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...
In 1945 a seven-man committee appointed by Mayor Edward J. Jeffries prepared a master plan for the City of Detroit's transportation systems, in order to keep up with modern city plans of the day, like Chicago and London. The document, entitled "Detroit Expressway and Transit System" and prepared for the Detroit Transportation Board, was supported by both Cincinnati and Chicago consultants, as well...
Detroit’s streets and expressways have and continue to play an integral part in the city’s development and maintenance. While streets and expressways may be apolitical on their own, their placement by city planners has had a great effect on the city. In 1946, urban planners began to work on Detroit’s local transportation plan to tackle the city's growing problem of limited capacity for "through...
1940, the city of Detroit voted to consolidate the Department of Parks and Boulevards and the Department of Recreation into a new Department of Parks and Recreation. The consolidation was the outcome of overlapping goals and not enough discussion between the groups, which sometimes bottlenecked recreational activities. “It was a case of one hand letting the other know what it was doing,” remarked...
On July 22nd 1942, George Washington Carver, an African American scientist, visited his friend and fellow innovator, Henry Ford, at the Ford Nutritional Laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan. Carver and Ford were old friends, having met 10 years prior and establishing a friendship based on Ford's interest in Carver's work at the Tuskegee Institute, where Carver experimented with agricultural raw material...
Evidence of lackluster city zoning is still evident in Delray. While there may have been a historical absence of zoning in the heavily industrial, immigrant community of Southeast Detroit, the residents of Delray were never adequately served by city zoning. Despite high-density residential settlement, Delray was never zoned residential, and through time this allowed for inadequate environmental and...
Twelve years after the Detroit Parks and Recreation Department entered into service, they proudly announced that they had become the “largest and most active [Department] in our City Government.” Originally created to prevent overlaps in event planning, the department expanded along with the booming city of Detroit. The total acreage of Detroit parks from 1940-52 jumped from 4163 to 5736 acres,...