PART ONE
Company Town
1
City Building and Boundary Making
On the eve of the Allied victory in World War II, as Michiganâs defense plants hummed and the nationâs economy boomed, Carl Crow, the official historian of the Buick division of General Motors, penned a glowing tribute to his employer and its hometown. Published in 1945, Crowâs encomium included the phrase âBuick is Flint and Flint is Buick,â a simple but revealing statement that captured the close relationship between GM and the Vehicle City. Comparing the company-town bond to that of a âself-sacrificing father and a successful son,â GMâs chronicler saluted the people of Flint for enabling GMâs rise to industrial supremacy. Because of GMâs triumphs, Crow averred, Flintâs citizens had obtained a degree of security and prosperity that made them the envy of the world.1 Like many of the cityâs promoters, Crow believed that Flintâs successes symbolized the fruition of the American Dream of progress, prosperity, and opportunity. âAmerica is a thousand Flints,â he concluded, because the city and its people exemplified the principles and aspirations that made the United States a beacon of hope for the wider world.2
Although Flintâs standing as a leading industrial city would ultimately prove fleeting, Crowâs optimism at warâs end was understandable. By the time he had finished writing The City of Flint Grows Up, the United States sat on the cusp of one of the longest periods of economic expansion and consumer prosperity in human history. As one of the worldâs preeminent manufacturing centers, Flint played a major role in driving the nationâs postâWorld War II economic boom. Equally important, the cars and trucks made in the Vehicle City helped to fuel the transportation revolution that transformed the United States into a predominantly suburban nation. In exchange for these accomplishments, Flintâs autoworkers earned impressively high wages, particularly after they unionized in the 1930s. Hoping to claim a share of that bounty, tens of thousands of migrants flocked to the Vehicle City during the first half of the twentieth century. Their arrivals helped to make Flint the eleventh-fastest-growing city in the United States, a fact that seldom escaped the areaâs boosters. Nevertheless, conditions on the ground in this densely populated working-class town were much more complicated than Crow and others were willing to acknowledge. To wit, the Flint that Crow championed was also a harshly divided city.3
During the decades preceding World War II, a potent combination of private discrimination, federal housing and development initiatives, corporate practices, and municipal public policies converged to make Flint one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States. As was the case in most other urban communities nationwide, housing proved to be a key venue for the establishment and maintenance of Flintâs color line. In the 1910s and 1920s, GM executives and local real estate developers worked to resolve the areaâs deep housing shortage by building new homes and neighborhoods for migrant workers. Because the deeds to these new properties contained racially restrictive covenants, however, they were available only to white buyers. By the 1930s federal and local policy makers had begun playing a more active role in shaping the Flint areaâs residential housing market. Still, though, segregation was the rule. Across the nation, in fact, New Deal housing programs hardened popular, legal, and administratively driven forms of residential segregation. During the 1930s officers from the federal Home Ownersâ Loan Corporation helped to codify racist standards for measuring mortgage risks, neighborhood stability, and market vitality. Later adopted by officials from the Federal Housing Administration, those standards led to the systematic practice of mortgage redlining. Working alongside local realtors, builders, and municipal officials, FHA representatives in Flint and other places established rules for metropolitan real estate development that all but required discrimination against African Americans.
For a time during the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, many of these same federal policy makers also engaged in suburban redlining. This punitive practice forced officials from the areaâs white working-class suburbs to provide new services and establish political independence from Flint as a prerequisite to obtaining federal mortgage insurance. Over time, the redlining of Flintâs dilapidated suburbs fostered the growth of a socially and politically divisive brand of suburban capitalism. As with whites-only schools, parks, and workplaces, the segregated and politically fragmented residential arrangements that proliferated during this period fit comfortably within Flintâs civic culture of Jim Crow.
Company and Town
Flintâs phoenixlike emergence on the national scene was a testament to copious amounts of hard work, government support, and imperial ambition. The cityâs identity as a commercial and industrial center first began to take shape in 1819, when an enterprising settler named Jacob Smith established a fur trading post on the Flint River. Prior to then, several groups of Ojibwe Indians had shared the sparsely developed lands of the Saginaw Valley with an assortment of trappers, subsistence farmers, and territorial officials. By 1820 the US government had acquired all of the Ojibwe lands in southeastern Michigan through a mix of treaties, purchases, and raw violence.4 Flintâs ascent as an urban and commercial hub coincided with this era of Native American dispossession and displacement. Located between Detroit and Saginaw, Smithâs settlement on the banks of the Flint River was an excellent stopping point for both traders and travelers. An influx of settlers during the antebellum period helped to turn Flint into a bustling hamlet of nearly twenty thousand permanent residents. Encouraged by this growth, community leaders launched a successful campaign for municipal incorporation in 1855. Soon after that, the cityâs burgeoning lumber and carriage manufacturing industries began attracting thousands of workers to Genesee County. Nevertheless, Flint remained a tiny, relatively unknown city until the turn of the twentieth century, when the arrival of the âhorseless carriageâ inaugurated a new epoch in the communityâs history.
The birth of the automobile industry helped to transform Flint from a small town into a metropolitan center. The shift began shortly after engineers unveiled the first generation of gasoline-powered cars in the 1880s, at which point area investors launched a campaign to recruit automobile companies to the Flint region. Civic boosters achieved a major victory in 1904 when one of the areaâs leading industrialists, James H. Whiting, acquired the Buick Motor Company and relocated its manufacturing operations to Flintâs north side. Soon afterward, Whiting hired a Flint-based carriage maker and speculator named Billy Durant to run his new venture. Durant promptly moved Buickâs industrial operations ninety miles southeast to the city of Jackson, Michigan, however, claiming that Buickâs Flint facilities were too small and outdated. In response, civic leaders, in what would become a recurring theme in the cityâs history, launched a major fundraising campaign to bring Buick back to Flint. Within weeks, local bankers and industrialists had pledged over five hundred thousand dollars in stock subscriptions, which provided Durant with the capital necessary to build a suitable assembly plant on Flintâs north side. By 1906 Durant and Buick had returned to Flint to establish long-term operations.5
Two years later, Durant founded the General Motors Corporation. Eager to build an industrial empire, Durant promptly acquired the Olds, Cadillac, and Oakland automobile companies. On the strength of those investments, GM quickly became one of the worldâs leading automobile producers, bringing windfall profits to Durant, Whiting, Charles Stewart Mott, and other local industrialists. By 1929 Durantâs company had produced ten million cars, and GM was well on its way to becoming the worldâs largest industrial firm. As GMâs birthplace and manufacturing headquarters, Flint grew rapidly during this freewheeling era of corporate expansion.6 Between 1900 and 1930, Flintâs population soared from just 13,103 to 156,492.7
As GM grew and opened new manufacturing and assembly facilities, the city began to resemble Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other industrial metropolises. On the near north sideâto the west of the gritty St. John Street neighborhood, the Flint River, and the Chesapeake and Ohio rail linesâsat GMâs massive complex of Buick plants. With an employee roll that routinely exceeded twenty-five thousand, âThe Buickâ was Flintâs largest employer and virtually a city unto itself. Nearby there were two major industrial facilities operated by GMâs AC Spark Plug division. At its peak, AC employed nearly twenty thousand workers who manufactured spark plugs, oil filters, and other auto parts. On Flintâs west side, in a valley surrounding the Flint River, visitors could find GMâs Fisher Body 2 plant and a large complex of Chevrolet plants known as âChevy in the Hole.â There nearly twenty thousand workers produced GMâs top-selling line of cars and trucks. Just to the northwest of Chevy in the Hole, on the corner of Third and Chevrolet Avenues, stood the General Motors Institute of Technology, an elite division of the company dedicated to training automobile engineers and corporate managers. Another of Flintâs major industrial facilities was the Fisher Body 1 plant, located on the cityâs far south side. By 1955 eight thousand workers at Fisher Body 1 manufactured automobile bodies for the north side Buick plants.8 An industrial marvel, Flint was home to more GM workers than any other city in the world and second only to Detroit in annual vehicle production. âIt is to the automobile,â claimed the New York Times Magazine in 1937, âwhat Pittsburgh is to steel, what Akron is to rubber.â9
Although the Vehicle Cityâs booming economy attracted migrants from virtually every part of the world, Flint was much less diverse than most urban centers. As late as 1930, over 80 percent of Flintâs residents were native-born whites, most of them Protestants. Approximately three-quarters of Flintâs people hailed from either Michigan or the nearby states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Nearly 15 percent of Flintâs residents in 1930 were born in the South, many from the states of Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. In a striking departure from many other urban areas, foreign-born residents accounted for just 14 percent of the cityâs overall population on the eve of the Depression. Among these immigrants, the largest numbers were from England, Scotland, and Anglophone sections of Canada. Whereas Catholics hailing from Poland, Italy, and elsewhere constituted up to a third of the population in Detroit, Chicago, and other midwestern cities, southern and eastern Europeans accounted for only 19 percent of Flintâs already small immigrant total. Similarly, only a tiny fraction of the cityâs total populationâapproximately 1 percentâwere of either Hispanic or Asian descent. For their part, African Americans represented just 3.6 percent of the Vehicle Cityâs relatively homogeneous Depression-era population.10
Upon arriving in the Flint area, most migrants knew that they wanted to make a living at General Motors. They knew much less, however, about where, with whom, and under what conditions they would live. For many newcomers, then, the quest to locate...