johnclark54
Registered
Orville Hubbard -- the ghost who still haunts Dearborn
For most of his 36 years as mayor of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, the late Orville L. Hubbard (1903-82) was known as the most outspoken segregationist north of the Mason-Dixon line.
A few years after taking office in 1942, Hubbard started attracting national publicity as a controversial administrator with a strange sense of humor. Eventually he gained a reputation as a political boss who worked to keep his town predominantly white.
The following chapter on Hubbard's peculiar brand of racism was excerpted from the 1989 biography Orvie: The Dictator of Dearborn (Wayne State University Press) by David L. G
od. Good, an editor in the features department of The Detroit News, lives in Dearborn and once covered city hall under Hubbard.
By David L. Good / The Detroit News
Through the half-drawn
bli
nds in his mayoral suite at Dearborn Ci
ty Hall, Orville Hubbard could see mainstream America. He could see the storefronts along historic Michigan Avenue, once the main Detroit-to-Chicago auto route, known during Indian days as the Sauk Trail. He could see the housewives at the neighborhood shops, the businessmen at the lunch spots, the auto workers at the bank, the retirees on the benches and the youngsters on the municipal playground equipment. He could see it all. And he could see that it was white.
In a sense, Orville Hubbard's view was no different from that in any of a dozen or more other segregated suburbs that ringed the city of Detroit -- or in hundreds of other such communities scattered across the country. But Orville Hubbard saw the cityscape and knew it was more than jus
t a view. He knew it was a level for self-perpetuation. And while the racism of Orville Hubbard was not the racism of the Ku Klux Klan, of the cross burners and the lynch mobs, it was just as insidious
in its way,
representing as it did the strangleh
old of the white power structure on the political machinery of the suburbs of northern America....
Despite his record, Hubbard, intriguingly, saw himself as almost a moderate on the race issue, even while giving in to racist invective of the worst sort. "I'm not a racist," he once protested to his assembled department heads, "but I just hate those black bastards." Once, in an apparent effort to show a group of appoinees and a reporter how broadminded he was, he approached a black parking attendant at one of his favorite luncheon spots and, with a flourish, kissed the man on both cheeks. "See," the mayor told his entourage, "I don't hate n-----s."
more at
http://www.detnews.com/history/hubbard/hubbard.htm
For most of his 36 years as mayor of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, the late Orville L. Hubbard (1903-82) was known as the most outspoken segregationist north of the Mason-Dixon line.
A few years after taking office in 1942, Hubbard started attracting national publicity as a controversial administrator with a strange sense of humor. Eventually he gained a reputation as a political boss who worked to keep his town predominantly white.
The following chapter on Hubbard's peculiar brand of racism was excerpted from the 1989 biography Orvie: The Dictator of Dearborn (Wayne State University Press) by David L. G
od. Good, an editor in the features department of The Detroit News, lives in Dearborn and once covered city hall under Hubbard.
By David L. Good / The Detroit News
Through the half-drawn
bli
nds in his mayoral suite at Dearborn Ci
ty Hall, Orville Hubbard could see mainstream America. He could see the storefronts along historic Michigan Avenue, once the main Detroit-to-Chicago auto route, known during Indian days as the Sauk Trail. He could see the housewives at the neighborhood shops, the businessmen at the lunch spots, the auto workers at the bank, the retirees on the benches and the youngsters on the municipal playground equipment. He could see it all. And he could see that it was white.
In a sense, Orville Hubbard's view was no different from that in any of a dozen or more other segregated suburbs that ringed the city of Detroit -- or in hundreds of other such communities scattered across the country. But Orville Hubbard saw the cityscape and knew it was more than jus
t a view. He knew it was a level for self-perpetuation. And while the racism of Orville Hubbard was not the racism of the Ku Klux Klan, of the cross burners and the lynch mobs, it was just as insidious
in its way,
representing as it did the strangleh
old of the white power structure on the political machinery of the suburbs of northern America....
Despite his record, Hubbard, intriguingly, saw himself as almost a moderate on the race issue, even while giving in to racist invective of the worst sort. "I'm not a racist," he once protested to his assembled department heads, "but I just hate those black bastards." Once, in an apparent effort to show a group of appoinees and a reporter how broadminded he was, he approached a black parking attendant at one of his favorite luncheon spots and, with a flourish, kissed the man on both cheeks. "See," the mayor told his entourage, "I don't hate n-----s."
more at
http://www.detnews.com/history/hubbard/hubbard.htm
