It seems unlikley that the great amount of racism in early Detroit was one sided: What did blacks to do anger.

Question

whites? How did they retaliate (besides the two riots) I'm reading a couple books such as Detroit: I Do Mind Dying and The Origin of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit and few, if any, examples are given. It seems impossible that from the 1910s to the 1970s blacks were just innocent victims of all of that brutality. There must be some reason...?

Answer 1

There's no simple answer to that question but consider this: Detroit was a place where many southern whites, pushed out of the south for economic reasons, settled. Many of the racial problems from the 1930's and 40's are directly attributed to white southerners living in Detroit. You also have to consider this: As soon as African-Americans began moving to Detroit in sizable numbers, whites with money retreated to all-white suburbs like Grosse Point (which didn't allow blacks to move in). Poor whites were left in the city competing for scarce jobs, of course you can see the result of this. In the 30's you had many southern whites moving in as well, which made the situation worse. In the 40's there was the war industry and again some people had problems working together. After the war and Detroit started its slow, painful economic decline. After busing became an issue, the middle-class whites that were left fled as fast as they could to the lilly-white suburbs, again leaving poor whites to compete with blacks for scarce economic oppurtunities. It didn't take much to convice poor whites that blacks were the root of their problems and vice versa.

Answer 2

Why? There are lots of examples where people thought other people were second rate and uppity and deserved to die if they didn't behave - Sunni's and Shi'ites are doing it in Iraq right now.
Blacks flooded into Detroit looking for jobs and with the surplus of workers, wages were held down or dropped. The automakers, in particular Henry Ford, used armed troops ("guards") to break up union organization attempts and to play whites against blacks.
Why do you want to blame the victim? As in "she must have done something"

Answer 3

~Sorry to disappoint you, but in early Detroit the racism was by the whites against the Indians. The blacks came up later to fill the void created by the successful genocidal policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.