Black Bottom Blues...

Howard Husock, "Rock Bottom: How progressive reforms helped level a historic part of black Detroit"

The United States recently marked the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The newfound attention, including from the president, to the destruction of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” reminds us that thriving, dynamic black communities existed in America long before the War on Poverty or the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. But Greenwood was not the only African-American neighborhood that would be leveled: consider the DeSoto-Carr section of St. Louis, parts of Chicago’s Bronzeville, Cedar-Central in Cleveland—and Black Bottom in Detroit.

These neighborhoods, however, did not fall to racist mobs. They were the victims instead of progressive reforms: above all, urban renewal, as authorized by the National Housing Act of 1949, which provided funds to clear neighborhoods and replace them with public housing towers. The law made available “federal advances, loans, and grants to localities to assist slum clearance and urban redevelopment,” leading to the construction of 850,000 new public housing apartments. In Detroit’s Black Bottom, once home to 140,000 black residents, the process became known as “Negro removal”—as evoked by “Why I Sing the Blues” by Aretha Franklin, whose father, C. L. Franklin, ran the New Bethel Baptist Church, one of the Black Bottom buildings demolished.

Like the Greenwood Massacre, Black Bottom and its history have received fresh interest. In 2015, a young African-American community organizer, PG Watkins, established the Black Bottom Archives. Watkins is at work recording the oral histories of those who once lived in the neighborhood. A onetime social studies teacher at a charter school, Jamon Jordan, who heads the Detroit chapter of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, has set up a successful business, the Black Scroll Network, which gives guided tours of the few remaining buildings. His clients include former Black Bottom residents as well as college students. He tells them a well-researched story of loss—of homes, businesses, churches, and mutual-aid groups.

In Black Bottom and elsewhere, urban renewal and public housing helped wipe out hubs of black-owned businesses and self-help institutions.

Black Bottom—named by the area’s early French residents for its dark farm soil—“was not destroyed by the Ku Klux Klan and lynching,” says Jordan. “It was destroyed because the federal and city governments colluded to wipe it out without almost any compensation.” As happened in many other black neighborhoods, urban renewal and public housing helped wipe out a hub of black-owned businesses and self-help institutions, a community that fostered homeownership and wealth accumulation—goods that contemporary American blacks have struggled to achieve.

If the 1949 Housing Act led directly to the death of Black Bottom and its adjoining neighborhoods, the previous decades of reform—when progressives developed federal tools to demolish what they termed slums and replace them with modernist, top-down plans—laid the groundwork. Neighborhood residents didn’t lead these crusades. Indeed, as sociologists Peter Rossi and Robert Dentler have written, the public-policy modernists faced local opposition. “The community was viewed by Negroes as an almost ideal residential location and far from blighted or deteriorated,” they observe of a Chicago neighborhood similar to Black Bottom. “For Negroes from every class level . . . the importance ascribed by whites to renewal seemed only a flimsy excuse . . . [R]enewal plans were seen as directed specifically against Negroes.”

The origins of the idea of slum clearance date to journalist Jacob Riis, who photographed New York’s Lower East Side in How the Other Half Lives. Conspicuously, his work never included residents’ thoughts about their own neighborhood. Riis’s biographer, Tom Buk-Swienty, labeled him as among the “writers who wrote about the slums focused primarily on suffering and squalor.” As Buk-Swienty noted, however, “there was more to the slums than abject poverty. Hundreds of thousands of families lived relatively normal lives. They worked, although usually under deplorable conditions, paid rent, fed their children and had hopes and dreams for the future. For a large number of immigrants . . . life in the tenements was an improvement on their old lives, offering a more dignified existence.” In an insight that would remain elusive to later Riis-inspired housing reformers, Buk-Swienty maintained that “poverty was not a life sentence, as many writers, including Riis, at times, seemed to want readers to believe.”

The most direct link to the destruction of Black Bottom involves the progressive movement and its latter-day federal incarnations: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal. Upset by slum conditions that they knew only at a distance, two well-educated members of the upper middle class—Columbia University faculty member Edith Elmer Wood and Cornell architecture student Catherine Bauer—supplied the intellectual framework for these programs.

For Wood, the physical condition of poor neighborhoods—some of which, including Black Bottom, still included homes with outdoor privies—was the only relevant concern. The idea that communities of private, low-cost, low-income housing—with their local businesses and property owners and dense networks of social and religious institutions—could be way stations to upward mobility and could see their prospects improve as U.S. prosperity improved never occurred to her. In a 1934 paper, “A Century of the Housing Problem,” and in other writings, Wood led the charge against slums and the private housing industry itself. Her work would shape New Deal housing policy. “The housing problem is an inevitable feature of our modern industrial civilization and does not tend to solve itself,” she wrote. “Supply and demand do not reach it, because the cost of new housing and the distribution of income are such that approximately two thirds of the population cannot present an effective demand for new housing. And while some of the older housing is acceptable enough, a great deal is shockingly inadequate. . . . There are housing conditions across the United States which cannot be tolerated in civilized communities.”

If Wood provided the theory, Catherine Bauer offered the blueprints. In the late 1920s, she was living a Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village, before turning her sights toward housing reform. Bauer was enthralled with modernist architecture, and the idea that it should replace existing low-rent housing. She envisioned a modernist workers’ housing utopia. Photography and architecture dominated her profoundly influential 1934 book, Modern Housing. But her written message was even more ambitious—and radical—than Wood’s. “The need to remove housing from private hands was the principal message of Modern Housing,” writes architectural historian Barbara Penner, in the foreword to a 2020 edition of the book. Frank Lloyd Wright, who liked Bauer personally, called her “Communist Catherine.” As Bauer wrote in the depths of the Depression, when housing construction of all kinds was at a standstill, there “is no getting around the fact that modern housing and much of the framework of contemporary Western society are mutually antipathetic. The premises underlying the most successful and forward-pointing housing developments are not the premises of capitalism, of inviolate private property, of entrenched nationalism, of class distinction.” Not only the physical conditions but also the very idea of a poor neighborhood such as Black Bottom were anathema to Bauer, who believed that private construction would fail to provide decent housing for most people. Modern Housing promoted Le Corbusier–style social housing as a more advanced approach.

Roosevelt took office a year after Modern Housing was published, soon breaking ground on the first public housing in the United States. That included the Brewster Homes, which replaced a small portion of Black Bottom. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had pushed for blacks to be included in public housing, spoke at the Brewster Homes groundbreaking in September 1935. When the project opened in 1938, it became America’s first public housing project built for African-Americans.

But Black Bottom’s fate was not yet sealed. At the same time that Wood and Bauer were laying the groundwork for public housing, the neighborhood was being transformed. Black Bottom was long an immigrant neighborhood—successively German, Irish, Italian, and Jewish. But even in the pre–Civil War era, it was a beachhead for a small number of blacks, such as William Lambert, the Trenton, New Jersey-born son of a freed slave who arrived in Detroit as a steamship cabin boy and went on to build a successful tailoring and dry-cleaning business on the neighborhood’s St. Antoine Street. He was an active leader in the Underground Railroad, shepherding fugitives across the nearby Canadian border to Windsor, Ontario, and corresponding with leading abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison. His Saint Matthew’s Episcopal church remained a community institution until Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, an adjoining neighborhood, were cleared.

The neighborhood’s heyday as a black community began in earnest in the years after World War I, when Henry Ford’s famous offer of a $5-a-day factory wage drew Southerners, including blacks, to Detroit. That appeal grew in 1941, when President Roosevelt lifted a ban against blacks working in defense industries, including the converted auto plants. Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, on the city’s East Side, adjoined its downtown, bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, Vernor Highway, and the Grand Trunk Railroad tracks. Both neighborhoods grew increasingly populated.

Race, and racism, doubtless played a role in Black Bottom’s development—and its eventual demolition. The era of Black Bottom’s growth, notes Jamon Jordan, coincided with a period in which private deed restrictions still commonly barred the sale or rental of homes to blacks. The Supreme Court would not declare these unconstitutional until 1948. Meantime, the federal government’s move into the private housing market brought with it not only long-term government-insured mortgages but also the denial of such insurance for loans made in areas where the Federal Housing Administration concluded that blacks were likely to move. By assuming that whites would then flee, the agency deemed such areas high-risk—and drew red lines around them on maps. Thus it was that the Roosevelt administration, not private banks, began the now-infamous practice of “redlining.” As Richard Rothstein explains in The Color of Money, this policy made ownership far more difficult to attain for potential black home buyers. Government involvement in the private housing market, which served to institutionalize racism, meant that blacks in Detroit had to squeeze into Black Bottom.

Nonetheless, business and civic life thrived in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. The Michigan Chronicle, Detroit’s African-American newspaper, says that black Detroiters had “created their own utopia in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, where hundreds of businesses, churches, nightclubs, clubs, hotels, barbershops, and beauty salons were owned by African-Americans.” Residents included Motown records founder Berry Gordy Jr. and “Detroit Red”—later known as Malcolm X. Along such lost streets as St. Antoine, Hastings, and Adams Avenue, estimates Jordan, stood no fewer than 350 black-owned businesses. They included the Jesse Faithful and L’il Soul Food restaurants, the Busy Bee Cafe, the Wolverine Barbershop, tailor and shoe-repair shops, the Chronicle, the black-owned Hardin drugstore, and the Paradise Bowl, a 20-alley bowling facility part-owned by heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, who had lived in Black Bottom after his family moved north from Alabama and kept an office in the neighborhood.

Black Bottom was home to entertainment spots, including the Forest Club, owned by one of the city’s wealthiest African-Americans, Sunnie Wilson. Major blues singers, big bands, and jazz artists—Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie—regularly performed in the bars and clubs of Paradise Valley’s entertainment district. They might have stayed in Black Bottom’s Gotham Hotel, considered the best black hotel in the country, or in the Mark Twain Hotel, owned by Wilson. Both were listed in the now-famous Green Book guide to places where blacks could safely stay when travelling.

Aretha Franklin performing at a 1980 benefit for her father, Reverend C. L. Franklin, long-time pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church, once located in Black Bottom (Leni Sinclair/ Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Jordan also points to the presence of mutual-aid associations. The Phyllis Wheatley Home for Aged Colored Ladies helped elderly widows. The Detroit Housewives League, sister organization of the Booker T. Washington Business Association, organized boycotts of white businesses that would not hire blacks and urged Black Bottom residents to patronize black-owned stores. The Urban League’s Detroit branch—which relatively affluent blacks established to help newcomers from the rural South adjust to city life—had its office in Black Bottom. And, of course, houses of worship were abundant: Catholic and Lutheran churches from when the immigrant neighborhood had been Irish, Italian, Polish, and German; and black churches, most famously New Bethel Baptist, headed by the Mississippi-born reverend C. L. Franklin, whose daughter Aretha was already on her way to stardom when the church had to relocate.

Finally, there were black property owners of single- and multifamily homes. Notwithstanding the conventional view that outside landlords owned “slum” housing, black Detroit boasted plenty of homeowners. Census data from 1950 show that in predominantly black Detroit neighborhoods, 28.1 percent of residences were owner-occupied. Many of those homes also had rental apartments, so they were sources of wealth accumulation. Many tenants, in turn, rented out rooms to boarders, both to pay their rent and to accumulate savings of their own. Such property owning was a route to upward mobility, in contrast with the public housing that would replace the neighborhood—in which private ownership is, by definition, impossible.

Aproximate cause for the decision of Detroit’s civic leaders to clear Black Bottom came in 1943, when a fierce race riot wracked the city. A year earlier, the advent of one of the earliest public housing projects, built in response to the needs of defense workers new to Detroit, had stoked tensions. Named for the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth, the project was located in the mostly white, blue-collar Seven Mile-Fenelon neighborhood, adjacent to an existing black neighborhood, Conant Gardens. In 1942, after the first black families moved in, a wave of violence followed. These black residents were defense workers, and Jordan explains the reaction, aside from its racist motivations, as a post-Depression hangover: whites wanted to be sure that, upon their return from war, they would still have jobs. The fact that blacks were both being permitted to work in wartime factories and live in government-supported housing fueled fear and anger.

Then, in June 1943, groups of whites and blacks fought each other on Belle Isle, and from there, sparked by rumors of other racial incidents, the violence spread into Detroit proper. White mobs attacked, looted, and burned residences and businesses in Black Bottom. “This was a true race riot,” observes Jordan. “Whites were fighting only with blacks, and blacks were fighting only with whites.” According to the Detroit Historical Society, nine whites and 25 blacks died in the 1943 riot, including 17 blacks killed by police.

Detroit resolved not to attempt to rebuild and incrementally improve Black Bottom. Blacks, not whites, were viewed as violent instigators, with Black Bottom and Paradise Valley their epicenter. In 1944, real-estate developer Eugene Greenhut proposed the neighborhoods’ demolition. The idea found favor with Detroit mayor Edward Jeffries. “This area,” Jeffries wrote in 1946, should “be acquired by the city and completely cleared of all buildings thereon. . . . The area [should] then be re-planned, with the object in mind of disposing of as much as possible to private enterprise for redevelopment for housing and incidental commercial purposes after providing sufficient space for parks, playgrounds, schools and other public uses.”

It was a vision of modernist planning, but it stalled for lack of funds and might have languished permanently were it not for the National Housing Act of 1949. Washington funds would make possible both the clearance of Black Bottom and the construction of six high-rise public housing towers, known as the Frederick Douglass Apartments, which, combined with an older project, became the Brewster-Douglass Homes. The plan suited the purposes of two seemingly disparate groups: postwar progressives in the Truman administration, convinced that public housing would provide the “safe and sanitary” conditions that too many Americans lacked; and Detroit’s Republican mayor Albert Cobo, elected in 1950, whose racially charged campaign, following the Supreme Court’s 1948 decision to strike down deed restrictions, included promises to maintain white neighborhoods as white. The Michigan Chronicle characterized Cobo’s election as “one of the most vicious campaigns of race-baiting and playing upon the prejudices of all segments of the Detroit population.”

But progressive housing policy did what even a race-baiting mayor might never have achieved. Because Black Bottom was such a concentrated neighborhood, Jordan says, “it was so easy to just wipe it out.” Business owners, for the most part, received no compensation because, he notes, they owned only their stores, not the land. Renters got nothing but a chance to live in public housing.

The area that was once Black Bottom, in present-day Detroit (© Romain Blanquart/Detroit Free Press/ZUMAPRESS.com/Alamy Stock Photo)

“Public housing,” observes Jordan, in an understatement, “was problematic.” True, it initially provided better physical accommodations for those relocated. “A significant number of people clamored to be on the list.” But “after years living there, all you would have would be rent receipts.” Referring to the FHA’s redlining, Jordan says, “African-Americans would get the projects, whites would become homeowners. And property ownership is the way to accumulate wealth in America.”

Contemporary black–white wealth disparities confirm that observation. In Detroit and across America, blacks continue to live in public and government-subsidized housing disproportionately to their share of the total population. Of some 5 million units of subsidized housing in the U.S.—including all public housing—African-Americans occupy 39 percent, more than three times their percentage of the U.S. population (12.3 percent). Tenants, on average, occupy subsidized housing for 12 years. These projects offer little springboard for upward mobility. Women head 79 percent of subsidized-housing households, while only 4 percent of such households are headed by two adults with children. One gets priority for public housing based on income; the higher incomes of two-parent families tend not to qualify. If a second breadwinner joins a public housing household, the rent, set at 30 percent of income, rises.

Without public housing, one can imagine a different history unfolding for Black Bottom. As black Detroiters became wealthier and the city’s auto plants boomed, black institutions might have renovated and otherwise improved historically black neighborhoods. Small-business owners might have expanded their firms and built wealth. Had the government not been so heavily involved in the mortgage market, competing banks might have sought out, not shut out, potential black home buyers.

Instead, Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were cleared. The Brewster-Douglass high-rises opened. By 2014, the project’s six towers had decayed to the point that they were demolished; Black Bottom, in effect, was cleared again. The nearby original site of Paradise Valley, cleared by 1956, lay fallow for years—a large, empty lot where a thriving neighborhood once stood. Ultimately, Detroit civic leaders, led by United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, pursued the construction of the Lafayette Park apartments, an upper-middle-class complex designed by pioneer modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Housing reformers got their way: clearance, followed by the anti-urbanism of modernist architecture, both in Lafayette Park and in the Brewster-Douglass Homes. A vital piece of black Detroit was swept away.

Is DOD Queuing up a Coup?

Andrea Widburg, "

Are our federal intelligence agencies compromised?"

A lot of people have been wondering why, suddenly, the leftist establishment is embracing the idea that COVID came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which is tied to the Chinese military) after denying the possibility for so long. The answer may lie in the fact that the Defense Intelligence Agency has for months been debriefing a high-level Chinese Communist Party defector – but withheld the information from other agencies until recently because of fears that those agencies are compromised. In other words, it’s a twofer: China did create and release the virus and our federal government cannot be trusted.

The information comes from Jennifer Van Laar, who broke the exclusive story at RedState on Friday afternoon:

A person believed to be among the highest-ranking defectors ever to the United States from the People’s Republic of China has been working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for months, sources inside the intelligence community have told RedState on condition of anonymity. The defector has direct knowledge of special weapons programs in China, including bioweapons programs, those sources say.

By now, of course, we have enough information regarding COVID’s origins that the point about China’s “bioweapons programs,” merely confirms our suspicions, rather than telling us something about which we were completely unaware. So, while it’s nice to be validated, that’s not the stunning information. Indeed, Adam Housley, a journalist has much the same information:

Again...what I reported tonight. US intelligence has a Chinese defector with Wuhan info. AND China is trying to produce variants that suggest it came from bats to cover up that coronavirus originally came from a lab

— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) June 4, 2021

The really shocking information is why we’re suddenly hearing about all of this now. According to Van Laar’s informants, who asked that their identities be kept secret, the DIA has had the information for months but refused to hand it over to other agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, because they believe which they believe are compromised by the Chinese:

Sources say DIA leadership kept the defector within their Clandestine Services network to prevent Langley and the State Department from accessing the person, whose existence was kept from other agencies because DIA leadership believes there are Chinese spies or sources inside the FBI, CIA, and several other federal agencies.

Read that paragraph again: The DIA refused to talk to other agencies in the federal government because it “believes there are Chinese spies or sources inside the FBI, CIA, and several other federal agencies.”

Van Laar also reported that sources say the DIA is convinced that the defector’s information about the Chinese bioweapons (and other weapons) program is legitimate, which is why they finally had to release the news – leading to the crisis of confidence in Fauci.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s very unlikely that those “spies or sources” inside the federal agencies are people from China or people of Chinese descent. Instead, and again I’m guessing, they’re probably college graduates who were taught that America is an evil country, or they’re Marxists who see China as the way to advance Marxism in America, or they are such fanatic NeverTrumpers that they were willing to compromise America’s national security to destroy Trump’s chances of reelection.

When the next true patriot comes to the White House, whether it’s Trump, DeSantis, or someone else, that president needs to recognize that the federal bureaucracy must be cleaned out with the thoroughness and ferocity that Hercules brought to cleaning the filth in the Augean Stables. Of course, the real clean-up starts with the Biden crime family which, we hope, will be brought to justice at the earliest possible opportunity.

Baltimore, The City that Reads

Jason D. Bland, "Baltimore Propaganda: So Bad It's Laughable"

Baltimore City, a once-proud industrial and commercial center in the mid-Atlantic, conveniently located between D.C. and Philadelphia, continues to slide into oblivion -- and one department’s propaganda machine is the warning signal rational people everywhere can no longer ignore.

Corrupt politicians, wasteful spending, horrible policies, and general negligence for the citizenry continue to highlight why this city is an increasingly horrible place to call home, despite the wonderful history, sports, parks, and food. Unfortunately, for me, as a Marylander, Baltimore is my neighbor. The crime, drugs, poverty, and general sense of hopelessness reside right around the corner from my home.

The education system in this city is notoriously corrupt and tragically incompetent.

The city is literally falling apart. I’ve seen it with my own eyes when I travel through the city for work. The countless vacant homes, abject poverty, and destroyed communities remind me of scenes from Detroit.

Despite the real problems: poor education, crumbling infrastructure, crime, poverty, and drugs, the city continues to hobble its own citizens and the local economy through arbitrary COVID measures. At the forefront of this effort is Mayor Brandon Scott and the Baltimore City Health Department.

The Health Department is focusing its effort on propaganda that continues to align with mainstream narratives regarding COVID, as well as to show their solidarity for Black Lives Matter. Yes, that’s right -- the Health Department is a supporter.

The other thing you’ll quickly notice is the content of their posts on Facebook. It seems like a peculiar mix of slick marketing and juvenile thinking, and there’s an ever-present sense of superiority in their word choice. The propaganda machine wants you to know that you’d better listen. They have the answers, and any contrary opinion is downright idiocy. Yet the harder they push their message, the more disingenuous it becomes.

The department’s posts range from helpful info about scheduling your vaccine to silly gifs that make little sense. When people push back and provide comments in opposition to the department, the administrator often replies with the simple phrase of “Stay Mad,” as if this is an acceptable and logical response. Although, if my guess is correct, the social media wing of the department is being run by a 20-something-year-old gender studies grad who has no sense of how to rebut arguments with any substance.

What particularly struck a chord with the public this past week and spread beyond Maryland, was a cartoony post about how to celebrate Memorial Day. One side showed an image representing those who have been “fully vaxxed” and can celebrate with food and friends at an outside BBQ -- “the absolute best”, as they describe it. The other side shows the “unvaxxed” who must stay at home, eat leftovers, and remain masked -- “the absolute worst.” A Maryland-based Facebook site caught the post before it was unceremoniously removed.

By all appearances, this was a legitimate post, although it didn’t seem to last long online -- It was apparently overrun by abject contempt from the readers. The propaganda machine was truly firing on all cylinders when they created this beauty. I understand there will be mistakes made, but this seems to be outright egregious. Just look at the absurd comparisons between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, not to mention the callous description of what it means to “celebrate” Memorial Day.

But, perhaps this is the best the city has to offer. And I don’t mean that facetiously.

If we look at the education system, high crime, horrible communities where vacant homes attract rats, trash, and drugs, who would want to move to Baltimore and make it home? When people outside of Maryland think of opportunity, I doubt they think of Baltimore. Their thoughts probably tend towards Texas, Florida, or Tennessee. The city isn’t drawing talent or new commerce, and unfortunately, the local population isn’t well educated or trained.

As we often hear, people vote with their feet. The city’s overall population declined from 1950 where the city peaked at almost one million residents to the current number which fell below 600,000 in 2019. That’s a 40% decrease.

Baltimore, like so many other cities, has been dominated by one-party rule for decades. Democratic mayors have dominated the city since the 1960s. This is not acceptable for a healthy and successful democracy to fully function. Instead, one-party rule allows for corrupt politicians and their policies to operate without checks or balances. The city continues to exemplify this unfortunate truism.

The sad result is that there’s so much untapped opportunity here. People want to be successful. People want to be safe and happy in their homes. If only those same people would realize they have the ability to make a difference by throwing out these corrupt politicians and leaders. The citizens need to regain a hold on the reins of power and rip them from the hands of the corrupt, ineffective, juvenile, thoughtless leaders that currently reign supreme. Only then will Baltimore have a chance at a bright future.