Living Detroit

Environmental Activism in an Age of Urban Crisis

Brandon M. Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000468908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

In Living Detroit, Brandon M. Ward argues that environmentalism in postwar Detroit responded to anxieties over the urban crisis, deindustrialization, and the fate of the city. Tying the diverse stories of environmental activism and politics together is the shared assumption environmental activism could improve their quality of life.

Detroit, Michigan, was once the capital of industrial prosperity and the beacon of the American Dream. It has since endured decades of deindustrialization, population loss, and physical decay – in short, it has become the poster child for the urban crisis. This is not a place in which one would expect to discover a history of vibrant expressions of environmentalism; however, in the post-World War II era, while suburban, middle-class homeowners organized into a potent force to protect the natural settings of their communities, in the working-class industrial cities and in the inner city, Detroiters were equally driven by the impulse to conserve their neighborhoods and create a more livable city, pushing back against the forces of deindustrialization and urban crisis. Living Detroit juxtaposes two vibrant and growing fields of American history which often talk past each other: environmentalism and the urban crisis. By putting the two subjects into conversation, we gain a richer understanding of the development of environmental activism and politics after World War II and its relationship to the crisis of America's cities.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in environmental, urban, and labor history.

1 LIVING JUST ENOUGH FOR DETROIT

DOI: 10.4324/9780429319914-1

In 1935, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt inaugurated an era of slum clearance in Detroit during a visit to a neighborhood called Black Bottom. Arriving in Detroit on September 9, along with the Secretary of the Detroit Housing Commission Josephine Fellows Gomon, she greeted a throng of city officials and residents at 651 Benton Street, several blocks north of downtown. One newspaper estimated the crowd of onlookers at 10,000 people, mostly African Americans, including “grown men hanging from nearby light poles.” Roosevelt raised her hand, and at “a fluttering handkerchief,” a construction truck started its engine and pulled down the first home of a $6.6 million slum clearance and public housing development program. Roosevelt told the crowd on hand that the mostly African-American neighborhood Black Bottom was a “slumlord’s paradise,” and an epicenter of juvenile delinquency, crime, and tuberculosis. Transforming the environment would improve the people’s lives. “Better housing,” Roosevelt promised, “makes for better living standards.” Roosevelt’s visit did more than kick off an era of slum clearance. As in numerous American cities, officials expressed a modernist faith that they could bulldoze their way to a more prosperous and healthier city.¹

Public health and planning experts, black and white concerned citizens, and policymakers worked to create a healthier, more sustainable city between the 1930s and 1960s through slum clearance, racial segregation, pollution abatement, central business district rehabilitation, and improved urban planning practices. Efforts to create a healthier city were not always neutral endeavors, with equitable objectives and outcomes. In many cases, racist and disruptive planning practices and slum clearance schemes failed in their ambitious goals while placing the heaviest burden on African Americans. Meanwhile, reform efforts facilitated the exodus of white residents from the city, with devastating consequences for the mostly working-class and African-American residents left behind.

Figure 1.1 First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (center) with Josephine Fellows Gomon (left). Secretary of the Detroit Housing Commission, greeting reporters in Black Bottom, September 10, 1935.

Source: Detroit News Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

Living in the city was a challenge for all residents, but more so for African Americans. Residents were confronted daily with environmental health problems: air and water pollution, diseases like tuberculosis, unhealthy physical dwellings, and dangerous workplaces. African Americans mounted an attack on all the obstacles to healthy living in the city, but they encountered powerful structural forces, policies, institutions, employers, and racist white residents which erected barriers to creating a more just and equitable environment. Black Detroiters’ efforts to create a healthier and more sustainable city have often been neglected from the story of the urban crisis and environmental activism. Fighting to create vibrant and healthful homes and neighborhoods amidst powerful political and physical forces of urban decay represented a significant act of resistance, a determination that they too had a right to the city.

Sick in the city

Tuberculosis plagued inner-city Detroit, which, like many North American cities, struggled to control the disease. After World War I, tuberculosis control efforts in the United States and Canada centered on sanitaria – long-term tuberculosis care facilities that isolated from society patients with the disease and provided a place for recovery.² Public health experts, doctors, and architects aimed to manage health through building design. Medical experts worked closely with architects to develop facilities that reflected cutting-edge knowledge about tuberculosis management. With most doctors prescribing the rest cure for tuberculosis patients, maximum fresh air, sunlight, and distance from the pollution of the city were reflected in the architectural design of sanitaria. Experts recommended that facilities be developed in pleasant building sites, taking care “that any natural beauties of [the] site be preserved in laying out the building scheme, since pleasant surroundings are undoubtedly a factor in the treatment of tuberculosis patients because of its tedious nature.”³ The most important operation in Detroit was the Maybury Sanatorium, which started with 300 beds in 1921 and grew considerably in the following years.⁴

While sanitaria could contain the human vectors of tuberculosis, they could not attack the source, which public health officials increasingly identified as the overcrowded and dilapidated slums of cities like Detroit. During the 1930s, public health experts and planners began advocating slum clearance for combating tuberculosis at the supposed epicenter. The shift from sanitaria to slum clearance as a public health planning strategy emerged from the belief that tuberculosis thrived in certain environments, and changing the environment – or removing an infected person from that environment – would promote public health. Slum clearance, however, was a far more destructive public health strategy, and the support of public health officials gave that planning strategy an important credibility boost. Policymakers in other cities in the 1930s also considered tuberculosis and the spread of contagious diseases as an important motivation for slum clearance. Cities throughout the United States embarked on similar slum clearance efforts motivated by public health hysteria.⁵

Fear of disease was racialized. In Los Angeles, tuberculosis became more closely associated with people of Mexican descent while in Detroit, planners and nervous white residents pointed to African Americans as the likeliest vectors of disease. Tuberculosis became increasingly associated with African Americans during the 1930s, but World War II especially proved a pivot point. Once tuberculosis was considered primarily a working-class problem, but now planners and policymakers considered it a black disease. White residents could escape unhealthful conditions by moving into newer housing developments, but African Americans were often trapped in the inner city by residential segregation practices, where substandard housing and overcrowding were the norm.⁶ In areas like Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, African Americans suffered from rates of tuberculosis up to 71.5% higher than white Detroiters.⁷ Only marginal progress was made in the 1930s toward eradicating tuberculosis. Soon, a city and nation consumed by war mobilization would create new environmental health challenges.

Wartime environments

Few places were as thoroughly transformed by wartime mobilization as Detroit, as its automotive and auto parts factories retooled to build bombers and other war materiel to earn the moniker “Arsenal of Democracy.” Much to the annoyance of industrial leaders, Water Reuther, then Director of the General Motors Department of the United Auto Workers (UAW), famously promised 500 planes per day if the factories shifted to war preparation. “The plane,” Reuther argued, “from certain points of view, is only an automobile with wings.”⁸ Factories buzzed with new activity, creating thousands of new jobs and inviting significant migration to the city. Between 1940 and 1943, the black population of Detroit increased by approximately 50,000.⁹ Overall, the population of Detroit between 1940 and 1943 increased by a half million, though housing and environmental resources like parks and recreation could not match the spectacular growth of demand.¹⁰ A tremendous need for additional housing existed in Detroit, particularly for African Americans excluded from white neighborhoods. Crammed into places like Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, African Americans pushing the boundaries of residential segregation prompted violent retribution from white Detroiters. The development of public housing offered some hope, but even the paltry efforts to supply it, such as with the Sojourner Truth housing project, resulted in a white backlash that ensured that black Detroiters could not enjoy the opportunity to rent there. After a few black renters moved into the housing project, crowds of supporters and opponents clashed, resulting in 40 injuries and 220 arrests.¹¹ Only through the presence of federal troops did a few black families gain access.

Hemmed in on all sides and squeezed into a handful of neighborhoods created an untenable situation in Detroit. Frustration with wartime housing arrangements as well as working conditions lead Life magazine to conclude: “Detroit is dynamite. . . . Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S.”¹² Just three months after its publication, deadly rioting on Detroit’s streets revealed it was capable of both. The so-called Arsenal of Democracy was far better at building bombers than homes. So concerned were American customs officials about the consequences of the Life story that it was embargoed from shipment outside North America. The Office of Censorship found the five-page article objectionable and harmful to the war effort.¹³

The influx of migrants created clashes of culture between newly arrived black and white southerners.¹⁴ Robert Williams, a noted civil rights and black power advocate in the 1950s and 1960s, was transformed by his wartime years in Detroit. Williams contrasted the culture of Detroit with his North Carolina upbringing, “I don’t like the atmosphere of dog-eat-dog and each one is trying to survive and doesn’t care how he survives and who is hurt and who is crushed.”¹⁵ On the factory floors, white workers clashed with black, with more than 240 incidents reported throughout the United States, but conflict was particularly sharp in Detroit.¹⁶ Some white workers engaged in wildcat strikes to protest working alongs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Archival abbreviations
• Introduction: The many lives of Earth Day
• 1 Living just enough for Detroit
• 2 The environmental quest for a livable region
• 3 Factories, fields, and streams
• 4 The UAW confronts the urban environmental crisis
• 5 Black environmentalism in an age of urban crisis
• 6 Environmentalism in the fragmented metropolis
• Epilogue: Age of crises
• Index