Detroit, in its meteoric rise from a quaint and beautiful city of 285,000 in 1900 to the millions-strong "Arsenal Of Democracy" less than 50 years later, went through many difficult transformations.

World War II elicited a complicated response in Detroit. It supplied a unity of purpose more binding than the single-minded pursuit of automotive production, and caused an uneasy truce between labor and industry. It also attracted hundreds of thousands of new workers to the city, which brought simmering social conditions to the boiling point.

In the hot summer of 1943 a fatal race riot began and raged out of control in Detroit. Inflammatory rumors spread amongst already antagonistic communities, and open fighting between fellow Detroiters ensued in the streets. It was sparked by a series of fights on Detroit's Belle Isle involving African Americans and whites, but its causes were much deeper.

The war had gathered migrant workers to fill factory jobs left vacant by enlisted men. Detroit swelled with new arrivals, including 200,000 Southern and Appalachian whites, and 50,000 Southern blacks. The racial antipathy that arrived with the new workers aggravated already troublesome conditions for Detroit's African American population, most especially a housing crisis characterized by extreme segregation and intolerable living conditions. One pre-war survey found 85 percent of Detroit's private housing closed to blacks, and fully 50 percent of what was available was substandard.

The riots that broke out on June 20, 1943 were quelled by several thousand federal troops, leaving thirty-four Detroiters dead, and hundreds of people injured. It was a wound that would be a long time in healing, and an ugly blemish on the "Arsenal of Democracy".

Racial tensions were not the only pressures simmering beneath the surface in World War II Detroit. While labor adhered to a "No-Strike Pledge" during the war, corporate profits soared. The government had enforced price controls, rationed essentials, and negotiated labor disputes through the War Labor Board. After the end of the war, and with the return of the troops and re-conversion to a consumer economy, labor resolved to substantially retool the prevailing status quo.

Late 1945 and early 1946 had brought a wave of strikes as vying Labor and industrialists strategically positioned themselves in a new post-war economy. Organized labor in Michigan, spearheaded by the United Auto Worker's Walter Reuther, organized a massive strike which shut down General Motors for 113 days beginning on November 21, 1945. Parallel strikes in steel and coal mining brought the number of striking workers to three million in the period from November 1945 to June 1946.

In a car-starved nation that sorely needed new vehicles, the industry was effectively shut down. On the day the Jubilee began, the Detroit Times reported on its front page that "All automotive companies in the Detroit area except General Motors and Kaiser-Frazier announced that they would shut down until Monday... because of the acute parts shortage and the coal [strike] situation."