A HARD-FOUGHT BATTLE FOR JOBS
In Detroit, a black middle class is born amid backlash from whites
Before 1968, America’s small African-American middle class operated mostly in a segregated world. Blackowned funeral homes, pharmacies, restaurants and clubs served a mostly black clientele in neighborhoods such as Detroit’s Black Bottom, soon to be razed for “urban renewal” — decimated like many others by new freeways.
Many college-educated blacks were able find jobs only in a few places open to them, such as the post office. When Ford Motor was asked in 1963 to list its white-collar occupations open to African Americans, it had to include service jobs such as valets, porters, messengers and mail clerks just to have any at all. Blacks then at Ford were relegated mostly to the worst dead-end jobs in assembly plants.
After the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 and the report of the Kerner Commission on urban unrest, America began, slowly and painfully, to offer more opportunities to people of color.
A white backlash grew along with the greater opportunities for African
Americans. The struggle for opportunity and the backlash against it played out dramatically in Detroit.
Among the witnesses was the Rev. Doug Fitch, a black Methodist pastor from Los Angeles who helped run the Detroit Industrial Mission, a task force designed to open auto industry jobs to African Americans.
“Often, those who were poor were relegated to the very dirty jobs,” said Fitch, 81. “They were on the assembly line, but they were not in the organization as managers.”
Industry responds
Some of Detroit’s corporate elite, including Henry Ford II and financier Max Fisher, ordered more opportunities for blacks in industry, including Detroit’s many auto plants.
Schools and housing remained segregated for decades, but over time, Fitch said, more economic opportunities opened for African Americans, from the factory floor to professional offices.
“What happened is that corporations began to think seriously about new employees coming into their business that would change the face of that corporation,” Fitch said. The face of work began to “look a lot like us.”
It remained a tense time. Rod Gillum, later a vice president and senior member of General Motors’ legal staff and chair of the commission that built the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, grew up in northwest Detroit in the 1960s when a distinguished legal career for an African-American young man remained unusual at best.
Gillum remembers vividly how it felt to grow up black in Detroit in 1968. He had a job at the Northland Mall in suburban Detroit, where he stood out among the mostly white clientele.
“You would pause a little bit, look over your shoulder, because you’d have some concern,” he said. “That was just the reality; that was your normal.
“You always wondered how others kind of viewed you at that time; and then with the death of Dr. King, whether they viewed you with some trepidation or they viewed you with more of a welcome. But that was your normal as a teenager.”
During the civil disturbances of 1967, which left 43 people dead in Detroit, President Johnson named Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner to head a 12-member advisory panel on civil disorders. The Kerner Report, released Feb. 29, 1968, found that black resentment of white racism fueled the unrest. It warned, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
Gary Gilson, a broadcast journalist, documented black resentment in the five months he spent in Detroit in late 1968 and early ’69 filming Do You Think a Job Is the Answer? His documentary was about efforts by Detroit industry to integrate more African Americans into the workforce. It ran on public television in March 1969.
Driving around Detroit, Gilson saw long lines of blacks lined up outside a movie theater. Puzzled, he stopped to look into it. They were there to see The Battle of Algiers, a film about Algerians rebelling against French colonial rule by organizing themselves into secret cells.
“There’s no way that the cops can crack that secrecy,” Gilson said. “Well, all these people were lining up to learn this! It was a symptom of what was the mood of the town. Resentment that so many black people felt toward the police was one of the major issues in town.”
President Johnson’s administration rejected the Kerner Report when it was issued. But when King was assassinated weeks later in Memphis, at least some white Americans began to take the concerns of black America more seriously.
Historian Thomas Sugrue, a professor at New York University, said the events of the year demonstrated the need for real change.
“The long, hot summers and the 1960s all the way up through the riots that accompanied the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 sent a very strong signal to government and to civic elites, particularly in riot-affected cities, that they needed to address the grievances and concerns of African Americans,” he said. As more opportunities began to open for African Americans, the white backlash grew.
A shift to the right
In the presidential race that year, the winner, Republican Richard Nixon, run- ning on his law-and-order message, and independent George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, together garnered 57% of the national popular vote, while liberal Democrat Hubert Humphrey took 43%.
Holding Michigan for Humphrey that year became a major goal for Detroit union leader Walter Reuther, president of the powerful United Auto Workers and a national leader of liberalism.
In 1968, Reuther faced criticism from within his own union, both from angry African-American members who formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement to demand greater opportunities for blacks and from resentful white autoworkers resisting black progress.
As Reuther biographer Nelson Lichtenstein wrote in his book The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, Reuther confronted that growing opposition during a visit to a UAW town hall meeting featuring a Wallace-friendly crowd.
Trying to respond to a white woman’s question, Reuther addressed her in union vernacular: “If the sister will sit down, I’ll explain that.”
The woman shot back, “Don’t you call me a sister!”
For Reuther, who had led sit-down strikes in the 1930s, survived beatings and assassination attempts and negotiated landmark contracts for his members after World War II, the rebuke from his own ranks was stunning.
Sensing his UAW members drifting toward Wallace and his angry antiWashington message, Reuther poured huge resources into saving Michigan for Humphrey. Humphrey carried Michigan that year, and Nixon and Wallace did several percentage points poorer than their nationwide averages.
But the writing was on the wall. “It was the last heyday of labor liberalism,” said Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of California-Santa Barbara. “It sent this jolt across the liberal labor leadership that this whole world was turning against them.
“They saved the day (in Michigan), but it was an auger for what would happen in the future.”
Historian Sugrue noted, “Urban unrest in the 1960s was decisive in pulling working- and middle-class whites rightward politically.”
White workers helped Donald Trump win the state in 2016.