Run Home If You Don't Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943

Abstract

In their critique of Kathryn Bigelow's 2017 film adaptation of the Algiers Motel incident during the 1967 Great Rebellion, historians Mark Jay and Virginia Leavell argue that by constructing tales of “irrational violence pitting young, angry, and unruly Black men against a group of racist rogue police officers,” popular representations of racial uprisings often fail to ask: “What were the causes of such dramatically articulated outrage? What did people demand, and of whom? Was this a political rebellion with targets and demands or merely an ineffectual symptom of the mass exploitation, unemployment, and racism endemic to advanced capitalism?”1 Retelling Detroit's under-studied 1943 racial uprising, Rachel Marie-Crane Williams's graphic history Run Home If You Don't Want to Be Killed offers a brilliant example of how to contextualize the causes and experiences of Detroit's interrelated histories of racial terror, labor organizing, and Civil Rights activism rather than narratively capitalize on its most spectacular expressions of violence.Contrary to Bigelow's film Detroit's relegation of the city's long history of racial and economic injustice to an aestheticized montage at the beginning of the film before jumping into the action of the 1967 Great Rebellion, the first half of Run Home documents the accretion of racial tensions due to housing and labor discrimination against African Americans migrating to and living in the city from the 1920s to early 1940s. The events covered in this portion of the book include the advocacy of Black organizers and pressure of large-scale mobilization of Black workers that lead to the passage Executive Order 8802 in 1941, which “prohibited racial and ethnic discrimination in the defense industries” (p. 27); the migration of Black workers to Detroit, the “arsenal of democracy,” their experiences of discrimination in housing and the workplace, culminating in the 1942 Sojourner Truth Homes riots, in which whites, enabled by the Detroit Police Department, terrorized and blocked African Americans from moving in to a subsidized housing project in a predominantly middle-class area of the city; and the precarious position of Black workers in Henry Ford's notoriously brutal union-busting strategies, followed by the challenging work of labor leader Walter Reuther to secure the trust and support of Black workers in the United Auto Workers union, which was sometimes pejoratively referred to by Black Detroiters as “You Ain't White.”2Each of these nodes provide crucial context for the more spectacular uprising of 1943, and the payoff for Williams's narrativization is profound. Beginning as a skirmish at the public parks of Belle Isle, racial conflicts broke out across the city that ended with thirty-four dead, including seventeen African Americans killed by DPD in a rash of appalling and racist police violence documented in the graphic history. In a considered and humanistic account of the horrific toll of violence against people of all backgrounds, Williams expertly weaves into her narrativization the work of scholars of African American studies and history to explain the significant and racialized role that rumors played in fueling the mayhem and violence against African Americans in Detroit's streets.Williams unfolds her archival research and firsthand accounts, many of which crucially center the stories of Black women, beautifully through the graphic form. The firsthand accounts of police violence are harrowing, heightened by the physicality of Williams's hybrid art style of sketched pencils, pens, watercolors, and mixed-media realism (such as real, photocopied police badges on the arms of drawn, two-dimensional figures). The artwork throughout the book is impressive and befitting of the narrative, with many effective comic adaptations of archival materials such as advertisements, broadsides, affidavits, and police reports. I did struggle with some of the graphic elements of the text. Drawn lettering—on brilliant display in the adaptation of these archival materials—would have fit much more appealingly with Williams's art style than the digital font chosen, in particular for the dialogue. The layouts of certain captions, word balloons, and thought bubbles at times obstructed rather than enhanced the visual storytelling. That said, as Benjamin Fraser documents in Visible Cities, Global Comics and Kate Polak further proves in Ethics in the Gutter, comics are an essential medium in narrativizing histories of urban experience and racialized trauma because of the interdependent and artistic rendering of words and images. As Fraser articulates, “comics artists necessarily comment on the way social power drives the structure of the city, resulting in the exclusion of certain groups and certain ideas. In the right hands, the visual structure of the comics page thus becomes a way of exposing, questioning, critiquing and perhaps even correcting this urban imbalance.”3 With Run Home, Williams powerfully demonstrates this capacity of comics to expose, question, and critique urban histories in her essential graphic account of Detroit's 1943 racial uprising.