For you are not powerless.… We do not need to become each other in order to work together. But we do need to recognize each other, our differences as well as the sameness of our goals. Not for altruism. For self-preservation—survival.
—Audre Lorde, “Commencement Address: Oberlin College” (1989)
I.
An astonishing difference in water bills across the invisible border between Flint and its suburban neighbors; tap water that was more discolored in some neighborhoods than in others. The disparities in the water traced a pattern of inequality and disinvestment that was decades in the making. The whole city was exposed to toxic water—and so were commuters and other visitors—but the people who had it worst lived in the poorer, more decayed neighborhoods. And they tended to be black. Flint’s black majority, about 57 percent of the population, was more than twice the proportion of the metro region. Many were the descendants of the bright-eyed southerners—thousands upon thousands of them—who had packed their cardboard suitcases and boarded northbound trains, steaming across the country, finding their way to Flint after hearing about the promise of opportunity in a bustling industrial town.1
It’s not just the lofty rhetoric of nostalgia: for many people, Flint really was one of the best places in the country to live and work. By the 1950s, when General Motors held 54 percent of the market share, about seventy-seven thousand people in the Flint area worked for the company. The community celebrated with a song written for GM’s golden anniversary:
The city of Flint salutes you
for the goal you’ve reached today
We are proud to be your neighbor
and we’re glad that you came to stay!2
The auto companies had it right when they boasted that, as Time magazine once had it, “motor prosperity can vibrate into every corner of the land.” The industry consumed so much iron, lead, steel, rubber, oil, plate glass, upholstery leather, tin, cotton, mohair, copper, glue, cork, turpentine, silicon, cadmium, and even the “vegetable hair” stuffing it pushed into cushions that the national economy blossomed with robust car production.3 Flint rose with that wave. The union movement that caught fire in Flint’s GM plants empowered workers thousands of miles away to negotiate their wages, hours, and work conditions. And during World War II, GM was the chief supplier of the defense industry. No cars at all were made during the war. Instead, the factories were retooled to build aircraft, trucks, tanks, and other machinery that proved to be essential for fighting the war.
“Vehicle City” was not just what Flint was; it was how it had contributed to the country and to the world. But the identity in which the city took such pride began to break down in the second half of the century—slowly at first, as GM began to build its plants farther afield, and then rapidly, as the auto industry restructured. Mass layoffs and closures decimated the town. Although GM is the largest employer in Flint to this day, its payroll is a tiny fraction of what it once was. This was both an economic cataclysm and a social trauma.
For years, Flint tried hard to rebuild. To transform, just as it had before: from river crossing to trading post to lumber town to a city that moved the world. But this time it wasn’t so easy. “There was an expectation that the city could recover on its own from this economic body blow,” said Gordon Young, a Civic Park native and the author of Teardown: A Memoir of a Vanishing City.4 Flint and local leaders were supposed to simply pull themselves out of it. But the city was at a particular disadvantage, struggling against a pattern that had been established almost a century earlier, when a series of decisions created a supposedly “separate but equal” metropolitan region.
During the boom years, GM was desperate for workers. In 1919, the year that it produced its millionth car, GM created the Modern Housing Corporation to entice new workers and help them get settled in Flint. It advertised in large eastern cities, appealing to demobilized World War I soldiers. A New York Times brief headlined “Detroit Needs Labor” noted that “Flint, where the General Motors Company has made plans for building 1,000 homes for workingmen, is declared to be particularly short of labor, and all classes of workers are wanted at the Chevrolet plant.”5
GM eventually constructed nearly three thousand homes in the neighborhoods of Civic Park, Chevrolet Park, and Mott Park.6 They were not sold on the public market, and they were offered to workers on friendly terms: 10 percent down payment, 6 percent interest, and mortgage payments that were about 1 percent of the total cost. But even if they could afford them, black people—who could work only in lower-tier jobs at GM, such as janitors or laborers in the dangerous foundries—were not allowed to buy them.7 Multifamily dwellings, liquor sales, and outhouses were all banned from GM-developed neighborhoods, and, as if they were an equivalent nuisance, so were people who were not white. This was explicit: the houses could not “be leased to or occupied by any person or persons not wholly of the white or Caucasian race.”8 An ad in the 1920s from the exclusive Realtor of GM homes promised buyers “the maximum of beauty, utility and value,” in part because “no shacks, huts or foreign communities will be allowed” in the neighborhood.
Segregation was the standard. Racially restrictive covenants—an agreement, written into deeds, to keep people out based on their race—were strictly enforced both in GM neighborhoods and throughout Flint.9 That included, especially, exclusive Woodlawn Park, where auto execs and shareholders (Charles Stewart Mott among them) built graceful mansions of stone and brick. It was spelled out in one deed after another and mandated by the so-called code of ethics from the National Association of Real Estate Boards. Realtors could lose their license for the supposed ethical violation of showing a house to a person of color in a white area.10 The only option for black people in Flint was to crowd into just two neighborhoods: dense St. John on the near north side, an area that bordered the Flint River, a rail line, and a polluting Buick factory; and Floral Park, south of downtown, an economically diverse area that was first settled in the nineteenth century by former slaves and freedmen.11
This apartheid approach to city building wasn’t just tolerated by the federal government; it was exacerbated by it. Federally funded public housing, a product of the New Deal, was segregated from the start. And when the government began providing people with long-term, low-interest home loans, the notorious policy of redlining was part of the plan. The mortgage program was a revolutionary practice of providing long-term, low-interest home loans that helped stabilize families, curb foreclosures, and boost the economy at the time it needed it most. But federally backed mortgages were available only in neighborhoods that were deemed safe bets for lending. On the maps provided to assessors, the areas that were cast in red could not receive them. In Flint’s first evaluation, St. John and Floral Park were redlined, and all but one of the neighborhoods that bordered them received low grades. The only one that didn’t earned its higher grade specifically because it had a racially restrictive covenant.12 Several white neighborhoods in Flint’s outskirts and early suburbs were also redlined, on account of their underdevelopment. They were filled with cheaply built cottages and they didn’t have public utilities. However, locals could improve those conditions to get a higher score, and they did so.
But because the presence of black residents was in itself seen as a negative factor, there was nothing, by definition, that neighborhoods that housed them could do to become eligible for secure loans. When evaluators gave a neighborhood a low grade or redlined it outright, they pointed to a population of “Undesirables—aliens and negros.”13 On rating sheets, evaluators ticked off a list of nuisance factors that included odors, noises, fire hazards, and “infiltrations of lower grade population or different racial groups.”14 Policies to ensure private loans through the Federal Housing Administration mimicked this technique of making risk and race synonymous. One manual for FHA assessors gave instructions for them to reject loans for “all blocks in which there are more than 10% Negroes or race other than white” as well as “areas in which there are a considerable number of Italians or Jews in the lower income group.” It bluntly stated, “If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same racial group.”
In 1937, the year that the sit-down strike triumphed at Flint’s GM plants, nearly every white homeowner in the city had a long-term, low-interest, guaranteed loan.15 It put them on the path to middle-class stability. At the same time, Flint was the third most segregated city in the nation and the most segregated of all northern cities.16 This pattern extended beyond the city borders. As the suburbs expanded, many either were explicitly for whites only or they were so de facto because of the restrictions on housing loans and insurance. And so, in metropolitan Flint, the highest-value homes largely served white people. Their children typically inherited the property or it was sold to others who looked like them. Black families also often left their homes to their children or sold it to people of the same race. But their properties were generally located in officially declared “undesirable” neighborhoods, served by infrastructure that was destined to suffer from neglect. Individual white homeowners in Flint might have been racists or they might have been champions of civil rights—it didn’t matter, really. The system was set up to create unequal living conditions for people of different races and to pass them down through the generations.
GM’s workforce became integrated during World War II. To fulfill its defense contracts, the company needed twenty-five thousand new hires in the Flint area alone, and President Franklin Roosevelt had issued an executive order that prohibited racial and ethnic discrimination by contractors. After the war, the GI Bill provided low-cost mortgages for all veterans, though only a minuscule number of them went to returning soldiers who were not white, in part because very few developments would let them purchase a house in the first place.17 That included the new postwar suburbs such as Levittown, New York, pristine communities that were built en masse with federal loans that had been issued on the condition that the homes not be sold or resold to black people.18 In 1948, the movement for equal opportunity got a boost when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that racially restrictive covenants could not be enforced by the government—but private parties could do as they pleased.19 Even though such covenants couldn’t be upheld in court, they could still be inserted into real estate contracts and deeds, and honored in day-to-day practice.
In Flint, all this meant that mortgages for homes outside two designated neighborhoods remained beyond reach for African Americans. Black real estate agents were barred from joining the Flint Board of Realtors, serving as appraisers, or accessing property listings on the industry-standard Multiple Listing Exchange.20 If a few black families in Flint found a way to move into a white school district—perhaps through a private purchase from an open-minded owner, or the common trick of working with a white ally who acted as a front for the real home buyers—the school board promptly redrew the boundaries to place their child back in the “transitional” school that they came from.21 There were also the plain old tactics of intimidation. “On the east side of Flint, the blacks who tried to move there had crosses burned on their lawn,” remembered Melvin McCree, son of the city’s first African American mayor.22 He grew up in St. John.
Because Flint’s African American population exploded during the Great Migration—quintupling between 1940 and 1960—and because African Americans could not buy homes outside St. John and Floral Park, those neighborhoods suffered extreme overcrowding. Even after better-paying postwar jobs brought some families enough money to purchase homes in tonier neighborhoods, they faced one hurdle after another. Of nearly six thousand houses built in Flint in the early 1950s, fewer than one hundred were open to African Americans, all in St. John and Floral Park.23 And despite the building boom, as late as 1959, fewer than 2 percent of FHA-insured housing loans nationwide had been made available to people who weren’t white.24 Landlords exploited this by charging black people exceptionally high rents, often for dilapidated apartments that were not up to safety codes. They got away with it because residents had nowhere else to go.25
Segregation wormed its way into the city’s business and cultural hubs as well. The luxurious Durant Hotel didn’t open its rooms to a black guest until 1954.26 Downtown businesses refused to hire African Americans, and entertainment venues—movie theaters, skating rinks, concert halls, and bowling alleys—let black patrons visit only during limited hours. Flint’s elected officials performed in blackface at minstrel shows, playacting as cartoonish characters for laughs, to raise money for charity. Berston Field House welcomed white children to swim in its pool six days a week, while black children were relegated to city sprinklers across the street. Wednesdays were the only day that black children were allowed in the Berston pool. And every Wednesday evening, after they left, the pool was drained and cleaned before the white children returned the next morning.27
Meanwhile, the underdeveloped communities on Flint’s outskirts were becoming a lot more appealing. They initially relied on wells and unregulated septic tanks, but this was inconvenient and unpleasant, and it taxed the water table and threatened a water shortage.28 One accidental drought hit the village of Flushing in 1954, obliging it to buy and distribute water from the City of Flint by the truckload for months.29 But once the suburbs were connected to Flint’s water and sewer services, the housing market got a jolt. The lack of adequate infrastructure had kept urban sprawl in check, but now, as the Michigan Civil Rights Commission later described it, development followed the pipes. By the end of the 1940s, about four thousand new homes were built in the young burgeoning communities.30 As they grew in stability and attractiveness, they pulled both population and resources out of the city they circled.
With all their cheap open space, industry, too, was tempted by the suburbs. Communities competed with one another to offer companies such as GM the sweetest deal for their own particular patch of land, where they would then build plants and enjoy an influx of new jobs and tax revenue. The Truman administration encouraged this with its Cold War–era policy of industrial dispersion, which urged manufacturers to move out of cities so that they would be less vulnerable to enemy attack.31 Between 1947 and 1960, GM built eight new manufacturing plants in Genesee County, all of them outside Flint, while also shutting down several plants within the city borders. It did this even though the city bolstered the company—then number one on the Fortune 500 list of the largest concerns in America—by charging it a deeply discounted rate for water use.32 Residential rates were about one and a half times what the company paid, even though residents consumed less water overall.33 By midcentury, when the automaker absorbed more than half of the water pumped by the city, it provided only about a third of Flint’s total water revenue.34
At first, the city supported GM’s regional expansion. Flint built roads to the new suburban plants and, every time GM asked, the City Commission voted to give them a water and sewer hookup.35 This was important because the young suburbs did not yet have the resources to provide these services themselves. “Never mind that it builds the plant and pays taxes in the next township, if it’s good for GM it will be good for Flint,” as the Michigan Civil Rights Commission described the thinking of city leaders. “Flint was, at least in their minds, a metropolitan whole that would rise or fall together.”36
Not everyone was a fan of sponsoring GM’s exit from the core city, however. Andrew R. Highsmith, in his remarkable book Demolition Means Progress, describes a union leader who argued that Flint was allowing GM “to enjoy all of the major services rendered by the city, including fire and police protection; water and sewage disposal—everything except the doubtful privilege of paying taxes.”37 By sharing its infrastructure with the suburbs and getting little in return, Flint was effectively subsidizing its own disinvestment.
Even though these neighboring communities relied on Flint to kick-start their growth, in time many of them developed their own infrastructure and public services. They didn’t mind paying for it, either. As one report from the era described it, “Not surprisingly, complaints over the quality of the water supply, sewers, and schools were foremost in the minds of suburban dwellers.… Most of these unhappy homeowners were desperate to bring the conveniences of urban living to their new neighborhoods—even if that meant higher taxes.”38 By 1956, the number of public water systems in Genesee County jumped to nine, and many more developed their own sewer systems.39
Any inconvenience of a move to the suburbs was mitigated by the construction of a massive interstate highway system beginning in the 1950s, which made it easier to commute as needed, and also easier for businesses, which typically thrive in transit hubs, to spread out. Brand-new shopping malls began to provide an alternative to dusty downtown retail. Early suburban residents loved the places they helped build for the quieter streets and cleaner air, for the green lawns and the extra space, and for being a place where everything could be made new. Each tiny town constructed a sense of itself as a unique community, untethered from the core city, with their own traditions, festivals, and proud high school sports teams. It grew stronger with every passing generation.
As the region grew, many people envisioned a metropolitan community that was not a collection of separate, competing enclaves, but a unified whole. In 1957, the plan for New Flint was launched. It was a proposal to merge Flint and twenty-five small inner-ring suburbs into a single municipality. The hope was to reduce redundancies in infrastructure, create economies of scale that would improve public services for all, and minimize shortsighted intraregional competition. New Flint was framed as a win-win strategy. The nascent suburbs would get the revenue, infrastructure, and cultural heft they needed to develop. Flint would get the land and resources it needed to keep humming along as an economic engine.40
GM was a champion of New Flint; it would have been happy to see new city limits drawn to include the suburban plants.41 The city’s elected officials, the trade unions, and the C. S. Mott Foundation were all on board, too. But suburbanites largely opposed the plan, not only in words but also in deeds. As the New Flint Resistance Committee, they campaigned against it—“Flint doesn’t need us and we don’t need Flint”—and one community, which wasn’t even included in the plan, was spooked enough to hurriedly incorporate, drawing the border around itself as thick as it could.42 Most African Americans also opposed New Flint. Their community groups had not been included in the proposal’s development, and they were concerned that, just as their voting power in the city was increasing, regionalization would dilute it.
No matter: there never was a vote on New Flint. Even though there were enough petition signatures to put it on the ballot, Genesee County’s Board of Supervisors rejected it. Supporters challenged this, but the Michigan Supreme Court upheld the decision. In killing the proposal, not only did the suburban communities fortify their individual boundaries, they also showcased what a powerful force they could be, even when going up against the big city and its most commanding institutions.43
Less than a decade after New Flint failed, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission confirmed that “rigid segregation” was endemic in Flint.44 At its hearings, a clergyman’s wife testified that when she and her husband tried to buy a home, they could do so only by arranging to have a white third party buy it first and then resell it to them. Black students were assigned to overcrowded black schools rather than white schools that had more space and were closer to their homes. Five years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared separate public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, the complaints of white parents prompted one second-grade teacher to isolate the single black child in her class of twenty-nine by making him sit alone in a small closet.45
In 1966, the commission’s number one recommendation for Flint was that it pass a fair housing ordinance that banned racial and ethnic discrimination in real estate.46 All residents should have equal access to decent living conditions. But the issue was postponed from one City Commission meeting to the next. Nothing was changing. Nothing ever seemed to change. Until, that is, the evening of July 24, 1967. Hundreds of frustrated residents gathered in northern Flint to protest the commission’s refusal to vote on the housing ordinance. What followed was a rebellion that, for American cities in the 1960s, was both extraordinary and familiar.
II.
In August 1965, the predominantly black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts exploded into a six-day riot. Triggered by a clash between an African American motorist and a white police officer, it involved arson, beatings, mass arrests, the militarization of city streets, more than a thousand injuries, and thirty-four deaths. Bayard Rustin, the civil rights activist, wrote in Commentary magazine that Watts “brought out in the open, as no other aspect of the Negro protest has done, the despair and hatred that continue to brew in the Northern ghettoes despite the civil-rights legislation of recent years and the advent of ‘the war on poverty.’” Watts, Rustin wrote, served as a kind of “manifesto.”47
If that was so, then people around the country were signing on. In the year after Watts, chaos broke out in at least eleven more cities. In 1967, the year of the “long, hot summer,” there were more than 160 uprisings.48 One was in Flint, catalyzed by the desperate overcrowding caused by segregation.49 “Riots were happening in other parts of the country,” recalled Melvin McCree, son of Mayor Floyd McCree. “Police wanted to put security on my father, but he didn’t want it. He was getting death threats.”50
On a Monday evening in July, after the fair housing rally in north Flint died down, a small group turned violent. It was a blur—a tumult of vandalizing cars, hurling rocks, firebombing storefronts, and looting. White-owned businesses were targeted, including a meat market, a drive-in restaurant, and a large furniture store. Law enforcement from Saginaw, Bay City, and the Genesee County Sheriff’s Department joined the Flint police on twelve-hour patrols.51 Mayor McCree, only seven months into the job and invariably described in news reports as “the Negro mayor,” walked alongside the officers. So did the Michigan National Guard. With McCree’s support, Governor George Romney temporarily banned liquor sales and the carrying of weapons countywide.52
Over at city hall, McCree worked with the county prosecutor and with civil rights activists such as Willie Nolden Jr., father of future city councilman BB Nolden, to arrange a deal. All 102 people arrested the first night would be released on the condition that they persuade others to stop the violence.53 It was a controversial move, but it worked. Almost all the people who left jail kept their promise, according to the Detroit Free Press, returning “to the streets on foot and in cars, using loudspeakers to amplify their calls for peace.” The unrest cooled after about two days. No injuries were reported.
Things were much worse in Detroit, where, that same week, the urban crisis of the 1960s crescendoed. A police raid at an illegal after-hours club full of black patrons—Vietnam veterans, a homecoming party—escalated into a street confrontation that morphed into a riot. Thousands of federal troops arrived, intervening in an American city for the first time in a generation.54 Local reporters rode in a military tank to track the story. Detroit’s landscape was permanently changed with the destruction of 2,509 buildings.55 Forty-three people were killed, mostly African Americans, over five brutal days. As the UPI news service put it, the Detroit battle was “the bloodiest and most costly Negro turmoil in modern U.S. history.”56
Besides Flint and Detroit, there were insurrections in about eighty different cities that week. New York, Chicago, Toledo, Phoenix, South Bend, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis were among them. In Michigan alone, violence (in some cases minor and short-lived) also flared up in Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Mount Clemens, Muskegon, Benton Harbor, River Rouge, Ecorse, Highland Park, Albion, and Pontiac, where two people were killed, both African American, one who was shot by a state legislator.57 Typical language described the chaos as being instigated by “young Negro rowdies.”58
As the fires cooled, President Lyndon B. Johnson took to national television. “My fellow Americans,” he said solemnly. “We have endured a week such as no nation should live through: a time of violence and tragedy.” The only solution, Johnson declared, “lies in an attack—mounted at every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence.”59
To accomplish this, Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, an eleven-member team led by Otto Kerner. It was a purposefully moderate and bipartisan group. Kerner was a former governor of Illinois and an army officer. New York City mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, was the commission’s vice chair. Other members included the Atlanta police chief, the head of the NAACP, and Senator Edward W. Brooke, the only African American member of the Senate. The Kerner Commission investigated what turned Watts and Detroit into searing emblems for American cities. After seven months of field studies, hearings, surveys, and research, they released their report on February 29, 1968—and it was a riveting account of how the poisonous belief in separatism was built into American cities.60 If left to fester, it would ruin them.
The events of the summer of 1967 are in large part the culmination of 300 years of racial prejudice. Most Americans know little of the origins of the racial schism separating our white and Negro citizens. Few … understand that today’s problems can be solved only if white Americans comprehend the rigid social, economic and educational barriers that have prevented Negroes from participating in the mainstream of American life.61
Cities weren’t roiling with unprecedented trauma, the report said; they were following a familiar script. Since slavery days and beyond, murderous violence had plagued settlements where African Americans tried to participate in civil society. In 1866 in Memphis, for example, white mobs led by police officers marched into the African American side of town and shot whomever they could find, including black Union soldiers, women, and children. No one was ever prosecuted. In the aftermath, many residents, both white and black, fled the city.62
The Great Migration forced the nation to confront the limits of a separate-but-equal society. In 1910, 91 percent of black people lived in the South, few of them in towns that had more than twenty-five hundred residents. By the time Floyd McCree became mayor of Flint, about one third lived in the country’s twelve largest cities.63 Although their moves north and west were fueled by the search for jobs, African Americans were more than twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, and black men were more than three times as likely to be in low-paying, unskilled, and dangerous jobs—such as the ones in the Buick foundry in Flint, where even the mayor worked.64 This “policy of separation,” as the Kerner Report described it, relegated black people to a “permanently inferior economic status” and undercut the myth that if impoverished European immigrants could transcend their ghettos, then so could African Americans.65
So much time, effort, and money went into making this divided society. The commission called for an equivalent investment into unmaking it. That included more investment in education, jobs, housing, and social services. “The vital needs of the Nation must be met; hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted,” they wrote.66 They also asked us to push back against the trend of metropolitan sprawl around an emptying center by focusing “the interests of suburban communities on the physical, social, and cultural environment of the central city.”67
More than 740,000 copies of the Kerner Report were sold, making it a bestseller.68 It even outsold the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It made headlines around the country, often provocative ones. “Suburbs Can Fight ‘Country Divided’/Riot Report Points to You,” read a lead story on March 17, 1968, in the Roselle Register, from a Chicago suburb. Civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., applauded the report, and it so inspired the leader of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, he ordered clergy to give sermons on combating racism.
But the report’s fate was just as its authors feared: it was shelved. Conservatives disliked it because they felt it diminished the individual responsibility of rioters and underplayed, as one columnist put it, “an even more bloody-minded black racism” toward whites.69 Leftists believed that it wasn’t revolutionary enough; they had little faith in political solutions.70 Governors disavowed it. George Romney in Michigan, who had only recently dropped his presidential campaign, opposed the creation of big government programs. Georgia governor Lester Maddox argued that the cause of the riots “isn’t racism, it’s Communism, I know it is.”71
And Lyndon Johnson himself kept quiet. His press secretary offered only a bland statement: “The President wants to do everything he can in this field, and the report will be very carefully considered.”72 Later accounts suggested that the president believed the commission had called for an impossible federal investment at a time when the nation was at war in Vietnam, and that it didn’t give enough credit to the Great Society reforms of his administration.
In any case, soon after the Kerner Report’s release, Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection. Less than a week later, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. instigated no small amount of civil disorder in about a hundred cities. A few months later, Robert Kennedy was killed after winning the California Democratic primary. The Vietnam War churned on with sickening brutality, and in Chicago police officers attacked demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention. Against this turmoil, the Kerner Report faded into the noise. And when Richard Nixon won the presidency in November, it cued a new era of law-and-order politics. As political historian Julian E. Zelizer wrote, urban policy was replaced by “the war on crime and the war on drugs.”73
III.
The unrest in Flint had quieted by July 27, the same day that President Johnson’s speech was broadcast on national television. The City Commission soon agreed to vote on a fair housing ordinance, one that included penalties for violators and a process to investigate complaints.74
On the day of the vote, Mayor Floyd McCree spoke to his fellow members of the commission and pled for justice. His father had fought in World War I, he said. He and his brothers fought in World War II. Other McCree family members fought in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. “Yet today,” he said, “those persons we fought to preserve democracy [for] can come to Flint and buy a house wherever they wish. But members of the Negro race cannot do so, simply because of the color of their skin. I hope this city commission has the guts to pass this ordinance.”75
Three commissioners voted for it, five against. Housing discrimination was still legal.
With tears in his eyes, McCree resigned in protest. “Last November this city commission saw fit to make me mayor and that was fine all over the country, very wonderful. I thought here at last we have a local government willing to accept people on the basis of their ability and not because of race. And I have lived with this and I have preached this to my community. Tonight, however, I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to sit up here any longer and live an equal opportunity lie.”76
At least sixteen other city workers backed him up, saying that if McCree was leaving, they were too. Soon after the vote, McCree was admitted to the hospital for a stomach ulcer and exhaustion. His cousin Woody Etherly Jr. visited him. During their talk, Etherly came up with a big idea—a sleep-in on the lawn of city hall. Before long, young people had set up camp and said that they would not leave until the commission reconsidered the ordinance. “Amazingly, all the networks came,” Etherly said.77 “And we came in with our little sleeping bags and stuff. We went down to city hall and began to spread our sleeping bags and the city cut on the [lawn sprinklers] and were up on the roof with their guns looking down on us.”
Flint’s housing demonstration made national news. More supporters showed up. Over ten days, about two hundred people took part in the sleep-in, and nearly five thousand people supported them and the mayor with a unity rally, including Governor George Romney. Someone made eggs and pancakes for the demonstrators to eat at breakfast.
The ground shifted. The commission agreed to take up housing once again. McCree returned to the mayor’s office and began working on a new policy. In October, he was victorious when a fair housing ordinance, albeit a watered-down one, narrowly passed.78
But even then the fight wasn’t over. Within minutes of the vote, opponents took up a petition to repeal it. The Committee to Repeal Forced Housing Legislation included at least fifty Ku Klux Klan members and was led by a member of the John Birch Society. With nearly six thousand signatures, the bid to overturn fair housing got on the ballot. The new ordinance was suspended until the vote. An interracial group worked to defend it, including McCree, who took a leave of absence from his job at the Buick foundry to campaign.
At the time, the housing question was tormenting cities all over the country. When Mayor Henry Maier of Milwaukee testified to the Kerner Commission, he spoke plainly: “There is a system of apartheid confining the poor and the Negro to the city.” Maier warned that core cities could not “long endure within a segregated metropolis.”79
On February 20, 1968, more than forty thousand Flint residents voted on whether to repeal the policy of allowing people to live where they chose, no matter the color of their skin. By a hairsbreadth margin—just thirty votes—repeal was denied. Fair housing won.
“I’m overwhelmed by the decision but the people of Flint should take the credit,” said McCree, after the final vote tally came through.80
This was a big deal. Flint was first in the nation to support fair housing by popular vote. Similar votes failed in Seattle, Berkeley, Toledo, Akron, and Tacoma, and the U.S. Congress had been dragging its feet on a federal fair housing law for ages.81 It seemed to be going nowhere until after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death; as cities exploded in anger and sorrow, the legislation was fast-tracked. The fires had scarcely ceased in the nation’s capital when the Fair Housing Act finally passed.
For Flint, though, the fair housing victory was bittersweet. The city’s population had already begun to slip. Along with school desegregation, the new housing laws accelerated the exodus as mostly white people left the city. Two years after the adoption of the ordinance, the Census marked Flint’s first ever drop in population. It happened in other cities, too. In the years following the groundbreaking civil rights laws and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, residential segregation in America effectively increased as people found novel ways of dividing themselves up. In the early seventies, a federal civil rights commission concluded that “the zeal with which Federal officials carried out policies of discrimination” decades earlier “has not been matched by a similar enthusiasm” in carrying out fair housing policies.82
Most people who left Flint could cite rational reasons for doing so: they simply wanted to make the best investment for themselves and their families. And, indeed, they were often rewarded with better housing values and, increasingly, better schools and public services. There was also more green space and less congestion. The suburbs were set up to succeed. After explicitly racist housing policies became illegal, many of them retained their relative homogeneity with new exclusionary policies: bans on multifamily housing, minimum square footage requirements, and refusal to accept affordable housing vouchers. Proposed developments that would make a community more integrated were sometimes shot down on the grounds that they would overtax the water and sewer systems.83 George Romney, the governor who became an ally of Mayor McCree, went on to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington. He described urban sprawl as a “high-income white noose” around black cities, and proposed withholding federal money for redevelopment projects, including sewer and water, in exclusionary suburbs.84 He acted on it, too, with some success. A Boston suburb, for example, agreed to proceed with a housing development so that HUD would release funds for a water project. But Romney’s strategy was controversial—he needed a police escort to exit a public forum in a Detroit suburb—and Richard Nixon’s administration eventually brought his efforts to a halt.
White people who stayed in Flint were essentially punished. The worth of their homes tumbled. Even those who may have morally resisted what was happening in their city would have a hard time staying when their children’s inheritance seemed threatened.85 The other side of the coin was that when a black family purchased a home, its worth dropped the moment they signed their papers. Black families therefore could not build financial stability that secured their retirements and legacies for their children in the same way that white families generally could. And, in this self-fulfilling spiral, their houses generated less money in property taxes, which meant fewer resources to invest in schools and infrastructure. African American neighborhoods were “objectively” worth less, setting up the cold, contextless accounting that led state and city officials to select St. John as the community to demolish when it built freeways in the 1960s, and Floral Park to displace with a highway interchange.86 It was just economics.