Labor Day Reflections - Part I

How Did Detroit Get

To Where It's At?

The J.L Hudson Co.'s downtown store, circa 1955, courtesy of Wayne State University.

As the downward spiral of Detroit continues -- in spite of a successful revival of downtown and promising new plans for its neighborhoods -- the question often asked still is: How did we get here? Let's take a brief spin down history's lane, with me behind the wheel, of course.

The course to Detroit's current plight can be traced to the twenties when Henry Ford sent recruiters to the South to bring back busloads of black and white men to work in his factories. This was part of the Great Migration of blacks moving North seeking jobs and freedom from the Jim Crow South. In Detroit it planted the seed for what later resulted in -- compared to other Northern cities which also experienced the Great Migration -- a disproportionately high black population as a percentage of the city's entire population. All the large northern cities were recipients of the Great Migration but none ultimately were impacted by it more than Detroit.

You can see the migration's impact in the fact that Detroit's population has been a black majority since the eighties and today's remaining population of 900,000 is 90 percent black. A growing black population and a declining white population accelerated this transformation like no other major American city, except perhaps Washington D.C. Detroit was once the nation's fifth largest city with a population of 1.8 million; today it is 12th.

The recruitment of workers from the South by the auto industry and others is a watershed in Detroit's history. It is one of the main reasons that Detroit became a crucible for racial tension and a northern center of the civil rights movement. Without such a large black population, relatively speaking, the history of Detroit would have been profoundly different. I hasten to add that I am not saying that Metro Detroit's black population has been or was the cause of the city's problems in the last 45 years. The causes are many, complex and interrelated.

What Could Have Been?

I am saying that the economic and social development of Detroit and its environs would have occurred in a dramatically different way had the city received a proportionately smaller influx of blacks from the Great Migration. Although no one can every say with certainty, with a smaller beginning black population, the city's white population would have stabilized somewhere near 50 percent in the seventies. By example, the population of the city of Philadelphia in the fifties was 2.1 million. Today, Philadelphia's population is 1.2 million with a 65 percent white population. Philly lost nearly 900,000 residents, but maintained its white majority.

Detroit's total population would have settled in somewhere a tad above one million. Fewer corporations and manufacturing plants with their jobs and tax revenue would have fled. The suburban sprawl of the 70's and 80's would have not been so rapacious of both the city and its rural land use. During the last half of the 20th century, the suburbs were awash in economic growth while the city continued its decline. Imagine if only half of the growth that occurred in Oakland County over the past 40 years had taken place in the city.

Detroit's efforts to prevent a declining population and to keep whites from fleeing was hampered in the first half of the 20th century by the city's inability to annex municipalities and their tax bases and "keep" whites in the city through geographic expansion. Other large cities like Chicago, and later in the century Phoenix and Columbus OH simply kept expanding the city limits so that as white flight moved outward, the city kept those citizens as taxpayers to support schools and municipal services for the entire city. This also had the affect of maintaining a "racially balanced" city even though it would have racially segregated neighborhoods. Today other Midwest cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and others still have white majority populations.

Detroit was unable to expand physically because it has been bordered by Oakland county on the north, Macomb County on the northeast, the small city-suburb of Dearborn on the west, and the Detroit River on the south, thus making it jurisdictionally landlocked and unable to expand the city limits and hang on to its middle class tax base. Also, during the first 40 years of the 20th century, Detroit was growing and nobody was thinking about out-migration from the city, or if they did, they saw it as another sign of prosperity. Besides, there were wars to be fought and won.

Labor Day Reflections Part II appears tomorrow on Talk About Detroit.