The Power of a Detroit Rumor: The Belle Isle Bridge Incident and the 1943 Riots
As you stand here on the Belle Isle Bridge, you may see a charming view of the river or families driving by on their way to a picnic, but this bridge has also been the site of violence, and the setting for a very powerful urban legend that led to the 1943 riots.
On June 20, 1943, residents heading home after a day on Belle Isle crowded this tiny bridge. City neighborhoods were starkly divided by race, but everyone enjoyed Belle Isle and in the rush of traffic black and white motorists were up against each other. A fight broke out between black residents and white sailors who were stationed Brodhead Naval Armory, and rumors of the violence quickly spread up Woodward.
To the west of Woodward was Cass Corridor, then a poorer white neighborhood made up mostly of migrants from Appalachia. To the east were the black neighborhoods of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. Parallel rumors spread along the racial divide inciting the days of violence to come.
In black neighborhoods, the legend was that the sailors had thrown a black baby off of the Belle Isle Bridge in the fighting. Others described the mother being thrown as well. Most famously, a man pretending to be a police sergeant announced the rumor to a crowd at the Forest Club in Paradise Valley and called on all who were present to come down to the bridge and fight.
Meanwhile, the same rumor spread throughout the white neighborhoods, but with one small change, the baby was white and the killers were black. Some accounts also described the rape and murder of the white mother. Neither account was true. No babies or women were killed on the bridge that day, but 34 people died in the riots that followed over the next three days.
Of course, the rumors alone did not cause the riots but spoke to tensions in the community that had existed for a long time. Wayne State Professor of Folklore Janet Langlois explained in an article for the Journal of American Folklore that the two narratives were the location at which each community’s “perception of the other’s inhumanity [became] tangibly expressed” (188).
Black residents had already experienced some very tangible expressions of hate from their neighbors. Protests, burning crosses, and violence surrounding the black Sojourner Truth housing project in a white neighborhood just a few years prior made the position of many white residents clear. In addition, more than one-third of the plants in the “Arsenal of Democracy” wouldn’t hire black workers, and just two weeks prior, 25,000 white workers walked off the job in protest when two black workers were promoted at the Packard Plant.
Although the rumors that sparked the riots may have been equal, the damage was not. Twenty-five of the 34 people killed were black and the majority of them were killed by police. Most of the arrests made during the protest were also of black residents, while accounts tell of white rioters setting fire to overturned cars in front of police without consequence.
So this bridge is more than simply the connection from the busy city to a peaceful park. It is the location where racial tensions once boiled over into violence, and the setting for a terrible rumor which spoke to each community’s fear of the other. Ultimately, it is a haunting reminder of the power of storytelling.
