“In the car on the way to my Aunt Mildred’s for my ninth birthday party, we heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. America was at war.
‘And on my birthday, too,’ I murmured.

Everything changed then. America mobilized. No more butter. White margarine with a little orange button of dye that you squeezed into it and beat until it was yellow, so that when you spread it on your bread, it booked like butter instead of lard. My Girl Scout troop collected scrap metal for the war effort. We had to save bacon drippings in coffee cans and turn them in. I beautifully brought the cans of fat in my wagon to the collection site. Nothing went to waste everything was saved, collected, and delivered for the war effort. My mother went to work in a factory that made bomb sights. All popular music changed to war songs. Patriotism was in the air. We were the good guys. We were fighting evil and God was certainly on our side.

Detroit became known as the Arsenal of Democracy. The automobile plants were converted to factories producing tasks and guns. They were gobbling up the workforce and needed more manpower. The factories reached out to the blacks of the South, who began migrating to the North for jobs and higher wages. Trouble was, everyone welcomed the black laborers into the factories, but nobody wanted them and their families to live in the all-white neighborhoods. The new workforce of 200,000 was corralled into sixty square blocks on the east side of the city.

Detroit had become a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and when tensions finally erupted, an angry mob of thousands of whites began pulling blacks off streetcars and beating them to death in full view of the white police.

Riots broke out and the police killed seventeen people, all black. I was to enter Hutchins Intermediate school, but the school’s opening in September was delayed a week. I was told the reason was: ‘The colored are rioting.'” -From, “Lessons In Becoming Myself” By: Ellen Burstyn