75th Anniversary of the 1943 Race Riots

[kathy2trips]

Forcing people to get along has the same effect as outright prejudice. People have their reasons to live as they want. Detroit won many legal battles, but did Detroit win the minds?

Indeed, there's a difference between tolerance [[a.k.a. "live and let live" as they'd say in the 1940s) and government mandated social engineering.

dtowncitylover unfortunately makes his determination of the cause of the 1943 riots through the lens of modern perceptions of the situation. Let's look at an August 1943 editorial from the Free Press regarding the Dowling Report on the cause of the riots, and the authors frustration at the report's shortcomings:



Of course, there were red-lined districts; I am not defending those. But there were many who were not, and indeed, there were. However we cannot ignore the "birds of a feather [[flock together)" mentality that existed in the 1940s. Does it surprise you that blacks also wanted to live with other blacks? That they had little in common with white, often Catholic or Orthodox, frequently non-English speaking people? Just two years later, in 1945, the Detroit Free Press reported on a new subdivision [[NOT housing project) that was being built so black people could enjoy a sense of community in a residential neighborhood setting?



As far as my politics are concerned, I consider myself an independent, capable of critical thinking. I applaud both my family dinner-table discussions and my teachers and professors [[particularly Neal Shine, at WSU) for cultivating my abilities in this area.