It’s the black working class—not white—that was hit hardest by industrial collapse
In places like Flint, Michigan, the story is very real
The streets were filled with jubilant crowds and awed journalists as a gold-plated car rolled off the General Motors assembly line in November of 1954. The occasion marked the 50 millionth car produced by GM, and the celebration, called the Golden Carnival, was in the town where the manufacturing behemoth was born: Flint, Michigan.
“There were more autoworkers and auto factories here than anywhere else in the world,” says Michael Moore—who was raised in a nearby town—in his film Roger and Me. “We enjoyed a prosperity that no other city had seen before,” he marveled in a voiceover, as archival footage showed people dancing, thronging the streets, and cheering on a parade of elaborate floats.
All of those ebullient people pictured celebrating in 1954 were white, even though African Americans made up a substantial percentage of Flint’s population at the time of the GM jubilee. They made up an even larger percentage when Moore’s movie was released in 1989. Yet later in the film, as the last truck rolled off the line of a closing GM plant, and Moore’s camera panned to the factory workers, they were also all white.
The story that the white working class has been hardest hit by downsizing is a popular one, and especially so since the rise of Donald Trump. Books like Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in their Own Land found a ready audience of Americans who wanted to understand the plight of a neglected white working class, and that was before the election. After Trump’s election, attention to the white working class turned feverish, as if understanding their problems was the surest path to reclaiming America’s soul.
Yet, a far higher percentage of African Americans than whites are working class, and have been historically. They’ve therefore shouldered the worst of de-industrialization. Pinned in place by a lack of economic mobility, they’ve remained in dying cities like Flint long after whites have moved on. Flint’s overall population decreased by more than 27 percent between 1970 and 1990, driven by white flight. The white population dropped from 138,000 to about 70,000 between 1970 and 1990. Meanwhile the African American population increased from 54,000 in 1970 to 67,500 in 1990.
As far back as the 1850 census, 70 percent of all free blacks—then a tiny sliver of the mostly enslaved African American population—were working class. After slavery, starting in the 1870s, the black working class took off, reaching a new high and then plateauing in the 1960s. Then, as today, a higher percentage of blacks than whites are working class.
Of course, circumstances for black workers have been far from ideal. They were excluded from unions and freely discriminated against in hiring practices. Still, African Americans leaving the South in the early 1900s flooded urban centers in the North, Flint included, in search of jobs in the burgeoning auto industry. But even if they found work, they were confined to unskilled positions and forced by legal segregation into two small areas of the city.
Skilled black labor did make it onto the auto factory floor eventually, following an executive order issued by a begrudging Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II. Roosevelt was backed into issuing the order by Asa Philip Randolph, founder of the Pullman Car porters union, who threatened a 100,000-man march if African Americans weren’t allowed at least some of the benefits of wartime industry.
In his 1941 Executive Order 8802, Roosevelt ordered that “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin” — which included the automotive industry.
The city of Flint boomed into the early years of the 1970s, but the boom period was far shorter for black workers than for whites. Factories began to creep out of Flint into nearby suburbs as early as the 1940s. By the 1950s, they ringed the city like a moat. Nearby towns like Davison, where Moore was raised, were kept exclusively white through clauses in deeds of sale, called restrictive covenants. Taxes on property and business shifted to the all-white suburbs, slowly choking the city of Flint over decades.
The recession of the early 1970s marked the beginning of a series of death blows for the majority black city. Competition from Japanese cars increased. More plants moved to the suburbs or overseas. By the 1980s, when the plight of factory workers hit mainstream consciousness, the city of Flint was on its last legs. By the 1990s, more rats than people lived in Flint.
In Roger and Me—now a 27-year-old elegy for the white working class — African Americans show up mostly at the periphery of the story. The sheriff evicting people is black, as are the two families evicted on camera, as are grieving women slumping to the ground in shock after a murder, the victim still lying in the road, covered in a white sheet.
We may miss a telling economic bellwether in ignoring African American workers and excluding them from popular conceptions of the working class. African Americans are usually the first to feel the effects of economic downturns, and their plight could show the rest of the country how hard they should brace for the economic pain that’s coming. “Throughout history, it was the black working class who sounded the alarm the loudest,” argue the authors of Lessons from the Black Working Class.
This theory seems to hold in the case of Flint and GM. The company left Flint slowly between the 1940s and the 1980s, untroubled by the idea of abandoning a city that not only housed but encouraged their growth for half a decade. Attention to the plight of the increasingly black city as GM withdrew may have prevented the company from walking away from the entire region in the 1980s and 1990s, or at least given the white working class a clue as to what was coming.
