[Marxism] White racism in Detroit

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(From a profile on Thomas Sugrue, the author "The Origins of the Urban
Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit".)

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/23790.html
Slogging through the vast archives that are the product of the age of the
carbon copy, the mimeograph, and the Xerox, I sometimes wonder why I chose
twentieth century American history. So much material, so many numbing
interoffice memos, so many duplicates of the same document, yet so little
of value. Still, even when it's foolhardy, I can't resist the lure of
crumbling yellow paper and fading photocopies. There just might be
something there.

On a cold winter week a decade ago, I had finished the research for my
first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, but I felt compelled to make
one more trip to the archives. A new collection had opened at the Walter
Reuther Library at Wayne State University, part of the hundreds of boxes of
papers donated by the United Automobile Workers. The title of the
collection sounded promising: the UAW Community Action Program. Opening the
finding aid to a newly processed collection--especially when you think you
are finished with a project--can be a terrifying experience. Much to my
relief, most of the UAW-CAP records were beyond the scope of my book. But
in box four, I made one of those finds that makes the dig worthwhile. It
was a few copies of a little newsletter, innocuously named the Neighborhood
Informer, produced by the Greater Detroit Homeowners' Association, Unit
Number 2, a group founded in 1949 to fend off the "Negro invasion" in a
little bungalow-filled neighborhood on the city's West Side.

In my research, I had found evidence of about two hundred such
organizations in Detroit between the 1940s and the 1960s. Most were
short-lived. They burst onto the scene in moments of crisis and disappeared
just as quickly. Most didn't have time to keep records. Here is where being
an archive hound paid off. I reconstructed their history from the traces
they left behind: letters to city mayors, testimony at public hearings,
signatures on court records, copies of police reports, and investigations
of their activities by city community relations officials. Often their only
appearance in the public eye-little did they know--was in the African
American press. Detroit's three black papers regularly reported their
extralegal activities--window-breakings, arson, and other attacks on the
first blacks who had the audacity to breach the city's residential color line.

It was my good fortune that someone from the UAW had bothered to save a few
copies of the Neighborhood Informer. As I unfolded the newsletters' pages,
I turned to its masthead. Its officers were Polish, German, Italian, and
Irish. But they spoke of themselves as "white." They found common cause in
the "defense" of their households from the "colored."

I didn't expect to uncover two family names. One was the newsletter's
editor, James Sugrue. I didn't have a clue as to who James was, but there
aren't very many Sugrues in Detroit who aren't related to me. My father's
parents had emigrated from Ireland in the 1920s. My grandfather was one of
seventeen children. James, it turned out, was one of my dad's second
cousins (the first cousins alone numbered in the three digits). What
surprised me more was discovering that one of the neighborhood "wardens"
was none other than my great Uncle Matt, my grandmother's twin brother.

My family is full of storytellers--but my family's involvement in Detroit's
troubled racial past was not part of our family lore. I don't know whether
James and Matt attended a few meetings or hurled some bricks or just joined
because they thought it was the right thing to do for their families. I
don't know if they played a role in chasing out the first black family, who
moved into the neighborhood in 1955 and moved away a few weeks later. What
I do know is that my relatives joined a multiethnic--but self- consciously
white--army to defend their neighborhood and that forty five years later, I
had uncovered the fact. There I was, a young historian, coming to grips
with America's troubled racial past and coming to terms with my own family
history. Dig deep and you never know what you might find.


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