Detroit Race Riot (1943)

The 1943 Detroit Race Riot was a race riot which occurred during World War II. The racial tension in Detroit during WWII increased as migration of blacks from the Southern United States to the industrial cities of the Manufacturing Belt accelerated. A prime motivation for the migrations was the labor shortage and the opportunities to obtain factory jobs. Additional support for the migrations came also from the 1941 rulings of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) which declared that there could be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries (such as the mass production of military hardware, airplanes, tanks, and other vehicles in Detroit, a center of the “Arsenal of Democracy”) due to race, creed, color, or national origin.

The riot began on June 20, 1943, on Belle Isle (one of the world's largest parks) when roughly one hundred thousand Detroiters gathered to enjoy the hot Sunday afternoon. Hostile confrontations between young blacks and whites broke out throughout the day, and fights erupted on the bridge connecting Belle Isle to Southeast Detroit. Rumors of race war roused whites and blacks, who both took to the streets near Belle Isle and in the downtown area and attacked passersby, streetcars, and property. Blacks in Paradise Valley (“Black Bottom”) looted white-owned shops; whites overturned and burned cars of black drivers on Woodward Avenue. According to Thomas Sugrue in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: "Many Detroit police openly sympathized with the white rioters, and were especially brutal to the blacks; 17 blacks were shot to death by the police, no whites were" (p. 29).

The riot came to an end once Mayor Edward Jeffries, Jr. and Governor Harry Kelly asked President Roosevelt for help. In response, federal troops in armored cars and jeeps with automatic weapons drove down Woodward Avenue. The appearance of the troops with their overwhelming firepower succeeded in dispersing the mobs. Over the course of three days, 34 people were killed, of whom 25 were black. 675 suffered serious injuries, and 1,893 were arrested.

References

• Sugrue, Thomas J. (1996). The Origins of the Urban Crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-05888-1.
• The 1943 Race Riots. The Detroit News. Retrieved on September 22., 2006.