According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black or African Americans living in Detroit accounted for 79.1% of the total population, or approximately 532,425 people as of 2017 estimates.

[3][needs update] Many black Detroiters have moved to the suburbs or Southern cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Birmingham, Memphis, San Antonio and Jackson.

[9] In the days before the Civil War began, Detroit was an important site on the Underground Railroad, in which local people aided the passage of fugitive slaves to freedom.

Local blacks involved in the Underground Railroad work included Samuel C. Watson (who later opened a drug store in Detroit),[10] William Whipper, Richard and George DeBaptiste, and others.

A Democratic Party paper, The Detroit Free Press, supported white supremacy and opposed President Abraham Lincoln's handling of the war.

[14] After the war, African Americans formed an important political block in the city, led by Watson, George DeBaptist, John D. Richards, and Walter Y.

[20] Because landlords began to restrict access to housing, Black residents were forced into small districts, which became overcrowded as the population grew.

T. J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, wrote that the first geographic racial divisions between Whites and Blacks developed during the Great Migration.

Steve Babson, author of Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town, wrote that in the early 20th century the Black population "was relatively behind the middle-class leadership" of the NAACP and the Urban League.

[21] Around the 1920s and 1930s Black people working in Henry Ford's factories settled in Inkster because they did not want to commute from Detroit and they were not allowed to live in Dearborn.

Sections of the auto industry were converted to wartime production of the arsenal and vehicles needed for war, and a new wave of Black people migrated from the South.

[6] President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an Executive Order to prevent discrimination among defense contractors, increasing opportunities for minorities in the range of jobs and supervisory positions.

By 1940, 80% of Detroit's residencies abided by racial covenants, and thereby restricted black housing to historically impoverished and dangerous areas on the basis of race.

[31] For instance, Mayor Albert Cobo outwardly supported white homeowner groups and pledged upon being elected in 1949 that "it will not be the purpose of the administration to scatter public housing projects throughout the city, just because funds may be forthcoming from the Federal Government".

[27] This organization inevitably faced strong opposition from anti-public housing groups and white homeowners who were fixated on maintaining racial homogeneity in their neighborhoods.

Through the use of mutual reciprocal legal agreements, homeowners associations maintained racially specific language to bar black people from obtaining loans in white populated areas.

Cobo opted to have several members of homeowners associations counsel zoning and urban development policies which attempted to further enforce de facto segregation within Detroit.

Historians have previously connected homeowners associations’ efforts to prevent integration to be tied to the sense of identity within the segregated neighborhoods in Detroit.

Once this sentiment of safety was threatened with integration of black residents who have been construed as dangerous and inhumane, the agency of white homeowners associations was actualized.

In 1968, the HUD Act was passed by the federal government to address the problems of housing availability and residential segregation that constrained the agency of African Americans.

The HUD Act mandated the production of 10 million units of new and renovated housing within a decade and also guaranteed that the federal government would pay the full mortgage of any foreclosed homes.

[41] Real estate companies used the existing poverty and inadequate housing conditions that redlining created as excuses to sell homes to African Americans at disproportionately higher prices.

This riot started with a conflict among young men at Belle Isle, and it quickly spread into the city, inciting violence between whites and blacks.

Although at the time blacks were largely blamed for the violence, studies have found that many young armed whites traveled across the city to attack majority-black areas east of Woodward Avenue.

In Detroit, activists pushed for more representation in local government, including the white-dominated police force, and for equal justice in housing and employment.

According to columnist Keith Richburg, in the 1960s a social divide developed between the many black people from Alabama and those from South Carolina; they lived east and west of Woodward Avenue, respectively.

[6] Pressures on the auto industry and restructuring of heavy manufacturing across the region caused high job losses, adding to the strains of the city.

[citation needed] By 1970 Detroit and six other municipalities, Ecorse, Highland Park, Inkster, Pontiac, River Rouge, and Royal Oak Township, had higher than average black populations.

[45] As of 2002, a total of 90% of the black population in Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland counties resided in Detroit, Highland Park, Inkster, Pontiac, and Southfield.

"[46] Some suburban residents, including middle-class blacks, resented the new arrivals, feeling they brought unwelcome patterns of behavior that disrupted the peace of the suburbs.