for our country mobilizing for that war was this conundrum of where all the workers would live, who worked in these newly built and newly retooled production plants? in an already crowded city like detroit, for example, the government of 1941, realized that they re gonna have to quickly add hundreds of thousands of units of housing in order to bring in hundreds and thousands of new workers to staff these defense production facilities that were being retooled from civilian detroit, or in fact newly opened to make more material in that city. and that math is easy to see, right? you need to build a whole bunch of new stuff. you need a whole bunch of new or retooled or expanded facilities to build that stuff. you need a lot of people to work in those facilities, so they need a place to live. the math is simple, right? on paper, that s all very rational. that all just follows. it s very logistical. it makes sense. in practice, though, it was its own kind of war. while detroit resi
own kind of war. while detroit residents got one of their u.s. senators, a democratic senator named prentice brown, to lead an effort in washington, to declare that new housing built in detroit for defense plant workers would be whites only housing. and, that effort in washington actually seemed like it would work for a while, before it didn t, before they sort of blot it back. ultimately, it was black families in detroit who moved into some of the new housing. white residents put up this billboard across from some of that new housing, as you can see here, it says, we want white tenants in our white community. the american flags they put up there in the corners of the sign, isn t that a nice touch? that was february, 1942 because in february of 1942, february 28th, to be exact, two dozen black families, again, these are families of workers at the new defends plants, two dozen