In the late 1950s, Floyd moved out of the Black neighborhoods of Detroit and into the Black sections of Pittsburgh. Unlike his White peers, he could not escape harsh conditions. Urban development across the country had decimated Black neighborhoods in cities everywhere, hurting the economic and social fabric that supports people. Less than a decade after developers in Detroit displaced Blacks by building highways through Black areas, city planners in Pittsburgh displaced Blacks in the 1950s by building the Civic Arena sports stadium in the economic and social center of the Black community.
The devaluing and abandonment of Black people by White Detroiters, facilitated by the federal government, left those who remained behind without a government-backed means to uplift their own social status like their White peers had done. For instance, the Black soldiers who could not use the GI Bill because of redlining and racial covenants had no choice but to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
The Civil Rights Movement did produce gains during the period: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But that legislation was followed with the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. The next month, police sicced dogs on 600 civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, racial tensions were at a breaking point. White people’s resistance to integration around the country led up to the turbulent “long hot summer” of 1967 in which 159 race riots erupted nationwide.
In Detroit, racial tensions exploded after police raided an unlicensed bar known as the Blind Pig. What police officers thought would be a standard police raid turned into “five days of violence, leaving 43 people dead, thousands of others injured and much of the city looking like a smoldering war zone,” according to Detroit Free Press reporting.14 Black Detroiters set the city ablaze, proclaiming that their lives matter. “The insurrection was the culmination of decades of institutional racism and entrenched segregation,” according to an account offered by the Detroit Historical Society.15 The conditions in which my grandmother reared Floyd were the same as those the protesters were willing to burn down.
After the riots, Blacks continued to press for economic justice in the face of flagrant discrimination. The intense labor demands of the high-growth automotive industry pressured companies to meet those needs with Black workers. Approximately one in five Detroit autoworkers was Black when I was born in 1970, up from 16 percent in 1960.16 The proliferation of unionized jobs in the auto industry empowered Black people in Detroit like few other places in the country. In terms of labor participation, Detroit had become a Mecca for Black people, just like Grandma Doris talked about.
University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue found that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, unionized companies hired more Black people for higher pay than their non-unionized peers; the positions came with benefits, including health insurance and pensions. Union rules privileging seniority helped protect Black workers from discrimination by their supervisors, encouraging longevity in their jobs and, subsequently, creating much-needed opportunities for wealth building. Unions also created fair employment practice departments for autoworkers to seek redress for grievances.
“Because auto industry jobs were unionized and relatively well-paying, Black autoworkers formed a Black labor ‘aristocracy,’ ” wrote Sugrue in a series of articles on Blacks in the auto industry.17 General economic growth in the region in the 1960s and 1970s spurred business activity among Black-owned companies.
Floyd’s Uncle Rufus, who also lived in Detroit the late 1960s, saw an opportunity in the growth of the auto industry to start a trucking company. Rufus Criswell’s Trucking Company hauled lumber from the ports to the factories in Detroit. His business supported about a dozen employees and his immediate family who also lived in Detroit. When Rufus’ trucking business was growing, Floyd lived in Pittsburgh, and he soon got a call to return home and help with the business. It was an opportunity for a fresh start that he desperately needed, and it would help him take care of his two young sons and his daughter. In addition to giving him a job, Rufus also invited Floyd to stay with him in his house on Whitcomb Street.
Moving back to Detroit made sense. In 1970 in Detroit, the overall unemployment rate was 7.2 percent; Black unemployment was 10.3 percent. In many U.S. cities, the unemployment rate for Blacks was double that of Whites. Floyd took Rufus up on the offer. He married Bernice, the mother of his daughter, packed their bags, and moved to Detroit. My brother Kevin and I stayed at home with Mom and Mary in Wilkinsburg about 300 miles away.
Floyd landed a solid job, had a family who supported him, and was living rent-free in a single-family home in a solidly middle-class neighborhood where the lawns were maintained and light decorations in the front gave the neighborhood an upright identity. But it didn’t take him long to return to his old life of drugs and crime. Floyd was an addict. And the criminalization of the underground economy of drugs, prostitution, and other activities made Floyd vulnerable to incarceration.
In 1971, two years after he moved to Detroit, Floyd was sentenced to two and a half to five years for attempted larceny in Jackson State Penitentiary (now Michigan State Penitentiary), located about seventy-five miles outside of Detroit. He was released in 1974, but police records show he received another sentence of one to two and a half years for carrying a concealed weapon the year he was released. Floyd entered Jackson on a third charge of unarmed robbery in 1977 for a ten-year bid. Between his stints in prison, Floyd fathered another child in Detroit with his wife Bernice, as well as two children with another woman. When Floyd was killed in prison in 1978, he left behind six children born of three women. The kids ranged in age from ten to one.
He died the day before his twenty-seventh birthday. Records say he was stabbed in the heart at 7:50 a.m., dying of a single, fatal wound. My family says someone killed Floyd while he tried to break up a fight. The records are painfully inadequate. I believe Floyd died because he entered a prison instead of a drug treatment center. Many will point to his drug use and his criminal activity as causes. Floyd’s personal story is about so much more than his individual choices. Floyd’s story is about the devaluation of Black people as well as the places and homes in which he lived. That story of devaluation is being played out in the lives of countless others today.
RACISM COMES OUT IN THE WASH OF RESEARCH
Racism can be defined as the systemic devaluation of people because of their race, ethnicity, and/or immigration status. However, people and places are inextricably linked. When it comes to housing discrimination, it’s hard to see where bigotry against people begins and where place-based injustice ends. Discriminating against