Sojourner Truth housing controversy (1942)

The Sojourner Truth housing controversy of 1942 stands as one of the most significant episodes in Detroit's civil rights history — a confrontation between Black defense workers' constitutional right to safe housing and the organized resistance of white segregationists determined to maintain racially exclusive neighborhoods. Created by the Detroit Housing Commission (DHC) and the United States Housing Authority (USHA), the proposed 200-unit development was intended to alleviate housing shortages caused by the wartime climate of World War II. What followed was a months-long crisis involving federal indecision, violent clashes on neighborhood streets, mass arrests, and ultimately the intervention of the Michigan National Guard — events that foreshadowed the far bloodier Detroit race riot of 1943 and left a permanent mark on the city's public housing policy for decades.

Background: Detroit's Wartime Housing Crisis

Detroit did not invent the American housing conflict, but in the early 1940s it refined it — under the pressure of war, migration, and a manufacturing economy running hot enough to be nicknamed the "Arsenal of Democracy." The city needed labor quickly, and it recruited it broadly, including from the South, where Jim Crow's violence pushed Black families northward even as the promise of a paycheck pulled them toward factory gates. The Motor City's African American population doubled, from 149,000 in 1940 to 300,000 in 1950.

The housing crisis was particularly severe for Black residents who moved to Detroit at the start of World War II. Longstanding practices of segregation and federal policies confined Black Detroiters to a few neighborhoods: the near East Side along Hastings Street, known as Black Bottom, a pocket on the West Side, and a very few outlying Black enclaves in the city, including Conant Gardens. This pattern was reinforced by redlining, overseen by Roosevelt's Home Owners' Loan Corporation, and especially covenants over housing deeds barring people of certain racial or ethnic groups from renting. The Ford Motor Company increased its activity when it joined the war effort, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had recently signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in the defense industry. Yet adequate housing for Black workers remained unavailable throughout the city.

The Roosevelt administration was under immense pressure from civil rights activists to provide housing for Black as well as white defense workers, so in 1941 the Detroit Housing Commission approved two sites for federally sponsored public housing. Shortly thereafter, federal housing officials overrode local officials and designated a location at the intersection of Nevada and Fenelon, purchasing the farmland on that site. This location was not far from the Black enclave at Conant Gardens but was directly adjacent to the Polish American neighborhood near St. Louis the King church. Federal planners believed the likelihood of violent white protest was minimal in this remote area of Detroit. That assessment would prove catastrophically wrong.

In September of 1941, the two-hundred-home development was named the Sojourner Truth Homes, commemorating the African American evangelist, abolitionist, and women's rights advocate, Sojourner Truth (1797–1883). The Sojourner Truth housing project was constructed as permanent housing, and it was Detroit's only permanent "war housing." The funding for the Sojourner Truth Homes was allocated under the Lanham Act, special emergency legislation enacted to provide accommodations for defense workers. The homes were built rapidly and completed by December 15, 1941. The Black residents were scheduled to begin their rent payments on January 1, 1942.

The Opposition and Federal Indecision

Whites living in the area protested, led by Congressman Rudolph Tenerowicz — a Polish physician who had served as mayor of Hamtramck before being elected to Congress — by the Reverend Constantine Dziuk, pastor of St. Louis the King, and by local activist Joseph Bulla. The Seven Mile-Fenelon Improvement Association, which led the organized hostilities, was exclusively white, and its principal organizers were two real estate developers, Joseph F. Buffa and John Danzell, each of whom held substantial property interests on Detroit's northeast side.

The group even persuaded some Black residents of Conant Gardens to join their cause by convincing them that their home values would decrease if lower-income Black residents were allowed to live nearby. Since the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) refused to insure any mortgage loans in the area after the announcement of the project, many residents in the area believed the project would decrease nearby property values and reduce their ability to build on adjacent vacant lots.

Detroit's congressman Rudolph Tenerowicz convinced the mostly-southern Appropriations Bill Conference Committee to cave to the white residents' demands, and the projects were restricted to white workers only. Submitting to this pressure and fearing racial violence, federal housing officials in Washington announced on January 20, 1942, that the Sojourner Truth Homes would be designated for white, not Black, residents.

That reversal prompted organized protest from the African American community, including the Detroit Urban League, the Reverend Charles A. Hill of Hartford Avenue Baptist Church, and union activist Coleman A. Young. Hill sent a telegram to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt requesting her support. Black civil rights activists also contacted Eleanor Roosevelt directly, who in turn persuaded the president and Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries to restore the project to its original designation for Black residents. The Reverend Horace White, Senator Charles Diggs Sr., and the Reverend Charles Hill led the civil rights counter-protest, and the complex reverted to its initial designation for Black residents.

The Violence of February 28, 1942

On February 27, 1942, a group of 150 white people picketed the Sojourner Truth Homes site one day before African Americans were to begin moving in. The incident included a crowd of hundreds and a Ku Klux Klan-style cross burning. A billboard announcing "We Want White Tenants in our White Community" with American flags attached was put up just before the families were to move in.

On February 28, 1942, when twenty-four Black families attempted to move in, a mob of approximately seven hundred white protesters blocked their entrance to the Sojourner Truth Homes. This touched off violent confrontations and fighting between Black residents determined to defend their homes and white protesters. Hundreds of people, including the Ku Klux Klan, convened outside. The KKK burned crosses, and moving vans were stopped several blocks away. A Nazi group was also reportedly present and helped stoke the violence.

Forty individuals were sent to local hospitals, and more than two hundred others were arrested and jailed. Police, instead of arresting the white residents who were breaking the law, arrested Black people. Of the 109 people held for trial, all but three were Black.

Mayor Edward Jeffries then stopped any Black people from moving into the housing project. Black community leaders wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt to intervene. World War II propaganda from America's enemies began exploiting the conflict, highlighting racial prejudice in the United States.

Resolution: The National Guard and Final Occupancy

A huge rally of thousands of African Americans was held in Cadillac Square in downtown Detroit on April 12, 1942, demanding immediate occupancy. The Sojourner Truth Citizens Committee was organized to advocate for the Black residents. On April 15, 1942, the National Housing Agency ordered the homes opened to Black residents.

At the end of April 1942, 1,100 city and state police officers and 1,600 members of the Michigan National Guard were mobilized and sent to the area around Nevada and Fenelon to guard African American families as they moved into the Sojourner Truth Homes. On April 29, 1942, African American families at Detroit's Sojourner Truth Homes were assisted by more than 1,500 state troopers and city and state police as they moved into their federally funded homes. That show of military force broke the back of white resistance and, thanks to a continued police presence, there were no further racial problems for the Black residents who moved into the federal housing project. Eventually, 168 Black families moved into the homes.

Legacy and Later History

The most consequential legacy of the Sojourner Truth Homes may be what happened after the immediate conflict: how the episode became a precedent. Preservation documentation and historical analyses describe the way Detroit officials, reacting to the violence and the political pressure surrounding it, leaned into a doctrine that public housing should not "change the racial pattern" of neighborhoods. The effect was to normalize segregation inside the very programs that were supposed to mitigate hardship.

The February 1942 confrontation was the precursor to the bloodiest race riot of the war just sixteen months later. The city suffered through a race riot beginning on June 20, 1943. White residents' fears of more African Americans in Detroit and the impact on jobs and housing were among the root causes of that civil unrest.

Though not within Black Bottom itself, the 1942 Sojourner Truth housing controversy heavily impacted those who lived there, as the events were met with increasing anti-Black hate crimes from white Detroit workers and played a significant role in the eruption of the 1943 riots.

Coleman Young, who had been among the civil rights protesters, would later become a Michigan state senator in 1965 and the first Black Detroit mayor in 1974. On October 17, 1986, Young, state Representative Virgil C. Smith (D-Detroit), housing advocate Lena Bivins and others dedicated a new 66-unit townhouse public housing project on the historic Sojourner Truth site. Twenty-six of the original 46 buildings were demolished in 1981 as part of a modernization project.

The Sojourner Truth Homes were placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the official list of United States sites worthy of preservation and protection. The designation means the homes, built in 1941 at Nevada and Fenelon streets, could be eligible for preservation tax credits designed to support the country's historic places. City and state officials subsequently dedicated a Michigan Historical Marker at the Sojourner Truth Homes celebrating its inclusion on the National Register. The City of Detroit's Historic Designation Advisory Board (HDAB) has also recommended that the Detroit City Council designate the site and the adjoining neighborhood of Krainz Woods as an official City Historic District.