton named the "Black Bottom Stomp" after the area. Soon, the Black Bottom dance overtook the Charleston in popularity during the 1920s.


Paradise Valley began north of Gratiot Avenue to Grand Boulevard. This area was the entertainment zone for Detroit's blues and jazz music scene from the 1930s through the 1950s. It was also the center of African-American social life with places like the Horseshoe Lounge, Club Plantation, Club 666, and The Paradise Theater.

The likes of Ethel Waters, Pearl Bailey, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Della Reese, and Red Fox were among Paradise Valley's long list of headliners. Traveling African-American performers loved playing Detroit because they could stay at the Gotham Hotel--one of the only first-class hotels in America that served the black community.

Gambling was big business through the Great Lakes Mutual Numbers House and the Frog Club. Whites and blacks mixed comfortably in Paradise Valley until the 1943 race riots. After that, it was rare to see whites venturing into the area--except to cruise for female companionship.

With the passage of the Federal Interstate Highway Act of 1956, the die was cast for the demolition of a long list of urban communities across the country. In Detroit, over 3,500 dwellings and 300 black-owned businesses were condemned and bulldozed tearing apart the social fabric of the community. The Chrysler Freeway opened in June of 1964 paving over Hastings Street and destroying the culture of its inhabitants. Today, Ford Field and Comerica Park stand where once a thriving community lived.

The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) announced in 2013 it is considering a plan by urban planners to remove I-375. Research data shows the I-75 spur is underutilized and could be replaced with a boulevard to make the area more pedestrian and neighborhood friendly.

The unspoken truth is downtown Detroit real estate is just too valuable and begs for redevelopment. This MDOT pronouncement comes sixty years too late for people who remember Black Bottom and Paradise Valley back in the day.

Victoria Spivey and "The Detroit Moan" (1936): https://youtu.be/pKGuHCWWYU0