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Detroit Divided



It's common knowledge that Henry Ford lent a helping hand to residents of Inkster who were living in squalor in the 1930s by not only employing them but also helping to rebuild parts of the city. The housing project included new schools, refurbished homesteads, discount (price wise, not quality) food pantries, soup kitchens and a re-payment plan that would make the Inksterites self-sufficient with some aid from their benefactor. The plan nearly paid for itself with only 3% of the nearly $1.75 million loaned out paid back. Ford, of course, paid the difference.






Detroit Free Press, February 27, 1938

In the book Detroit Divided the authors claimed that Ford's housing project, as beneficent as it was, was not merely an act of charity but one of political bias. Not against the people that he was helping but rather Jewish merchants whom Ford thought would take advantage of the poor blacks and keep them indebted. Ford's antisemitism was well-known--he had an admirer in Adolf Hitler--and his publication The Dearborn Independent often ran screeds against the banking system. Rightly so, but pinning it on a cabal of wealthy Jewish bankers made him no friends and brought condemnation upon the articles. The unfair and illegal banking practices that caused the usury and indebtedness which Ford railed against continue to this day.








A brief history of racial segregation in Inkster and the Detroit area is covered in the chapter which the excerpt below is taken from. The book appears to be available in its entirety at the link above.




THE CREATION AND MAINTENANCE OF SUBURBAN SEGREGATION



The suburban story is different in some ways, but similar in others. During World War I, two developers recognized that blacks needed housing and had very few options within the city. One of them, Henry Stevens, owned land just north of Eight Mile Road and decided to sell lots to blacks. Unforunately, there were no water or sewage systems, but blacks moved there anyway, since it was one of the few places they were welcome, and put up tents or temporary structures until they could build their own homes. By 1926, about 4,000 lived in this location--a squatter settlement, since municipal authorities provided few services to the area (Dancy 1966, 57-59; Levine 1976, 1929). Another developer realized that many blacks working for Ford in Dearborn needed housing. In 1921, he purchased a twenty-acre tract in Inkster, a suburb west of Dearborn, and began constructing small cottages that he sold to blacks at low cost. By 1930, about 2,000 blacks lived in this suburb. Inkster got an unusual boost in the early 1930s. Henry Ford introduced the first V-8 and announced he was hiring after several years of layoffs. He recruited blacks from Inkster and while he believed they could work in his plants, he felt they needed much guidance. In particular, he thought that Jewish merchants would get blacks into debt and then take all of their wages. So Mr. Ford paid his new black workers only one-quarter of their salaries in cash using the remainder to develop community institutions in Inkster, so Henry Ford became known as the Patriarch of Inkster (Conot 1973, chap. 60). This place continues as one of the few suburban pockets of African Americans. About 19,000 lived there in 1990.
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