Detroit was once a city of postcard dreams, the place associated above all others with the rise of the northern Black middle class. It was where, in 1914, Henry Ford made history when he gave autoworkers an unprecedented $5 a day, and then again, in the 1920s, when he hired large numbers of Black migrants moving up from the South. Yet it wasn’t until the boom of World War II that Black workers were hired by the rest of the auto industry en masse. Once the war ended, as federal defense contracts dried up or were diverted to upstart military industries in the Sunbelt, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler looked at their bottom lines and came to feel that the union movement had won too much. Ford opened its Automation Department in 1947. Automakers took advantage of the brisk new transport routes opened by postwar highway construction to shutter or downsize their centralized Detroit plants, moving production to remote cornfields or to the unionless sunshine of the South… read more >
