Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City

Whose Detroit?

Politics,

Labor,

and

Race in

a Modern

American

City

Heather Ann Thompson

With a New Prologue

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Dillon, Wilder, Ava, and always Isabel

my light, my warmth, my joy;

for Jon, my center;

and, finally,

for Detroit

Contents

Prologue to the 2017 Printing

Notes to the Prologue to the 2017 Printing

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Reassessing the Fate of Postwar Cities, Politics, and Labor

1. Beyond Racial Polarization: Political Complexity in the City and Labor Movement of the 1950S

2. Optimism and Crisis in the New Liberal Metropolis

3. Driving Desperation on the Auto Shop Floor

4. Citizens, Politicians, and the Escalating War for Detroit’s Civic Future

5. Workers, Officials, and the Escalating War for Detroit’s Labor Future

6. From Battles on City Streets to Clashes in the Courtroom

7. From Fights for Union Office to Wildcats in the Workplace

8. Urban Realignment and Labor Retrenchment: An End to Detroit’s War at Home

Conclusion: Civic Transformation and Labor Movement Decline in Postwar Urban America

Epilogue

Notes from the Author

Notes

Index

Prologue to the 2017 Printing

Back in 2001, in the first printing of this book, I argued most forcefully that if one wanted really to comprehend the fate of America’s inner cities over the course of the postwar period, one had to begin by fully understanding what had happened in the Motor City. Detroit, I had maintained, was in fact ground zero for any scholar seeking to make sense of why cities across the nation that had seemed to be synonymous with economic opportunity and prosperity in the 1950s became, by the 1960s, the epicenter of countless rebellions for greater racial equality and, then, by the 1980s, bastions of crime and decay.

Today, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the historic urban rebellion that rocked the Motor City in July 1967, I realize that I had actually underestimated just how much the city of Detroit is a bellwether for urban America writ large. I had not fully appreciated just how important it is for the nation to pay attention to what happened, and continues to happen, in Detroit, Michigan, if it has any hope of making America’s inner cities prosperous and just for all who live in them.

* * *

July 23, 2017, marks the semicentennial of the infamous night when Detroit, Michigan, found itself engulfed in a fiery five-day protest that would end with forty-three people dead, 696 others wounded, and with the city’s poorest neighborhoods smashed and smoldering. This event, known by too many as the Detroit Riot of 1967, was, in fact, an act of both rage and rebellion. It was the product of African Americans having suffered decades of brutality at the hands of the Detroit Police Department while civic leaders—even liberal leaders publicly committed to racial equality—were not stopping the abuse. It was the result of the grinding poverty that continued to exist in Detroit’s black neighborhoods as white Detroiters enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. It happened because access to everything from good housing stock to strong schools remained elusive for black Detroiters while, for white city residents, such access was a given.

To be sure, Detroit was not the first inner city in which such a devastating history of law enforcement abuse and entrenched inequalities led to civic disorder. But while urban rebellions had erupted in places such as Philadelphia, Harlem, Rochester, Watts, and Newark well before one rocked the Motor City, Detroit’s urban insurrection was a particular shock to the nation. In short, not only had Detroit been, according to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, America’s Arsenal of Democracy, but it had also been heralded as an exciting and shining model of a 20th century city in the Great Society, according to powerful labor leaders like Walter Reuther.¹ Indeed, state politicians from Los Angeles and New York City to federal legislators in Washington, D.C., had hoped that everything from President Lyndon Johnson’s new social programs, which were rolled out with particular fanfare in the Motor City, to legislative victories such as the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which Detroit leaders had supported with particular zeal, would bring enough positive change to stem the tide of civil rights activism that was now washing over the North with as much force as it had the South. And yet, white politicians had underestimated the extent to which discrimination continued to plague the lives of African Americans in cities across the nation. Detroit was their wake-up call.

Still, when the fires of Detroit’s 1967 rebellion finally were extinguished, America’s power brokers and policymakers chose not to listen to those who had taken to the streets who spoke loudly about the desperation and frustration that had led to such a dramatic uprising. They simply refused to hear when those who rebelled spoke clearly and eloquently about being bone tired of police officer abuses, too few job opportunities, poorly run schools, and having to pay white business owners exorbitant prices for their basic necessities.

Politicians and policymakers didn’t even listen to the experts whom they themselves had asked to determine why cities across the nation were erupting. Like those speaking out from the streets, those who had been appointed to local civil rights committees by mayors such as Jerome Cavanagh or governors such as George Romney, as well as those who sat on Lyndon Johnson’s Kerner Commission, were also crystal clear that cities like Detroit had gone up in flames because of entrenched inequality. In short, the mere passing of laws and creation of new programs, while a good start, had barely made a dent in racial and economic inequality in America’s postwar cities. It would take much more political will, and many more public dollars, to do that.

In fact, those with power in the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan, or the federal government already knew this. They were well aware that the various new laws that had been passed and programs that had been created were largely panaceas rather than instruments of profound social or economic change. Few were interested in radically altering the urban social structure or economy. Some hoped that what would in fact change most was the attitude of African Americans. As even Lyndon Johnson, someone sympathetic to civil rights, had put it bluntly back in 1957, These negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they’ve never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.²

And so, not only was Detroit ground zero for all the ways in which the postwar promises of prosperity, full citizenship, and equality under the law remained unfulfilled for the many thousands of African Americans who had migrated North during and after the Second World War, and not only did it epitomize the black rebellion against this injustice nationally, but also it would be the place where the backlash to black demands on the polity and economy would play out with particular ferocity. Detroit would come to exemplify America’s crisis-filled urban and racial future just as powerfully as it had exemplified its devastating urban and racial past.

* * *

The first printing of this book chronicled much of this backlash, as well as the degree to which Detroit’s eventual devastation was caused, most directly, by it. Readers saw how hard black Detroiters, along with their white allies, fought to overhaul Detroit’s police force, courts, schools, and workplaces in the wake of their 1967 uprising. They read as well about the real victories that those intense struggles netted between 1967 and 1973—particularly in the city’s historically racist court system, and especially when they managed to elect a black mayor who was committed to desegregating every city institution and dismantling one of the Detroit Police Department’s most racist units, known as STRESS. Finally, however, they read about the long-term costs of these wins—the toll that the white flight, as well as suburban, state, and federal hostility to urban black leadership, took on the city after 1973. I still believe that the most important outcome of the urban uprisings of the 1960s was not devastation—neither that witnessed during their peak nor that visited upon inner cities in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. African Americans across the nation had put politicians on notice that they would never lie down or remain mute in the face of social, economic, and racial inequality.

That message, however, would generate its own backlash—one more profound than could fully have been appreciated at the time. In 1965, one year after Lyndon Johnson announced his plans for waging a War on Poverty in cities like Detroit, and the same year that he passed the historic Voting Rights Act to further racial justice in America as a whole, the rash of urban rebellions across the nation prompted the president to initiate a historically unprecedented War on Crime as well—one that would be waged almost exclusively and most aggressively in the nation’s poorest urban neighborhoods.³ That latter war, it turns out, would do more damage to cities like Detroit and more directly undermine racial and economic equality across the nation than anyone could imagine when it was started, or I could really see back in 2001.⁴ Perhaps most tragically, it was a war that even black leaders, ones who had spent the entire postwar period demanding ways other than aggressive policing to make city streets stable and safe for all urbanites, were also soon waging most vigorously.⁵

When Coleman Young took office in 1974, a War on Crime was already well underway in the City of Detroit. As soon as black Detroiters had become more vocal about the need for Detroit’s leaders to address racial injustice in the city, particularly in the early 1960s, not a few white leaders began pandering to white Detroiters’ deep-seated fears about black criminality. To many white Detroiters the very presence of blacks in the city was threatening. As one put it, All you BLACKS know how to do is to have illegitimate children, drink, tear up schools, rob, rape, and constantly expect handouts from tax-paying whites.⁶ That fear mongering, and that regular equating of civil rights activism with disorder and criminality, had long defined local politics in the South, but when southern blacks moved North, bringing their demand for racial justice with them, it quickly defined politics there as well. It was no accident that President Lyndon Johnson responded to the urban rebellions that exploded in key northern cities like New York and Philadelphia in 1964 by creating the Office of Law Enforcement Administration Assistance (1964) and by passing the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (1965), as well as the Safe Streets Act (1968). It was precisely because a great deal of crime fighting funding suddenly became available to cities like Detroit that the police department there was able to become so much more aggressive with black Detroiters in the wake of the ’67 rebellion. In short, this funding, and the very call for a new and aggressive War on Crime, is what made Detroit’s inflammatory STRESS program possible and, ultimately, caused much tension between black Detroiters and the police when Coleman Young was their mayor.

There were, of course, many ironies here. The first is that Johnson’s War on Crime, and indeed the funding that flowed to cities like Detroit as a result of it after 1965, began even though crime rates were unremarkable both nationally and in the Motor City. Whereas there were 125 murders committed in Detroit in 1964, nine years earlier there had actually been 140 homicides and, by 1965, the street-crime rate per 1,000 persons was still only 1.6 percent.⁷ In fact, over the course of the entire decade of the 1960s, homicide prosecutions dropped 32.2 percent.⁸ The War on Crime was, at its inception, about creating public order—which to so many white voters meant reining in the blacks—well before it was about fighting truly threatening crime rates in America.

Even though greater federal and state funding for fighting crime became available to cities as a response to urban disorder, not to record rates of crime, the result was intensified policing of overwhelmingly black communities. As evidence of this, of the 67,385 total arrests in 1967, 46,911 were of blacks and 21,474 were of whites. In 1975, there were 52,890 blacks arrested and 13,776 whites . . . [and] not only did the Detroit police officers arrest far more blacks than whites, they also singled them out for investigation far more often. In 1967, of 3,539 investigated, 2,863 were black and 676 were white.⁹ This disproportionate policing led to a second irony about the embrace of law-and-order politics in Detroit: Thanks to the War on Crime that white politicians and voters had embraced even as they abandoned cities like Detroit, by the time Young took office, Detroit’s black neighborhoods were indeed in the grips of a real crime crisis. Part of this had nothing to do with the War on Crime. When whites abandoned the city, taking its tax base and jobs too, many poor black Detroiters were forced to rely on an illegal drug economy for survival. But, of course, it had been the War on Crime that had created that illegal economy that, in turn, created a real crime problem. As one reporter noted in 1977, when Coleman Young was elected Detroit’s first black mayor, the city’s crime rate was the highest in the country, and it had earned Detroit the dubious title of ‘Murder City.’¹⁰

In short, thanks to the illegal drug economy, one necessary for countless Detroiters to survive, Detroit the city was rendered newly dangerous. Notably Detroit’s first black mayor chose to deal with this brewing public safety crisis by beefing up law enforcement rather than by addressing its economic roots, in no small part because, after 1965, federal dollars flowed much more freely if they were to be used to get tough on crime, not if they were earmarked for things such as more jobs and better schools. Indeed, although Young had been elected because he had promised to rein in and reform Detroit’s police department, ultimately he made the policy an even greater presence in black Detroiters’ lives with dire consequences. To be sure, Young had, for example, made dramatic efforts to integrate the force, and he had also championed community-based policing. Ultimately, however, this later reform effort in particular served to increase police surveillance in the city’s already most fragile neighborhoods. As the historian Elizabeth Kai Hinton points out, once Young could no longer count on dollars for social programing from federal sources like the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (because those dollars were increasingly earmarked for the Department of Justice), he too became a law-and-order politician. As she points out, not only did Young recall 400 previously discharged officers to expand his police force, but he also placed thirty separate police Mini Stations—stations that were open around the clock—in Detroit’s poorest black neighborhoods and eventually placed an early curfew on city youth.¹¹

And the Young administration’s embrace of law-and-order solutions to deeply social and economic problems in the city led, in turn, to a third great irony. Detroit grew increasingly less safe and less stable over the course of Young’s mayoralty. In fact, by the time Young had finished his last term in office, in January 1994, his decision to wage a most aggressive war on crime and drugs in Detroit, and to lock up more city residents than ever before, had damaged his city to a degree not even he could see at that time. By that year scores of Detroiters were suffering a spate of new mandatory minimum sentences that had them serving record time behind bars even for nonviolent offenses. One of these, the notorious 650-Lifer law, meant record numbers of them were actually serving life sentences for possessing cocaine. Indeed, by the time Young left office, the Narcotics Division of the Detroit Police Department was commanding an operating budget nearly 90 percent higher than it had in the early 1980s.¹² Notably, an overwhelming number of people arrested in the city on a drug charge were users and addicts not sellers.¹³

The number of Detroiters locked up only continued to rise when other mayors took office. Whereas there had only been 7,834 Michiganders behind bars when Young took office, by 2011 there were 42,940, and the Michigan Department of Corrections was supervising many more.¹⁴ Again, an overwhelming number of those people heralded from Detroit, and, indeed, a full 41 percent of those who served time returned to eight very specific and particularly impoverished zip codes in the city.¹⁵ To accommodate this flood of bodies, the state of Michigan built twenty-three new prisons while Young was mayor.¹⁶ In Young’s fourth term alone nine new facilities opened in the state, and within a mere four years of his leaving office the state was operating forty-one correctional institutions and fifteen prison camps.¹⁷

During the years Coleman Young governed, Detroit was literally ravaged by the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, and the product of them both: mass incarceration. Eventually Detroiters would compose the nation’s second highest number of adult prisoners serving a life-without-parole (LWOP) sentence, as well as the second highest number of children serving an LWOP—more than 360 by 2011. On the east side of the city alone, one in twenty-two people were living under some form of correctional control, and fewer than 40 percent of all Detroit high school students were graduating because their homes and schools had become so criminalized.¹⁸ In 2009, 21,298 youths aged seven to seventeen had been arrested in Michigan, overwhelmingly in Detroit, and only a tiny fraction of those had been charged with violent crimes such as aggravated assault.¹⁹

This history matters to the story of Detroit and urban America as a whole. As I noted elsewhere, it turns out that in addition to the white exodus that followed the election of Mayor Young back in 1973, and on top of the devastating deindustrialization that had also been eroding the Motor City since at least the mid-1950s, something else had been happening in Detroit that would, over the long haul, gut this city in ways that no one predicted.²⁰ Yes, it remains true that when Coleman Young became the first black mayor of Detroit, he was asked to do the impossible: steer a ship that was slowly sinking in the wake of local white tax and job abandonment as well as the broader state and federal abandonment of the Great Society. But in ways we can only now see, it is also true that the nation’s embrace of the War on Crime, and the fact that Young too signed on to it, also served to devastate Detroit. By sending so many city residents to prison—prisons housed in all-white rural areas far away from Detroit—Detroit was emptied of its people, emptied of opportunity, made significantly poorer, had its already fragile communities undermined, and was even robbed of its political power at the very time it needed it most.

Consider, for example, that in 1970, Detroit’s population measured 1,514,063, but by 2010, it had shrunk to 713,777. There is no question that a great deal of this population loss resulted from white flight, particularly that set in motion by the election of a black mayor. By 1980, whites largely had abandoned the inner city of Detroit. As I have noted previously, between 1970 and 1980 alone, more than 310,000 white city residents fled for the suburbs, and the percentage of blacks in Detroit rose from 43.7 to 67.1. By 1982, Detroit had lost an additional 63,776 residents—mostly white—giving the Motor City one of the highest African American populations in the urban North,²¹ in ways few have yet appreciated. Staggering rates of incarceration also explain this marked decline. In short, persons who are incarcerated in Michigan are counted for census population where they are locked up, not where they live, and this mattered tremendously to Detroit’s economic health. Once the fifth largest city in the nation, which afforded it a great deal of federal support for everything from schools to roads, Detroit was by 2010 a virtual ghost town in census population terms. In 2010 when the city’s census population was recorded, 10,000 incarcerated Wayne County residents (overwhelmingly from Detroit) were being counted in other counties.²² Each of those persons not counted in the Detroit census would have brought roughly $10,000 to the city over the next ten years, for schools, roads, hospitals and social service programs like Medicaid.²³

Emptying Detroit of its population wasn’t the only long-term cost of this city’s choosing to solve its problems through punishment rather than greater possibility. The Motor City was also emptied of its opportunity—namely the opportunity to be educated or employed—and thus its population was made significantly poorer over time. As all social scientists have made clear, the safest, most stable, and most prosperous cities are those with the greatest educational opportunities. And yet, the more Detroit was criminalized and locked up, the less funding there was for its schools. Specifically, from 1979 to 2013, Michigan increased spending on schools by 18%. During that same time period, the state increased spending on corrections by 219%.²⁴ And, in a vicious cycle, without an education, young Detroiters were destined to try to survive in a dangerous illegal drug economy and, in turn, were heavily policed and incarcerated in historically unparalleled numbers.

Even once out of prison the opportunity to return to the Motor City to try, once again, to pursue an education was rendered nearly impossible by the punitive law-and-order ethos that had gripped the city and the nation as a whole. As the Office of the U.S. Department of Education puts it, Your eligibility for federal student aid can be affected by incarceration and/or the type of conviction you have.²⁵ For those with drug convictions or those with convictions related to any sexual offense—which did not necessarily mean convictions for a violent offense—Detroiters indeed lost eligibility, which, for the majority, meant that higher education was unattainable.

Even securing employment was rendered virtually impossible once a Detroiter had a criminal record. Families had already been left poorer with their loved ones in prison.²⁶ Indeed by 2012, 228,000 Michigan children had a parent incarcerated, again disproportionately children from Detroit, and one study estimates that a child’s family income declined by an average of 22 percent when a father is locked up.²⁷ But when that incarcerated parent eventually made it home, the family’s economic hardship rarely improved. Indeed, for most, it just grew more severe over time. In short, the majority of people who came home from prison on parole remained unemployed. As the president of the Detroit City Council put it, [a] lot of times, folks who come out [of jail] and get roadblock after roadblock and door closed, they give up and some of them re-commit crimes because they feel that’s their only option.²⁸

Even those who managed to overcome employer prejudices against formerly incarcerated citizens had few jobs to pick from within the city limits. This was not only because so many of Detroit’s auto plants had closed, as I pointed out in the first printing of this book. It was also because correctional facilities, rather than factories, had increasingly become the place where things were manufactured in Michigan. Whereas access to prison labor had been rendered largely unprofitable for much of the twentieth century, thanks to New Deal regulations demanded by the labor movement, businesses succeeded in overhauling these barriers in 1979. In 1980 the state of Michigan worked to make its prisons more attractive to manufacturers and buyers alike. Soon prisoners were making everything from farm equipment to steam engines, boilers, barrels, copper wire, cigars, tombstones, and shoes to laundry supplies, lawn mowers, office furniture, eye-glasses, and dental implements. Prisoners had also become textile workers in Michigan prisons, and by the close of the twentieth century there were twenty-nine prison factories operating around the state. The benefit, prison officials boasted, was that the use of prion labor would save the state the cost of civilian wages, salaries and other costs which previously had to be paid.²⁹ At the same time, of course, any business in the city of Detroit that had made any of these products was no longer viable. Detroiters forced to work in prison were then left jobless once they returned home. In short, too many Detroiters were, according to one city leader, better off in prison than in the community, homeless and hungry.³⁰

The combination of postconviction barriers to employment and the dearth of jobs thanks to white flight, deindustrialization, and the resurrection of prison labor proved deadly to the economic health of Detroit and its already poor residents. Detroiters were suffering record and disproportionate rates of unemployment as the twenty-first century began to unfold. By May 2016, Wayne County, of which Detroit is a central part, had the highest unemployment rate of any county in the state of Michigan.³¹

Any community enduring such high rates of joblessness has to rely on some form of assistance from the state or federal government, and again, thanks to the embrace of law-and-order policies, this safety net was not available to countless Detroiters in need. In fact, anyone convicted of more than one drug felony was prohibited from receiving state aid, and anyone who had violated either probation or parole, no matter what the original offense, was prevented from accessing any aid for ten more years. Given that the rules of parole were so restrictive, such violations were common and, indeed, often unavoidable. If, for example, one’s parole required payment of court costs or other fees as a condition of release, and then that parolee could not find employment and thus could not pay up, he or she was in violation. And most ironically, given the fact that the state allowed employers to ask any applicant whether they had ever been convicted of a crime, one could also risk violation if one had not fulfilled the postrelease requirement of finding and keeping employment.³²

Needless to say, the result of so many Detroiters having neither a job nor access to state or federal assistance was disastrous for the city and its residents. For too many who lived in Detroit the illegal economy remained the only economy available and, too often, this meant even more arrests and an even greater incarceration drain on city neighborhoods over time. For the city it soon added up to complete economic collapse. The result of no jobs and no aid was desperation and, ultimately for the city, financial collapse. After declaring a financial emergency in March 2013, on July 18, 2013, the city of Detroit filed bankruptcy. Not only was Detroit the largest city in American history ever to file Chapter 9, but its debt also exceeded that of any city that had ever filed as well: approximately $20 billion. To the rest of the nation this state of affairs was deemed predictable because Detroit had suffered five decades of fiscal mismanagement under an incompetent black leadership. Detroit had experimented in black leadership—between 1973 and 2013 it had a succession of four black mayors—and the experiment had failed miserably. The ugly truth was, though, that Detroit’s economy was destined for collapse not because it had been managed by black mayors but instead because the city had been reviled and abandoned once it elected black leaders and, then, because the national and local embrace of punishment policy left these black mayors with few resources to deal with the fallout from that hostility and abandonment other than to criminalize their own citizens and, thus, tragically, to be complicit in the gutting of their own economy.

Given how devastating both the war on crime and war on drugs had been to the city of Detroit—combining as it did with the ill-effects of white flight and deindustrialization to eventually cause Detroit’s collapse—it may seem curious that Detroiters themselves did not stand up to these punitive policies that were so obviously decimating families and neighborhoods across the city. Why, for example, didn’t Detroiters who were suffering the fallout from such intense policing and such draconian drug laws, as well as the long-term fallout of having a conviction on their record, work to change the laws or redirect the funding that was going to policing and punishment rather than to educational programs and job creation? The answer points to yet another tragic irony about Detroit’s post-1967 past: The mass incarceration of Detroit robbed Detroiters of their power not just economically but politically as well.

When any Detroiters were sent to prison—no matter where it was—they lost their right to vote. It mattered not whether they were convicted of a major or minor crime, nor did it matter if they were detained in a state or federal facility. Once they entered that prison, they could no longer vote. Given how many Detroiters were imprisoned after 1973, this had major implications for democracy in the state of Michigan. In short, as laws were becoming more draconian, fewer Detroiters could weigh in on them. Even Detroiters no longer housed in a penal facility—say those on work release programs or home monitoring—also could not cast their ballot.³³

Even more devastating than being barred from voting while incarcerated or still under some form of correctional supervision, the mere presence of so many Detroit bodies in prisons in all-white areas of Michigan actually gave those districts, those that supported increasingly punitive justice policies, more political power. Just as it mattered a great deal to the allocation of resources that the U.S. Census counted prisoners where they were locked up not where they actually lived, so did it matter to the allocation of political power. In short, while Detroiters in prison were barred from voting, their bodies were counted for census population where they were imprisoned which, in turn, gave the residents of any county that housed a prison greater political power. And so, as Detroit was losing its residents to prisons across the state, those counties that had built those prisons—such as Chippewa, Ionia, and Jackson Counties—gained census population which made their voices in the political process carry even more weight. Indeed, a full four state senate districts in Michigan drawn after the 2000 Census (districts 17, 19, 33, and 37) would not even have met federal minimum population requirements to be a district if they didn’t count prisoners—who themselves couldn’t vote—as their constituents.³⁴ Whereas senate districts were supposed to contain about 261,528 residents, in two of the four that depended on prison gerrymandering, 7,000 of these residents were in fact prisoners barred from the polls.³⁵ The situation was no more democratic when it came to the drawing of house districts in Michigan. A full five house districts drawn after the 2000 Census (districts 65, 70, 92, 107, and 110) also met their minimum population requirements only because they could claim prisoners as constituents.³⁶

A city without jobs, schools, and access to the political process is a city in crisis. Detroit remains that city today. But it is important to understand why this was Detroit’s fate. Even though the ravaging of Detroit was better known by the media than say that of Ferguson, Missouri, or entire swaths of Baltimore, Chicago, and Baton Rouge, these histories are linked and, thus, to understand urban America, one needs to understand Detroit.

* * *

And so, now, on this most important fiftieth anniversary of the Detroit urban uprising of 1967, I invite readers to read this history book once again. By reading the original story of James Johnson Jr. and stories of the complex struggles that played out on the streets and in the workplaces of the Motor City between blacks and whites, among radicals, liberals, and conservatives, and between the police and the African American citizenry, readers, I believe, still will be challenged to think in new ways about why America’s urban spaces have ended up as some of the most decimated and hardest places to live for people who were already the most marginalized. And, it is my hope that readers will now see as well that Detroit’s fate, like the fate of all inner cities in this country, was impacted negatively by something far more insidious than the limitations of postwar liberalism or the ravages of white flight and deindustrialization. As I have argued in this new prologue, and as I think evidence even in the original printing of this book indicates, the urban crisis that had gripped countless inner cities by the 1980s—that which has only deepened since—was rooted as well in the choice made by this nation’s politicians, policymakers, and powerbrokers in the wake of the civil rights sixties to begin a historically unparalleled, unprecedentedly punitive, and unforgivably racialized war on crime, rather than to embark on an equally ambitious, but by far more just, plan to try to improve opportunity for all Americans. In fact, it was that choice, above all others, that ensured Detroit’s now decades-long devastation.

Understanding Detroit is, today, no less important than it has been if we really want to understand all American cities—from those that are stable to those that are now erupting because they, like Detroit, are still struggling to find their way forward after decades of abandonment and excessive criminalization. Like Detroiters, all urbanites—no matter how poor, nor matter how marginalized and disregarded, and no matter what period in American history—want equality of opportunity and equal treatment under the law. This is their story.

Notes to the Prologue to the 2017 Printing

1. A. J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War (Boston, Mass., 2014); this book, 55.

2. Robert Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III (New York, 2009), 955.

3. For a comprehensive history of the connections between the War on Poverty and the War on Crime, see Elizabeth Kai Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2016) and Julilly Kohler Haussman’s book, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, that addresses these intersections as well. For more on the relationship between crime, the War on Crime, and the political origins of mass incarceration, see Heather Ann Thompson, Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar America, Journal of American History (December, 2010).

4. For more on how the War on Crime impacted Detroit, see Heather Ann Thompson, Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Journal of Law and Society (December, 2014).

5. For more on African Americans and the origins of America’s War on Crime, see Donna Murch, Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?, Boston Review , 16 October 2015; Elizabeth Hinton, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, and Vesla M. Weaver, Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill? New York Times , 13 April 2016; and Nathan Connolly, A Black Power Method, Public Books , 15 June 2016.

6. See 81–81 of this book.

7. As noted in Heather Ann Thompson, Rethinking the Politics of White Flight in the Postwar City: Detroit, 1945–1980, Journal of Urban History (January, 1999): 179, i8i.

8. As noted ibid., 181.

9. As quoted ibid., 176.

10. Ken Kelly, Employment Is Up, Murder Is Down—and Mayor Coleman Young Has Detroit on the Rebound, People Magazine 8, no. 14 (October 3, 1977).

11. Hinton, From the War on Poverty , 201–2.

12. The War on Drugs: Arrests Burdening Local Criminal Justice Systems, Report to the Chairman, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Committee on Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate, United States General Accounting Office, April 1991, www.gao.gov/assets/220/214095.pdf .

13. Ibid.

14. Ann Carson and William Sabol, Prisoners in 2011, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 2012.

15. Amy L. Soloman, Gillian L. Thomson, and Sinead Keegan, Prisoner Reentry in Michigan, Urban Institute, Justice Policy Center, October 2004, 411172_Prisoner_Reentry_MI.pdf .

16. Prison Expansion in Michigan: A Brief History, Citizens Alliance On Prisons & Pub. Spending (Mar. 5, 2013), 5, http://www.capps-mi.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/5.-Prison-expansion-in-Michigan-history.pdf .

17. Growth in Michigan’s Corrections System: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Report 350, June 2008, Citizens Research Council of Michigan, http://www.crcmich.org/PUBLICAT/20O0s/2008/rpt350.pdf .

18. The 5 Worst Cities for Urban Youth, ABC News, Scoop/Daily, 14 November 2009, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Politics/worst-cities-urban-youth/story?id=9083935&page=2#.UZpFBcrHb58 .

19. Michigan’s Statewide Juvenile Arrest Analysis Report, vol. 1, Report, Michigan Department of Human Services Child Welfare Funding and Juvenile Programs and the Michigan Committee on Juvenile Justice, March 2012, 2012JuvenileArrestAnalysisReportVol1.pdf .

20. Thompson, Unmaking the Motor City.

21. As noted in Thompson, Rethinking the Politics, 163.

22. Kane Farabaugh, Detroit Population Drops Dramatically in Latest Census, Voice of America, 22 March 2011, http://www.voanews.com/content/detroit-population-drops-dramatically-in-latest-census-118535489/163525.html .

23. Ibid.

24. Lori Higgins, Michigan Spending on Prisons Far Outpaces Schools, Detroit Free Press, 7 July 2016.

25. Federal Student Aid Guidelines, Office of the U.S. Department of Education, https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/eligibility/criminal-convictions .

26. Collateral Costs: Incarceration’s Effect on Economic Mobility, The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010, Washington, D.C., http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2010/collateralcosts1pdf.pdf .

27. Allie Gross, Thousands of Michigan Kids Suffer Because of Mass Incarceration, Detroit Metro Times , 26 April 2016.

28. Justice Reinvestment in Michigan: Analyses of Crime, Community Corrections and Sentencing Policies, Council of State Governments Justice Center (New York: Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2009). Pugh quoted in Study Shows Ex-offenders Have Greatly Reduced Employment Rates, Prison Legal News , 20 May 2013.

29. For information on Michigan’s relationship to private companies in the state, see http://www.michigan.gov/msi/0,4642,7-174-59000_59003-271940--,00.html . For a history of Michigan Prison Industries, see http://www.michigan.gov/msi/0,4642,7-174-23878-65447--,00.html .

30. As quoted in Motor City’s Woes Extend beyond Auto Industry, AP wire, NBCNews.com , 20 December 2008, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/28327490/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/t/motor-citys-woes-extend-beyond-auto-industry/#.UanCP5xN8pk .

31. Detroit Area Economic Summary, 29 June 2016, Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/summary/blssummary_detroit.pdf .

32. Probation Supervision, Michigan Department of Corrections, http://www.michigan.gov/corrections/0,4551,7-119-1435_11634-4999--,00.html .

33. Criminal Statutes and Voting in Michigan, 2004, http://richa.dod.net/crime/crimstatusvote.htm .

34. Prison based Gerrymandering in Michigan, Prison Policy Initiative, 15 January 2013, MI-prisongerrymandering.pdf .

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations for Collections of the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit

Introduction

Reassessing the Fate of Postwar Cities, Politics, and Labor

He was arbitrarily fired. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t beg The Man but he asked him rather specifically, What do you mean fired? Just for asking about my job? And The Man said, That’s right. You don’t ask you do what you’re told. You’re fired! The brother went out and he got his gun and he did some firing. Many people thought this was a deplorable situation. I don’t; I think it practical, because we have forewarned that corporation.¹

In the wee hours of July 23, 1967, urbanites took to the streets of Detroit in an uprising that stunned the nation. For days, Detroit’s poorest neighborhoods burned, and virtually overnight the city came to symbolize America’s inability to solve vexing problems of race and poverty. Almost exactly three years later, a thirty-five-year-old African American autoworker named James Johnson Jr. walked into the Detroit auto plant where he worked and proceeded to shoot and kill two foremen and one die setter in retaliation for numerous racially based offenses that he believed he had long endured. These murders brought the Motor City into the national spotlight once again.²

Johnson’s actions on July 15, 1970, might have been quickly forgotten after a brief spate of media attention; on the surface they were no different from other violent acts committed before and after in Detroit. But these particular killings touched a nerve in the city as few others had. Even though the fires of the 1967 rebellion had long been extinguished, to civic and labor leaders seeking to rebuild Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society in Detroit, James Johnson’s sensational act signified that black Detroiters had regained little confidence in liberal programs for eradicating racial discrimination in the city or the plants. Indeed, to much of the city’s black community, Johnson’s act seemed one of intense frustration. It was a clear warning to city and labor leaders that, as long as conditions for Detroit’s African Americans remained intolerable, violence was inevitable. To many in the city’s white neighborhoods, on the other hand, Johnson’s violence seemed simply to substantiate a long-held suspicion that urban blacks were determined to destroy the city and its workplaces. And to still other Motor City residents—both black and white revolutionaries seeking a fundamental overhaul of civic and labor relations—Johnson’s act was politically symbolic and worthy of Che Guevara or Mao Tse-tung.

That a desperate figure like Johnson should be so familiar by the early 197os illustrates how extraordinarily complex both race relations and politics had become in Detroit since World War II. The bitter disagreement about what lessons might be learned from Johnson’s killing spree signifies that the Motor City and its auto plants remained in the grips of a severe racial and political crisis long after the bloody days of July 1967. Detroit’s future was still uncertain.

While Johnson is clearly not an Everyman, his participation in the Second Great Migration to Detroit during the 1950s, as well as his experiences in Detroit’s auto plants, courtrooms, and city streets during the 1960s and 1970s, were certainly understood by many Motor City residents and plant workers. Johnson’s story is emblematic of the complexity that was Detroit and the urban North writ large between 1945 and 1985. As such, it is woven throughout this book.³

By 1970, the soulful sounds of Marvin Gaye’s Heard It through the Grapevine and Diana Ross’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough filtered from the radios of cars