Students wear gas masks in a University of Detroit wartime drill June 23, 1942. From left: Mary Turner, Helen Williams, Evelyn Buss and Joan Joliet.
Enjoy a break when you have time to see the way our city was seven decades ago. Thirty vivid, oversize black-and-white photos from the Library of Congress are posted by The Atlantic magazine (link is below).
Full-screen scenes show vintage vehicles, fashions, hairstyles, the Crowley-Milner department store, Cunningham's drugs, a streetcar, Chrysler's tank assembly workers, tense integration of the Sojourner Truth Homes federal housing project in 1942 and five images from June 1943 rioting
"The decade was full of upheaval and change," Alan Taylor writes in a short introduction to the gallery.
The need for workers brought an influx of African-Americans to Detroit, who met stiff resistance from whites who refused to welcome them into their neighborhoods or work beside them on an assembly line.
A race riot took place over three days in 1943, leaving 34 dead and hundreds injured. After World War II ended, the demand for workers dried up and Detroit started plotting its postwar course, an era of big automobiles and bigger highways.
-- Alan Stamm
