Arc of Justice

Here are some of the passages we will discuss

(p.5) The frenzy was shot through with condescension. White "slummers" thought black life exciting because it was "primitive" and vital.

(p.6) Fear of moral decay

(p.7) Everyone knew that Negroes were a breed apart , "... charming in their simplicity but also frightening in their volatility, their carnality, their utter incapacity to learn the lessons of civilized society

(p.9) As the structures of segregation hardened, white homeowners became more and more determined to protect their neighborhoods' racial purity. Those whites who could afford to do so left the ghetto. Those who had no black neighbors organized to keep their areas lily-white. They formed legal organizations, protective associations, they called them ...to write clauses into their deeds prohibiting the sale of their homes to blacks. They monitored real estate sales to make sure no one broke the color line. And if a black family somehow managed to breech the defenses, they could always drive them out, quietly if possible, violently if necessary

(p.14) in 1900, when Ford was first organizing his company, Detroit had 285,000 living within its city limits. By 1925, it had 1.25 million.

(p.15) Immigrants clustered on the east side of the city, the native-born on the west side, all of them paying premium prices for homes slapped up amid factories, warehouses, and railroad yards or along barren streetscapes

(p.23) Detroit's race relations had been deteriorating ever since the Great War, when Southern blacks had begun flooding into the city [55 blacks shot by police within the 1st six months of 1925; police department thick with Klansmen]

(p.83) For the huge middle range of jobs that didn't require any special skill-- increasingly Detroit's specialty-- most of the big employers hired the foreign-born.

(p.103) A city which is built around a productive process... is really a kind of hell. Thousands in this town are really living in torment while the rest of us eat, drink, and make merry. What a civilization! [Reinhold Niebuhr]

(p.103) The manufacturer's definition of citizenship "Each one in his sphere, keeping busy, doing honest work, and contributing to the sum total of wealth for the support of the nation."

(p.104) Ford's extremism fed fires of xenophobia smoldering among the city's Anglo-Saxon minority, blending anti-Semitism with anti-Catholicism, nativism, and a deepening racism."

(p.106) Like so many other parts of the North, Detroit's race relations had been decaying since the turn of the century. The Great Migration dramatically accelerated the decline

(p.108) In Detroit, the neighborhood color line was drawn in the same jagged way that segregation was imposed everywhere else in the city through a host of individual actions arbitrarily imposed.

(p.133) "Do you want to maintain the existing good health conditions and environment for your little children?" the flyer asked. "Do you want to see your neighborhood kept up to its present high standards?" Those who shared those goals were invited to organize "in self-defense" at what the Waterworks Park Improvement Association was calling a mass meeting.

(p.134) In the privacy of their flats, husbands and wives talked nervously of fragile family budgets, mortgage years fro being repaid, and the specter of plummeting property values. Children heard the fear in their parents' hushed voices and spun out the horrors that the Negroes would bring to their homes, terrifying and thrilling themselves with thoughts of assault and pillage. Out on the streets, there was rage at the audacity of the coloreds, moving where they didn't belong, buying the best goddamned house on the block.

(p.136) An acquaintance once remarked that Ois wasn't as articulate as his older brother. " The difference," Ossian bitingly replied, " is the difference between a Negro who has been educated in the North and one who has been educated in the South." Had they not been brothers, Ossian wouldn't have chosen Otis as a friend."

(p.138) When the Anglo-Saxon elite took control of city government in 1918, they made it a priority to restructure Detroit's criminal court, long known as Recorders Court, which they considered hopelessly soft on crime. To toughen it up, they increased the number of judges from five to seven, put control of case assignment in the hands of a presiding judge, then made sure that hard-nosed conservatives won election to four of the seven seats on the bench, enough to assure them a permanent hold on the presiding judgeship and this on all the court's activities. In short order, the conservatives launched a massive crackdown on petty crimes and the poor people who committed them, a judicial complement to police brutality rampant in the foreign-born and colored districts of the city."

(p.140) By 1923, there were twenty-two thousand Klansmen in Detroit, and the Invisible Order was ready to go public. Throughout that summer, the KKK held nighttime rallies on the far west side, complete with cross burnings so spectacular and speeches so incendiary they drew upward of eight thousand...And on Christmas Eve 1923, Klansmen marked the season by burning a six-foot tall cross in front of city hall, then cheering a hooded Santa Claus, come to entertain the kids.

(p.142) That Saturday night, upwards of fifty thousand gathered under a flaming cross in the western suburb of Dearborn-- Henry Ford's hometown-- to hear last-minute exhortations and the usual round of condemnations. Klan pickets kept nonmembers away, so no outsider knew precisely what was said. But the message was clear enough. The KKK was preparing for power.

(p.143) And in Detroit, there was no better way to fuel savage anger than to raise the specter of the Negro masses pouring across the color line into white man's land.

(p.147) Surely it crossed the parents' minds that their daughters soon would be sharing the street with brooding Negro men and sitting in classrooms next to colored boys whose passions knew no restraint. At least some people also felt in the rumor a blow to their pride. Having Negroes in the neighborhood would ruin standards, Harry Monet insisted, dragging whites down to the coloreds' level, degrading everything people up and down the block had worked so hard to achieve.

(p.157) " a single fatal riot would injure this city beyond repair."

(p.219) Johnson, however had to make sure that the story was spun in just the right way. For a campaign created on the run-its strategy and publicity shaped in the snatches of time the association's frenzied schedule permitted--it was very effectively fashioned. Beginning with the press release announcing that the NAACP "will throw its entire power to the defense of Dr. O. H. Sweet," sent out the day the defendants lost the preliminary hearing, Johnson never failed to link the Sweet case and the Washington Supreme Court challenge, companion pieces in a seamless struggle against residential segregation."