Managing Inequality

Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit

Karen R. Miller

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479893553
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the wake of the Civil War, many white northern leaders supported race-neutral laws and anti-discrimination statutes. These positions helped amplify the distinctions they drew between their political economic system, which they saw as forward-thinking in its promotion of free market capitalism, and the now vanquished southern system, which had been built on slavery. But this interest in legal race neutrality should not be mistaken for an effort to integrate northern African Americans into the state or society on an equal footing with whites. During the Great Migration, which brought tens of thousands of African Americans into Northern cities after World War I, white northern leaders faced new challenges from both white and African American activists and were pushed to manage race relations in a more formalized and proactive manner. The result was northern racial liberalism: the idea that all Americans, regardless of race, should be politically equal, but that the state cannot and indeed should not enforce racial equality by interfering with existing social or economic relations. In Managing Inequality, Karen R. Miller examines the formulation, uses, and growing political importance of northern racial liberalism in Detroit between the two World Wars. Miller argues that racial inequality was built into the liberal state at its inception, rather than produced by antagonists of liberalism. Managing Inequality shows that our current racial system—where race neutral language coincides with extreme racial inequalities that appear natural rather than political—has a history that is deeply embedded in contemporary governmental systems and political economies.

1

African American Migration and the Emerging Discourse of Northern Racial Liberalism

In May 1918, Detroit police officers began to stop African American travelers arriving at the Michigan Central Railroad station to inspect their bodies for smallpox vaccination scars. If no scars were found, the new arrivals were lined up, taken into a common room, and required to submit to a vaccination shot. The Board of Health had instituted these shots to prevent an epidemic but targeted only African American travelers as carriers of disease.¹ White male police officers inspected black migrants in a room “where both sexes [were] present” and in a manner that intimidated and humiliated them. One woman protested that despite her objections, “the upper part of her body was exposed in an embarrassing manner with men present.” The vaccination program thus relayed a strong symbolic message: black newcomers should expect city officials and institutions in Detroit to treat them with suspicion. At the same time, the Board of Health did not disrupt the flow of African American travelers into the city; black migrants were crucial to the local labor market from the beginning of the First World War through the 1920s. Some of the new arrivals were detained for a few hours, but none was turned away.² The vaccination program promoted race-based distinctions between white and black migrants that shaped the social, political, economic, and occupational terrains of Detroit.

Public health workers found as many cases of smallpox among whites in Detroit as they did among blacks, but they did not target white migrants as carriers of disease. Indeed, the Board of Health’s belief that black migrants were likely carriers and its simultaneous disinterest in white travelers illustrate that it understood public health concerns through a racial lens. The smallpox vaccination program reflected white leaders’ more general worry that the presence of black migrants in Detroit posed a threat to the city’s social, political, and economic order. Rather than casting all African Americans as inherently inferior because they were black, northern white leaders targeted black migrants as carriers of pathogens. This move was both racially specific (directed only toward black migrants) and racially ambiguous (ostensibly directed at them because of their potential for illness rather than their race itself). This approach to black newcomers was a central lexicon for how northern racialization would work in Detroit and other northern cities. Concern about black migrants’ potential to threaten public health was a double-edged sword, since it brought some resources to African Americans at the same time that it helped vilify them. For example, beginning in 1917, the board worked with the Detroit Urban League (DUL), a social service agency for African Americans, to improve sanitation among blacks to prevent the spread of smallpox. The board paid for DUL social workers to visit recent migrants, give them advice about diet and clothing, and encourage them to be vaccinated.³

During the First Great Migration, Detroit’s white leaders increasingly and self-consciously defined the city against popular conceptions of the American South, characterizing their racial practices as more flexible and less harsh than the systemic racism and vigilante violence so prevalent in the South. However, the treatment of black migrants at the train station reveals a deep gap between the idea that race would play a negligible role in shaping Detroit’s economic and political geographies, and the reality of the racially disparate treatment and deeply unequal conditions of northern life. It contradicted the implicit northern promise that blackness would be an insignificant barrier to full urban equality, especially compared with the South. Indeed, it confirmed for African American travelers that racially based differentiation, exclusion, and discrimination would shape their lives in the urban North as well. The quality of the racial systems in these two regions would be different, as would white explanations for the persistence of deep racial inequalities, yet racial inequality would play a central role in shaping Detroit’s economic, social, and political terrains. Ultimately, the promise that the North would be the land of racial freedom reflected the ideology of northern racial liberalism rather than the reality of life in the region.

Detroit’s white leaders overplayed the differences between their racial practices and those of southerners’, but their interest in confirming that their regional system was fairer meant that they did accommodate some black challenges to inequality. They made these concessions on their own terms, however, without acknowledging that racism in the North was systemic and without disclosing that their decisions were effected by black protest. For example, white leaders initially ignored African American migrants’ complaints about the vaccination program and about police officers’ invasive behavior at the train station. However, after a committee of middle-class black leaders from the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) approached the city’s commissioner of health, Dr. James Inches, the vaccination program was terminated. Inches did not acknowledge that this meeting affected his decision. Instead, he claimed the program was ending because it was ineffective, thereby avoiding responsibility for having implemented a racially discriminatory policy. By not mentioning race, or recognizing that it had played a role in the vaccination program, Inches cast himself and his department as immune from prejudice.⁴

Ultimately, the formation of northern racial liberalism and of black responses to this new racial ideology was the product of a number of contemporaneous changes in Detroit and the nation. First, it emerged alongside the beginning of the First Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the urban North, a demographic shift tied to black workers’ new role in the local labor market. Second, it developed as migration reshaped the city’s housing market and racial geography during which struggles over racial boundaries became more pronounced. Third, it coincided with a significant change in the city’s white leadership and in the municipal government more broadly, characterized by the growing power and popularity of urban reform. Urban reformers provided a language for explaining stratification and developed institutions for managing urban populations that white leaders then used, both ideologically and practically, to handle the influx of black newcomers. Finally, northern racial liberalism emerged as a response to an increasingly vocal and politically organized African American minority that was actively debating the meanings of full racial justice and challenging the racial hierarchies of the North. In order to comprehend the city’s treatment of African American people at the train station, it is important to consider several intertwined historical developments: migration, racially based labor market segmentation, urban reform, and black political activism. Developments in each of these crucial areas set the stage for white leaders’ political engagement with African Americans and contributed to new ideas about race in Detroit and the urban North more generally.

The Political Tradition of Race Neutrality

The posture that characterized northern racial liberalism—a discourse of race neutrality, an ambivalent stance against racial violence, and a belief that African American equality would emerge gradually as black people progressed and assimilated middle-class norms—evolved out of existing political discourses and practices. Michigan’s mainstream white political leaders had passed laws banning racial discrimination and mandating integration well before the beginning of the First Great Migration. Indeed, the state had been a haven for fugitive slaves through the antebellum era and was more welcoming of African Americans than its neighbors into the late nineteenth century. The Republican-dominated state legislature passed a handful of laws during Reconstruction, the two decades immediately following the Civil War, that integrated the state’s public schools, overturned prohibitions on interracial marriage, and banned discrimination in the administration of life insurance, the selection of juries, and public places of accommodation, recreation, and amusement. These laws illustrate that the majority of Michigan’s Republican lawmakers believed in and supported the idea of legal racial egalitarianism in the 1860s, 1870s, and into the 1880s.⁵

Michigan’s Republicans supported race-neutral laws and antidiscrimination statutes because these positions stood in line with their political economic vision. Founded to oppose the expansion of slavery, encourage industrial development, and foster the “free market,” Michigan’s Republican Party stood for free labor ideology, the antebellum notion that white workers’ economic independence was the foundation for republicanism and civic virtue, both of which were fatally encumbered by slavery.⁶ This ideal—that white workers should be able to sell their labor freely—did not preclude virulent racism against African Americans. However, for white northerners, support for race-neutral laws helped amplify the distinctions they drew between their legal system, which promoted the free market, and the racially hierarchical legal system upon which slavery was built. After the Civil War, Republicans continued to support legal race neutrality, position themselves against the brutal racism of the South, and distance their racial practices from white southerners’ efforts to sustain control over populations of former slaves. New laws marked a decisive rejection of efforts to legally exclude African Americans from public spaces and institutions and provided avenues for challenging race-based exclusion. However, Republicans’ commitment to legal race neutrality should not be mistaken for an effort to integrate Michigan’s small African American population into the state on an equal footing with whites. Few Michigan Republicans expressed an interest in altering the material effects of existing race-based structural inequalities. The new laws remained difficult to enforce and included few consequences for the businesses or individuals who broke them.

Despite their support for the legal theory of race neutrality, white Republicans only occasionally achieved substantive victories for black equality. Detroit and Wayne County were both majority Democrat during and after the Civil War. Democratic city and county leaders rarely prosecuted violators of the Republican-sponsored state laws and frequently resisted those laws’ mandates. The city’s school board, for example, refused to implement the 1867 statute calling for school integration and supported white teachers who turned black students away from their classes. Joseph Workman, whose son had been excluded from a nearby school, took the case to court with support from the African American Second Baptist Church and the financial backing of John Bagley, a white Republican financier and tobacco manufacturer who later became Michigan’s governor. In 1869, the state supreme court overruled the city’s school board, mandating integration.⁷ In the 1870s and 1880s, a handful of well-connected African Americans won political offices and appointments through the Republican Party machine of Michigan, but Republicans’ power in Detroit, home to the vast majority of the state’s black residents, was limited. While African Americans won the struggle for school integration, they were unable to enforce other newly passed laws against black exclusion. Like their twentieth-century counterparts, few white Republicans moved beyond proclamations about their belief in equal protection under the law, fewer still mounted challenges to existing hierarchies, and many subscribed, self-consciously or unself-consciously, to contemporary ideas about race that justified the inequalities their laws were aimed at undermining.⁸

By the 1890s, Detroit, like the rest of the state, had become a Republican stronghold, but by then, white Republicans had become even weaker political allies to African Americans. Former abolitionists and Civil War officers thinned out of the ranks of active white Republicans, and the party moved away from its Civil War identity. For example, the reform measures introduced by Hazen Pingree, Detroit’s Republican mayor through most of the 1890s, and Michigan’s governor through 1900, undermined black access to public office. Civil service measures undercut patronage appointments, and direct primaries meant that political parties lost the power to unilaterally forward candidates to run in general elections. Reformers expressed no remorse about their new policies’ effects on African American political representation or access to public jobs, but they did use race-neutral language to dismiss black complaints—claiming that their reforms were about efficiency and fairness, not race. By the beginning of the twentieth century, African Americans were shut out of public office in Detroit, and civil rights legislation had fallen off the agendas of white leaders across the mainstream political spectrum.⁹ While white politicians made no effort to overturn legal racial equality, Reconstruction-era laws remained on the books but provided scant protection to black Detroiters.

Between 1890 and the 1920s, northern whites expanded their own segregationist practices while quietly watching the institutionalization of legalized Jim Crow and vigilante violence in the American South.¹⁰ Beginning in the mid-1890s, white employers began to replace black workers with white men and women in some of the most visible service jobs in the city. African Americans lost positions as barbers, coachmen, butlers, and maids in both private homes and hotels that had previously employed many of the most well-off blacks. In response, a group of black community leaders formed a committee to place African Americans in industrial jobs. While the organization successfully pressured the Detroit Street Railway to hire a number of black motormen, African Americans continued to be largely excluded from industrial employment.¹¹

The Springfield Riots

Mainstream white city leaders continued to position themselves against explicit expressions of racist violence in the first decade of the twentieth century, even as African Americans faced increased residential segregation, growing exclusion from jobs over which they once held practical monopolies, and decreasing access to public employment. The Detroit News’s coverage of the Springfield, Illinois, race riots of 1908, the event that precipitated the organization of the NAACP, reflected a practical consensus among the city’s white leaders about the need to reject violence against African Americans as unacceptable because of the urban disorder it caused. The newspaper lauded the Illinois governor, C. S. Deneen, for calling out the National Guard and declaring the violence “intolerable” and “inexcusable.”¹² The paper thus condemned the white rioters and positioned itself on the side of peace. However, its editors did not question the basic premise that white rioters used to explain their actions—that black male violence against white women was at the root of the racist hysteria.

For the Detroit News, lynching was unacceptable because it was extralegal, and rioting was deplorable because it caused urban mayhem and hurt innocent bystanders, including African Americans. But, like the vast majority of white Americans, the paper was not willing to consider either lynching or rioting as tools for enforcing systemic inequality, even though this analysis, generated by African American crusaders against extralegal racial violence, was available and relatively well publicized. Instead, the News suggested that whites and blacks shared responsibility for the bloodshed, even though white rioters perpetrated nearly all of the attacks and directed their animosity almost exclusively against African Americans and their allies. While News reporters deplored the racist rampage, they also shared white rioters’ concern that black male violence against white women was a chronic and dangerous social problem.¹³ For example, alongside news of the Springfield riots, the News reported soberly that “great excitement prevaile[d] at Pensacola,” Florida, because a black man accused of assaulting a white woman would almost certainly “be lynched and perhaps burned” that evening.¹⁴ Two other stories about black male violence against white women appeared farther up on the same page. One reported on a thwarted lynch mob in Virginia, and another covered the suicide of a black man accused of assaulting two white women. A third story reported that African American men who had fled from Springfield were “looking for trouble,” attempting to “arouse the people of their own race” to go back with them and fight.¹⁵ Taken together, these stories implicitly confirmed white rioters’ justification for their animosity, even while the newspaper explicitly condemned their extralegal behavior.

On the same page, the News ran a story announcing that a “Negro Minister,” the Reverend Henry W. Jameson, blamed the Springfield riots on the interracial association between the “undesirable of both classes mixing free...