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DETROIT’S SEGREGATED NEIGHBORHOODS

The city of Detroit originated in 1701 as a fort and settlement along the Detroit River. A century later, the settlement was incorporated as a village and became the seat of government for the Michigan Territory. After fire completely destroyed their established structures, settlers saw an opportunity to re-plat the village and, eventually, reconstitute Detroit as a city in 1815. Detroit would become the state capital at the time of Michigan’s admission to the Union in 1837 and remain so until the capital was moved to Lansing in 1847. From 1850 to 1910, Detroit’s population grew from 21,019 to 465,766, but the city’s black population remained in the range of 2 percent for the entire period, from 587 in 1850 to 5,741 in 1910.

As Detroit grew from a commercial center of a local agrarian economy to a regional industrial center, demographics changed dramatically. Beginning in 1910, the Great Migration of rural Southern whites and blacks to Detroit, fueled primarily by the promise of good jobs in factories such as in Henry Ford’s auto assembly plant in Highland Park, put great pressure on the city’s limited and highly segregated housing options. By 1920, in a city of now nearly 1 million, blacks numbered 40,838, or 4.11 percent.

Nonetheless, whatever difficulties they may have had in finding adequate housing in Detroit, African Americans had a double motive for abandoning the South. The plantation economy of the South—so dependent on sharecropping and tenant farming—offered little opportunity to advance beyond bare subsistence. Increased mechanization of farming, as well as the destructive impact of the boll weevil epidemic, created a labor oversupply, and what farm work was available now favored unemployed whites.

Pen-and-ink drawing depicting the six segregated black enclaves in the city of Detroit. Author’s collection.

In addition to economics, blacks continued to suffer from terrorism in the white supremacist “Jim Crow” South. Although the KKK had technically been disbanded in 1869, it merely went underground. Violence against persons and property continued as tools of intimidation and social control. Voting rights were routinely suppressed through the imposition of poll taxes and literacy tests. The court system offered little relief from injustice, particularly involving racial disputes. And the bifurcated Southern educational system (“separate but equal”) left black children with overcrowded classrooms and a shortage of textbooks, desks, blackboards and basic supplies—as well as with overworked, underpaid and often poorly trained teachers.¹¹ Still, leaving the South was a difficult and courageous act, and many African Americans who trekked north found work in large cities such as Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama, or Atlanta, Georgia, without ever having to cross the Mason-Dixon line.

BLACK BOTTOM

From 1910 to 1920, black migrants to Detroit would have been directed, almost universally, to Black Bottom, an area on the lower east side near the riverfront and bounded on the north by Gratiot Avenue, on the west by Brush Street, on the east by St. Aubin and on the south by the Grand Trunk Railroad Tracks. The area was thought to have been named for the rich loamy soil found along the shoreline of the river and not for any racial characteristics of its inhabitants. The fact is, Black Bottom had originally been settled by European immigrants two centuries prior. Through orderly succession, the area would be settled further and developed by an eastern European Jewish community. Even a century into Detroit’s existence, in 1820, there were only 67 black residents out of a population of 1,422, or 4.7 percent. From 1820 to 1920, the overall size of Detroit would grow from a little more than a square mile, incorporating Black Bottom, to just over seventy-seven square miles in 1920, with large tracts of land annexed to the north and to the west.

Even as the city grew dramatically in both population and in land acquisition, black residents were confined largely to a single area, the districts of the near east side, with two to three hundred people per acre. By 1926, there was sufficient land in the city (now 139 square miles) to make life much more bearable for its one and a half million residents, but racially restrictive covenants sewn into the property deeds of Detroit’s real estate transactions made migration from Black Bottom a legal nightmare for African Americans. And things would only get worse.¹²

Black Bottom was the first area of Detroit where African Americans could settle in large numbers. Before 1910, blacks integrated with many eastern and southern European immigrants, though blacks represented a small minority, living in relatively small wood-framed houses built close together on twenty- to thirty-foot lots. Originally constructed in the late 1800s, these houses occupied by blacks were clustered in an area bounded by Leland, Macomb, Brush and Hastings. After 1910, facing acute housing shortages signaled by the arrival of black migrants from the South, Black Bottom gradually expanded northward to Gratiot and eastward to St. Aubin. Housing conditions did not improve, however. Capricious landlords charged exorbitantly high rents for properties with unsanitary or unsafe conditions such as clogged plumbing and drainage, faulty electrical outlets, leaky roofs and unpredictable trash and rubbish pickups. In many cases, to make rent and accommodate new arrivals, boarders were taken in, further compromising healthy living space.

Streetscape of Black Bottom, the largest and most crowded African American enclave in Detroit until the 1960s, when it was completely leveled as part of a major urban renewal effort in downtown Detroit. Library of Congress.

Blacks from the South were not only directed to Black Bottom but also drawn by its sense of community. The gravitational pull came from several sources, including its churches as well as its nascent commercial, political, social and cultural organizations. Front and center were its churches, particularly Second Baptist Church, the oldest black church in the Midwest, which had been an important Northern station along the Underground Railway for escaped slaves, and, later, New Bethel Baptist Church, led by the Reverend C.L. Franklin, at 4210 Hastings Street. During the 1920s and ’30s, the African American enclave became a concentrated market for enterprising black businessmen who possessed the wherewithal to open and operate successful restaurants, barbershops, beauty parlors, drugstores and medical, dental and law offices.

Alleyway in Black Bottom neighborhood, Detroit. Library of Congress.

Overhead view of backyard and house in Black Bottom, Detroit. Library of Congress.

One block east of St. Antoine, running north and south along the eastern edge of Black Bottom, was Hastings Street, which underwent a transformation in conformity to changing demographics and contemporary interests. In the late nineteenth century, Hastings Street originated as a commercial district where Jewish shopkeepers and peddlers purveyed such comestibles as milk, butter, beef, corn, beans, seasonal fruits and vegetables, as well as such dry goods as fabric and thread and related merchandise. After World War I, black entrepreneurs opened up new commercial avenues, including record stores, taverns, bowling alleys, furniture outlets, pool halls and blues clubs, in which such important musicians as John Lee Hooker cut their teeth. By World War II, Hastings Street had also become a veritable boulevard of sin with notorious strip clubs, blind pigs and houses of ill repute.

Back of house in Black Bottom. Library of Congress.

PARADISE VALLEY

By the 1930s, a new and more upscale entertainment district was developing just north of Black Bottom and centered at the intersection of Adams and St. Antoine. In 1935, the federal government broke ground on the Brewster Housing Project on St. Antoine between Adelaid and Mack Avenues. With First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt present for the groundbreaking, the new development offered some measure of relief from the overcrowding in Black Bottom. As a direct consequence, however, Paradise Valley’s center of activity moved a block east to Hastings Street.¹³

The name of the area did not come by accident. Rollo S. Vest, theatrical editor for the local African American Detroit Tribune, ran a contest in the paper to name the fledgling district while promoting all the black owned and operated entertainment venues. As a booking agent for many of the local blues and jazz clubs, Vest recognized the value of branding, and when “Paradise Valley” was suggested, he seized upon it, and Paradise Valley was born. For eight consecutive years, from 1933 to 1940, readers of the Tribune had the opportunity to “vote” on a new “Mayor of Paradise Valley.” In an extravagant inaugural ball held at the Graystone Ballroom, the new mayor was installed. A few of the more notable mayors included Sunnie Wilson, owner of the Forest Club; Chester Rentie, a talent booking agent who once managed jazz vocalist Betty Carter; and Roy H. Lightfoot, owner of the B&C Club, who happily became the first titleholder. Part of the mayor’s duties were generally to represent and promote the Valley to the media, to act as master of ceremonies at neighborhood events and to coordinate local charity drives.

The value of the brand was not lost on local entrepreneurs. In 1941, for example, famed local fighter Joe Louis built the Paradise Bowl on Adams, just east of St. Antoine. The spacious facility featured a twenty-six-lane bowling alley, a roller-skating rink, a dining room and an ultramodern cocktail lounge. The most notable facility bearing the Paradise moniker was the Paradise Theater, so named by new owners Ben and Lou Cohen. The building was originally constructed in 1919 as the permanent home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO). Renowned for its near perfect acoustics, the DSO was forced to sell the facility in 1939 owing to financial issues before moving to more modest quarters in the Masonic Temple. After a two-year period of operation as a moving picture and vaudeville house under the name of Town Theater, the Cohens stepped in, purchased the property and renamed it the Paradise Theater. The venue would become a charter member of the Chitlin Circuit, which included the Apollo Theater in Harlem; the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C.; the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia; the Royal Theater in Baltimore; and the Regal Theater in Chicago. In its heyday, the Paradise attracted such luminaries as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, B.B. King and scores of other blues and jazz legends.

Streetscape, Paradise Valley business district, just north of Black Bottom, Detroit. Library of Congress.

The choice of hotel accommodations for prominent African Americans visiting Detroit invariably became the Gotham Hotel, located on the corner of John R and Orchestra Place. In 1943, John White and Irving Roane, two local black entrepreneurs, purchased the nine-story hotel from Danish businessman Albert Hartz. The Gotham soon became the choice of such black celebrities and cultural icons as Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King, Adam Clayton Powell, Thurgood Marshall and even the Harlem Globetrotters. The Gotham was known for its elegantly appointed guest rooms and fine dining offered in the exquisite Ebony Room. It was hardly unusual to witness athletes and entertainers mingling with politicians and civil rights activists in the spacious lounge area in the front lobby.

Pedestrians walking and shopping within the Paradise Valley business district. Library of Congress.

Though much of the community continued to grow and prosper economically, there were significant issues working against its overall health and success. Overcrowded houses and apartments were bursting with the working poor and the unemployed, and illegal gambling in the form of Mafia-controlled numbers operations run out of local hotels such as the Norwood exploited Detroiters who could least afford to gamble away what was left after settling with their unscrupulous landlords. The elegant Gotham Hotel was not immune to such activity, as co-owner John White was widely known to be running a high-stakes gambling operation on the top floor of the hotel, frequented by both black and white politicians. The Detroit Police Department turned a blind eye to the operation for more than a decade before the FBI shut the hotel down in 1962 in what was the largest single gambling raid in Detroit history.

Paradise Valley is best remembered, however, for its numerous theaters, restaurants and nightclubs. Any night of the week, one could find superior entertainment at such venues as Jakes, the Tropicana, Club Harlem, the Flame Show Bar, Sportee’s Lounge and the Horseshoe Bar. This concentrated area of black entrepreneurship, created ultimately by discrimination and segregation, would be obliterated by so-called urban renewal. Black Bottom and Paradise Valley would succumb to bulldozers during the 1950s to make way for the construction of Interstate 75 and housing redevelopment triggered by the passage of the Federal Housing Act of 1949.

NORTH END

Among Detroit’s many historic neighborhoods, none is more reflective of the city’s automotive manufacturing heritage than North End. The birthplace of the Model T, North End was once heralded as the most significant concentration of industry in the country, if not the world. North End was also home to a growing enclave of middle-class and working-class African Americans.

North End is bounded on the north by the alleyway between Woodland and Tennyson Streets that marks the boundary between the cities of Detroit and Highland Park, on the south by Interstate 94, on the east by the Canadian National tracks that also mark part of the boundary of the city of Hamtramck and on the west by Woodward Avenue.¹⁴

The City of Detroit annexed this roughly rectangular piece of land from Hamtramck Township in 1891. The moniker “North End” likely derives from the fact that at the time of annexation this 393-acre parcel represented the city’s northernmost boundary. One year later, Arden Park became the earliest platted residential development within the district. Planned as a luxury residential community, Arden Park remains even today one of the most desirable and architecturally diverse communities in the city proper, including examples of Tudor, Colonial, Renaissance and Prairie styles.

By 1900, many of Detroit’s business and industrial leaders built homes in Arden Park, including John Dodge, Frederick Fisher, Clayton and Albert Grinnell and J.L. Hudson. During the next two decades, single-family homes and apartments dominated the local landscape, particularly south of Holbrook and north of East Grand Boulevard. Along such north and south residential streets as John R, Brush, Beaubien and Oakland developed many attached row houses reminiscent of East Coast urban architecture. In many instances, neighborhood businesses—bakeries, butcher shops, cleaners, hardware stores, millineries and so on—occupied the first floors of these structures. By 1920, the city had constructed eight new schools to accommodate the growing influx of settlers.

Immediately south of East Grand Boulevard is Milwaukee Junction, so named because of its location at the intersection of the Detroit, Grand Haven and Milwaukee Railway and the Chicago, Detroit and Canada Grand Trunk Junction Railroad. Detroit’s industrial growth can be traced, in no small part, to this sub-district that provided ready access for factories to the national rail network while keeping these industrial sites relatively isolated from the city’s residential areas. By 1920, Milwaukee Junction had become the primary hub for the automobile industry as such companies as Ford, Fisher Body, Packard, Studebaker and more than a dozen others flocked to the area. On the corner of Woodward and East Grand Boulevard, Ford built an impressive Albert Kahn–designed sales and service facility in 1909. Other companies followed suit.

Milwaukee Junction was also home to the Jam Handy Organization. Founded in 1911 by Henry Jamison “Jam” Handy, the company produced in its studio complex on East Grand Boulevard promotional and educational movies as well as training films for the armed forces. By 1935, the company employed over four hundred writers, directors and trade craft workers. Famed animator Max Fleischer created the animated movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in Handy’s studio.

In the years prior to World War I, a massive influx of immigrants arrived in Detroit, particularly from eastern and central Europe. Many were working-class Jewish immigrants who settled in the North End to work in the automobile and related industries and to reestablish the dense network of religious and social institutions to which they were accustomed in Europe.

The infamous Purple Gang, a Mafia-style Jewish crime organization, was based primarily in the Brush Park neighborhood. A few blocks away, on the corner of Oakland and Hague and on the site of a former dance hall, Harry Metzger Jr., a Purple Gang associate, opened the Oakland Health Club in 1930. (Known today as the Schvitz Health Club—Yiddish for “sweat”—this Russian-style bathhouse is still in operation.) The Purple Gang likely spent a great deal of time in the bathhouse, evidenced by the numerous bullet holes in a painting in the lobby. The baths may have served as a watering hole for the gang during Prohibition because of its status as a private club, which placed it outside of direct police scrutiny.

Ford Piquette Plant in North End, Detroit, where Henry Ford rolled out Model Ts and experimented with a moving assembly line before shifting operations to a much larger production facility in Highland Park, Detroit. Author’s collection.

During this same period, small concentrations of African Americans lived in Highland Park and Hamtramck, on north Russell Street and near Milwaukee Junction. Over the next decade, Oakland Avenue became a hub for black musical innovation, making it a major blues and jazz scene. Oakland Avenue functioned as an extension of Hastings Street to the south. This avenue hosted numerous music venues and black-owned businesses, such as the Apex Bar at 7649 Oakland and Phelps Lounge at 9000 Oakland. Blues artist John Lee Hooker established himself at the Apex in the early ’40s as the principal evening act after working a full day as a janitor at one of Detroit’s downriver steel mills. One of Hooker’s signature songs, “Boom,” was inspired by his time at the Apex: “I would never be on time. I always would be late comin’ in. Willa the bartender always had the same things to say to me, ‘Boom, you late again.’ I said, ‘Hmm, that’s a song.’” Likewise, the Phelps Lounge, previously the Bizerte Jazz Bar, was a showcase for acts like James Brown, Etta James, B.B. King and Little Richard.

Jam Handy Building on East Grand Boulevard, Detroit. Author’s collection.

Oakland Health Club, offering a steam room, sauna and private lounge for members only in North End, Detroit. Frequent hangout for Detroit’s infamous Purple Gang. Author’s collection.

Apex Bar at 7649 Oakland Street, North End, Detroit. Favorite venue during the war years of legendary blues performer John Lee Hooker. Author’s collection.

By 1940, the black population of North End had climbed to 40 percent. Ten years later, population peaked with 51,709 residents, and African Americans were significantly in the majority. North End had firmly established itself as a black enclave in an otherwise highly segregated city. And so the pattern of racial succession occurred in the transfer of real estate between Jews and blacks on North End, just as it had occurred throughout Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. As Jewish residents crossed Woodward Avenue in their generational move to and through northwest Detroit, black citizens were there to gradually establish a foothold and create an enclave.

“OLD WEST SIDE”

“Old West Side,” as former residents called it, was yet another African American enclave within the city of Detroit centered at Tireman and Grand River. The area was actually composed of several neighborhoods. The boundaries were Grand River to the east, Buchanan to the south, Tireman to the north and Epworth to the west. Residents who lived west of Grand Boulevard typically worked in plants, were self-employed businessmen and women or were employed by the government or various other industries throughout the city. Residents of Scotten, Firwood and Boxwood were more typically professionals, such as physicians, dentists, attorneys and morticians. Aside from the small enclave at Eight Mile and Wyoming, blacks were unwelcome west of Woodward until well after World War II. Tireman became a visible barrier between black and white, solidified legally by racially restrictive covenants and unscrupulous real estate agents who steered clientele to properties by the color of their skin.¹⁵

Westsiders, in the main, were working-class individuals until World War II, when the huge labor shortage opened up many new job opportunities for blacks. A new African American middle class began to emerge by the end of the war, and the west side of Detroit reflected this gradual transformation.

But in the 1920s and ’30s, blacks on the west side of Woodward, as elsewhere, had limited employment options. The largest employer was the Ford Motor Company, followed by the Kelsey Hayes Wheel Company. Both the Michigan Central Railroad and the U.S. Post Office did employ a number of blacks prior to World War II. General Motors, on the other hand, had a large Cadillac facility on Detroit’s west side but did not start hiring African Americans until the war. Other west side businesses and factories, such as the Lincoln plant on Livernois and Awrey Bakery on Tireman, employed thousands of Detroiters between 1920 and 1950, but very few were African American.

Like the other segregated enclaves of Detroit, such racial concentration created business opportunities for the more resourceful. A large number of minority-owned businesses cropped up on the West Side catering primarily to a black clientele. Arthur G. Bennett, for example, was the first African American owner-operator of a Shell Oil Station in the Detroit area, located on West Warren and Junction, across from the Granada Theater, and he drew strong community support for many years. Florine Hawkins, a Georgia transplant, began her career in Detroit by selling shoes door to door on the west side. She later expanded her line to include dresses, lingerie and linens. On July 3, 1947, Florine opened the Hawkins Apparel Shop on West Warren. Other families worked together to build businesses, such as the Thompson Brothers’ Shoe Repair and Store, Peterson and Son Appliances, Jones Brothers Cleaners and Hatters, Hamilton Brothers Auto Service and G.W. Lloyd and Sons Movers.

West Side physicians found it difficult to practice their craft in the 1920s and ’30s, as a number of Detroit hospitals denied their patients’ admittance, and no black medical practitioners were appointed to hospital staffs. In 1918, local black physicians built their own hospital, Dunbar Hospital, at Frederick and St. Antoine on the city’s near east side. Physicians and dentists living or maintaining offices on the west side from 1920 to 1950 included James Young (the first African American to be appointed by Mayor Frank Murphy as Detroit’s city physician), D.J. Grimes, D.J. Graham, A.B. Cleage, James Brewer, William H. Lawson, A.L. Turner, John Bargyh, Lloyd Bailer and many others. Curiously, Betty Ann Graham, granddaughter of Dr. James Young, was the last baby to be delivered at Dunbar on August 26, 1929, with Dr. Young in attendance.

Another noteworthy Westsider was William Hiram Lawson, OD, who lived on Firwood Avenue for over sixty-eight years. Originally from Windsor, Canada, Dr. Lawson moved with his parents to Detroit as a child but returned to Canada to attend the Toronto School of Optometry. He subsequently opened an office in Windsor but, after taking and passing the Michigan State Board examination, returned to Detroit as the first African American optometrist in the United States and Canada. In 1944, Dr. Lawson was joined in his practice by his son, William E. Lawson, who—at age twenty-one—was the youngest optometrist ever passed by the board.

Living in a city as segregated as Detroit, West Side residents had to use creativity and resourcefulness to provide recreational experiences for their families. Off limits to Westsiders were many of Detroit’s hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues. Despite these restrictions, there were opportunities to enjoy picnicking, swimming and boating at Rouge Park or on Belle Isle. During the winter, nearby Northwestern High School flooded a field for outdoor ice skating. Another popular venue was the Lothrop Branch of the Detroit Public Library on West Grand Boulevard.

Black professionals were looking for a place to relax and network with their community peers. Rejected by the all-white Detroit Athletic Club and the Detroit Club, Raymond H. Menard and Julian Archer founded the Nacirema (“American” spelled backward) Club in 1922. The club purchased a two-story brick house and converted the property to a clubhouse for men only. (Women would be admitted to membership in 1998.) The Nacirema Club enjoys the distinction of being the first African American social club in Michigan, and its building at 6118 Thirtieth Street was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.

Nacirema Club, 6118 Thirtieth Street, Detroit, Michigan. Building purchased by African American professionals to serve as social club for “West Siders.” Author’s collection.

EIGHT MILE–WYOMING

In 1920, the City of Detroit’s fairly regular and rapid annexation of land had not yet extended to Eight Mile Road. A new subdivision, called Garden Homes, was one of the few areas in or near Detroit that was open for sale to African Americans, and lots were selling briskly. Precious few whites had settled in this area of unannexed land, and the many blacks who did were beginning to form a community of like-minded pioneers.

The land at issue was part of a much larger parcel owned by Henry G. Stevens, a Detroit philanthropist and first president of the Detroit Urban League, an organization founded on principles of racial harmony, if not full integration. Stevens would sell the land to real estate developers intent on breaking the parcel up into small, affordable lots. Once purchased, it was hoped, construction would begin on housing that would absorb some of the pressure overcrowding and blight were creating on Detroit’s near east side. The interurban streetcar line serviced the new area of development, so transportation for employment to and from the city did not seem to be an issue, though the streetcar stop was nearly a mile from the subdivision.¹⁶

Since banks charged private contractors who were willing to build in the area higher interest rates, few residents were able to afford these professional services. Instead, many residents built the main floor as a foundation and then set vertical poles in each corner to support what amounted to a large tent with walls made up of whatever malleable materials they could find. And still others constructed shacks, piece by piece, as lumber was purchased and scrap material became available locally.

Social workers dispatched to the area from the newly formed Detroit Urban League were distressed by the conditions under which residents lived their daily lives. With neither running water nor electricity, these migrants, it was feared, had “reverted” to their Southern roots. They were, in fact, recoiling from the unhealthy and inhospitable conditions within Black Bottom, where private space and good nutrition were at a premium. Here homesteaders engaged in subsistence farming, decorative gardening and small livestock breeding, particularly chicken, hogs and goats. Unpurchased lots became community gardens. If they were to be rejected in their efforts at integrating with Detroit’s white majority, then they would need to become self-sufficient. The unannexed land on both sides of Eight Mile and Wyoming created an opportunity for blacks to reject the transient nature of life on Detroit’s near east side and to develop a family-oriented community close enough to the big city for employment purposes but far enough away to avoid its inequities and iniquities.

In a sense, the Eight Mile–Wyoming community can only be fully understood as two halves of a larger one-square-mile whole, the present half-square-mile Royal Oak Township north of Eight Mile and the half-square mile of neighborhoods to the south that were annexed by the City of Detroit in 1923. Although both communities have unique historical moments, they are aligned closely by race, by culture and by shared experiences.¹⁷

Both before and after annexation, the community was well served by a black-owned commercial strip along Eight Mile Road. On the Detroit side, there was the Lett store, Worthy’s, McCuller’s Community Store, Charlie Rich’s Pool Hall, Alfred Davis’s Funeral Home and Thomas “Doc” Washington’s drugstore. Doc also owned Uncle Tom’s BBQ. There were white-owned businesses as well, including Jim Dolan’s, an Atlantic & Pacific Supermarket in Royal Oak Township, Sam’s Gas Station and Cockfield Funeral Home. Alice Newman recalled how her father, Jimmy Cain, managed several successful businesses on the north side of Eight Mile Road, including producing stage shows where he shared the stage as a musician. Newman vividly recalled performing in his shows as a dancer, earning a quarter a week. Perhaps her clearest and most colorful memory, however, was the hot dog stand her father operated on Parkside and Eight Mile Road called Jimmy’s, which became a popular hangout for young people. Hot dogs and soda pop were a nickel each, and a bowl of chili was a quarter. When her grandmother felt up to baking, single slices of sweet potato pie sold out quickly. Local kids enjoyed the varieties of gum and candy available but especially loved playing the slot machine in the back, with its spinning lemons and oranges and other colorful fruit.

Home built on Birwood Street in segregated West Eight Mile enclave. Children playing on mound of dirt next to house. Note the six-foot concrete wall in background. Library of Congress.

Considering that there were fewer than five hundred African American–owned businesses registered in the entire state of Michigan in 1929, Eight Mile–Wyoming was a haven for black entrepreneurs. During the early 1930s, the black-owned businesses fronting Eight Mile Road were wiped out when the state highway department decided to widen the road. The local businesses tried but failed in court to stop the proposed project, and so another chapter of black entrepreneurship was lost to the annals of local history.

Wall built by developer in 1941 to “protect” his real estate interests. The Birwood Wall, still standing today, stretches from Eight Mile Road three blocks south to Pembroke Avenue. Library of Congress.

Immediately to the west of the Eight Mile–Wyoming community was a large parcel of undeveloped land. In 1940, a real estate developer approached the FHA with plans to develop the property that commenced on the easement between Birwood and Mendota Streets and extended westward. His application for FHA insurance on bank loans for his whites-only clientele was initially rejected because the proposed project bordered directly on a “hazardous” neighborhood, as defined by the Home Owners Loan Corporation’s City Survey Program. The FHA was reluctant to insure bank loans on such properties because racially mixed areas, the agency reasoned, were likely to stir confrontation, lead to violence and jeopardize the fiscal soundness of the investment. Undaunted, the developer approached the FHA a second time with a new and novel proposal: he would construct a wall, six feet high and one foot thick, between the “hazardous” neighborhood east of Birwood and the proposed new development. The FHA agreed to the compromise. The Birwood Wall today stands as a monument to federal government complicity with racial segregation in the city of Detroit.

Children, oblivious to the deeper significance of the concrete wall behind them, pose for a picture on a sunny day in August 1941. Library of Congress.

CONANT GARDENS

In northeast Detroit, Conant Gardens became one of the first urban land tracts available for African Americans to actually build their own new homes, with FHA-approved loans, instead of having to purchase from an already existing stock of houses previously owned by European immigrants. Bounded by Seven Mile Road, Ryan Road, Nevada and Conant, the land was originally owned by Shubael Conant, a staunch abolitionist who founded the Detroit Anti-Slavery Society. Though he never married or had children, he instructed his heirs—various nephews—to disallow the insertion of any racially restrictive covenants into the deeds on land put up for sale. Thus, one by one, African American families purchased lots within the tract and built a variety of modest homes—frame, brick and a combination of brick and second-floor wood veneer.¹⁸

Aptly named Conant Gardens, this new community of African Americans transformed backyards into vegetable gardens of green beans, tomatoes, okra, collard and mustard greens, squash, peas, corn, cabbage and rhubarb. Forming borders around both house and garden were phlox, zinnias, gladiolas, marigolds, begonias, petunias and asters. Adjacent vacant lots also became gardens as they awaited homes to be built. New neighbors were quickly schooled on the merits of one particular grass seed over another.

Steady rather than specific kinds of employment, well-groomed lawns and brightly painted houses seemed to be the common denominators among families. Living alongside one another were doctors, accountants, postal workers, teachers, Ford factory workers, civil service employees, dentists, lawyers, sanitation workers and self-employed shopkeepers. Empty lots soon became construction sites, and existing residents began to be concerned about quality control. To ensure that property values would hold or even appreciate, a Conant Gardens Community Association was formed. The neighborhood attorneys drew up bylaws and regulations that addressed residential structures, habitation and commercial properties. Only single-family dwellings with one outer (front) entrance would be permitted. Occupancy was limited to one family. Commercial establishments were prohibited within the community but allowed on the periphery. Farm animals were prohibited.

Conant Gardens survived the Depression, but not without considerable cost to the community. As unemployment took its toll, some homeowners missed payments on their properties and were forced to sell or walk away. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal work programs and welfare assistance provided many Detroiters with a lifeline. Within Conant Gardens, filling dozens of vacant lots and paving the numerous dirt roads were placed on hold until the conclusion of World War II, at which time homebuilding resumed and all the streets were eventually paved.

The children of the community were served by Atkinson or Courville Elementary Schools, Cleveland Intermediate School and Pershing High School. One Cleveland student, Mildred Benson Scott, recalls that just before graduation in 1936, a classroom picture was taken with all six black students seated by the photographer on the bottom row, allowing for white families to easily “sanitize” the class photo by excising the bottom two inches. Located at Seven Mile and Ryan Roads, Pershing High School opened its doors on September 3, 1930, as a single school unit. A scarcity of funding prevented the city school system from constructing Pershing’s auditorium, gymnasium and swimming pool until 1952.

Streetscape, Conant Gardens segregated neighborhood enclave in northeast Detroit, just four city blocks from Sojourner Truth Homes housing project, the site of the February 28 riot. Author’s collection.

Against this backdrop of established African American communities within the city limits of Detroit came a huge influx of black Southerners seeking employment in the defense industry beginning in 1939. From 1940 to 1950, Detroit’s black population doubled from 149,119 to 300,506. Although 186,000 single-family homes were constructed in metropolitan Detroit during the 1940s, only 1,500 were available for black occupancy. The Second Great Migration put tremendous strain on the six segregated communities. Garages, attics, cellars and storefronts were converted into makeshift housing to accommodate the influx of daily arrivals.