As word of both incidents spread, so did the violence. Black motorists were also pelted with stones by White rioters. When the movie let out, Black men leaving the theatre were surrounded and beaten. Around 4 a.m., a mob of White men formed near the Roxy Theatre on Woodward. In a nearby area, angry Whites had gathered after hearing that Black men had raped a white woman near the same bridge. As these rumors spread, rioting began around the Forest and Hastings Street area and moved north, with breaking windows, looting White businesses, and attacking White individuals. African Americans at the Forest Social Club in Paradise Valley were told that Whites had thrown a Black woman and her baby off of the Belle Isle Bridge. Though police quelled the violence by midnight, tensions soared and later that night, two rumors led to incendiary action on both sides. On June 20, 1943, as nearly 100,000 citizens packed Belle Isle, Black and White youths engaged in racially-motivated fighting on the island. The Ku Klux Klan was active in the region and riots had already broken out in other U.S. Humiliation and resentment on each side spilled over into all facets of Detroiter’s wartime struggle and by the early 1940s, racially motivated street fights were common. Other factories faced habitual slowdowns by bigoted Whites who refused to work alongside African Americans. In June of 1943, White workers halted production to protest the promotion of their African American co-workers. ![]() In 1942, a mob of more than one thousand Whites, some of whom were armed, lit a cross on fire and angrily picketed the arrival of their African American neighbors.īlack workers faced virulent racism on the job as well. One of these neighborhoods consisted of 60 square blocks on the city’s near east side, an area known as Paradise Valley and Black Bottom.īecause there was simply no space left to expand upon already existing African American neighborhoods, the city attempted to construct a Black housing project in what was otherwise a White neighborhood, though near the predominantly Black neighborhood of Conant Gardens. Factories offered employment but not housing, and because Whites violently defended the borders of their segregated neighborhoods, Black residents had little choice but to suffer in repulsive living conditions.ĭetroit’s 200,000 Black residents were marginalized into small, subdivided apartments that often housed multiple families, mostly in a few small sections of the city. ![]() Because Black Detroiters were still treated as second class citizens, they suffered disproportionately from wartime rationing and the overall strains on the city. history.īefore and during World War II, workers migrated north to seek factory employment in such vast numbers that Detroit was incapable of adequately receiving them. Detroit was not alone in its turmoil that summer, though the violence and civil disturbances that occurred here were some of the worst in U.S. The apparent industrial prosperity that made Detroit the “ Arsenal of Democracy” masked a deeper social unrest that erupted during the summer of 1943. Like the successive rebellion that would erupt 24 years later, the Detroit Race Riot of 1943 was deeply rooted in racism, poor living conditions and unequal access to goods and services.
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