DEARBORN, MI — Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly did manage to accomplish two things last week: He drew attention away from Black History Month for a few days, and got his city national notice.
Not, however, in the way anyone would have wanted.
In an amazingly, well … stupid move, the mayor tried to suppress an issue of the Dearborn Historian, a magazine published by the city historical commission, and fired editor Bill McGraw, one of the most respected journalists in Detroit.
What he did instead was to embarrass himself, and take something he tried to keep from a few hundred people and give it an audience of millions, with coverage by the networks and the New York Times. All this happened because of a fair-minded, well-written and deeply researched article on the original Henry Ford’s virulent anti-Semitism, something no secret from anyone who has studied the history of the era, or of the Ford Motor Co.
Indeed, it was already well-known that Adolf Hitler had a picture of Ford on his office wall, and that Ford bought and published a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, largely to publish anti-Semitic diatribes about “the international Jew.”
Eventually, he closed the Dearborn Independent and stopped spewing hatred. But as McGraw noted, Ford’s anti-Semitic writings, later collected into a series of books, still are widely cited and disseminated on extremist websites today.
The flare-up of extremist movements nationally was one of the main reasons the editor thought the article was relevant today. The mayor, however canceled the issue. Though he ducked the press, his spokesperson, Mary Laundroche, told a columnist for the Detroit Free Press that the article “did not fall in line with the mission to understand Dearborn as a welcoming community today.”
That is baffling, seeing as nothing in the article indicated that anti-Semitism still prevails at Ford or in Dearborn. Indeed, the Ford Motor Co. has apologized repeatedly over the decades for the founder’s anti-Semitism. As an indication of how far the company has come, Mark Fields, Ford’s CEO from 2014 to 2017, is Jewish.
What’s most bizarre is that by clumsily attempting to censor the piece, the mayor gave it more distribution than any article in the Dearborn Historian (circulation, about 230) has ever had.
The publication is so small and obscure it has no online presence. But once the piece was censored, an online version was published that was seen by many thousands of viewers.
National publications and broadcast networks flocked to town and did stories on the event. For years, Dearborn, which has an estimated population of about 95,000 has been more famous for its large Arab-American population, now about a third of the total.
Some extremist sites — and a few out-of-state Republican politicians — have gone so far as to falsely assert that Dearborn is ruled by Muslim sharia law. In fact, “we are as much under sharia law as anyplace with a strip club, a bunch of bars and a Honey Baked Ham store can be,” laughed writer and local politician Brian Stone.
And when it comes to assessing Dearborn’s past, Henry Ford, who died in 1947, has been long eclipsed by Orville Hubbard, the flamboyant, clownish and hugely fat mayor whose slogan “Keep Dearborn Clean” meant, in fact, to keep it all white.Hubbard largely succeeded at that during the 36 years (1942-78) he was mayor. Though Dearborn has some black residents, it is still widely regarded by many blacks as racist now.
Now, thanks to a clumsy PR move, Dearborn, a former farm town that became the cradle of the modern auto industry, may be variously regarded nationally as a center of Sharia law and a hotbed of anti-Semitism with a legacy of hatred for black people.
If ever a city needed a massive PR makeover… Dearborn might well be it.
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Strange Paradoxes: Yet both Dearborn and its most famous son, Henry Ford, were far more complex that easy stereotypes show.
On my radio show last week, Howard Lindsey, a retired history professor at DePaul University in Chicago, said that Ford was directly responsible for nurturing hundreds of black families in the working-class suburb of Inkster. All of them had family members who worked for Ford Motor Co., often in less desirable jobs, as in the foundry, but at pay that was usually the same as white workers.
Henry Ford may have been anti-Semitic, but he was the first automaker to employ large numbers of black workers, generally at the same wages paid to whites. “He knew they couldn’t live in Dearborn,” Lindsey said. “So he built homes for them and sold them at cost,” and also often lent them money for necessities.
Ford believed in what he regarded as fair treatment for blacks, but not integration. “I found a paper on which he wrote a note to himself saying that the solution to the ‘Negro problem’ was ‘colonization,’” the historian said. Inkster, which today has about 25,000 mostly black residents, was meant to be such a colony.
Nevertheless, there are older black workers today who would never consider buying another brand of car or truck, since “Mr. Ford” gave their fathers and grandfathers good paying jobs when no one else would.
