The Spirit of Detroit, The Fist, and Detroit Time Capsule

History is fascinating in what it shows and tells and what it does not. My newest nonfiction book is a collection of seventy-five of my best Detroit blog posts called Detroit Time Capsule, which will be coming out this fall. Each chapter tells the story of some of the people who left their mark on Detroit history or its culture.

For the front cover, I chose a visually striking closeup view of The Spirit of Detroit by gifted Detroit photographer Chris Ahern. Searching for information about the building of the sixteen foot bronze statue and its dedication on September 23, 1958, I came across this color film I have linked below that tells the whole story.

To present a broader view of who and what the City of Detroit represents, the back cover photo will be a black & white closeup photo by Chris Ahern of Joe Louis' fist. I am anxious to see what my bookcover designer comes up with.

The Creation and Placement of The Spirit of Detroit 1958

Monument to Joe Louis "The Fist" 1985

The Fleisher Brothers--Louis: Unlucky or Stupid? (Part 1 of 2)

Alcatraz--the Rock.

Two bonus posts to supplement The Elusive Purple Gang: Detroit's Kosher Nostra. The Fleisher brothers, Harry, Louis, and Sam struck out on their own after the Purple Gang imploded. Part two is linked below.

 

Despite Abe Burnstein disbanding the Purple Gang in 1935, former members Harry and Louis Fleisher were directly responsible for keeping the defunct gang's name in the local press from the late 1930s through Harry's death in 1978. Those boys couldn't stay out of trouble. Every time their names appeared in the press--and there are hundreds of citations--the tags "former Purple Gang members," "alleged Purple Gang members," or "Purple Gang leaders" preceded their names.The Fleisher brothers may hold the record for the most family members to do hard time on the Rock--Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary off the coast of San Francisco.

Harry, Louis, and Sammy grew up in the same Paradise Valley neighborhood as the Burnstein brothers and other tough street kids who eventually coalesced into the Purple Gang. They learned their street smarts by preying on handcart operators at the Eastern Market and harassing shop owners on Hastings Street with petty crime and vandalism.

Harry Fleisher began his underworld career as a driver and bodyguard for Oakland Sugar House Gang leader Charles Leiter in the 1920s. Harry was a trigger man and shakedown artist of legal and illegal businesses like speakeasies and disorderly houses (brothels). For unknown reasons, Harry interacted as little as possible with younger brother Louis.

Louis began his professional crime career as a trigger man, a labor "organizer," and a hijacker for the Sugar House Gang. When the Sugar House Gang suffered a devastating bust of their leadership in the late 1920s, Louis gravitated to the Purple Gang.

When Louis was only twenty-two years old, he was the first of the three Fleisher brothers to serve hard time. Lou Jr.'s day job was helping his father Lou Sr. run an auto junkyard. Their side-job was retrofitting touring cars with hidden compartments for smuggling illegal liquor or concealing guns.

Louis Fleisher mug shot--1927.

In 1927, Louis and three other men hijacked a semi-truck in Flat Rock, Michigan, loaded with 400 new automobile tires bound for Detroit from Akron, Ohio. A green Studebaker sedan swept in front of the semi blocking it at a stop sign. Four men jumped out of the car with shotguns and machine guns commanding the drivers to get out of the truck. They were bound and shoved into the back seat of the Studebaker.

Two of the hijackers took the truck and the other two drove off with their captives. The bound men noticed there was some chrome trim damage on the passenger side of the car. One of them took the added precaution of spitting on the rear window to mark the car as the one they were abducted in. The truck drivers were released unharmed twelve hours later. The empty semi-truck was found two days later, and the green Studebaker with the faulty trim was tracked down shortly after that. The car's serial number revealed the owner to be Louis Fleisher.

Louis was located and arrested, but he refused to identify the other hijackers he was working with. After an initial plea of "not guilty," Louis changed his plea to "guilty," reasoning that he was safer in prison than on Detroit's streets. If he took the rap and served his time, he would prove himself to be a stand up guy and survive. If he was released on bail, he would be considered a risk to the gang and sooner than later he would be found dead on a city street someplace. A federal judge sentenced Louis to ten years at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He served a minimum sentence of six years and three months before being paroled for good behavior.

Sam Burnstein

Nine months after being paroled, Louis went into business with former Purple Gang speakeasy operator Sam "Fatty" Burnstein--not blood-related to the Burnstein brothers--reputed leaders of the Purples. Sam and Louis were brothers-in-law; Sam's sister Nellie was Louis's wife. Fleisher and Burnstein opened a scrap metal and auto junkyard in the autumn of 1935 far from Detroit in Albion, Michigan. The business was named Riverside Iron and Metal Company. Both men needed to demonstrate to their parole boards that they had gone "straight" and had a steady source of income.

These guys must have loved crime because their junkyard was a front for a safe cracking operation in central Michigan. The parolees went into a partnership with the Lizard Gang--a Hamtramck burglary ring. A nine-month crime spree ensued.

Louis used his mechanical, fabrication, and body shop skills to convert a 1935 Graham Paige sedan into a rolling fortress.The Graham Paige was stolen from a Dodge dealership in Ferndale, Michigan. This particular car was desirable because it was wider than other makes and was equipped with an eight-cylinder Blue Streak supercharged engine that could reach speeds of 100 mph. The car was bulletproofed, the passenger side doors were retrofitted to open extra wide, and a ramp was welded to the undercarriage which rolled out to load stolen safes quickly.



The Michigan State Police were baffled. Fifty businesses had been burglarized over a vast section of central Lower Michigan. Robberies occurred in Battle Creek, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Jackson, and Ionia. The burglary team stole safes from businesses and either blew their doors off with nitroglycerin or took the safes to the junkyard and burned off the combination locks with an acetylene torch.

On May 11, 1936 at 2:30 a.m., night clerk Jack Kane at the Capital Hotel next door to the Isabell Seed Company in Jackson, Michigan, heard men struggling to load the company's 500 pound safe through the side doors of the Graham Paige sedan. The burglary was reported to the State Police, but troopers were too slow on the scene to make an arrest or give chase. Then on May 30th, a local Albion resident reported to state police that a suspicious Graham Paige sedan was being stored in a barn across from the junkyard in Albion.

Officers from the Michigan State Police and the Albion Police Department descended upon the barn, broke in, and found the car with its left side strafed with bullets. The police also discovered two sets of stolen license plates, weapons, and burglary tools. Nitroglycerin, blasting caps, and fifteen feet of wire were concealed in the side panels of the car. State Police quickly arrested Fleisher and Burnstein along with their wives. Two junkyard employees were also brought in for questioning but later released for lack of evidence. After a brief investigation, Louis and Sam were indicted and posted bonds of $5,000 apiece. While awaiting trial, Louis jumped bail and remained at large for a year.

On the night of April 8, 1938, Louis Fleisher's car was pulled over by the Highland Park police. His wife Nellie tossed a .38 calibre automatic pistol out the passenger window which police soon found. A clumsy attempt had been made to etch out the gun's serial number. Louis and Nellie were arrested with a twenty-two-year-old man who gave his name as Jack Sherwood but was soon found to be Sid Markham--a first-degree murder fugitive from Brooklyn, New York. Markham was extradited to New York where he was convicted and sent to the electric chair in Sing Sing Correctional Facility on January 18, 1940.

Samples of weapons found in Fleisher apartment.

 

Louis and Nellie's arrests led to a search of their Highland Park apartment where police found what they described to reporters as "the largest underworld arsenal ever found in the Midwest." The unregistered arsenal was neatly packed in a trunk containing submachine guns, automatic pistols, revolvers with silencers, brass knuckles, tear gas shells, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

The Fleishers were held in Milan Detention Farm under a $50,000 bond each. On April 7, 1939, Louis Fleisher was sentenced to thirty years in Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary; Nellie received ten years in a Federal detention home. After serving nineteen years of his original sentence, Louis was released for good behavior from Alcatraz at the age of forty-one.

As a moth is drawn to a flame, so was Louis drawn to crime. On midnight Sunday, October 26, 1958, Fleisher and partner in crime Joe Anielak were caught red-handed trying to torch Dorsey's Cleaners on East Seven Mile Road. Anielak climbed on the roof with a length of rope. He threw one end down to Fleisher who attached a five-gallon gas can to the rope and Anielak pulled it up. They did this twice.

Little did the pair know they were under police surveillance on the ground and hidden on the roof tops of adjoining buildings. Anielak drilled several holes in the roof with a brace and bit auger. He inserted a funnel and was about to pour gas through the hole when police scout cars turned their floodlights on the roof. Anielak tried to flee, but when a detective fired a warning shot at him he surrendered. Fleisher was arrested in the alley. Because Fleisher had broken the terms of his parole, he was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary to serve out the rest of his original thirty-year Federal sentence while awaiting trial on the Michigan charges.

The two men were charged with three counts: conspiracy to place explosives, breaking and entering, and intent to destroy property with explosives. Each of the counts carried a fifteen-year sentence. Detroit defense lawyers Joseph Louisell and Ivan Barris delayed proceedings for two years until they plea bargained for an attempted arson charge which carried a maximum five-year jail term. It was unlikely that a jury would convict the defendants on the original charges because no explosives were found at the crime scene. The prosecutor didn't want these men acquitted. On October 17, 1960, the men pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of attempted arson and were given a three to five year sentence.

Louis Fleisher was transferred from Leavenworth to Milan Federal Prison to serve out his sentence. On April 3, 1964, he died of a heart attack in his jail cell just nine weeks and two days short of serving out his Detroit conviction for arson and leaving prison a free man. He was fifty-nine-years-old.

***

Louis' older brother Harry and his younger brother Sam also had checkered underworld careers which is the subject of part two of this post.

The Fleisher Brothers (Part 2) 

Rubin "The Voice" Weiss and His Wife Elizabeth "Woman of a Thousand Voices"

Elizabeth and Rubin Weiss rehearsing.

Rubin Weiss was born sometime in 1921 in Detroit, but no public record was recorded in Wayne County. He may have been born at home which was more customary in those days. As a child, he performed in Yiddish skits and plays within Detroit's growing Jewish community. Rube attended Northern High School and earned a master's degree in English while attending Wayne State University.

In December of 1941, Weiss entered the United States Army and fought in the European theater of World War II and rose to the rank of captain. At war's end, Weiss decided to try his hand at acting in New York City, but after a year of struggling, he decided to return to his family in Detroit and landed a job as an English teacher at his high school alma mater from 1946 through 1952. To supplement his modest teaching income, he picked up what radio and advertising work he could get. As soon as he was sure he could make a living in radio, he quit his day job.

Early in Weiss' WXYZ-Radio career, he specialized in playing "bad guys," much to the disappointment of his mother. His voice was much larger than he was at five-feet, five inches. His voice was versatile, and Weiss often played four or five roles in a single fifteen-minute episode. He was a featured player on popular Detroit radio shows like The Green Lantern, Challenge of the Yukon, and The (original) Lone Ranger, where Weiss met his future wife Elizabeth Elkin in 1948.

Later in Rube Weiss' career, he would run into people randomly who had no idea who he was until he spoke in his distinctive, resonant voice. Not only was Weiss' voice familiar because of his work in radio and television, he was the raucous announcer for "Saturday, At Detroit Dragway" heard on pop radio stations all over the Detroit and Windsor airwaves in the 1960s. What many Detroiters do not realize is that Weiss played Santa for sixteen years at the Hudson's Thanksgiving Day Parade. When fans would meet Weiss in person, they often remarked, "You sound taller on radio," his retort was, "I'm six-five when I stand on my money."

Rube Weiss said the most fun he ever had in his long career was being a regular on Soupy Sales' WXYZ-TV evening show at eleven o'clock. Rube and a talented cast of radio performers took their schtick to the small screen. His characters included big game hunter Colonel Claude Bottom, loudmouth pop tune composer Shoutin' Shorty Hogan, detective Charlie Pan, and The Lone Stranger's sidekick Pronto.

Weiss was a much sought-after freelance pitchman for Detroit and national brands. A short list of the brands he lent his voice talents to are Kay's Jewelers, Velvet Peanut Butter, Midas Mufflers, Chrysler Corporation, Kellogg's Special K, Lincoln Continental, and Marlboro cigarettes. 

Rubin Weiss passed away from an "internal infection" on April 25, 1996 at the age of seventy-six in Huntington Woods. Weiss' professional awards are too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say he won an American Federation of Television and Radio Actors Guild (AFTRA) Gold Card Award and several Emmy and Clio awards for his extensive work in radio. He is buried at Clover Hill Park Cemetery in Birmingham, Michigan.

***

Rube's wife Elizabeth was no less distinguished in her career than her husband, while also giving birth and being the proud mother of five children. Elizabeth Elkin was born in Detroit in 1925. Her talent as an artist and actor got her into Detroit's Cass Technical High School where she majored in Commercial Art. During World War II, Elizabeth became one of the youngest draftswomen in Detroit drawing plans for fighter airplane parts.

After the war, Elizabeth returned to the stage at Wayne State University performing in classical plays like Taming of the Shrew and Oedipus Rex at the Bonstelle Theater which was originally the Temple Beth El on Woodward Avenue (Piety Row) when it was built in 1902. Elizabeth honed her acting skills and landed a job doing summer repetory theater in New York City where she earned her Actor's Equity card. While appearing in The Importance of Being Ernest with the Actor's Company in Detroit, she became reunited with Rube Weiss, who was directing the play. They fell in love and married at Workman's Circle in 1949.

Elizabeth thought her regular voice was ordinary, but she could do dialects, foreign accents, or whatever a role required. A Detroit newspaper profiled her as The Woman of a Thousand Voices for her countless radio and television commercials.

Elizabeth and Rube's home was a gathering place for actors, artists, scholars, and comedians, where she became the hostess and gourmet cook. The Weiss home became so popular that the family was dubbed the Jewish Waltons. The family led a rich social life grounded in Elizabeth's love of Jewish culture.

Later in life, she performed in many Jewish Ensemble Theater Yiddish language productions. Rube would regularly appear on Detroit television celebrating Jewish holidays. Both of them were active in their synogogue and the Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit. Elizabeth taught an Institute for Retired Professionals (IRP) Yiddish language group for many years.

Elizabeth Weiss was a lifetime member of the Screen Actor's Guild and AFTRA. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alliance for Women in Media, and she was inducted in the Silver Circle of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Like her husband, Elizabeth received many professional and community service awards too numerous to list here.

But without a doubt, Elizabeth was most proud of her large and devoted family of five children, sixteen grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren who continue to be inspired by her example. Elizabeth Elkin Weiss passed on at the age of ninety on September 18, 2015. Her funeral was held at the Ira Kaufman Chapel, and her remains are interred beside her husband at Clover Hill Park Cemetery.

SATURDAY, At Detroit Dragway

The Beginnings of the Old Sauk Trail and the Building of Michigan Avenue (U.S.-12)

In 1820, Michigan Territory geologist, geographer, and ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft returned to Detroit from an expedition mapping Michigan following the Great Lakes from the headwaters of Lake Erie north and around the Great Lakes to the southern shore of Lake Michigan. Schoolcraft and his expedition returned following what early frontier game hunters called the Sauk Indian Trail across what would become the state of Michigan in 1837.

In his journal notes, Schoolcraft described the trail as a "plain horse path, considerably used by traders, hunters, and settlers." He noted that many minor trails and early dirt roads crossed the Sauk Trail making it difficult to follow in many areas without a guide.

University of Michigan paleontologists discovered that the Sauk Trail was originally formed by the migratory habits of mastodons (woolly mammoths) and ancient bison herds towards the end of the last Ice Age--the Pleistocene era--between 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago. With woolly outer fur and a dense undercoat, mastodons were well-adapted to the Ice Age climate.

Murial by Charles R. Knight--1919

Mastodon skeletons have been found along the southern corridor of the state of Michigan which U of M paleontologists named the Mastodon Trailway because of the great number of remains discovered. The woolly mammoth's Ice Age global range stretched across the northern tier of Eurasia and North America known as the Mammoth Steppe.

As temperatures rose and the glaciers began receding, the mastodons shifted their migration northward again. They co-existed with Stone Age humans who depended on them for food, clothing, and shelter until diminishing surviving herds were hunted to extinction at the end of the Ice Age. Their remains include skeletons, teeth, tusks, and stomach contents. 

The prehistoric trailway continued as a migratory path for herd animals for many thousands of years--most notably elk and deer. Paleo Americans, the ancestors of Native American Indian tribes, used the pathway as a game trail and passageway to the Mississippi River and the heartland of the continent.

Father Gabriel Richard (Ri-CHARD)

In 1823, a civic-minded Jesuit priest from Detroit, Father Gabriel Richard was elected as a non-voting delegate from the Michigan Territory to the House of Representatives for the18th United States Congress. He secured Michigan's first federal appropriation for road construction connecting Detroit with Chicago. The proposed road was surveyed in 1825 by Orange Risdon, who essentially followed the Sauk Trail across the state. Construction began in 1827 and the 210 mile road was finished in 1833 costing a grand total of $87,000.

Orange Risdon--Founder of Saline, Michigan

That year, the first scheduled stagecoach service was established from Detroit to Chicago. Settlers and businessmen from back East took the Erie Canal to Albany or Buffalo, New York, booked passage on a schooner to Detroit, and hired a stage to Chicago once they got to Detroit. The cities of Detroit and Chicago both experienced unprecentented growth in the mid-1830s.

What is presently known as Michigan Avenue has been called many names over the years. First, history records it as the Sauk Trail. It was little more than a footpath until the government improved it and renamed it Military Road. Father Richard pitched the project to Congress for security of the new frontier. Troops and supplies could move east or west on the new territorial road to defend and assist settlers. For a time, the road was known as the Chicago Turnpike, and then its name was shortened to Chicago Road.

The two-lane, highway from Detroit to Chicago has been known as Michigan Avenue since 1926 when the roadway was paved for automobile traffic. With construction of the Interstate Highway System during the Eisenhower administration in the late 1950s, many established U.S. highways were fragmented due to construction.  U.S.-12 was rerouted in some areas including the link between Ypsilanti and Saline to simplify state maps and minimize confusion for motorists. Michigan Avenue goes from Detroit to Dearborn, Wayne, Ypsilanti, Saline, Clinton, Irish Hills, Jonesville, Coldwater, Sturgis, Three Oaks, and New Buffalo before it dips into Michigan City, Indiana.

The story of Michigan Avenue may not be over. In 2020, a project was proposed in Detroit to update a forty mile stretch from Detroit to Ann Arbor, Michigan into the most advanced, high-tech roadway in the world dedicated to autonomous vehicles for the smooth and efficient flow of mass transit and high-tech automobile traffic.

Dedicated lane for automated traffic--artist rendering.

The project, supported by the Ford Motor Company, the Detroit Chamber of Commerce, and forward-looking Michigan politicians, would be a model for a possible multi-billion dollar business partnership between the public and private sectors, making southeast Michigan a hot spot for municipal transportation systems and the cornerstone of the state's economic recovery. An infrastructure development company is building a one-mile pilot road at the American Center for Mobility in Ypsilanti for further research and development.

Erie Canal Populates the Great Lakes Area 

Detroit's Father Gabriel Richard

Father Gabriel Richard

One of the most influential people in Detroit's 320 year history is Father Gabriel Richard (Ri-CHARD), who was born in La Ville de Saintes, France on October 15, 1767. At the age of seventeen, young Richard entered a Jesuit seminary and was ordained a priest on October 15, 1790.

After the French Revolution, Richard and many of his fellow priests refused to swear allegiance to the new secular French Republic. He escaped the guillotine when the captain of the ship Reine des Coeurs (Queen of Hearts) made it quietly known that he was about to sail for the United States and had room onboard to smuggle a few priests out of the country. When the Reine des Coeurs sailed on April 2, 1792 Gabriel Richard was aboard. Four months later, anti-Catholic mobs in Paris murdered 200 defiant priests.

Father Richard reported to Bishop Carroll of Baltimore and began his new life in America as a mathmatics teacher at St. Mary's Seminary. In 1798, the bishop assigned Father Richard to do missionary work with the local Native American tribes and to administer the sacraments to the Catholic population in the Northwest Territory. He arrived in Fort Detroit as a priest for the Society of Saint-Sulpice.

A defining moment in the history of Detroit and the life of Father Richard was the Great Fire of June 11, 1805. A burning ember from a baker's pipe fell into a pile of hay. Within minutes, the fire spread out of control burning everything within Fort Detroit but the stone chimneys. The blaze took most of the cattle and the town's food supplies did not survive the blaze. Father Richard took control and organized men into expeditions that went up and down the Detroit River asking farmers on both sides for emergency provisions to avert famine. From then onward, Detroit residents refered to Richard as "Le Bon Pere" (the Good Father).

To comfort his parishioners, Father Richard served an open air mass that included this phrase in his sermon, "Speramus Meliora Resurget Cineribus." (We hope for better things. It will rise again from the ashes.) These words became the official motto for the City of Detroit and appear on the city's flag. This motto would have renewed significance 162 years later when much of Detroit burned once again.

Along with Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory Judge Augustus B. Woodward, Father Richard founded the Catholepistemiad of Michigania on August 26, 1817--twenty years before Michigan became a state. The school's name was neither good Latin nor Greek, just hard to pronounce. On April 30, 1821, the school was renamed the University of Michigan.

In 1835, the new Michigan Constitution adopted the Prussian model of education which was a system of primary schools, secondary schools, and a university.  A Board of Regents of twelve members was nominated to govern the university. The system was administered by the state and funded with tax dollars. The University of Michigan moved from Detroit to Ann Arbor on forty acres of Henry Rumsey's farmland bought by the Board of Regents. The first class began in 1841 and the first commencement ceremony was in 1845.

Father Richard was elected as a non-voting delegate from the Michigan Territory to the United States House of Representatives for the 18th Congress. In March 1824, he petitioned for and secured federal funding for the Chicago Road to connect Chicago with Detroit, which was later renamed Michigan Avenue. The highway ran the full length of Lower Michigan, opening it up to the West for the development of the southern part of the state.

In 1832 with a servant's heart, Father Richard cared for cholera victims for four days before succumbing himself on September 13th. His body is buried in a crypt beneath the altar of Ste. Anne's side chapel. A bronze bust designates that his tomb lies within. At least five schools in Michigan bear his name, but most Detroiters today have no idea what a giant this five-foot, two-inch man was.

Saint Annes' in Corktown 

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

1930 Lincoln Phaeton Hamtramck Garage Find

1930 Lincoln Dual-Cowl Sport Phaeton Limo and its proud owner.

A photograph of a 1932 Detroit Police Lincoln Phaeton squad car caught the eye of one of my readers in my crime history The Elusive Purple Gang: Detroit's Kosher Nostra . Bill (last name withheld) emailed me with an interesting story about a 2005 garage find of a 1930 Lincoln Phaeton Dual-Cowl limousine with 70,000 miles on it which he found in Hamtramck, Michigan. The limo was covered with a canvas tarp and buried under an avalanche of trash for over fifty years.

The car's owner Bruno Rusniak bought the car when he was twenty years old in 1940. When Bruno died in 2004, his sister Lucille liquidated her brother's estate and sold the long-neglected car to Bill. The provenance of the car is interesting, but no less fascinating is the background of the Lincoln Motor Company and their Deluxe Dual-Cowl Sport Phaeton model.

***

Cadillac Motor Car founder Henry Leland left General Motors (GM) in 1917 to build Liberty V-12 aircraft engines with government funding for the World War I war effort. With the help of Ford, Packard, Buick, and other auto manufacturers, 20,748 Liberty engines were mass produced. After the war, surplus Liberty engines were adapted for hydroplane racing and luxury runabouts. Some used by smugglers during Prohibition.

At war's end, Leland with the help of his son reorganized his company and named it Lincoln Motor Car Company. On September 16, 1920, his first Lincoln L-Series, four-door, three-speed manual transmission car was built in his Dearborn, Michigan factory. The start-up company struggled in the competitive marketplace and had trouble fulfilling orders. Leland's stock holders were unhappy and his company went into receivership in 1922.

Edsel Ford

Only one offer was made to purchase Lincoln Motors. Ford Motor Company (FoMoCo) bought Lincoln for the bargain price of $8,000,000. Henry Ford's only son Edsel was made president of the company. By 1923, Edsel and his general manager Ernest C. Kanzler were able to trim manufacturing costs by $1,000 per car, and the company began posting a profit for the first time.

Edsel was a forward-looking Ford with a flair for automotive design and modern management. When the Lincoln nameplate began earning money, Ford's Lincoln Motor Car Division introduced a two-passenger roadster, a seven-passenger touring sedan, and a five-passenger limousine. Lincoln Motors (FoMoCo) competed against Cadillac (GM), Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg, Packard LeBaron, Pierce-Arrow, and Rolls-Royce in the stand-alone, luxury car market.

Lincoln Greyhound Hood Ornament

 

In 1924, the Lincoln L-Series became popular with police departments across the country in a model called the Police Flyer. They were equipped with Ford V-8 engines, brakes on all four wheels, 7/8" bulletproof windshields, and mounted spotlights on the left and right sides of the car near the windshield operated from handles inside the car. Police sirens and gun racks were also fitted to the Police Flyers making them much sought after, state-of-the-art patrol cars.

Another great stroke for the Lincoln L-Series was when a Lincoln became the first state limo in 1924--used by President Calvin Coolidge. The Lincoln Phaeton Dual-Cowl (front and rear seat windshields) limousine is the car that polio-stricken President Franklin D. Roosevelt used on the campaign trail so he could appear before crowds without leaving the vehicle. The car became known as the Sunshine Special because of its retractable convertible top. President Truman used the same car until it was retired in 1948.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Today, the Sunshine Special is on display at the Henry Ford Museum with other famous presidential cars. Lincolns were the official state limos until 1993 when Cadillac became the presidential state car.

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After Bill removed the clutter around and on top of his garage find, he rolled the car out onto the driveway and into the sunlight to get a better look. The Phaeton's original colors were blue with black fenders, but at some point the car underwent a hasty do-it-yourself paint job. Bill also discovered that the car had a smashed fender, other rear end damage, and several bullet holes in the aluminum body work. After rummaging through the limo's interior, he found a canvas bag from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in the back seat.

Extensive rear end damage on aluminum body.

The elderly sister of Bruno Rusniak told Bill that her brother was pulled over by the Detroit Police one evening for some unspecified reason. Rather than be subjected to a search, Bruno shifted the 4,920 pound car into reverse and slammed into the front fender of the squad car disabling it. Then, he sped home, drove the car into his garage, and pulled a tarp over it. There it sat for decades until his passing.

Bill contacted me to find out if the name Bruno Rusniak ever came up in any of my Detroit underworld research. He sent me a copy of the car's registration and Bruno's death certificate. I searched and found nothing about his involvement in the rackets, but for the record, Bruno lived his whole life at 5582 Caniff in Hamtramck. He served in World War II as a mechanic which became his life's work. Bruno died from a variety of heart ailments on November 25, 2004 and was buried at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Detroit.

After sheet metal repairs and straightened frame cradling a new gas tank.

As fate would have it, the new owner Bill is also a mechanic and a car enthusiast. After shipping the car to his garage, he changed the spark plugs, belts, and fluids, put some fresh gasoline in the tank, and sprayed some ether into the carburetor. The car started right up. Body shop repairs were made and new 7.00 x 20, six-ply whitewall tires were mounted. The Lincoln Deluxe Dual-Cowl Sport Phaeton limo is once again roadworthy.

Much to my surprise, Bill asked if I would like to take his classic car out for a drive the next time I'm in the Detroit area. That is an offer I can't refuse.

FoMoCo's Edsel Car Disaster