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Although many people began to pile into Detroit, Thomas Sugrue, author of "The Origins of the Urban Crisis", suggests, "Beginning in the 1920s—and certainly by the 1940s—class and race became more important than ethnicity as a guide to the city's residential geography."
1920s: All throughout the 1920s, patterns arose of whites beginning to define black neighborhoods by race. The 8 mile Wyoming colonie became a prominent arena for African Americans. White bureaucrats decided to erect a wall known as the"Detroit Wall" to segregate a black neighborhood in Detroit for real estate purposes.
Detroit's population began to expand rapidly based on resource extraction from around the Great Lakes region, especially lumber and mineral resources. It entered the period of largest and most rapid growth in the early 20th century and through World War II, with the development of the automotive industry and related heavy industry.
Going back a century in time, the Motor City was experiencing a period of significant growth and prosperity, largely due to the booming auto industry.
The Michigan legislature prohibited the sale of liquor in 1917, three years before national Prohibition was established by a constitutional amendment. [1] [2] Along with temperance supporters, industrialist Henry Ford owned the River Rouge plant and desired a sober workforce, so he backed the Damon Act, [2] a state law that, along with the Wiley Act, prohibited virtually all possession ...
Around the 1920s and 1930s Black people working in Henry Ford's factories settled in Inkster because they did not want to commute from Detroit and they were not allowed to live in Dearborn. [22] Whites resisted even middle-class blacks moving into their neighborhoods.
The trial of Ossian Sweet and ten family members and friends for murder after defending their Detroit home captured media attention in the 1920s. The Ossian Sweet case exposed racial tensions in Detroit following the Great Migration and marked a legacy in the history of challenging segregation in the court system.
The 1920s saw an explosion of growth in the population of small cities near Detroit, with some communities growing more than three fold. Dearborn was the most extreme case, growing 20-fold from 2,470 to 50,358 persons.