- People & Events Detroit Race Riots 1943 As the nation's most important production center during the Second World War, the city of Detroit was popularly known as the arsenal of democracy. The city's overwhelmingly industrial landscape had been rapidly expanding since the manufacturing boom of the post-Civil War era. Yet its industrial prosperity masked underlying and deeply-rooted racial ...www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eleanor/peopleevents/pande10.html