Churches and Urban Government in Detroit and New York, 1895-1994

By Henry J. Pratt, Annis Pratt, Faith Pratt Hopp and Ronald Brown

Beginning in the 1890s, the social gospel movement and its secular counterpart, the Progressive movement, set the stage for powerful church and city governance connections. What followed during the next 100 years was the emergence of religious bodies as an important instrument for influencing City Hall on moral and social issues. Churches and Urban Government compares the governing styles of Detroit and New York City from 1895 to 1994 and looks at the steps city-wide religious bodies took to advance the interests of their communities and their local government during this chaotic period in urban history.

Detroit and New York City make for a very interesting case study when casting the two cities’ many similarities against their contrasting urban governance styles. What these cities share is a longstanding liberal political culture and comparable ethnic and racial diversity as well as large populations of Catholics and Protestants. Emphasizing the role of Black churches, Henry J. Pratt—with additional material from Ronald Brown—examines how immigration, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights movement all nurtured this developing link between religion and politics, helping churches evolve into leadership roles within these metropolitan centers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Feb 12, 2004
• ISBN: 9780814336687

Henry J. Pratt

Henry J. Pratt (1934–2000) was professor of Political Science at Wayne State University.

Book preview

Churches and Urban Government

in Detroit and New York

1895–1994

African American Life Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found at the back of this volume.

Series Editors

Melba Joyce Boyd

Department of Africana Studies, Wayne State University

Ron Brown

Department of Political Science, Wayne State University

Churches and Urban Government

in Detroit and New York

1895–1994

HENRY PRATT

Preface by

Ronald Brown

Wayne State University Press   Detroit

Copyright 2004 © by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Pratt, Henry J., 1934–2000

Churches and urban government in Detroit and New York, 1895-1994 / Henry Pratt ; preface by Ronald Brown.

p. cm — (African American life series)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-8143-3 172-6

1. Christianity and politics—Michigan—Detroit—History—20th century. 2. African American churches—Michigan—Detroit—History—20th century. 3. Christianity and politics—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 4. African American churches—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series.

BR563.N4P72 2004

332’.1’0974710904—dc22

2003017637

ISBN 978-0-8143-3172-9 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-8143-3668-7 (e-book)

For Hilary and Betty Cunningham

Contents

Foreword

Annis Pratt with Faith Pratt Hopp

Preface

Ronald Brown

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Urban Churches in the Progressive Era

2 Churches, Government, and the Great Depression

3 Churches, Civil Rights, and the Great Society

4 New York Protestantism and Appointments to City Offices

5 The Urban Church in a Conservative Political Era

6 The Black Church in a Post-Church Federation Era

Ronald Brown

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

Throughout his academic career, Henry Pratt was intrigued by the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between political interest groups and public policy formation. In an introduction to Gray Agendas, a cross-national study of the relationship between old-age interest groups and public pension formation, he notes, I have been fascinated for a number of years by the social and cultural settings that have proved conducive to interest group formation, and to later reorientations of groups’ accustomed modes of social action (Pratt, Gray Agendas, 1993: 9; see also The Gray Lobby, 1976). Although perhaps best known in gerontological circles for his pioneering work in interest group formation and influence among older adults, he returned in his later years to a previous study of the relationship between church-based interest groups and urban politics. The present book is thus the product of a long-standing scholarly inquiry, which he first explored in his 1962 Columbia University doctoral dissertation on The Protestant Council of the City of New York as a Political Interest Group.

A Detroit native, he fell in love with New York City during his first year as a graduate student at Columbia. As a native New Yorker myself, I was particularly thrilled to hear of this evolving interest in one of his many letters to me during our engagement. In November 1958, he wrote: I supposed there are some studies which are best carried out on a secluded and restful campus among what is sometimes referred to as a community of scholars. But for the student of metropolitan government the intellectual reinforcement (which contributes to any kind of scholarly effort, regardless of subject) may flow in large degree from the place in which he finds himself. In New York City, data is the very soot of the air and clang of the fire bell. Always fascinated by the nitty-gritty of urban politics, he became a runner for the Riverside Democratic Party and once found himself inadvertently doing errands for Tammany Hall. He also immersed himself in the life of urban churches, attending services at St. John the Divine, Riverside Church, and other politically influential churches all over the city.

He returned to Detroit in the early 1970s to accept a position at Wayne State University, a move that rekindled his interest in the political continuities and transformations of his native city. During the 1970s he became curious about the role of ethnic loyalties as they interact with organized religion to influence community solidarity and political interventions in Detroit, which led to his edition of a collection of essays on Ethno-Religious Politics (1974).

Throughout his life, Henry also invested himself personally in a number of political callings, including a variety of political campaigns, the Civil Rights movement, opposing religious persecution, and a number of feminist causes. He was thus personally invested in the role that individuals, acting alone but particularly in groups, can play in American life and politics. Henry remained fascinated by the role played by church organizations in urban politics. While at Columbia, he agreed with Reinhold Niebuhr’s realistic approach to politics and his application of theology to both national and international political affairs. So, in the innocent, indefatigable way anyone who knew him would immediately recognize, he went to Professor Niebuhr’s office and introduced himself as someone interested in religion and politics. By the time I arrived back in New York shortly before our marriage in 1960, he was Professor Niebuhr’s research assistant, doing library runs for him and enjoying Sunday luncheons at his apartment. During the late 1960s, we returned to New York City for him to undertake the interviews and archival research for a book on the National Council of Churches, which Wayne State University Press published in 1972 as The Liberalization of American Protestantism. In this first book, he analyzed how the National Council responded to the political and ethical challenge of the Civil Rights movement by becoming more liberal. He demonstrated how the council emerged from political quiescence to insist that major social issues be confronted by the churches, demonstrating the crucial role of pressure group activity aimed at social reform goals (Pratt, The Liberalization of American Protestantism, 1972: 265).

The present book, therefore, represents the final outcome of a set of passions and interests, both scholarly and personal, that Henry developed and elaborated on throughout his career. His particular excitement about the relationship between church political interest groups and urban politics, and the depth of this interest based on a lifetime of study, are what sustained him in writing this book during the last three years of his life.

ANNIS PRATT

WITH FAITH PRATT HOPP

Preface

Henry Pratt’s premature death on May 7, 2000, prevented him from fully addressing reviewers’ concerns about black church confederations in chapter 6. Our common interest in the connection between religious institutions and local political culture led to countless discussions about this matter. Henry largely believed that black clergy placed more emphasis on the establishment of biracial coalitions because of their minority status. In contrast, I suggested that black religious nationalism or the belief in religious-group autonomy played an equally significant role in the development of strategies by black clergy. In the 1999 fall semester, Henry offered an undergraduate course on religion and politics, which he had developed; I was a guest speaker in his class. This was the last intellectual exchange that we had about the religion and politics nexus. The discussion centered on the contemporary affect of religious black nationalism on the political mobilization of African Americans in the city of Detroit. More specifically, we focused on the influence of the Shrine of the Black Madonna on grassroots political efforts in the city of Detroit. Henry had begun to explore more closely this dimension of black church life; however, he was unable to incorporate much of it in his chapter on black church politics.

After a discussion with Annis Pratt, Faith Pratt-Hopp, and Arthur Evans, then director of Wayne State University Press, I agreed to finish chapter 6. This chapter uses the pluralist-regime theoretical framework to describe how a black nationalism/integration political framework affected the political choices of progressive black activists. More to the point, I use Henry’s interviews, newspaper articles, and new primary sources from the Wayne State University Reuther Library and the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan to describe the black nationalism/integration political world-view of black activists. This information is used to describe how and why progressive black clergy were influenced by the black power ideology of the 1960s and 1970s. Black power, or the pursuit of personal and collective autonomy, led them to organize their collective resources in the pursuit of political power at the local level. Chapter 6, centering on the pluralist-regime theoretical framework that guides the book, argues that black religious nationalism, expressed largely by Malcolm X, Rev. Cleage, and to a certain degree by Adam Clayton Powell, affected black church politics in the early 1970s.

The idea of black nationalism—or collective autonomy and self-determination—would catch fire in both cities largely because of political discontentment at the mass level that would erupt in northern urban insurrections in the late 1960s. This is best illustrated by the fact that C. L. Franklin, an organizer of the March Down Woodward in 1963 that featured Martin Luther King, would, by 1968, have such sympathy for black nationalism that his church, New Bethel, would be the site of a controversial shoot-out between Detroit police and the Republic of New Africa. Furthermore, black nationalism in Detroit always had an interest in regime change. The idea of black nationalism within a pluralist system would echo itself in the formation of the Michigan Freedom Democratic Party in 1963, which consisted of black nationalist, Marxist, trade unionist, and civil rights activists. Finally, the black nationalists were part of the initial electoral campaigns of Coleman Young, David Dinkins, and Jesse Jackson, all of which are discussed in chapter 6. Essentially, what we hope to show is that a pluralistic-regime framework can be used to describe black church federation politics from the late 1960s through the early 1990s.

I do not think that Henry would disagree with this approach. He makes the point in the introduction that regime theory and pluralism both underscore the possibility that various non-regime institutions may, under certain conditions, exert a sustained influence on urban government. Black churches sought to adapt to a newly emergent political environment by using a black power ideology, rooted in black religious nationalism.

RONALD BROWN

Acknowledgments

Professor Ron Brown, a colleague in the Political Science Department at Wayne State, was most generous in his willingness to serve as coauthor of chapter 6 following Henry’s death. The depth and specificity of this chapter owe much to interviews undertaken by Sabrina Williams and by Carolyn L. Heartfield, to whom we owe special thanks. We were most grateful to Arthur Evans, the past director of the Wayne State University Press, and to the current director, Jane Hoehner, for providing encouragement and feedback on the manuscript to both Dr. Brown and to Henry’s family. We are aware that numerous others assisted Henry with gaining interviews with prominent church leaders in New York and Detroit, although, given his death before he could write his own acknowledgments, we regret that we cannot thank all of these people personally.

Finally, we appreciate Henry’s colleagues throughout the Wayne State University community and his students, who sustained and encouraged his intellectual interests throughout his thirty-year career at the university. The publication of this book three years after Henry’s death represents a true scholarly and personal collaboration, and I hope that the outcome of its publication will be the kind of intellectual and scholarly discussions and debates that Henry most enjoyed during his lifetime.

Introduction

This is a book about city hall and the church, and more especially about the linkages between citywide ecumenical church structures, on the one hand, and officials of large municipalities and their respective states, on the other. The book’s emphasis on big cities, as opposed to cities generally, is premised on the view that America’s major metropolitan centers are of special importance, both symbolically and materially. Admittedly, the post–World War II mushroom growth of non-central-city communities—suburbs, satellite cities, and other urban places—is a development of major significance. Yet their emergence has not wholly eclipsed the large metropolises, which continue to play a unique role in the nation’s life and imagination. The book’s emphasis on religious bodies citywide, as opposed to congregations and parishes, is grounded in the fact that the former are the chief mechanism for church pronouncements on moral and social issues, and the primary instrument for church efforts to influence city hall. While it is true that parish spokespeople—including, among others, local pastors and priests—do occasionally lobby local officials and politicians, such activity is typically on matters of narrower compass as compared to the broader concerns of their citywide counterparts. Obviously, any full discussion of the relationship between church and city hall would need to consider the local church dimension. Yet the present study treats it only tangentially—in the behavior of church federations and hierarchies responding, in part, to parish-based initiatives.

I gave careful thought before deciding to focus upon the two cities New York and Detroit. My interest centers on citywide church organizations and the factors that may have contributed to their sustained political involvement since being formed in either the closing years of the nineteenth century (the New York case) or the opening years of the twentieth (the Detroit case). It is clear from preliminary investigation that the church organizations in question are similar in some respects but dissimilar in others. One can hypothesize that this contrast is in some fundamental way related to a contrasting urban governance style in the two settings. From a research standpoint it is an advantage, not a disadvantage, that New York and Detroit are, in most respects, closely akin. Both these cities (1) have long-standing liberal political cultures, (2) exercise metropolitan dominance over a hinterland that encompasses much of their own state in addition to portions of others, (3) are diverse in terms of ethnicity and race, and (4) contain large numbers of Catholics and Protestants (New York, of course, also has a large Jewish population). By holding constant such background characteristics, one can more easily test for the possible significance of the known variable, namely the form and style of urban governance.

Analysts sometimes apply a general model, deductively derived, to a range of cases to illustrate that the theory fits the cases. To do this, however, one would need to apply the model to all known instances of the phenomenon in question to establish that every instance follows essentially the same rule. Yet as Ann Shola Orloff observes in her discussion of state pension policy development in the industrialized nations, such an approach may well push the analyst away from the direct involvement with the cases which is so important for untangling the complex causality inherent in macro level social and political processes (Orloff, 1993: 28). Following both Orloff and Theda Skocpol (1984), I opt for a strategy of analyzing the causal regularities, hoping to account for important historical patterns within specific and significant sets of cases (Orloff, 1993: 28). For the same basic reason that Orloff adopts a most similar nations strategy, under which variation among control or background variables is minimized while variation along potentially explanatory dimensions are maximized, so this study, by focusing on two cases that are similar in most respects, aims to assess the significance of one key area of contrast.

The most salient area of contrast presented by the two cases relates to their forms of municipal government and their related political ethos. On the one hand, New York is historically a machine city in which party organizations offering inducements, both symbolic and material, to their supporters were for many years central to the city’s politics. This picture has altered somewhat of late. Tammany Hall, the traditional symbol of party control in the city, began to fade as a political force beginning around 1950 and is now but a shell of its powerful position in the 1920s. Still, traditional political organizing continues to figure in New York City mayoral contests, and various elements of the old regime remain securely in place (McNickle, 1993: 325). Detroit, on the other hand, has been governed on the basis of reform principles for most of the twentieth century. Reform is part of a larger Anglo-Saxon middle-class ethos, and its abiding goals consist of eliminating corruption, increasing efficiency, and making local government in some cases more democratic (Banfield and Wilson, 1963: 138–39). Detroit was perhaps the first large American city to accept the reform package essentially in its entirety: nonpartisan, at-large municipal elections; the initiative, referendum, and recall; the short ballot; the municipal reference bureau and the citizens’ association; and (especially since the revised city charter of 1974) the strengthening of the power of the mayor. Among all the reforms brought together by the National Municipal League in 1916 as its second municipal program, and then promoted nationwide as orthodoxy, Detroit elected to reject only the council-manager form of government, as have essentially all American big cities (Banfield and Wilson, 1963: 141).

Machine dominance in a given city tends to shape the political environment in which interest groups of all kinds, urban church federations included, must operate; reform tends to produce an equally distinct environmental impact. The question for research, then, becomes one of trying to identify the contrasting patterns of church political behavior in Detroit, with its reform tradition, and in New York, with its equally traditional machine orientation.

The premise that church representatives are potentially a source of influence and pressure in large-city governance is one unlikely to arouse much controversy. Churches are generally recognized as having an interest—moral, spiritual, and material—and, as is true of pressure groups generally, their interest is one that can serve as the basis for organized, concerted action. The urban politics literature of the past quarter century, while seldom mentioning churches as such (a point returned to below), does underscore the role of pressure groups and lobbies, and often employs an implicit demand-pressure model in accounting for public policy outcomes.

The present discussion is sensitive to the possibility that a church demand-pressure model may apply to one or the other of the cities during all or some of their twentieth-century histories. Churches may make demands in the form of formal pronouncements or other public policy statements. They may then apply pressure aimed at insuring that such statements receive full consideration. Assuming a positive response from government, the church groups would then logically monitor the situation to guarantee that outcomes roughly coincide with the original intent.

Yet the research is also sensitive to a second possibility, one that includes, but goes beyond, the demand-pressure model. Under certain conditions municipal officials and citywide church leaders may become partners in what amounts to an interdependent, symbiotic relationship. Leaders of both church and state, I suggest, may on occasion participate in a trading relationship, with each party exchanging resources that the other considers useful, even critical, to its own functioning. (Resources here is intended in its broadest sense, denoting both symbols and tangible, material assets.) While there is no presumption here that such symbiosis has in fact taken place in either of the two settings, it may now (or may recently have) occurred, and the research needs to be sensitive to that possibility.

Relationships between church organizations and city hall, whether in the simple demand-pressure mold or in the more complex symbiosis pattern, occur in the context of this country’s tradition of church-state separation. That tradition restricts the ability of church leaders and city officials to collaborate overtly with one another, as is often the case in other public policy spheres—for example, in urban land-use development where business groups and government officials often act jointly in furtherance of municipal projects. Federal and state courts are invoked from time to time in giving legal definition to the church nonestablishment clause and also the religious free exercise clause of the First Amendment. In that process, the courts play an important role in big-city church-state relations. Given the peculiarities of First Amendment concerns, the nexus between city church groups and city government probably has no exact counterpart elsewhere in urban governance, where interest groups of other types seek to influence public policy outcomes.

In exploring the linkages between church organizations and urban governance structures, I take into account the two approaches that together have dominated late-twentieth-century theorizing about American urban politics, namely regime theory and pluralism. Each of these merits a word of explanation. A regime has been defined as an informal yet relatively stable group with access to institutional resources that enable it to have a sustained role in making governing decisions. Participants are likely to have an institutional base, a domain of command or power (Stoker, 1995: 58). There is no formal hierarchy that serves as the focus of direction and control. Instead, regime theory posits a network, premised on solidarity, loyalty, and trust, through which cooperation is obtained and governing capacity is achieved. Regime theory, as Stoker remarks, is concerned with the process of government interest group mediation, including the internal politics of coalition building (Stoker, 1995: 50). Churches are unlikely to be included within any city’s regime, given the emphasis placed on church-state separation, the scarcity of disposable church resources, and church leaders’ absence of real command over the resources nominally at their disposal. Yet there remains the possibility that churches are involved in the mediation process in their efforts to influence one or more areas of pubic policy.

Studies reveal that a number of North American cities are governed by regime in a classic, highly developed form. Atlanta, in the decades beginning in 1945, is a leading case in point (Stone, 1989). Detroit has been found to lie at the other end of the continuum: a city with a limited and weak regime-building capacity (Stoker, 1995). Still, despite such wide city-to-city variation, regime-theory analysts consistently report that social complexity is a fundamental aspect of American big-city politics, and that fragmentation and the absence of consensus characterizes most urban systems (Stoker, 1995). Interest groups of all types benefit from this pattern, since fragmentation normally enhances their ability to achieve and maintain governmental access.

Pluralism, a somewhat older analytic tradition, dates from the 1960s and early ’70s, and to the writings of analysts such as Robert Dahl, Raymond Wolfiner, and Nelson Polsby. Two of its leading propositions are: (1) power is fragmented and decentralized, and (2) there are dispersed inequalities, insofar as all groups have some resources to articulate their case, even if their demands are not necessarily or specifically acted upon (Judge, 1995: 14). Since receiving its classic expression forty years ago, the pluralism tradition has metamorphosed to the point that its recent expressions have been labeled neo-pluralism. Thus, for example, Douglas Yates reformulates Robert Dahl’s original query, who governs? into the question does anybody govern? Yates’s street fighting pluralism emphasizes the wide diversity and complexity of interests and decision games (Yates, 1977). Policy making, in this view, involves direct and well-crystallized conflicts about urban goods and services (Judd, 1979: 24). To a far greater extent than classical pluralism, neo-pluralism is sensitive to the social context of policy formation—spatial, temporal, and socioeconomic. In this respect it has come increasingly to overlap concerns central to regime theory, in which social context is also underscored. Consequently, the earlier intense debate between pluralist and elite approaches has now considerably abated (Judge, 1995: 30).

Regime theory and pluralism, then, both underscore the possibility that various non-regime institutions may, under certain conditions, exert a sustained influence on urban government. Are churches and church leaders one such source? It is an aim of the present study to find an answer. It would be wrong,