The “Great Migration”, which saw six million African-Americans move from the South to the cities of the North and Midwest between 1910 and 1970, accelerated sharply during WWII. Detroit’s car factories, turned over to the war effort, attracted 50,000 black and 350,000 white migrants, mostly from the South, in the early 1940s, increasing its population to almost two million. The city’s black residents were crammed into a ghetto on the east side, while white workers deeply resented the hiring of African-Americans.
In the summer of 1943, similar tensions led to race riots in Harlem, Los Angeles and Beaumont, Texas. In Detroit, the fire was lit by plans to build a new housing project for black families, and by two false rumours: that a white gang had thrown a black woman…
