Multiculturalism Detroit in 1908 My

Multiculturalism

Detroit

In 1908 my great grandmother came to Detroit on the train with her mother, two brothers and a sister. She was eight years old. Her father had come a few weeks earlier to find work and a place for them to live. They were from Albany, New York and Detroit was "out west." Her father's mother (my great-great-great grandmother) wanted him to be a barrel maker. But he went against her because he could see that machines were what the future was about. He went to different factories in New York State to learn tool and die making. For instance, he worked for a year in a factory in Schenectady, New York to learn gears. But he decided to move to Detroit because Henry Ford was paying a dollar for men to work in his factory. Detroit was "where it was at."

At that time a great number of people were moving to Detroit. It must have been an exciting place then. There were still lots of horses for transportation, but there were some cars too and some of the streets were paved (with bricks). Gas lights were used to light the streets at night. Lots of new houses were being built (Gay 16). My great-great grandfather bought a house on Lansing Avenue in the southwest part of the city. It was a neighborhood where many German and Polish people lived. The Germans were Protestants, and the Polish were Catholics but they got along pretty well together. In 1900 the population of Detroit was 285,704 people, but Detroit grew steadily. By 1910 it was 465,766 and by 1950 there were 1,849,568! When my German great-great grandparents moved to Detroit, there were 32,000 Germans who made up 11.2% of the population (History Detroit online).

In 1900 Detroit already had a sewage system that was begun in 1836. This is important because some scholars believe that longer life expectancies were the result of better sewage treatment facilities (rather than medical breakthroughs). Today Detroit has the largest wastewater treatment plant in the world. When visitors come from other countries they are taken to see this (Detroit Infra).

The layout of the city was designed by the same man who designed Washington, D.C. Detroit is shaped like a wheel. Streets and roads begin at the River downtown and fan out. There are three main arteries that run north from the river like spokes in a wheel. Woodward Avenue runs straight north. Gratiot runs northeast, and Grand River runs northwest. Street cars ran on tracks on these main thoroughfares until after World War II.

East side and West side are almost like two separate cities. People tend to stay on the side they grew up on.

My great grandmother grew up on the West side and went to Detroit Teacher's College, which later became Wayne State University. She married my great grandfather in 1923. They met at a club meeting. For dates they walked downtown and got ginger-ale floats at the Vernor's Factory.

They had two children, Anne in 1929 and Tom in 1930; then, the Great Depression came. My great-grandfather, who worked for the Detroit Free Press lost his job. They would have had to go on the "dole" but her father, the tool and die maker, had money by then, and he helped them. They had bought a house and were making payments on their refrigerator, furniture, and new car. They didn't lose those things, but it was close, and they never got over being afraid of debt. They never bought anything they couldn't pay cash for after that.

Detroit was one of the hardest hit cities during the Depression with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. President Hoover was in denial, though. He claimed the economy was just fine and anybody who wanted to work could get a job if he wasn't too lazy. This made people mad. My great-grandfather was in the crowd when Hoover came to Detroit during the election campaign of 1932. Thousands of men lined up in the streets and chanted, "Hang Hoover! Hang Hoover!" President Roosevelt got elected. He brought social programs to help the people, like social security for old folks and the WPA for unemployed workers. Things didn't really get better in Detroit, though, until World War II. Big changes happened then. For one thing, my great-grandfather got a job selling life insurance in 1938, and my grandmother Caroline was born in 1940.

All the automobile factories were geared up for war manufacturing instead of cars. The men went in Service and the women went to work in the factories. At the same time black people from down South, who were not allowed in the Army because of their color, came to Detroit and found work in the factories. Back in 1900 there were only 4,111 black people living in Detroit, but by 1940 the number was 300,506. The influx resulted in racial conflicts.

My great-grandfather on my father's side was one of those African-Americans who came to Detroit from Georgia in 1940 and went to work for Henry Ford. He and my great-grandmother lived in Inkster, a community Henry Ford built to house black workers and their families. Of course, they didn't know that someday their grandson would marry a white woman. In those days Detroit was strictly segregated. A black man wouldn't go to jail or be lynched for marrying a white woman like down south, but there was a lot of racial tension in Detroit. In 1944 a terrible race riot broke out on Belle Isle (a park on an island in the Detroit River) and lasted almost a week. Nobody has ever been sure exactly what started it because the two stories were so different.

After the war when the men came home, they took back the factories and women stayed home. There was lots of stuff to buy again, like furniture, appliances, cars and electronics. It was a time of prosperity. Detroit was very dynamic. My grandmother told me her mother used to take her downtown every Saturday on the bus to shop. There were crowds of people crossing the streets and wonderful stores that competed for the most beautiful window displays.

J.L. Hudson's was the largest department store in the world. The Vernor's ginger ale factory was downtown and Saunder's Ice Cream. For 30 cents you could get a double dip hot fudge sundae. One of the biggest shoe stores in the world was there, too. It was called Fyfe's -- a six story department store with nothing but shoes.

My grandmother told me that white people who lived in Detroit in the 50s and 60s believed that Detroit blacks were better treated there than anywhere else. This was because Detroit had the largest middle-class black population in the country. More blacks owned their own homes, for example, than in any other city (Georgakas 27). So they (the white people) were utterly unprepared for the riots in 1967. Of course, the rioters were not the middle class black people. They were poor people who had no hope. Fires wiped out whole neighborhoods and for a week there was gun fire, sniping in the streets, looting, fighting, and crime. Finally, President Johnson sent the military to quell the "civil disturbance." The effect of the riots was disastrous for Detroit. During the next three years more than a million people moved out. Detroit lost more than half its people plus its tax base went with them.

Those who were left had never run a city before, and they had no money to do it. On my grandmother's street, for example, the street lights were on only three nights a week. Her neighborhood had to take turns with other neighborhoods because Detroit didn't have enough money to pay its electric bill. What money was available went to the downtown area. The neighborhoods were left to rot. By the 1980s many of them looked like war zones. In 1975 my grandmother moved up north to escape the racial tension which had grown quite ugly. My grandmother had four children by that time and one of them was my mother Anna.