The modern history of Detroit began with the creation of the Ford Motor Company in 1903 by Henry Ford. Fordism created an appeal for Detroit’s automobile factories, and soon they were the embodiment of American labor and industry. In Henry Ford’s footsteps, the Dodge Brothers and other automotive inventors and capitalists began building their own automobiles in Detroit, forging Detroit’s famous nickname as the “Motor City.” Soon, Detroit’s economy and the automobile industry were one in the same, and the reliance on the automotive boom in the early 1900’s shaped Detroit’s economy for a century. The creation of the Big Three American automobile companies brought manufacturing-sector wage labor and heavy reliance on the oil, steel, and rubber industries.

Detroit was not immune to the Great Depression of the 1930’s, but the gaping hole in the economy was filled with a threat abroad. During the Second World War, Detroit auto plants were converted in order to construct tanks and aircraft, earning Detroit the …show more content…
In 1943, the Packard Industrial Plant hired three black men to work alongside the white factory workers, resulting in the immediate resignation of 25,000 white workers in Detroit. Whites felt as if their jobs had been taken over by southern black families, and during World War Two, the sentiment only increased as veterans returned to find a lack of jobs waiting for them. The city, which had already been a KKK hotspot in the North as whites also came north for work, broke out into weeks of protests and eventually three days of riots.

The Riots of 1943 began on June 20th 1943, and took place on Belle Isle, Detroit’s Island gem, as well as the mainland immediately across the bridge. During the riots, thirty-four people died; twenty-five of the dead and a majority of the eighteen hundred people arrested were African American. Six thousand federal troops were called in to suppress the rioting, and the city stayed occupied for six