Monday, January 14, 2002

Timeline
Major moments in Metro Detroit race relations


By Zena Simmons / The Detroit News

   1832: Michigan's first anti-slavery society is formed; two years later white abolitionist Seymour Finney arrives and hides slaves while their pursuers eat in his hotel.
   1836: Thirteen black Detroiters form Second Baptist Church, which becomes a stop on the Underground Railroad.
   1863: Federal troops restore order after angry whites stone and burn black homes when William Faulkner, who is black, is convicted of raping two girls; the girls later recant.
   1869: The first blacks are admitted to Detroit schools.
   1923: Henry Ford's auto plants become a major draw for black workers from the South, but most black Detroiters are confined to an area called Black Bottom on the lower east side.
   1925: A white man is shot dead after an irate white mob threatens outside the home of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black physician who moved to an all-white area in Detroit. Two trials end without convictions.

Twenty-five blacks and nine whites die when racial friction boils over in 1943.

   1942: Detroit police arrest 106 blacks and three whites in clash when black residents move into the Sojourner Truth housing project in a heavily Polish northside neighborhood.
   1943: In one of the nation's worst wartime riots, 25 blacks and nine whites die when escalating racial friction boils over beginning at Belle Isle.
   1944: A white neighbor sues, citing deed restrictions that bar blacks, when Orsel and Minnie McGhee move into a northwest neighborhood; the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948 sides with the McGhees and abolishes racial deed restrictions.
   1950: Detroit's population reaches a high of 1.85 million, but over the next 10 years the black population increases by 50 percent while the white population drops 25 percent.

King Jr.

   1958: Ozzie Virgil becomes the first black Tiger, 11 years after Jackie Robinson's debut, despite Detroit Tigers' owner Walter Briggs longtime opposition to blacks.
   1960: Grosse Pointe real estate agents and sellers are found to use a "point system" that ranks potential buyers by race, nationality, occupation and "degree of swarthiness."
   1963: Nearly 250,000 blacks and whites, led by Martin Luther King Jr., march in Detroit to protest injustices two months before the famous rally in Washington, D.C.

Five days of rioting in 1967 leave 43 dead after Detroit police raid an after-hours saloon in a mostly black neighborhood.

   1967: Five days of rioting leave 43 dead after Detroit police raid an after-hours saloon in a mostly black neighborhood.
   1968: Congress passes the Fair Housing Act, which bans race discrimination in housing.
   1970: Southfield and Oak Park prohibit home "for sale" signs to stem "blockbusting," in which real estate agents incite panic-selling by moving blacks into a previously all-white block.
   1970: Warren residents vote to reject $2.8 million in federal urban-renewal grants that would have required the city to adopt integration policies.
   1971: Opponents of mandated busing to integrate schools firebomb 10 Pontiac school buses; Michigan Ku Klux Klan members are convicted.
   1973: A federal court rules Detroit and suburban schools must integrate by busing students across district lines; the U.S. Supreme Court later reverses, saying Detroit cannot bus suburban children.
   1974: Coleman A. Young, Detroit's first black mayor and a racially polarizing figure, starts the first of five terms.
   1978: Orville Hubbard leaves office after 36 years as Dearborn mayor marked by rigid opposition to integration; leaders later disavow his racism, but name a street and senior complex after him, and honor him with a holiday and statue.
   1991: Television video shows black Detroit women beating and robbing three suburban white women at July 4 fireworks; one Detroiter pleads no contest, one is acquitted.

East Detroit, a predominantly white suburb, changes its name to Eastpointe in 1992 to distance itself from Detroit.

   1992: East Detroit, a predominantly white suburb that borders Detroit along Eight Mile, votes to change its name to Eastpointe, hoping to increase property values by distancing itself from Detroit.
   2001: Census results show Metro Detroit has the most segregated black-white living patterns in the nation.