2019 Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner: Racial Pragmatism and the Conditions of Racial Contact: The Detroit Interracial Committee, Public Schools, and Measuring Racial Tension, 1944-1950

Abstract

The Michigan Historical Review 46:1 (Spring 2020): 69-105©2020 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved 2019 Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner Racial Pragmatism and the Conditions of Racial Contact: The Detroit Interracial Committee, Public Schools, and Measuring Racial Tension, 1944-1950 By Sean Henry While June 1943 saw racial violence erupt across the United States— including similar race riots in New York, Alabama, and Texas, and an uptick in industrial hate strikes throughout the urban north— the Detroit race riot of June 20-22, 1943, represented an especially severe episode in the ever-escalating picture of wartime racial tension. Historically attributed to factors ranging from preexisting racial prejudices to housing shortages resulting from the early years of the Second Great Migration, what began as brawls between groups of black and white Detroiters in the municipal park on Belle Isle devolved into riots across the city that led to 34 deaths, almost 700 serious injuries, and over 1,800 arrests.1 Of equal significance to the circumstances that led up to the riot, however, were its aftereffects; among which was the establishment of the Detroit Interracial Committee (IRC) “to address the grievances of black city residents and to cool racial tensions,” and that did so in a way that “inspired other cities around the country to form similar organizations.”2 1 Notably, the Detroit race riot of 1943 was awash with disproportionate violence against black Detroiters, especially by the police: of the thirty-four that died, twenty-five were black, as were all of the seventeen shot to death by police. For these statistics and more on the riots, see Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), esp. 28-30. See also Harvard Sitkoff, Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 43-64; Robert Shogan and Tom Craig, The Detroit Riot: A Study in Violence (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964); Alfred McClung Lee and Norman Daymond Humphrey, Race Riot (New York: The Dryden Press, 1943); Norman Daymond Humphrey, “Race Riots and Detroit Social Agencies,” The Compass 26, no. 3 (March 1945): 20. 2 Sugrue, Urban Crisis, 30. For more on the optimism surrounding the promise of interracial committees, see, for instance, Rufus E. Clement, “Educational Programs for 70 The Michigan Historical Review The IRC was not without precedent. In a 1946 article chronicling the life cycle of the IRC’s early years, Wayne University sociologists Alfred McClung Lee and Norman Daymond Humphrey explained that what evolved into the IRC on January 18, 1944, succeeded a series of similar entities in Detroit that “had come into existence after riotous events, studied ‘the situation,’ prepared and submitted reports and recommendations, and then quietly and ineffectually passed into oblivion” over the course of the previous eighteen years.3 In its infancy, the IRC was no different: it was composed of six African Americans and six whites, had no budget, and paid its members no salary—and, although varying slightly in membership in terms of its size and composition, it remained as such throughout its earliest years.4 Nonetheless, the minutes of the IRC’s first meeting indicate that the group, comprised of a blend of African American and white politicians, civil servants, philanthropists, attorneys, educators, labor organizers, and even doctors, set out to accomplish two specific goals “to bring about better race relations”: “to work in the area of attitudes for the improvement of better conduct and better manners” and “to improve the services which flow from the departments of government to the communities.”5 Undoubtedly, an the Improvement of Race Relations: Interracial Committees,” Journal of Negro Education 13, no. 3 (1944): esp. 328. 3 Alfred McClung Lee and Norman Daymond Humphrey, “The Interracial Committee of the City of Detroit: A Case History,” Journal of Educational Sociology 19, no. 5 (1946): 278. 4 Lee and Humphrey, “Interracial Committee,” 279. In fact, though lacking the benefit of hindsight, Lee and Humphrey go as far as to argue that it was not until June 1945, when long-time Detroit social service administrator George Schermer assumed the role of director...