A Case Study of Northwestern High School
An ongoing series on civil rights in Detroit in the 1940s
By Michael Jackman
By Michael Jackman
On Wednesday, February 28, 1940, Detroiters awoke to front page news: A riot had broken out at 2 p.m. the day before, in front of Northwestern High School. For more than an hour, gangs of kids, Black and white, fought a running battle along Grand River Avenue. Seven were injured; six white males age 16 to 18, and a city patrolman. Two were stabbed, another two had been clubbed. Before it was over, dozens of police from three different stationhouses were on the scene in scout cars and cruisers, jamming one of the world’s busiest intersections.1
Readers who skimmed quotes in the morning newspaper could have concluded the white kids were just defending themselves:
“About 75 of the colored fellows came after us,” 17-year-old Otto Bartholma told cops. “I took care of about eight of them with my fists,” he bragged. “One fellow came after me with a knife. I didn’t see it until it flashed. I swung to protect myself and that’s the last thing I remember. I don’t know whether I connected or not.”2
Those perusing the story in the Detroit Free Press more carefully would have reason to suspect Bartholma was lying. One of the injured teens, 16-year-old Harold Erickson, said “the colored boys were not the instigators of this affair,” and said white boys had been chasing them home from school each day. In fact, the policeman had gotten his black eye from a gang who rushed him to get at a Black suspect he had detained.3
Meanwhile, the school’s principal, B.J. Rivett, said the fighting was caused by “outsiders” who came from more than a mile away, not by students. “We don’t have any trouble in the school, and there is hardly any racial feeling among the students whatsoever. The trouble comes from outside elements in no way connected with the school.”4
The trouble in February was just the beginning. The school’s “race riots” went on for years. Finally, the bloody 1943 Detroit riot, equally misunderstood, eclipsed the story entirely. How was violence permitted to continue at Northwestern High School for more than three years?
Myths and Backstories
Black students at Northwestern High School were members of the oldest, most successful Black district on the west side of Detroit, and despite claims that their share of enrollment at the high school was increasing, Rivett’s figures showed a steady ratio had prevailed for years. The area’s first Black residents had set down roots there before the Great Migration, when much of the west side of Detroit was farmland. Their story in North America was already centuries old, compared to many of the European immigrants clustered around their stronghold in 1940.5
Often known as the Old Westside, the district had long been accustomed to discrimination. Many of the newest developments on West Grand Boulevard and Grand River Avenue were hostile. Churches in the vicinity feared losing their parishioners to Black homebuyers, white businesses often refused to serve Black customers, and even the Fisher Branch of the YMCA was a segregated institution.6 But this exclusion meant that the Old Westside boasted hundreds of local businesses to serve its own residents. In spite of the hostility, the neighborhood was prospering, even growing.7
In 1940, adolescence, at least as we know it today, didn’t exist. In a blue-collar town like Detroit, adulthood often began at 16 years old, without the buffer of compulsory education. For young men, fighting was a feature of life, something one grew up with. Some embraced it and would form gangs, arm themselves, board automobiles, go on sprees of “motorized warfare.”8 Even girls carried blades.9
If the struggles of growing up weren’t enough, war loomed behind it all. It had begun in Europe in the fall, and it filled newspapers, magazines and newsreels with images of conflict. Commentators at the time considered how the possibility of war, of having to become a soldier and perhaps being killed, contributed to young men’s emotional instability.10
A leading Westside preacher, the Rev. Malcolm Dade, vicar of St. Cyprian Episcopal Church, had been engaged on this issue of racial friction at Northwestern High School for months. In the days after the street battles, Dade announced a mass meeting where much came to light.11
At the church, corner of Milford and Twenty-Eighth streets, Black Westsiders aired many indignations. Parents already knew that the school employed no Black instructors and that gym and music teachers at the school were bigoted. With such people in charge, the curriculum had never been adapted to teach students from different backgrounds how to work together in a democratic way. Instead, they had been permitted to form gangs to defend their own groups.12
The school’s administrators were in the twilight of their careers. Rivett, age 61, had been principal there for two decades, since 1920.13 The head of physical education, Bertram Gordon Maris, was a year older, born in rural Ohio, and had been in his position since 1914, just a couple years after the building had been dedicated.14
At the meeting, it became clear that Principal Rivett had no interest in challenging the violence. Not only had he been warned on several occasions, the Rev. Dade declared that he had called Rivett on the morning of the riot and alerted him in vain that trouble was imminent. Once the fighting began, Rivett refused to close the school, and did not act on Black Detroiters’ warnings or suggestions. For instance, if “outsiders” were to blame at the school, why not issue student badges to weed out the unenrolled troublemakers? Several at the meeting charged that Rivett was, in fact, a racist whose claims about outside instigators represented a clumsy effort to mislead the public and conceal his hypocrisy.15
As the community spoke, it became clear the “riot” was not so much an interracial fracas as it was an organized attack on the Black students attending Northwestern High School — to literally chase them out of the neighborhood.
The fighting followed a pattern that had been escalating for weeks, since late January. Reportedly, white students from Northwestern High had been driving by a nearby school, Fanny E. Wingert School on West Grand Boulevard, that was predominantly Black. On Feb. 23, white students blamed a Black kid for a free-for-all that broke out near Northwestern at a shop on Grand River Avenue. Just a few days later the attack on Black students started as they walked home from school. They were chased down Taft Street in a running battle on their way to Wingert School, where they skirmished on the Westside’s border. There, brickbats were thrown, disguised as snowballs.16
Another point of contention at Rev. Dade’s meeting was the police response. Black parents and relatives rushed to the school in hopes of rescuing their young ones; instead they fell into a police dragnet that saw them as troublemakers, even as snarling youths rampaged around them. The police placed them under arrest while treating whites as complainants.17
Facing such a wide spectrum of hostility from school administrators, business owners, and the police, those who had convened at St. Cyprian had good reason to suspect it ran even higher. In fact, the Rev. Horace White, pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church, explained that violence was being organized by real estate brokers. He was in a position to know, as the first Black Detroiter seated on the Detroit Housing Commission, and alleged the issue was Black residents moving north of Tireman Street.18
Concerned community members called for action, mostly in the form of personnel and curriculum changes and better resources for Northwestern. A resolution adopted at St. Cyprian demanded the removal of the principal and four racist teachers. Other measures included a modest request that the city’s Common Council investigate alleged overcrowding and devote resources to train staff.19
The Real Instigators
Criticism extended to the police and terror groups, alleging that the campaign was one of organized violence that included extremists and the almost entirely white police department.
The situation made national news. Civil rights organizers in Minneapolis and St. Paul decried the riots as organized by the Ku Klux Klan. Twin Cities Civil Rights Committee Vice President Henry Murray raised the alarm: “KKK and other undemocratic elements in Detroit have organized the beating of Negro students at Northwestern High School. Police do nothing to stop it. Protests are in order!” Murray wrote to Mayor Jeffries with several pointed questions about this campaign of “beatings and terror”: “Why did City police … stand idly by while physical assaults continued. Why did they then arrest those who by distributing leaflets sought to end these assaults?”20 (In a polite but fatuous reply, Jeffries insisted that Murray had simply misunderstood what happened.)21
As a New York newspaper noted, the same police who allowed the KKK to maintain an open headquarters in midtown and “made no serious attempt to halt the beatings” at Northwestern High School arrested those who protested — members of the NAACP Youth Council, the Jewish American Youth Council, and other groups — and hauled them into the station.22
The revival of the Ku Klux Klan in Detroit, with the quiet blessing of Detroit’s industrial moguls, was part of an effort to divide the city’s workforce by aggravating racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism. One of the chief outposts of Christian fundamentalism and white supremacy was less than a mile from the flagpole at Northwestern High School: neon-lit Temple Baptist, led by Alabama-born fundamentalist Baptist preacher J. Frank Norris, a ferocious racist, anti-Communist and reputed Klan member who became a powerful religious leader in Detroit starting in 1935.23
Why was Mayor Jeffries so slow on the uptake? Jeffries was no fool; he met with Norris and had a great relationship with him. It hardly made sense for an ambitious politician playing footsie with a racist zealot to address the matter in public.24
Push vs. Shove
The situation continued to harden. After the school year opened in the winter of 1941, a news report revealed the rationale under which Northwestern High School prohibited Black clubs at the school. Since the school did not permit interracial clubs, Black students had formed their own club. But Rivett had strictly forbidden white teachers from sponsoring the club, so it could not meet on school grounds.25
Black and white leaders pushed for progress. On March 30, the Detroit Youth Assembly sponsored a meeting at the school, ostensibly so all students could come together and “thrash out for themselves the problems of interracial relations.” The event drew members from a score of progressive and left-oriented groups invited to participate.26
Assembly leaders laid out for a crowd of about 200 some of the ugly facts, including open conflict between students. Yet again, the recommendations were exceedingly modest and civil in tone.27
That same afternoon, the Detroit Civic Rights Committee gave a presentation at the nearby Hartford Avenue Baptist Church to discuss the disparities in the courts, but also at Detroit’s schools. As the event’s handout detailed, outlying schools with predominantly white student bodies, such as McKenzie and Denby, boasted swimming pools, music rooms, gymnasiums, locker rooms, rifle ranges, and more. Facilities for Black students at the Garfield School, however, were never expanded.28
Mayor Jeffries did establish an interracial committee to investigate the causes of the friction. Recalling the committee and its report a couple years later, Detroit NAACP official Gloster Current said Jeffries only agreed to empanel the committee “after much importuning,” and then only “to study the cause of the rioting and to make recommendations.”29 By April, the group was ostensibly already on the job, although Jeffries hoped the effort would “take only a few meetings.”30
The semester ended with a bad beating at Northwestern on June 18, 1941, sending one white youth to the hospital with serious head injuries.31 According to the Black-owned and -operated DetroitTribune, the attack was unprovoked, as 20 Black youths pounded two white boys on the grounds of the school. Trying to make peace, a delegation of Black Detroiters visited the home of one victim to assure his family they would help bring the attackers to justice. In light of the “recent waves of fights between white and colored neighbors,” the NAACP and the Rev. Dade urged all Detroiters to be tolerant.
In July, the West Side Human Relations Council presented the Detroit Board of Education with a petition listing 2,000 signers, requesting Black teachers be placed at seven schools, including Wingert and Northwestern.32 On Tuesday, Aug. 26, petitioners appeared before the board. The Rev. Charles A. Hill, Bridget Poulson, and the Rev. John Miles asked the Board to employ one Black teacher. Hinting at the political dynamic behind the violence, Poulson emphasized the “deliberate effort to divide and disunite America” which, she said, gave the issue a moral importance that made it impossible to ignore. The board, though balking, voted to have a committee study the suggestion further.33
Blood in the Halls
With the opening of the fall semester, violence flared again. On the morning of Sept. 5, 1941, Harold Sparrow, 19, was stabbed in the hall at Northwestern High School. He and a Black student had shared words in the hallway. Sparrow, stepson of a Detroit cop, punched 17-year-old William Templeton in the face. Recovering from the blow, Templeton slashed at Sparrow, causing at least three wounds. Westsiders expressed sympathy for Sparrow, including the purchase of a floral display for delivery to him as he recovered. Templeton was arrested for the crime Sept. 8.34
In the bloodshed’s wake, the Detroit branch of the NAACP called a meeting at the Rev. Dade’s church. It was an emotional, confrontational session that almost broke up at least once. The Rev. Dade advised the crowd of 300 parents, students and community members to check their antipathy and adopt a cordial attitude, likely acknowledging the presence of at least one school official, Phys Ed Director “Bert” Maris.
It is likely Maris (or other school staff present) tested the community’s composure with accusations, including the charge that Black students carried knives. Parents noted that they had consented to searches, yet the school would perform none.
The question of the school’s “Hi-Y” club was raised: In partnership with the YMCA, a special club invited the participation of only the school’s white children. Under what rationale was this discrimination allowed? One can only imagine the exchanges of that meeting, as oblivious white officials faced questions they were unprepared to answer. Maris thought it appropriate to bring up the “darkies” of his rural Ohio upbringing. The comment almost broke up the meeting.35
Public Riots, Private Reports
Mayor Jeffries got more than he bargained for from his interracial committee. Its overworked head William J. Norton was likely relieved that the Black members of the group worked overtime to assist with the job. Input from the Detroit Urban League was reflected in the report’s priorities. The league was hardly a militant organization; it had originally represented an effort by Detroit’s Black and white business elites at social control, not an anti-discrimination group but a “coordinating agency.”36
This attitude came through in the report, which was described as making recommendations that reflected only the broadest civic values.
The Detroit NAACP’s Gloster Current described the study’s recommendations: “reevaluation of the education curricula and teaching policies of the Board of Education, certain improvements in housing and employment policies.”37
A report like that may have provided the additional momentum to compel the recalcitrant board of education to reconsider its attitudes, and may have helped embolden some of the more progressive forces in play on the issue. One gets the sense that the report was presented in a finished form by mid-June. If true, it meant that months had rolled by even as the progressive voices on campus waited for validation from the mayor’s committee.
In fall of 1941, a larger student meeting took place at Northwestern High School, with teens permitted to form an interracial “executive board” to help alleviate tensions at the school. It would be the first official interracial student group of its kind. On Tuesday, Oct. 14, the board met and listened to actors Wendell Saunders and Bill Challee, both in town for a performance of the stage version of “Native Son.” Saunders commended the students, telling them, “These problems should be brought out into the open and solved, not hidden away.”38
That fateful October, as student organizers rallied and the school board weighed what to do next, Jeffries not only refused to release the report, he feigned ignorance when asked about it.
When a letter from the Rev. Owen A. Knox of the Civil Rights Federation asked if he would make the report public, Mayor Jeffries responded, “I did not know that a report on conditions at Northwestern High School was being prepared,” and insisted he’d let the reverend know if he received one.39
Gloster Current would later write, “The report remained on the Mayor’s desk for two years and to the day of the June 20th riot in 1943, nothing was done about the recommendations in the 1941 report.”40
Increasingly, Jeffries antagonized Black Detroit, running racist re-election campaigns in 1943 and 1945. In 1947, after having established himself the longest-serving mayor in Detroit’s 246-year history, Jeffries lost the mayoralty. Two years later, he won back a seat on the City Council but served only a few months. The former mayor who had been cursed by Black Detroiters for his inactivity and betrayal died of a heart attack in Miami Beach, Fla., on April 2, 1950, just one day shy of his 50th birthday.41 In 1961, an expressway that took traffic off the Old Westside’s streets was named for the mayor who had represented the district’s interests so ineffectively.42
Michael Jackman spent fifteen years at Detroit’s Metro Times, where he started as copy editor and worked his way up to senior editor. He is in the process of completing his nonfiction book about Detroit in the 1940s.
Also from this series, by Michael Jackman:
Men of the Cloth, Men of Capital
Looking Past the Exploitative Lens, Fighting Against Erasure
Lead image: Photo of Northwestern High School in Detroit courtesy Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library
Endnotes
[1] “Seven Injured as Youths Riot at High School,” Detroit Free Press, 2/28/1940, 1; “Students in Race Riot at Northwestern High,” Michigan Chronicle, 3/2/1940, 1. Intersection data from “Detroit Engineers Hear Traffic Talk,” Detroit Free Press, 10/21/1937, 3.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid. No doubt the principal’s mention of Michigan Avenue would suggest to many Detroiters the well-known “white slum” in the area, Earl Brown, Why Race Riots? (New York : Public Affairs Committee, Inc., 1944) 17.
[5] A perusal of the 1910 U.S. Census will reveal that a sprinkling of Black and biracial people resided in this area, then on the outskirts of town.
[6] Sheridan A. Bruseaux, Investigation of Recent Detroit Riots, 7/12/1943, Riot Information folder, Box 9, 1943, Mayor Edward J. Jeffries Jr. Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit.
[7] Nancy Kaffer, “West Side Story,” Metro Times, 12/7/2005, 12; John R. Searles, “Movement of the Negro Population Within the City of Detroit by Census Tracts — 1930-1938,” (Detroit: Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research, Memorandum No. 178, n.d.), first map: Percent Negro Population by Census Tracts, 1930 and 1938.
[8] “Store Smashing Laid to Rivalry of Boys’ Gangs,” Detroit Times, 11/22/1942, 3.
[9] “It Took Two Cops,” The Afro-American, 3/9/1940, 1.
[10] Walter White and Thurgood Marshall, What Caused the Detroit Riot (New York: NAACP, 1943), 14; John Wood, “Trouble in Highland Park,” Michigan Chronicle, 11/14/1942, 1.
[11] “The Student Riot at Northwestern,” Detroit Tribune, 3/2/1940, 12; “Police Rapped for Partiality,” Detroit Tribune, 3/9/1940, 1.
[12] Bruseaux, 4-5.
[13] “Miscellaneous Clubs,” Detroit Free Press, 11/14/1920, Part 3, 10; WWI registration card for Byron J. Rivett, Detroit, ancestry.com.
[14] Marshall Dann, “Bert Maris, at 63, Refuses to Let Himself Grow Old,” Detroit Free Press, 2/9/1941, Sports, 2.
[15] “Police Rapped for Partiality,” Detroit Tribune, 3/9/1940, 1; letter from Clifford Christian, 2/28/1940, Interracial Commission, Box 4, 1940, Mayor Edward J. Jeffries Jr. Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit.
[16] “Seven Injured as Youths Riot at High School,” Detroit Free Press, 2/28/1940, 1; “Students in Race Riot at Northwestern High,” Michigan Chronicle, 3/2/1940, 1; “It Took Two Cops,” The Afro-American, 3/9/1940, 1.
[17] “Fighter Freed on Riot Charge,” Detroit Free Press, 3/3/1940, 3; “Police Rapped for Partiality,” Detroit Tribune, 3/9/1940, 1.
[18] “Police Rapped for Partiality,” Detroit Tribune, 3/9/1940, 1; “Rev. Horace White Is Named To Housing Body,” Michigan Chronicle, 4/15/1939, 1.
[19] “Police Rapped for Partiality,” Detroit Tribune, 3/9/1940, 1.
[20] “People Urged To Protest Student Beatings,” St. Paul Recorder, 3/8/1940, 1.
[21] Letter from Henry Murray, Minneapolis, 3/7/1940, copy reply, 3/16/1940, Interracial Commission, Box 4, 1940, Mayor Edward J. Jeffries Jr. Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit.
[22] “Detroit Liberals Push Probe Of Attacks on Negro Students,” Sunday Worker (Daily World), 3/3/1940, 3.
[23] “To Detroit Church,” Windsor Star, 1/3/1935, 8; though the Klan did not meet at or recruit from Temple, membership ran broadly through the church, allegedly to the Rev. Norris himself, document headed “Confidential: File Resource, Origin of ‘Hell Brewers,’” Folder 13, Box 18, “Hell Brewers of Detroit,” the Rev. Claude C. Williams Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit; further reading, see, Michael Jackman, “Men of the Cloth, Men of Capital,” Threefold Press, Issue 17, Winter 2025, https://threefoldpress.org/menofthecloth; Alan Clive, State of War: Michigan in World War II, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 139.
[24] Letters from J. Frank Norris, 5/5/1940, 11/14/1940, 12/2/1940, Ni-Nz, Box 7, 1940, Mayor Edward J. Jeffries Jr. Papers.
[25] “Michigan Klan Spurs Jim Crow In Schools,” Daily Worker, 2/13/1941, 5.
[26] “Youth Assembly To Hold Institute On Racial Problems,” Detroit Tribune, 3/29/1941, 3.
[27] Harriet Robinson, “Ask Jobs For Negro Teachers At High School,” Detroit Tribune, 4/5/1941, 2.
[28] Handout, “Where Does Justice Begin in the Courts and Public School System for the Negro?” (Detroit: Detroit Civic Rights Committee), Interracial Committee, Box 6, 1941, Mayor Edward J. Jeffries Jr. Papers.
[29] Current, letter to Reid Jackson, 7/25/1943, NAACP Detroit Branch Files, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.
[30] Letters of appointment mentioned in letters of acceptance from Geraldine Bledsoe, Dr. James J. McClendon, the Rev. W. H. Peck, Kenneth L. Moore, W. A. Thompson, the Rev. Malcolm G. Dade, Fred R. Johnson, etc., workload from letters between Jeffries and William J. Norton, April 3-4, 1941, Interracial Committee, Box 6, 1941, Mayor Edward J. Jeffries Jr. Papers.
[31] “Seek to Curb Numerous Racial Clashes Here,” Detroit Tribune, 6/28/1941, 3.
[32] “Westsiders Petition For Colored Teachers At Northwestern,” Detroit Tribune, 7/26/1941, 2.
[33] “Petition Board of Education for Negro Teacher at N.W. High,” Detroit Tribune, 8/30/1941, 1.
[34] “Northwestern Student Held For Stabbing Of Boy In School House,” Detroit Tribune, 9/13/1941, 1; “Parents Willing To Help Solve Race Problem At Northwestern High School,” Detroit Tribune, 9/20/1941, 1; 1940 U.S. Census, Detroit, E.D. 84-839, Pages 1B-2A, Dan Coleman household, .
[35] “Parents Willing To Help,” Detroit Tribune, 9/20/1941, 1; Marshall Dann, “Bert Maris, at 63,” Detroit Free Press, 2/9/1941, Sports, 2.
[36] Letters between Jeffries and William J. Norton, April 3-4, 1941, Interracial Committee, Box 6, 1941, Mayor Edward J. Jeffries Jr. Papers; David Levine, Internal Combustion: The Races in Detroit, 1915-26 (Westport, Conn.; London: Greenwood Press, 1976), 84; Detroit Urban League contribution from Current, letter to Reid Jackson, 7/25/1943, NAACP Detroit Branch Files, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.
[37] Current, letter to Reid Jackson, 7/25/1943, NAACP Detroit Branch Files, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.
[38] “Students Try For Race Unity,” Detroit Tribune, 10/18/1941, 1.
[39] Letter from the Rev. Owen A. Knox, 10/8/1941, Interracial Committee, Box 6, 1941, Mayor Edward J. Jeffries Jr. Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit.
[40] Current, letter to Reid Jackson, 7/25/1943, NAACP Detroit Branch Files, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.
[41] “Jeffries Dies in His Sleep,” DFP, 4/3/1950, 1.
[42] “9.6-Mile Crosstown Fisher Xway Route Revealed,” Detroit Free Press, 5/7/1961, 3