HISTORY LESSON: In telling the Great Migration story, don't leave out the ugly parts

Welcome to History Lesson, a new recurring feature in Model D led by local historian Jacob Jones, in which we delve deep into the annals of Detroit history and nerd out over a different topic each time. This month, we're talking about what's left out of Detroit's Great Migration story.

In the summer of 1923, a Black man named William Young and his family stepped off the train at Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, a grand Beaux Arts temple on the boomtown’s west side. The family moved, likely through a swarm of other arrivals, into a white marble lobby, ducked around the Corinthian columns, and made their way out the bronze doors and into their new hometown – a city where, many in the South said, the streets were lined with gold.

Like thousands upon thousands of other migrants, the Youngs settled in the neighborhood then known as Black Bottom. The family’s oldest son, Coleman, would be raised and be plagued by prejudice. He was barred from attending Bob-Lo Island with his Boy Scout troop because he was Black. He would be denied entry to one of Detroit’s premier Catholic schools for the same reason. His desire to fight against this prejudice would drive him for the rest of his career. 

In 1936, just a year before the historic UAW-led sit down strikes, Young was forbidden from working as an electrician at Ford’s Rouge Plant. His only option was to work in the substandard and dangerous steel mill, where conditions were especially hard on the black workers who were putting in longer hours for lesser pay. For almost two years, Young toiled in these conditions and organized the workers around him. In a dispute with management, he clubbed a foreman and was fired.

Young’s time in the automotive factory lit the spark of a political career which would see him help desegregate the UAW, go toe to toe with the House Un-American Activities Committee, serve at the contentious 1968 Democratic Convention, help write the state constitution, and ultimately be elected as Detroit’s first black mayor.
Young’s story is one of individual success, but is also a story of Detroit and its role in America’s Great Migration. Which is why I was surprised that it, nor any stories related to prejudice and labor inside Detroit’s automotive factories made it into the recent PBS series of the same name.

Overlooked narratives

Great Migrations, the four-part PBS documentary from Dr. Henry Louis Gates, which was funded in part by the Ford Motor Company, opens with the historian standing in the lobby of the beautifully renovated Michigan Central Station. He speaks beautifully and thoughtfully on what it must have been like to step off a train into the beautifully huge station for the first time.

Later in the series, Detroit is described as a “Black mecca” where the streets were paved with gold and migrants could live in “relative freedom.” The raw numbers of the migration to Detroit are stunning. From 1910-1920, Detroit’s Black population jumped nearly 10 times to more than 40,000. Decade over decade, it would grow exponentially to over 300,000 by 1950.

Thomas Sugrue, a New York University professor and author of “The Origins of the Urban Crisis,” appears in the documentary and describes the migration phenomenon as a feedback loop where people moved to Detroit, found a good job and told their relatives about it, encouraging more migration.

Gates correctly credits this population boom to the automotive industry. But he fails to adequately interrogate the automotive industry’s role in perpetuating racism. He states: Henry Ford’s assembly line system revolutionized the industrial process. Ford’s astonishing promise to pay even black workers $5 a day was unheard of. A tantalizing draw difficult to resist. Finally allowed to join the powerful union movement, black workers bolstered by the activism of local civil rights organizations slowly gained access to more jobs in the auto industry.

On its face, this is an oversimplification of Detroit’s industrial history and a minimization of the issues migrants faced when they arrived. Ford introduced the $5-a-day wage in 1914. The UAW did not become the officially recognized bargaining unit for autoworkers until 1937, after the successful Flint Sit Down Strike. The Ford Motor Company did not recognize the UAW until 1941, after the bloody Battle of the Overpass and a series of strikes at their Rouge Plant destroyed production. 27 years of automotive history passed by as swiftly as a new car came off the line. 

There is no discussion of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black dentist who also arrived in Detroit during the Great Migration, who was tried for murder after defending his home from a white mob.

The 1943 Packard Plant Hate Riot, in which 25,000 white workers attacked black workers and walked off the job after three of their colleagues’ received promotions, is not mentioned.

Images from Detroit’s 1943 riots are used in the documentary, but its story is not told. In July of 1943, tensions due to years of prejudice, unfair housing, and workplace discrimination boiled over. Violence began on Belle Isle and spread throughout the City. 34 people were ultimately killed during the riot - 25 of them black, 17 of those killed by police.
 
There is no mention of the automotive tycoons and their efforts to maintain racial and social hierarchy in their workplaces. Henry Ford’s $5 a day pay and assembly line innovations are praised, but the racism, prejudice, and surveillance tactics he enacted on those who arrived at his factories during this Great Migration, are not.

It would be unfair to ask Great Migrations and Dr. Henry Louis Gates to cover every aspect of the Great Migration in Detroit. It would be too great a task in a documentary which is thoughtfully exploring everything from A. Phillip Randolph’s Sleeping Car Porters Union and housing in Los Angeles to the growth of Southern hip-hop and Caribbean immigration to the United States. The documentary is ultimately a powerful and uplifting story of struggle and success.

But we shouldn't gloss over the Detroit stories that didn’t make the Great Migrations cut. These stories show the promise that Detroit offered, the struggle that it often confronted its would-be residents with, and the successes ultimately afforded through perseverance.

Jacob Jones is a historian and storyteller who has spent a decade leading tours of the city’s iconic landmarks. His tours of the Fisher Building, Guardian Building, and Packard Plant have attracted tens of thousands of guests from around the world and have been praised by the Detroit Free Press, the BBC, and the New York Times. When he’s not sharing history you can find him in a good local bar, perusing the stacks at the Detroit Public Library, and cheering on his beloved Detroit Lions.