Not every white ethnic worker embraced interracial solidarity. In recalling the Slav Congress’s efforts to calm Detroit following the June 1943 race riots, Pirinsky reminded readers that his organization had been one of the few East
European groups unequivocally to condemn the white assault on blacks.
“The American Slav Congress by its very nature is averse to racial bigotry and prejudice,” Pirinsky stressed. “Imbued with the philosophy of dynamic democracy, it joined hands with the labor movement and other liberal groups in sharply condemning these disgraceful and dangerous riots. It spoke out vigorously against the Slav Negro baiters, most of them innocent dupes who swallowed the vicious propaganda of native fascists.” The ASC sponsored a Slav Day rally in nearby Hamtramck, at which five thousand attendees heard Slavic luminaries “castigate the fomenters of racial disorders in the sharpest terms. Sharing the platform with them was a youthful Negro leader, Shelton Tappes, secretary of Ford Local No. 600, UAW, who described the Detroit riot as Hitler’s last effective weapon. . . . Practically the entire City Council of Hamtramck, the most Polish city in America, attended the rally.”80
Progressives had their hands full countering those who condoned at-tacks on black people. Even before the riots, in Detroit white people of many ethnicities had already challenged the planned opening of Sojourner Truth Homes, a public housing project that they feared was designed for black resi-dents. A Polish priest inveighed against the invasion of “the niggers” as a riot ensued to prevent the homes from being opened. The IWO worked to coun-ter the influence of Polish American congressman Rudolph Tenerowicz, who had “made himself the initiator and leader of an anti-Negro movement which culminated in bloodshed when attempts were made to rob the Negro people of Detroit of the Sojourner Truth housing project.” The IWO backed a primary challenger who favored open-housing laws and other progressive measures.81
The FBI provided further evidence that the IWO and other left-wing organizations were working to smooth the integration of black people into fiercely defended “whites only” neighborhoods. In its huge file on Marcan-tonio, a Detroit FBI agent wrote to Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1943 that he had found a letter in the wastepaper basket of the Detroit CP headquarters from “Pat,” asking Marcantonio about Tenerowicz’s “pro-fascist and vicious speech in the House . . . in connection with the Sojourner Truth Housing Project in Detroit.” The letter rifled from Communist garbage pails labeled Tenerowicz’s speech “a compendium of stool pigeons’ reports, Dies Commit-tee misinformation and other concocted material provided by the KKK in defense of the Klan’s subversive attack against the Negro people here.” The letter writer also noted that the congressman had charged he had evidence
“Negro and radical elements” had “deliberately incite[d] both Negro and Whites” during the Sojourner Truth riots. The writer wanted to know if Tenerowicz could be forced to reveal his sources. In 1941 the FBI had already proposed that Marcantonio, a duly elected, sitting congressman, be held for custodial detention should the FBI deem that internal security warranted the roundup of “subversives,” although an assistant to the attorney general
reminded Hoover, “Being a citizen the Congressman naturally is not subject to internment as an alien enemy in the event of war.” In 1950 the FBI again recommended this congressman be targeted for preventive detention, in part due to his militant advocacy of black civil rights. That the FBI weighed the possibility of rounding up elected congressmen might give respecters of civil liberties pause. That defenders of black civil rights, not the apologists for white housing rioters, were labeled possible “internal security threats” sug-gests advocacy of racial equality itself marked one as subversive in the eyes of conservative officials in 1940s America.82
Despite FBI surveillance, progressive Slavs, Italians, and others carried on with their civil rights advocacy. In the aftermath of the 1943 Detroit antiblack riot, the IWO issued news releases and letters to its members blaming the riots on “Nazi-led KKK attempts to divide the people.” Národné noviny published articles in which Marcantonio faulted “the government of all race rioters,” and Congressman Samuel Dickstein blamed the “KKK riot” on far-right agitators such as HUAC chairman Dies. Three weeks later the paper published an English-language editorial from the CIO News arguing, “Race Hatred Is Sabo-tage.” Národné noviny also reprinted a CIO editorial asserting that “job dis-crimination, poll-tax denials of political rights, [and] unequal community treatment of racial minorities” were “some of the dark spots in American life where race hatred is bred.” Still, the editorial was sure the riots were the work of Hitler’s agents provocateurs, suggesting that some writers were unwilling to acknowledge Slavs could be both anti-Hitler and violently antiblack.83
Nowak continued to advocate for black people’s access to adequate hous-ing outside of the constricted ghetto of Detroit’s Paradise Valley, despite fierce opposition from many of his white ethnic constituents. At a December 1944 meeting, Nowak emphasized “the necessity of integrating the negro into full citizenship and the problem confronting progressive forces in op-posing efforts to prevent negro housing in Dearborn.” Nowak worked with the IWO to pressure Dearborn to provide public housing available to Afri-can AmeriAfri-cans.84
When white residents continued to resist black people’s movement into their neighborhoods, up to and including firebombings in places such as Chi-cago and Detroit, members of leftist organizations expressed solidarity with African Americans in ways large and small. But even tiny acts of interracial solidarity were cause for official alarm. The CRC organized interracial house-painting parties for black homeowners facing angry mobs in 1948 Detroit.
When the first black family moved into the 3400 block of Harrison Street, Detroit police reported that five white men were observed helping to paint the house and that “materials and labor used in the painting of this house are free of charge to the new owner.” It was unclear which element of this ad hoc celebration alarmed the red squad more, black-white fraternization or fear that the donated paint and services might undermine the American capitalist system. The following day, the red squad noted that two picket lines appeared
outside the Wayne County Building. “One picket line is made up of about 11 white women and 1 white man, all residents or home owners on Harrison Street . . . , who are opposed to the Negroes who purchased homes. . . . The other picket line is made up of men and women, white and colored, represent-ing the Michigan Chapter of the Civil Rights Congress and the Progressives of America (Youths for Wallace).” Not surprisingly, only the names of the latter, pro–civil rights picketers were recorded by the red squad. Vigilante defenders of “whites only” neighborhoods often had the support of the forces of law and order. Interracial house painters were, however, colored red.85
The violence that greeted black home buyers was more than rhetorical.
Arthur Price of the CRC of Illinois invited Marcantonio to a parade and demonstration to demand open-housing laws. The call came following the latest firebombing of a black family’s home, something that had occurred weekly in the past few years as black people “moved into formerly lily-white communities.” The “organized terrorizing” spurred the CRC to distribute flyers demanding, “Stop the Ku Klux Terror in Chicago” and “Put a Halt to Terrorism against the Negro People!” The mob that broke into the Johnson home on S. Lawrence Avenue and set the house ablaze with oil-soaked rags was countered by the solidarity of the CRC, which was quickly labeled a subversive organization for its interracial activism.86
The IWO cooperated with other left-wing organizations such as the CRC—not surprisingly, since IWO vice president Louise Thompson Patter-son was married to CRC executive secretary William PatterPatter-son—and Order officials urged members to back up rhetorical commitment to black equality with tangible actions. In publicizing IWO celebrations of Negro History Week and Brotherhood Week, Middleton reminded members in New York,
“Inter-racial unity is not something to be worn like a Sunday suit of clothes—
on certain special days of the year. By our daily deeds we of the I.W.O. labor to stamp out prejudice and discrimination and strive to help attain full equality for all groups of the American people.”87
There was no guarantee, however, that every IWO member would take the message of racial equality to heart, especially when it came to residential integration. In Detroit, Reverend Charles Hill, an IWO member and candi-date for city council, complained that Garibaldi Society members bitterly opposed his call for open-housing laws and resisted building public housing open to black people in white neighborhoods. An IWO official wrote to Gen-eral Secretary Milgrom that Hill was just about to quit the Order over his Italian brothers and sisters’ white chauvinism.88 Milgrom apologized but also to some degree excused the Italians’ resistance:
I am sorry that Reverend Hill takes the attitude that he does. . . . I hope he realizes that we are a fraternal organization and that our basic problem is to educate our membership. After all when a mem-ber joins the Order he comes in with all the baggage of his prejudices.
Even while in the Order so many of our members . . . are reached with our education on the Negro question only with great difficulty. . . . I am sure we can convince Reverend Hill that the lead-ership of the IWO is conscious and is fighting for a definite policy which necessarily will come across difficulties in accomplishment. . . . I am sending out copies of [the] pamphlet “Complete Equality” to each member of the Garibaldi Society in Detroit.89
The Garibaldi Society’s Candela traveled to Detroit to soothe his compatri-ots’ resistance to integration, but Michigan IWO officials remained unim-pressed by Candela’s efforts.
Perhaps as a counter to some of its recalcitrant members, the IWO’s Michigan leadership demanded Detroit’s city council reverse itself and pro-vide black people with public housing in formerly all-white neighborhoods.
The IWO issued press releases backing Hill’s attempt to become the city’s first black councilman, but the reverend was unsuccessful in his bid. The Order also issued a news release “condemn[ing] the un-American attitude expressed by those members of the Common Council who voted against the proposed Negro housing project in Oakwood” but was silent on the opposi-tion of its own Garibaldi Society members.90
The FBI, keeping tabs on IWO lodges in Detroit and elsewhere for its own purposes, detailed the troubles the Garibaldi Society members caused with their opposition to neighborhood integration. In 1945 the bureau noted that the IWO’s recent decision to grant greater autonomy to its language federations ironically gave the Italians more latitude to balk at black housing rights, and an informant revealed that “some of the Italian IWO people had signed a petition opposing negro housing.” A meeting of all the Italian lodg-es in the city was called, and the IWO worked with the Delray Communist Club to secure black peoples’ housing rights. The FBI agent echoed IWO official Eleanor Broady and noted Candela’s visit to the Motor City “to rally the Italian lodges behind the program for negro housing in the Oakwood section.” It was regarded as “a ‘black eye’ for the IWO that the city council had voted down the housing project for negroes and that a fight must be undertaken to persuade them to reverse their position.”91 Within the fraught relationship to housing integration we can see the beginning of the white ethnic backlash to the New Deal coalition once race entered the picture.
Similar to Hill, Nelson of the IWO’s Douglass-Lincoln Society com-plained in a 1950 letter to a Daily Worker columnist, “I was unfavorably impressed by the opening of your column . . . on Abdoulay Diallo. You opened by describing him as ‘a slight, dark skinned young man,’ and contin-ued as though there was something incongruous in this ‘dark-skinned young man’ being influential, and giving reaction the jitters. Whatever your intentions, this kind of description . . . is a typical stereotype such as we
encounter in commercial publications but which has no place in progressive journalism.”92 The Left did not always deliver on its rhetorical commitment to racial equality.