That time Henry Ford made a racist white town and an enslaved Black town

Banned Histories of Race in America

I’ve got a question for you about Thanksgiving and being thankful, but first, this quote:

“It is the victim of a mass of lying propaganda and is therefore looked upon with disfavor in many quarters. But if the truth were known about it, it would be looked up to as a patriotic body, concerned with nothing but future development of the country in which it was born and the preservation of the supremacy of the true American in his own land.”

That’s billionaire industrialist car-manufacturer Henry Ford, as quoted by the New York Times in 1924. The poor “patriotic body” he’s speaking of, the wrongly accused “victim of a mass of lying propaganda” is the Ku Klux Klan.

I guess it’s common knowledge that that motherfucker was racist as hell. But did you know that Henry Ford created a white-only town? Yup, Dearborn, MI, where Ford grew up. It was basically a carriage-stop back then, but eventually he turned it into a town so racist that one time just the sight of a moving company’s Black employees frightened 400 local whites into rioting. The cops let the whole thing happen. The mayor went into hiding and was eventually arrested and brought up on federal charges. It was a whole thing.

But even that doesn’t compare to the Black town Ford made.