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

Detroit's Griot of Griswold Street--Larry Mongo--on The Blue Vein Society

In a hidden pocket--a couple of blocks up and over from Grand Circus Park in downtown Detroit--Cafe D'Mongo's Speakeasy is tucked within a very short block. Owner Larry Mongo bought the business in June of 1987 from the Greek Seros family. Their specialty was chili con carne. At one time, the building was an old-fashioned soda pop shop.

 

Larry's son Jerome turned the building into an afterhours club called the Wax Fruit Rhythm Cafe where Detroit rappers performed until it closed in 1993. Larry and his wife renamed the business Cafe D'Mongo's. The "D" represents his wife Dianne.

 

There is a low counter top and stationary stools bolted to the floor and four booths across from them. Behind the booths is a wall separating an area with upholstered chairs and a few small tables facing a grand piano where the Speakeasy's house band Carl and Company--led by Carl, the Human Jukebox--performs after 8:00 PM on Friday and Saturday nights. The bar is open from 5:00 PM until closing.

There is no better way to describe D'Mongo's Speakeasy than an authentic Detroit dive. The interior decoration looks like a museum of Detroit memorabilia. Its walls are loaded with photos that harken to Detroit's past, mixed with vintage photos of the Mongo family from the 1920s onward. Adorning several spots on the walls are original portraits of American jazz artists painted by longtime docuartist DeVon Cunningham. Many celebrities have made the pilgrimage to D'Mongo's--movie director Quentin Tarantino for one and actor Ryan Gosling for another.

Larry Mongo and Quentin Tarantino

Larry invited my Terror In Ypsilanti researcher Ryan M. Place and me to attend a taping at Cafe D'Mongo's Speakeasy for a program called Ten Best Bars In America for Esquire magazine. The joint was packed with the new face of Detroit--a mixture of young, upwardly mobile Detroiters. 

***

The Mongo family has had a long and fabled history in Detroit since the first four Mongo men left South Carolina in 1906 to avoid the long arm of the law. One of them was wanted to murder. During prohibition, the Mongo family worked with Detroit's Purple Gang, so they could safely operate a chain of fish markets in the Detroit area which the gang used to launder their bootlegging, extortion, and gambling profits. This relationship gave that generation of Mongos a certain level of power and respect on the street.

In more recent Detroit history, Larry and his younger brother Adolph have been political advisers to Black mayors from Coleman Young--Detroit's first Black mayor--to Kwame Kilpatrick. When things went terribly wrong in the Kilpatrick administration, the Mongo's wisely took a step backwards to disassociate themselves from the bad publicity.

One afternoon, I was able to meet and talk with Larry Mongo about the issue of race which has dominated Detroit politics for the last fifty years. Being an Ofay--derisive Black term for a White person--I was not aware of something which contemporary social scientists have labeled pigmentocracy. Within the American Black population at the turn of the twentieth-century until the mid-1960s, wealth and status of African Americans were tied to the shade of skin color--the lighter, the better.

"There was an interracial caste system in the Black community where dark skinned blacks were looked down upon by lighter skinned blacks as being genetically inferior," Larry Mongo explained. "There was something called The Blue Vein Society where a person had to show his or her forearm to look for a dark blue vein to determine if the person was mixed race or not.

"Inner racism was worse at times than outer racism. We classified ourselves by shade of color or how much African blood you had. You might be described as an octoroon--a person of one-eighth African blood--or a mulatto--bi-racial--or somewhere in between."

President Johnson and Martin Luther King at signing of the 1964 Civil Rights bill.

I asked Larry Mongo about the impact of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on Detroit's Black community. "After the Civil Rights Act--passed by Lyndon Johnson's administration--everything changed in the Black community and neighborhoods," Larry explained.

"Don't get me wrong, things were never perfect back then, but everyone knew their place and the color lines were clearly drawn. Cross them and you did so at your own risk. That was in the heyday of the Jim Crow--separate but equal--laws.

"All manner of Black businesses catered to Black neighborhoods and things usually went okay. Everyone was getting by. When the Jim Crow laws were repealed and the Civil Rights Act was passed into law, more affluent Blacks could spent their money in White establishments like hotels and restaurants which had been off limits before.

Patterns of segregation--previously enforced by red-lining and real estate covenants--became illegal and drew successful middle-class Blacks out of the ghettos into outlying areas. This migration drew valuable resources away from the Black neighborhoods.

"Many Black businesses were mom-and-pop operations in neighborhoods that could no longer support them. These
neighborhoods went into further decline struggling to survive. Then in the sweltering heat of July 23rd, 1967--all hell broke loose on 12th Street--Detroit started to burn. 

"When (Antoine) Cadillac came here in 1701, it took 250 years to build up Detroit. This city has rotted from the inside out. Detroit needs a new economy--then business growth will begin to feed everything else. The city will survive only by creating wealth and decent jobs to help our residents pull themselves out of poverty and despair. More of our young people need to go to school rather than jail. They need to go to the library instead of the street corner. Now that will be a real revolution."

***

After my visit with Larry Mongo, I decided to Google the Blue Vein Society to learn more about it. From there, my research led me to several other culturally historic facts about the Black community in the first half of the twentieth-century.

The phrase Blue Vein Society originated at the end of the nineteenth-century, according to American author Charles W. Chesnutt in 1898. "This is a group which limited its membership to blue veins--light-skinned Black people White enough to show blue veins on their forearms.

"At the turn of the century, there were many American cities with Blue Vein Societies representing the miniscule Black upper and upper-middle classes. The Negro Blue Vein Society mimicked the white patrician Blue Blood Societies. Their primary purpose was to sponsor balls and galas as meeting places for eligible blue veined youth."

The Creoles in Louisiana formed almost a separate class of black American because they tended to be better educated with lighter skin--the children of more generations of co-mingling with European Whites--especially the French and Spanish.

Another phenomenon of Black cultural pigmentocracy--a carry over from the nineteenth century--was the paper bag test which originated in New Orleans. A brown paper bag would be attached to the entrance of a party or event, and anyone darker than the paper bag was denied admittance. This test was said to have been used in many churches, fraternities, and nightclubs.

Michael Eric Dyson

American author Michael Eric Dyson wrote, "The brown paper bag test is a metaphor for how the Black cultural elite literally established a caste system along color lines within the black community. This is one of the ways Blacks with European ancestry attempted to isolate and distinguish themselves from those who are mostly African."

My research also revealed some other labels still used within the black community. A redbone describes light coppery or caramel-colored skin with red overtones in the hair, sometimes with freckles and sometimes not. A yellowbone--also called high yellow--is slang for light-skinned Black females who could often pass as a White person.

 

Remember, this was the world before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In an attempt to secure a better life in segregated America, many light-skinned, mixed-race Blacks crossed the color line as reborn descendants of European ancestry and never looked back.

The history of mankind is rife with examples of one group who perceives itself as superior foisting itself upon another group who is perceived as inferior. This oppression takes many forms but always ends up the same way with someone being discriminated against.