Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit

344 Pages·2016·2.888 MB·English

by  Karen R. Miller

Managing Inequality
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Managing Inequality
Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit
Karen R. Miller
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2015 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Karen R.
Managing inequality : Northern racial liberalism in interwar Detroit / Karen R. Miller.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4798-8009-6 (cloth : acid-free paper)
1.  Detroit (Mich.)--Race relations--History--20th century. 2.  Detroit (Mich.)--Politics
and government--20th century. 3.  African Americans--Civil rights--Michigan--
Detroit--History--20th century. 4.  African Americans--Michigan--Detroit--Social
conditions--20th century. 5.  Liberalism--Michigan--Detroit--History--20th century.
6.  Equality--Government policy--Michigan--Detroit--History--20th century. 7.  Detroit
(Mich.)--Economic conditions--20th century.  I. Title.
F574.D49A25 2014
308.896’07307743409042--dc23
2014024575
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Also available as an ebook
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 African American Migration and the Emerging
Discourse of Northern Racial Liberalism 24
2 Protecting Urban Peace: Northern Racial Liberalism and
the Limits of Racial Equality 64
3 Between Ossian Sweet and the Great Depression: Tolerance
and Northern Racial Liberal Discourse in the Late 1920s 97
4 “Living Happily at the Taxpayers’ Expense”: City Managers,
African American “Freeloaders,” and White Taxpayers 129
5 “Let Us Act Funny”: Snow Flake Grigsby and Civil Rights
Liberalism in the 1930s 163
6 Northern Racial Liberalism and Detroit’s Labor Movement 205
7 “Better Housing Makes Better Citizens”: Slum Clearance
and Low-Cost Housing 237
Conclusion 262
Notes 273
Bibliography 305
Index 317
About the Author 331
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Acknowledgments
This project has been a long time in the making. It began in the
Shaker Heights, Ohio, of my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s. A self-
consciously liberal, affluent, and integrated inner-ring suburb, Shaker
Heights was known for its good schools, winding streets, and anti –
white flight programs: low-interest loans designed to integrate neigh-
borhoods, robust busing, and ordinances against blockbusting. But
the city’s liberalism and its pro-integration policies did not eliminate
segregation or stratification, even locally. In spite of busing, elementary
schools in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods were majority white, and
those that sat next to Cleveland were almost all black. By high school,
tracking by race and class was intense.
Available explanations felt inadequate: we were taught that rac-
ism was a relic left over from slavery, rooted in the American South,
mostly a problem of the past, and something that was already fading
away. Or, it was a failing of individuals who had absorbed toxic ideas
and needed them purged. Shaker Heights was certainly more integrated
than neighboring towns, and as I came to understand later in life, its
racial progressivism and limited residential integration were quite rare
for suburban America. But contradictions remained between the racial
liberalism it espoused and the persistence of inequalities in wealth and
schooling, even very locally. This book is my effort to understand why.
Archivists and staff members at the Bentley Historical Library at
the University of Michigan, the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and
Urban Affairs at Wayne State University, the Burton Historical Col-
lection at the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Pub-
lic Library went out of their way to help me find materials relevant to
my interests. I am indebted to Debbie Gershenowitz, who acquired the
>> vii
viii << Acknowledgments
book for NYU Press, and to Clara Platter and Constance Grady, who
saw it through production. I am grateful for two incisive reviews that
helped me reshape and strengthen the manuscript from Kevin Boyle
and a reviewer who remains anonymous. Richard Thomas generously
allowed me to use a map he dug out of his files, and I am thankful for
that act of kindness. I would also like to thank Gianluca Vassallo for
letting me use a photograph, part of his “Free Portrait” project, as my
author photo.
I began to write about the history of Detroit as an undergradu-
ate at the University of Michigan. I was incredibly fortunate to have
Elsa Barkely Brown and Robin D. G. Kelley guide me through my
undergraduate thesis and shape my thinking about the city and its
racial dynamics. Graduate school faculty, including my adviser, Terry
McDonald, and a committee that included Matthew Countryman, Earl
Lewis, Hannah Rosen, and Heather Thompson, provided me with mod-
els of engaged and careful scholarship after which I modeled my own.
Each of them helped sharpen the questions I was asking and the book
that ultimately emerged. Friends and faculty in Ann Arbor, whom I met
through the university, through activism, and through local networks,
also contributed to my thinking and provided me with invaluable sup-
port and camaraderie. Thanks go to Chris Cassell, Leland Davis, Angela
Dillard, Clara Kawanishi, Sarah Jessup, Tamara Joseph, Christine Kel-
ley, Kate Masur, Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Alyssa Picard, and Nick
Syrett. In 1997, I moved to Detroit and was fortunate to meet people
who introduced me to the city and became my friends and comrades.
Glen Bessemer, Dianne Feeley, Jessica LaBumbard, Peter Landon, Kris-
tin Palm, Jenny Schmidt, Dave Schroeder, Matt Siegfriend, Jane Slaugh-
ter, and especially Jana Cephas, Mark Dilley, and Lori Stark helped me
navigate Detroit and understand its many geographies.
In 2003, I moved to New York. A welcoming group of old and new
friends and colleagues help me rethink and refine this project. David
Kazanjian generously read an early draft of the manuscript and offered
helpful advice about how to proceed. Both formal and informal writ-
ing groups with colleagues at the City University of New York were an
essential part of the revision process. Carolina Bank Munoz, Stephen
Steinberg, Celina Su, Saadia Toor, and Nicole Trujillo-Pagan all offered
invaluable feedback. I am grateful to the many friends, colleagues, and
Acknowledgments >> ix
comrades in New York and elsewhere who have listened to me work
through my ideas over dinner, coffee, work dates, and playdates, as well
as those who have provided a respite from thinking about this project:
Kelly Anderson, Moustafa Bayoumi, Padmini Biswas, Shelley Curnow,
Kristen Gallagher, Mary Greenfield, Alyssa Katz, Robin Kietlinski,
Emily Kohner, Jude Koski, Allison Miller, Sarah Miller, Charlie Post,
Deb Reichman, Kirsten Scheid, Brooke Smith, and Chloe Tribich.
Phyllis van Slyck has fed my son, Oscar, and me countless delicious
Sunday dinners and whisked us away to the beach. She, Laura Tanen-
baum, and Arianna Martinez have helped me feel at home at LaGuar-
dia Community College. Michelle Billies, another CUNY colleague
and friend, has been encouraging and interested in my work. I have
known Liza Featherstone since I was an undergraduate, and we have
been talking about these questions since we first met. Doug Henwood
has whipped up fabulous delicacies over which we complain about poli-
tics and the Left. My cousin Sarah Miller wrote her senior thesis about
Detroit as well; she served as an invaluable research assistant when I
was finishing graduate school. Rebeca Carrion was Oscar’s caregiver for
two years, and I am indebted to her for her enthusiasm and generosity.
Mary LuAllen has made this project possible by helping me analyze and
understand my relationship to its content and production. I have also
been honored to have had excellent students at LaGuardia Community
College ask me provocative questions about cities, race, and history and
push me to clarify my claims. One of them, Anthony Salcedo, worked
as my research assistant. I look forward to reading his scholarship in
the near future.
I feel very lucky and deeply grateful to have a full-time academic job
that provides me with a living wage, summers off, job security, and a
day job that is related to my intellectual pursuits. Other funding has
also been crucial. Grants from CUNY’s Faculty Fellowships Publica-
tions Program, the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY
Graduate Center, and the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program have
released me from teaching and allowed me to focus on my writing. I
finished a major round of revisions when I was on sabbatical and in
residence at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the Uni-
versity of Michigan. Funding from the Educational Development Ini-
tiative Team’s Professional Development Grant Program at LaGuardia