The color of citizenship: Race and politics in Detroit, 1916--1940.

This dissertation demonstrates that African Americans in Detroit, intent on winning freedom and prosperity in the urban North, helped redefine the meanings of citizenship between the beginning of the First Great Migration and the end of the Great Depression. By consistently defying white efforts to restrict their freedom, black activists and residents made questions about justice, equality, liberty, and racism prominent elements of civic dialogue. This study also demonstrates that established white liberals embraced a political philosophy which I call white racial liberalism and in so doing developed strategies to both accommodate and contain African Americans' demands for citizenship in the 1920s and 1930s. I argue that black activists played a more important role in shaping the urban political sphere in Detroit than previous historians have suggested. I look at how the demands black residents and activists placed on white leaders increased the material resources they actually received from the state. White liberal politicians in the urban North adopted much of the language of black liberals, declaring their opposition to race prejudice, but shying away from black demands to promote the non-economic interests of African Americans, resolve racial conflict, or enforce integration. The first two chapters of my project focus on the years between the beginning of the First Great Migration and the end of the 1920s. I argue that the emerging power of Detroit's rapidly-expanding black community forced white politicians and residents to respond to African Americans' demands. The four remaining chapters consider how these dynamics played out during the 1930s. Each chapter offers a case study of a different aspect of the urban political terrain, examining how ideas about race and African-American rights shaped public debates about welfare, politics, labor struggles, and slum clearance both within and outside of the African-American community.PhDAmerican historyBlack historyEthnic studiesSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123652/2/3096153.pd