Ghetto Grocers: Race, Commerce, and Ethnicity in Detroit, 1965-2015

  • GHETTO GROCERS: RACE, COMMERCE, AND ETHNICITY IN DETROIT, 1965-2015
    Chaldean grocery store, Detroit, 1974
  • Two men walk down the street past shops in Chaldean Town, Detroit. Year unknown, likely 1980's.
    Chaldean Town, Detroit. Year unknown, likely 1980s.
  • Transaction between two people, photo shot from behind the counter at a Chaldean liquor store in 1983.
    Behind the counter at a Chaldean liquor store in 1983.
  • Two men walk down the street past shops in Chaldean Town, Detroit. Year unknown, likely 1980's.
    Chaldean Town, Detroit. Year unknown, likely 1980s.
  • Inside a Chaldean store in 1974.
    These stores were some of the only sources for food, drink, and, as the sign at the top displays, places to cash checks, especially as banks left the city for the suburbs.
 
 
 
 
 

When grocery store chains fled Detroit in response to the urban crisis during the last few decades of the twentieth century, ethnic merchants - newly immigrated to the United States after Congress abolished the National Origins Formula in 1965 - bought up abandoned property and established a monopoly of small to mid-sized grocery and corner stores. A large chunk of these stores were owned by Chaldeans, Iraqi Christians who immigrated to Detroit in waves throughout the 20th century and whose numbers grew rapidly after 1965. Family owned and passed down, these small stores resembled the ethnic markets and shops of the 1920s, when all major cities were awash with immigrants from around the world. But their customers were mostly working-class and underemployed African Americans, not their ethnic kin, and rather than being located in ethnic neighborhoods, most stores operated in majority African American neighborhoods. By the 1980s, thousands of these stores provided Detroiters with nutrition and social spaces, and crucial tax dollars for the city. Amid the prolonged economic pains in urban America during the 1980s, these stores and the social networks around them formed a distinct feature of the history of racial capitalism during this period. As much as they connected the community, they also sparked conflict: Chaldean grocery stores were marred by violence. Hundreds of Chaldeans were killed in their stores during holdups and muggings. The Chaldean community saw this crime spree as an attack against their key familial and economic institution: the family store - a place of pride and economic and social security. African American communities around them saw otherwise. Instead of a 'war against Chaldeans,’ the violence around the stores was seen as the product of the exploitative relationship Chaldean merchants had with local residents. Many disdained high prices, low quality of food, and harassment and intimidation from store clerks. They felt a sense of economic predation in their neighborhoods when Chaldeans refused to donate to local causes or speculated abandoned property near their stores, preventing the land from being developed. In response to dramatic merchant slayings of African American youth, they formed organizations to protest and boycott Chaldean stores. Chaldean merchants responded in kind by demanding more policing and fortifying their stores with bullet proof glass and barbed wire. While studies showed disputes between merchants and customers rarely led to violence, the killings that did occur marked a tenuous and strained relationship between these Arab-American merchants and their mostly African American cliental. The African American-Chaldean clash in Detroit allows us to understand how violence, protest, and social life around ethnic stores in the late twentieth-century urban America was key site of contestation where notions of ethnicity, Blackness, criminality, and consumerism were remade by customers, communities and businesses owners. The struggle for food, economic power, and control over these spaces came define the complicated history of race, commerce, and ethnicity in the post-1970s city.

 

This project is being developed by Kenneth Alyass and Professor Lizabeth Cohen