Nowhere to run to: the duality of the black experience in Detroit during and after the Civil Rights Movement

Includes bibliographical references (pages 66-68)The Civil Rights Movement refers to the mid-twentieth century struggle by African Americans to obtain their rights as citizens of the United States. It is typically viewed as a movement aimed at fighting segregation and protecting the voting rights of African Americans in the southern states. However, segregation and discriminatory practices did not occur solely in the South. Although many perceived the North as being more accepting of African Americans in general, race relations there were very complex. African Americans in northern cities were subjected to segregation and discrimination in their private lives and in the workplace before, during, and after the civil rights movement. \ud Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, this study recounts how African Americans citizens outside of the south were denied equal access to both employment and housing. Using Detroit, Michigan as a model for northern cities, it reveals the consequences such actions had on the black community. For example, blacks were restricted to living within areas abandoned by whites, thereby creating a class of people that was denied upward mobility because of the color of their skin. Segregation and discrimination problems developed in Detroit as early as 1863 in the wake of President Lincoln???s Emancipation Proclamation, reflecting a fear among whites who thought they would lose their jobs to ex-slaves. Although many industrialized cities attracted laborers from throughout the country and the world, blacks born in the United States were overwhelmingly denied opportunities in the workplace which could lead to better opportunities in their private lives. \ud Detroit provided one of the best alternatives for employment to blacks with little or no education living under Jim Crow laws in the South. Therefore, during the first half of the twentieth century, thousands of blacks migrated to Detroit to work in the automobile and steel factories. Unbeknownst to them, northern cities were not unlike their southern counterparts. Throughout the twentieth century blacks in Detroit became quite familiar with the similarities between the two regions. \ud To understand how treatment similar to what blacks received in the South affected them in the North, chapter one describes how and why racist policies developed in Detroit. The second chapter examines the nature of workplace discrimination through a class-action lawsuit against the Detroit Edison Company and supplements the analysis with several oral history interviews. The third and final chapter examines the nature of housing discrimination in the Detroit area through a class action lawsuit against the city of Hamtramck, the defeat of an open housing bill in Detroit, and the eruption of violence in the city of Dearborn over the possibility of integration. This study hopes to explain how some of the problems that plagued the African American community during and after the Civil Rights movement are based on employment and housing discrimination practices born out of a direct link to the institution of slavery