Flashback: How Orville Hubbard gaslit Dearborn to stop a housing development

No matter how enthusiastically he promoted his goal of “segregation, 1 million percent on all levels,” Orville L. Hubbard generally bristled at being called a racist.

Yet the late Dearborn mayor devoted so much energy to race-baiting during his 36 years in office — from 1942 to 1978 — that he could hardly escape the label.

By the mid-1950s, lionized by legions of local voters but branded a dictator by his opponents, he was already the most unabashed segregationist north of the Mason-Dixon Line and the best-known suburban mayor in America.

Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, vilified him in 1969 as the nation’s “meanest man in race relations.”

Hubbard once told the New York Times that he did not hate Black people. “Christ, I don’t even dislike them,” he said. But if white homeowners don’t want to live next to Black neighbors, “they sure as hell don’t have to. Dammit, this is a free country. This is America.”

Hubbard began dredging up the race issue for political gain in 1945 when he mobilized the objections of a consortium of communities against a federal proposal to provide affordable housing for Black war workers in Dearborn and neighboring suburbs. Three years later, he embarked on the most blatantly racist performance of his career — perhaps the one that best demonstrated his ability to influence events in Dearborn and attract national condemnation.

On Nov. 2, 1948, Dearborn voters went to the polls on a different low-cost housing proposal, this one a $25 million, multiple-family project proposed by the John Hancock Life Insurance Co. of Hartford, Connecticut. The Springwells Park Development, as it was called, would house 1,200 families in 600 duplex units to be built on 930 acres owed by the Ford Foundation and Ford Motor Co. Eventually, it might accommodate 45,000 residents.

The project was not targeted at any group of people. Rent was to average $125 a month, about $1,500 today.

A whispering campaign begins

The land changed hands without complications, pending rezoning. The project appeared to be moving forward. And then Orville Hubbard weighed in.

The integration of their city, as Hubbard was well aware, was of particular concern to many Dearbornites because of a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that restrictive covenants on property deeds, common around the country, violated the 14th Amendment and thus were not enforceable in state courts, as a way to prevent Black people from buying homes.

Given that Dearborn consisted overwhelmingly of single-family homes owned exclusively by white people, it was no surprise there might be an audience for warnings about the threat posed by outsiders. Indeed, the city’s civic associations had labored for years to keep Dearborn white, as noted by historian David M.P. Freund:

“It was Dearborn’s homeowners that kept the race issue front and center,” he wrote in his 2007 book, “Colored Property.”

“Their activism sustained the campaign to exclude apartments and black people from Dearborn throughout the early postwar years. And it was their activism that set the tone for and helped establish the terms of the fight over the Hancock apartments.”

With this backdrop, Hubbard and his minions began a whispering campaign that warned the Hancock project would become a “huge Negro community.”

To bolster his argument, he read to City Council a telegram from a Black union official asking whether “these badly needed homes would give any relief to the colored population.” Although the very question, Hubbard said, indicated a “race problem” in the making, the council voted 4-3 against the mayor’s recommendation to give residents a chance to vote on the issue.

Criticizing Henry Ford II

Finally, at a third meeting in October, before a raucous audience of 600, the council voted unanimously to put Hancock on the fall ballot, even though most council members favored the project.

While Hubbard contended that all the civic associations and 95% of the city’s residents were with him, the Dearborn Press conducted its own poll, concluding that 75% of residents were actually in favor of the project.

In the weeks before the scheduled election, the mayor continued to warn that the project would mirror a similar Hancock development in Brookline, Massachusetts, described by him as shoddy-looking row housing that would deteriorate into a “Negro slum.”

And, taking a shot at Henry Ford II, Hubbard charged that the project was a plot by “idle millionaires” to exploit the common people. He also distributed a flyer calling the project a “racial gamble,” even as every council member but one endorsed the development as a way to “establish for all time an area that will act as a bulwark against any poor real estate development that might seep into Dearborn.”

By this time, the project had won the endorsement of many city organizations and such voter groups as the Dearborn Citizens’ League. The Dearborn Press ran a preelection story headlined, “It’s City vs. Mayor on Homes,” proclaiming Dearborn had “lined up solidly” against Hubbard “in his one-man steamroller campaign.”

At last came the vote. Although the referendum had no legal standing, city officials agreed to accept the outcome as the final word on the Hancock project. But Henry Ford II and the other proponents had not reckoned with the mayor’s next move: Hubbard sent his top lieutenants — as well as some civil service employees — fanning out across the city’s polling places on Election Day with cards that read:

“KEEP NEGROES OUT OF DEARBORN / Vote NO on (Advisory Vote) /PROTECT YOUR HOME and MINE!”

One city council member was spotted wearing a hat decorated with one of the cards. And leaflets pointed out that none of the 1,500 or so Black workers at Ford Motor’s Rouge Plant lived in Dearborn and that Hancock would be unable to keep the new project segregated.

“Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security,” the leaflets warned.

The vote surprised some people

How much backing did Hubbard really have? Despite the previous shows of support for the project, the vote was 15,948 against and 10,562 in favor. Hancock was dead in Dearborn, much to the apparent astonishment of almost everyone — except the mayor.

Hubbard attracted his share of finger-pointing afterward. In one councilman’s words, the mayor’s “rottenest” tactics made “a white project a Negro project. He lied to every civic organization in the city and every registered citizen.”

Over the next 30 years, Dearborn voters kept returning Hubbard to office. He floated in and out of the headlines, frequently in the role of a racist agitator. That reputation has endured over the four decades since his 1982 death, despite efforts by subsequent administrations to showcase Dearborn as a “diverse and welcoming” community, which now boasts a majority of Arab Americans and a growing Black population.

David L. Good is a retired Detroit News reporter and editor and the author of “Orvie: The Dictator of Dearborn."

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Orville Hubbard gaslit Dearborn to stop a housing development