Several buildings align St. Antoine Street, a well-known street in Paradise Valley. The buildings on this street all look similarly plain and hastily built, which speaks to the poverty present in the area. Cars frequent this area to experience the entertainment life, which is in part shaped by the 606 Horse Shoe Bar and Lounge. The 606 Horse Shoe Bar and Lounge, a popular spot in Paradise Valley, stands...
World War II brought a lot of good opportunities in the workforce for the city of Detroit. Because of Detroit’s powerful automobile industry, they became the epicenter for WWII production. Black men and women were given many more job opportunities. The three major effects that helped black people were economic forces, activism, and government assistance. The most powerful of the three effects were...
In Detroit, 1942, Ford Motor Co.’s experimental laboratories attempted to form a closer partnership between agriculture and industry, in an effort to produce new war (World War II) materials for bombers, jeeps, tanks and other vehicles. The three new materials included plastics for airplanes, synthetic rubber, and “wool” from soybeans. Henry Ford, founder of the automobile company, had the...
The two photographs show very conflicting images. One is a flyer distributed by local white residents requesting assistance from other white people outside their neighborhood to help keep black Detroiters from moving into the newly-completed public housing project just north of Hamtramck and on the eastern boundary of Nortown. It encourages people to “Help the White People to keep this district...
On the evening of June 20, 1943, tensions finally boiled over on Belle Isle, a popular recreation area for both blacks and whites in the city of Detroit. Twenty-three people perished, and hundreds were injured in the fighting that ensued. It was reported that the initial rioting occurred on the belief that an African American woman and her baby were thrown off of the Belle Isle bridge, which connected...
In 1943, racial tensions were high as more and more African Americans left the South in pursuit of a new life and new opportunities in the North. Many African Americans hoped to leave their agricultural and rural roots in the South for a more urban lifestyle in the nation's larger and more industrialized cities. Large urban centers such as Detroit strained to accommodate the massive influx of people,...
Fifteen months before the race riots of 1943, a Detroit report warned that "unless some socially constructive steps are taken shortly, the tension that is developing is very likely to burst into active conflict." The racial tensions in Detroit at the time came from a variety of sources, but especially resentment by white residents of the city's growing African-American population, based on discriminatory...
Lenore Lewis Lawson is an African American woman who grew up on the Near Eastside of Detroit. She lived on Hendrie Street with her parents, brothers and sisters. Her home was just four houses from Hastings (a major thoroughfare in Detroit’s Black community surrounded with small businesses). She said that “she views her years growing up in the old neighborhood as some of the best years of her life”....
During the late 1930’s and early 1940s, Paradise Valley was one of the few Detroit neighborhoods in which black people were allowed to reside. Paradise Valley was a over populated neighborhood because of so many black migrants from the South moving up North to find jobs that could only live in certain areas such as Paradise Valley. It became a well known area for hosting famous African-American jazz...
In 1944, the U.S. Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, often called the G.I. Bill of Rights (or just the G.I. Bill), to provide aid for returning veterans of World War II (and prevent another economic crisis like the Great Depression, which the country had just recovered from). The bill’s main provisions were to guarantee that veterans would receive several things that had previously...