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    Detroit:: The Black Bottom Community
    Detroit:: The Black Bottom Community
    Detroit:: The Black Bottom Community
    Ebook187 pages55 minutes

    Detroit:: The Black Bottom Community

    By Jeremy Williams

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    Between 1914 and 1951, Black Bottom's black community emerged out of the need for black migrants to find a place for themselves. Because of the stringent racism and discrimination in housing, blacks migrating from the South seeking employment in Detroit's burgeoning industrial metropolis were forced to live in this former European immigrant community. During World War I through World War II, Black Bottom became a social, cultural, and economic center of struggle and triumph, as well as a testament to the tradition of black self-help and community-building strategies that have been the benchmark of black struggle. Black Bottom also had its troubles and woes. However, it would be these types of challenges confronting Black Bottom residents that would become part of the cohesive element that turned Black Bottom into a strong and viable community.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439624357
    Detroit:: The Black Bottom Community
    Author

    Jeremy Williams

    Jeremy Williams grew up in Madagascar where he lived with his parents, two brothers, two sisters, a dog, three pigeons, sixteen chickens, four ducks, four tortoises, two cats that liked him and one that did not. There was no TV or computer games, so he read every children's book in the house, then Dad's history books and Mum's classic novels. Then he started on the encyclopedia. He read as far as G before somebody sent some new books. Unsurprisingly, Jeremy has only ever wanted to be a writer. Today he writes serious books for adults and less serious books for children. He still doesn't have quite enough books.

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      Book preview

      Detroit: - Jeremy Williams

      (BHL).

      INTRODUCTION

      Today, driving through the tattered and busted remains of the lower east side of Detroit, one would perhaps never realize that there was once a place there called Black Bottom where blacks lived, struggled, and prospered. It was located on Detroit’s lower east side and was bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, Vernor Highway, and the Grand Trunk railroad tracks. Its main commercial strips were on Hastings and St. Antoine Streets, an adjacent neighborhood known as Paradise Valley. The two were not, however, the same neighborhood. To the world-renowned Paradise Valley, one went for a fancy dinner and an elegant evening of top-notched entertainment. However, it would be these types of challenges confronting the Black Bottom community that would become part of the cohesive element that turned Black Bottom into a strong and viable community.

      Notwithstanding historical debate, Black Bottom was particularly unique in how it was formed and shaped into a community and why it ultimately collapsed, leaving its residents to continue their search for answers as to why Black Bottom was given such a grim and unjust fate. It has been nearly half a century since the demise of Black Bottom, but many of Black Bottom’s former residents cannot seem to reconcile why they [urban planning officials] broke up the community. They broke up the business, according to former Black Bottom resident Billie Jimerson.

      This book offers a visual history of Black Bottom during the formative years between 1914 and 1951, because by this time Black Bottom had both changed its racial composition significantly and had received a significant economic charge due to the first war. After several decades of struggling to make a life for themselves, the Black Bottom community had reached its social, cultural, and political zenith. The year 1941 would mark the point of decline for this once-bolstering arena, when Mayor Edward Jeffries would mark the area for demolition and urban renewal.

      Between 1914 and 1920, Detroit’s African American population rose from 5,751 to 41,532. Before the war demand of labor, blacks had been unable to obtain employment in certain northern occupations, due to racism and discrimination. However, employment agencies now found it difficult to find black labor (partly because the majority of the total population still resided in the South).

      However, by 1927 the importance of black labor diminished. In Detroit there were only 14,454 blacks employed, compared to 20,404 the previous year. (It was not as though blacks could logically return to the agricultural fields of the South because the labor shortages in the South were soon replenished by white labor.) This economic spin ushered in the Depression for Black Bottom residents, most who obviously depended on the economic security of Henry Ford’s lucrative and alluring promise.

      The countrywide collapse of the open stock market in October 1929 would shake the economic base of Black Bottom’s working-class community even more. The once-stable black employment rate plummeted, sending Black Bottom residents into a depression and to the city relief offices, while industry analysts theorized the effects of the stock market crash and whether or not our normal purchasing power [had] been appreciably impaired, one Detroit Free Press article reported. By November of that year, employment bureaus throughout the nation reported a significant decline in the number of applicants that applied for employment with the ones that actually obtained employment. Industrial plants in Chicago sent workers home daily. Although blacks were typically the first to suffer any employment crisis, whites too found themselves joining the ranks of the dispossessed and unemployed.

      By 1930, there were 120,066 blacks reported in the city of Detroit, most who were settled in a 30-square-block area east of Woodward Avenue called Paradise Valley. According to Robert Weaver, in 1932 newly elected Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal offered hope for African Americans by promising to put [them] to work. According to Christopher G. Wye’s essay The New Deal and the Negro Community: Toward a Broader Conceptualization, the New Deal also purported to include blacks into programs designed to relieve the special problems created by the Depression. For example, the Sojourner Truth Homes would help ease the tension in Black Bottom’s housing crisis. But two years later, Detroit’s department of public welfare reported that 29.6 percent of its black population was on the welfare rolls.

      By 1940, the annual report of the Detroit Urban League approximated Detroit’s black population at 145,000. World War II, as well as economic and social tensions in the South, would continue to send black southerners to the North in search for a better way of life. The Northern factories offered the kind of wages that most blacks would never receive in the South. Although the workplace was often a hazardous environment for the black migrant worker, it was the financial rewards coupled with the steady and consistent work schedule that made blacks leave the South. One [black man] from the North recently returned with $600 dollars. He paid his debts; paid the rent in advance for his parents; and took his own family back North, observed Dr. Robert R. Morton in a lecture titled, Effects of Negro Migration on the South. Detroit’s burgeoning war industries offered the kind of employment opportunities that provided blacks enough money for a decent living and to purchase a home. As Detroit’s emerging black industrial working class continued to grow, this inevitably meant that the Black Bottom community would increase, creating the need for extra housing. Because of unchecked discrimination in housing in Detroit, black social and cultural organizations became inundated with the demands of migrants seeking accommodations in employment and housing.

      With Black Bottom’s population growing rapidly as a result of the burgeoning war industries, black leadership faced the challenge of facilitating the transformation of the rural uneducated southern agricultural worker into the expanding urban industrial metropolis. The black church served as a vital resource center for Detroit and Black Bottom’s black community. Detroit’s black migration dilemma encouraged some black ministers to start churches. Therefore, any examination of black social, political, and cultural strivings must begin

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