Federal Housing Administration Quotes

“Clark Foreman proposed a Detroit development, the Sojourner Truth Homes, for African Americans. The project was in the district of Democratic Congressman Rudolph Tenerowicz, who persuaded his colleagues that funding for the agency should be cut off unless Foreman was fired and the Sojourner Truth units were assigned only to whites.

The director of the Federal Housing Administration supported Tenerowicz, stating that the presence of African Americans in the area would threaten property values of nearby residents. Foreman was forced to resign. The Federal Works Agency then proposed a different project for African Americans on a plot that the Detroit Housing Commission recommended, in an industrial area deemed unsuitable for whites. It soon became apparent that this site, too, would provoke protests because it was not far enough away from a white neighborhood. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt protested to the president. The FWA again reversed course and assigned African Americans to the Sojourner Truth project. Whites in the neighborhood rioted, leading to one hundred arrests (all but three were African Americans) and thirty-eight hospitalizations (all but five were African Americans).

Following the war, Detroit's politicians moblized white voters by stirring up fear of integration in public housing. Mayor Edward Jeffries's successful 1945 reelection campaign warned that projects with African Americans could be located in white neighborhoods if his opponent, Dick Frankensteen, won. Jeffries's literature proclaimed, 'Mayor Jeffries Is Against Mixed Housing.”
― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America