The Poisoned City

CHAPTER 3: REVELATIONS

. For what is probably the very best telling of the Great Migration, look no further than Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010).
. This song is quoted in Andrew R. Highsmith’s Demolition Means Progress: Flint Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 1, to which this chapter in particular owes a great deal. Some of the material in this chapter first appeared, in a different form, in articles by the author that appeared in Splinter (“‘An Equal Opportunity Lie’: How Housing Discrimination Led to the Flint Water Crisis,” with Josh Kramer, December 5, 2017) and in the New Republic (“Flint Prepares to Be Left Behind Once More,” March 3, 2016).
. “All Change!,” Time, January 9, 1933, p. 59.
. Gordon Young, phone interview with the author, January 2016.
. “Detroit Needs Labor,” New York Times, April 23, 1919, p. 21.
. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, pp. 31–-32.
. Ibid., pp. 81–84; and Rhonda Sanders, Bronze Pillars: An Oral History of African Americans in Flint (Flint, Mich.: The Flint Journal and Alfred P. Sloan Museum, 1995), p. viii. Sanders: “From the early 1900s until the early 1940s, the main jobs open to blacks were domestic ones such as cooking, cleaning or chauffeuring for wealthy white families. A few worked in trades as barbers, furniture finishers, barn builders, doctors or lawyers. Most black men who worked in the automobile factories were janitors, although some worked at Buick’s hellish foundry.” Beginning in the 1940s, black women, albeit only those with light skin, were hired to operate elevators in banks and hotels (pp. 92–93).
. Sanders, Bronze Pillars, pp. viii, 2, 32; and Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 32. It’s worth pointing out, though, that there appeared to be more flexibility when the proportion of African Americans in Flint hovered at about 3 percent: “Blacks could not live anywhere they wanted until a legal mandate in 1968. However, many blacks and whites lived in the same neighborhoods before World War II and formed close friendships,” as Rhonda Sanders describes it. She quotes William Hoskins, who arrived in 1936 from Mississippi. “When I first came to Flint, there was no such thing as a black neighborhood. The Italians, Polish and everyone else (including blacks) lived together.” Some black children learned to speak foreign languages from their playmates.
. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, pp. 30–37.
. “The Realtor should not be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood.” That appeared in the code of ethics of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers in 1950. The same sentiment appeared in textbooks the organization published as early as 1922. The code is quoted in: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Understanding Fair Housing,” Clearinghouse Publication 42 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, February 1973), p. 3.
. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress. Highsmith describes these neighborhoods, including where their borders fell, on pp. 30–31. He also notes that up until 1940, 60 percent of St. John was made up of white immigrants, mostly Catholics from Eastern Europe, though about three quarters of them left over the next ten years, while the number of black households tripled (p. 151). According to the memory of those interviewed by Rhonda Sanders, even as many of the white immigrants moved out of St. John, they kept up family businesses in the neighborhood. As for Floral Park’s roots, Sanders builds on the early history of Flint as a place of refuge for former slaves. “Some of the first blacks to visit Flint may have been fugitive slaves en route to Canada. Detroit was the most direct stopover on the Underground Railroad network that secretly led runaway slaves to freedom in Canada. Flint is believed to have been an alternative route that directed fleeing slaves through Port Huron into Canada.” Sanders, Bronze Pillars, p. 4.
. Flint’s first evaluation by the Home Owners Loan Corporation was in the summer of 1937. The GM neighborhoods got a B rating, the second-best category. The one exception to the all-white neighborhoods that were redlined because of their proximity to African American residents was a part of Woodlawn Park that bordered Floral Park. “Will hold up,” the assessor noted. “Pride of ownership.” As Highsmith writes, “West Woodlawn Park no doubt contained many proud homeowners, yet the neighborhood’s blue grade stemmed also from its abundance of racially restrictive housing covenants and the impermeability of the Lapeer Road color line that separated it from Floral Park.” Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 41.
. A scanned version of the original evaluations are presented in a wonderful interactive by Mapping Inequality, a project that shows the primary materials for how redlining worked in New Deal America. Two received this same “undesirables” notation that first year: the areas labeled D12 and D18, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=12/43.0303/-83.6896&opacity=0.8&area=D18&city=flint-mi&adimage=4/67/-123.
. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, pp. 36–38.
. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 71.
. Ibid., p. 34; and Young, Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City, p. 72. This was at the end of the 1930s. Flint was behind Miami, Florida, and Norfolk, Virginia.
. Also, there was nothing compelling lending institutions from working with African American mortgage applicants, even with the Veterans Administration guaranteeing the loan. “And so home ownership quickly soared to two out of three, then more gradually reached its current zenith of three out of four. Home ownership rates for black and Hispanic families during the postwar boom years, however, hovered at or below 40 percent; and even today, while the children and grandchildren of white veterans enjoy all the benefits of that government-sponsored home equity, black and Hispanic home ownership rates remain stuck below 50 percent.” Edward Humes, “How the G.I. Bill Shunted Blacks Back into Vocational Training,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 53 (Autumn 2006): 92–104.
. Ibid.; and Richard Rothstein, “Modern Segregation,” presentation to the Atlantic Live Conference “Reinventing the War on Poverty,” Washington, D.C., March 6, 2014. Text published the same day at the Economic Policy Institute website, http://www.epi.org/files/2014/MODERN-SEGREGATION.pdf.
. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 US 1 (1948). The Court found that racially restrictive covenants are a contract that private parties can voluntarily engage in, even though state enforcement of the covenants would violate the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the case, the Shelley family, which was African American, tried to buy a home in St. Louis that had a covenant attached that banned “people of the Negro or Mongolian race” from owning it. The neighborhood sued to keep the family from moving in.
. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, pp. 60–61.
. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 69. Another resistance tactic: constructing entirely new houses. “Many blacks who were turned away from Woodlawn Park proper resolved the problem by building homes on vacant land to its immediate south and east,” including the first black president of Flint’s Board of Education, a civil rights attorney, and the first black woman elected to the school board. Sanders, Bronze Pillars, p. 20.
. Sanders, Bronze Pillars, p. 22. Another story Sanders captures is from Bill Williams, who moved to northwest Flint in 1968. “I had two cars,” he said. “One I left home with my wife and one I drove to work. I have a one-car garage so I’d park the good one in the garage and the work car in the driveway. I’d come out in the morning and find eggs all over the car and garage. The tree in the yard, we had decorated for Christmas; I came out and the lights had been stolen and it had been decorated with toilet paper.” The harassment subsided after a few years, Williams believed, because his house was one of the best-kept in the neighborhood (p. 25).
. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 144.
. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Understanding Fair Housing,” p. 5.
. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 44; and Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, pp. 325–27.
. For this and the rest of the paragraph: Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, pp. 34–37.
. According to community memory, the pool stopped its segregated access program in the 1950s, which coincided with the time when white families were moving out of the neighborhood. The pool closed in 1978. Berston also had a library, but black children were allowed to use it only if escorted by a teacher on a class field trip. Sanders, Bronze Pillars, pp. 197–99.
. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 44.
. Ibid., p. 48.
. Ibid., p. 43.
. “The Need for Industrial Dispersal,” committee staff, materials prepared for the Joint Committee on the Economic Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, August 1951; and Harry S. Truman, “189—Memorandum and Statement of Policy on the Need for Industrial Dispersion,” August 10, 1951, online at Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28364.
. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 122.
. Ibid., pp. 130–31.
. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 52.
. Ibid. It also provided water and sewer services to some residents of suburban communities until 1953, when the utility’s long-term capacity began to be in question.
. Ibid., p. 51.
. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, pp. 130–31.
. Ibid., p. 117.
. Ibid., pp. 114–15.
. Ibid., pp. 133–42.
. Ibid., pp. 121–22.
. Ibid., pp. 138–39. The quote is from an unidentified woman speaking at an April 10, 1958, meeting about New Flint in Mt. Morris Township. The suburb that incorporated was Swartz Creek, after a vote on August 5, 1958, partly out of fears that they’d lose their Chevy facility if they didn’t.
. Suburban communities that had GM plants were especially opposed to New Flint, including Grand Blanc, Burton Township, Flint Township, and Beecher. Opponents worried that the plan would increase their taxes and make them subjects of the city. It also cut against the rising pride they had in their own small communities. Swartz Creek incorporated in response to New Flint even though the area wasn’t included in the borders of the proposed metropolitan government. The Genesee County Board of Supervisors, which prevented the question from getting on the ballot, was dominated by New Flint opponents, particularly those from townships. Its Legislative Affairs Committee declared that the petition was legal, but the board voted 25–13 to keep it off the ballot. The Michigan Supreme Court voted unanimously in support of the board, on the grounds of a technical distinction between consolidation and incorporation, saying that New Flint would violate state law by incorporating areas that were already incorporated. Flint was then left in a tight spot. It made efforts to annex nearby areas, just as cities in the South and West had done. It was a process that required separate majority votes in both the affected communities. Flint Township voted 3–1 against annexation by the city in 1961. But the law permitted annexation of industrial and commercial sites with a simple majority vote, which is how Flint, with the support of General Motors, was able to annex four GM plants in Flint Township, Bishop International Airport, and two shopping centers—1,370 acres of land altogether. The city failed in its effort to annex a GM plant and open land in Beecher and Mt. Morris Township. Also, the Genesee County Board of Education voted that the taxes passed by the annexed facilities would continue to support the suburban schools, not the ones in the city. More suburbs incorporated in the following years: Fenton, Flushing, Mt. Morris Township, Beecher, Flint Township. The campaign for Flushing’s incorporation advertised in the newspaper about how the move would “end septic tanks … plug up the wells—get pure city water—quality for low-cost FHA loans on mortgages” (Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, pp. 139–44).
. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, pp. 60–64.
. Ibid., p. 79.
. Ibid., p. 149.
. Bayard Rustin, “The Watts,” Commentary, March 1, 1966.
. “Of 164 disorders reported during the first nine months of 1967, eight (5 percent) were major in terms of violence and damage; 33 (20 percent) were serious but not major; 123 (75 percent) were minor and undoubtedly would not have received national attention as riots had the Nation not been sensitized by the more serious outbreaks.” The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Kerner Report, p. 6.
. “From 1940 to 1960, Flint’s African American population grew from just over six thousand to nearly thirty-five thousand. Yet over the same period the boundaries of the city’s black neighborhoods remained essentially fixed. With a residential segregation index that reached 94.4 in 1960, Flint ranked as one of the most racially divided cities in the country—more segregated, in fact, than Atlanta, New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.” Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 149.
. Sanders, Bronze Pillars, p. 23.
. Judy Wax and Doris Jarrell, “Grand Rapids Hit by Sniper Attacks,” Detroit Free Press, July 27, 1967, p. 9A; Joseph W. Wagar, “Flint Troubles on ‘Simmer,’” Flint Journal, July 26, 1967, p. 1.
. Wagar, “Flint Troubles on ‘Simmer,’” p. 1. Also, gas stations were asked to close by the chief of police, and “false alarms plagued the fire department” (“The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 66).
. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 66.; and Wagar, “Flint Troubles on ‘Simmer,’” p. 1, as reproduced in: Ananthakrishnan Aiyer, Telling Our Stories: The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in Flint (Flint, Mich.: Flint Colorline Project, 2007). Eighty-one people were arrested the second night. Rhonda Sanders quotes Woody Etherly Jr.’s assessment of how Mayor Floyd J. McCree handled the unusual amnesty deal: “Floyd was the kind of person that could build bridges on all sides.… People think of Floyd as a gentleman and gentle person, but Floyd did what Floyd had to do behind closed doors. He was very articulate behind closed doors, and he would sit down, and if he had to, you know, he had to fire up sometimes” (Sanders, Bronze Pillars, p. 288).
. About 4,700 army paratroopers were airlifted into Detroit, then the nation’s fifth-largest city, after police officers and National Guardsmen were reported trapped by snipers in two precinct stations. “It looks like Berlin in 1945,” said Mayor Jerome Cavanagh. Federal troops had been activated in recent years to help implement desegregation, but this was altogether different. So rare was this move, its legality and protocol were disputed, but it was deemed acceptable under a provision for “insurrection in any state against the government” in a law from 1795. Said President Johnson upon dispatching the troops: “I am sure the American people will realize that I take this action with the greatest regret—and only because of the clear, unmistakable, and undisputed evidence that Governor Romney of Michigan and the local officials in Detroit have been unable to bring the situation under control. Law enforcement is a local matter.… The Federal Government should not intervene-except in the most extraordinary circumstances. The fact of the matter, however, is that law and order have broken down in Detroit, Michigan.” The last time federal troops had been sent into an American city: Detroit again, during the riot of 1943. Gene Roberts, “U.S. Troops Sent into Detroit; 19 Dead; Johnson Decries Riots; New Outbreak in East Harlem,” New York Times, July 26, 1967, pp. 1, 19; “President Used a Law of 1795 to Send Troops,” AP wire, New York Times. July 26, 1967, p. 18; and Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks to the Nation After Authorizing the Use of Federal Troops in Detroit,” July 24, 1967, online at Peters and Woolley, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28364.
. Bill McGraw, “Before ’67 Riot, Detroit Thought It Could Avoid Civil Unrest,” Detroit Free Press, July 15, 2017, updated July 17, 2017.
. UPI Wire Staff, “Worst U.S. Riot Ending in Detroit,” Battle Creek Enquirer and News, July 27, 1967, p. 1.
. Pontiac, about twenty-five miles from Detroit and the seat of Oakland County, had about 82,000 residents. According to an AP wire story: “State Representative Arthur J. Law, a Pontiac Democrat, said he had fired his 12-gauge shotgun at a half dozen Negro youths after they had hurled a trash can through the plate glass window of a food market he has owned since 1948 in a heavily Negro area. Pontiac has 15,000 Negro residents.” AP Wire Staff, “2 Killed in Pontiac,” New York Times, July 26, 1967, p. 19.
. Ibid; and “Worst U.S. Riot Ending in Detroit.”
. Lyndon B. Johnson, “The President’s Address to the Nation on Civil Disorders,” July 27, 1967, online at Peters and Woolley, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28368, video available via C-Span, https://www.c-span.org/video/?431462-1/president-johnson-address-civil-disorder-kerner-commission.
. Some of the material in this chapter about the Kerner Report and the riots first appeared, in different form, in an article by the author that appeared in Politico (“Mass Shootings Are the Systemic Crisis of Our Time,” October 4, 2017).
. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report, p. 211.
. More than a day after the attack began, forty-six black people and two white people were dead. More than a hundred buildings in the black community were set afire.
. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report, pp. 12–13. “From 1950 to 1966, the U.S. Negro population rose 6.5 million. Over 98 percent of that increase took place in metropolitan areas—86 percent within central cities, 112 percent in the urban fringe,” Kerner Report, p. 244.
. Ibid., p. 14. Mayor Floyd McCree began working in the foundry after his military service and, over the next couple decades, he was able to rise up in the ranks.
. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report, pp. 23, 278–82.
. Ibid., p. 1.
. Ibid., p. 17. The report also declared that police forces needed to be better trained and more accountable, and that newsrooms should to be more diverse, so that there would be more nuanced coverage of cities. More early childhood education was essential, too, it said.
. It was issued as a mass-market paperback with an introduction by New York Times columnist Tom Wicker. Marlon Brando read excerpts of it on The Joey Bishop Show.
. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report, pp. xxxi–xxxii; and William S. White, “Riot Report Certain to Help Republicans, Hurt Democrats,” Washington Post, March 4, 1968, p. A23.
. White, “Riot Report”; and “Kerner Panel Report Sends Shock Waves,” Washington Post, March 2, 1968, p. A1.
. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report, p. xxiii.
. “Kerner Panel Report Sends Shock Waves.”
. Julian E. Zelizer, “Fifty Years Ago, the Government Said Black Lives Matter,” Boston Review, May 5, 2016; Robert Siegel, “50 Years On, Sen. Fred Harris Remembers Great Hostility During 1967 Race Riots,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, July 20, 2017; and Gene Schlickman, “The Kerner Commission and the Search for Answers.” Chicago Tribune, May 11, 1992. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was a bit warmer to the report, saying at an appearance at Florida State University that it showed the need for a “tremendous, coordinated, massive program of rehabilitation and social reform.” “Kerner Panel Report Sends Shock Waves.”
. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 66.
. Editorial, “Racial Equality Under Law Suffers Setback in Flint,” Detroit Free Press, August 16, 1967, p. 8A; and Allan R. Wilhelm, “More Negro Resignations Are Part of Protest Drive,” Flint Journal, August 17, 1967, p. 13, as reproduced in Aiyer, Telling Our Stories, pp. 85–86. Among those who announced their resignations were five Flint appointees to the Genesee County Board of Supervisors; a member of the Hurley Hospital Board of Managers; and three members (two of them white ministers) of the Citizens Advisory Committee on Urban Renewal.
. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 67; Sanders, Bronze Pillars, p. 22; and Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, pp. 170–71.
. Sanders, Bronze Pillars, p. 305.
. Thorough accounts of Flint’s fair housing fight, which this chapter relies upon, are found in Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress; Young, Teardown; Aiyer, Telling Our Stories; and Sanders, Bronze Pillars.
. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report, p. xix, citing “Presidential Advisors Hear Maier’s Views,” Milwaukee Journal, October 5, 1967.
. “Open-Housing Ordinance Passes by 43 Votes in Flint Referendum,” New York Times, February 22, 1968, p. 22. The narrow vote count was later checked and revised.
. Coincidentally, the Flint vote came just nine days before the publication of the Kerner Report, which discussed fair housing and segregation at length in its dissection of what ailed cities: “Integration is the only course which explicitly seeks to achieve a single nation.”
. As quoted in U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Understanding Fair Housing,” p. 7.
. Ibid., pp. 16–18. In one example from 1970, Lackawanna, New York, refused a building permit to an African American person who wanted to build a low-income housing project. Per the report from the Commission on Civil Rights, “The city defended its position on the ground that the new units would be a burden on the city’s sewer and water system. In addition, the city contended the proposed site was needed for a city park. The [federal] court found a different reason for the position of the city. Substantial evidence proved to the court that opposition to the low-income housing project was based on the ‘discriminatory sentiments of the community.’” For book-length accounts on how ostensibly race-neutral exclusionary practices enforced racial segregation, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Thomas M. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Equality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
. He made the “white noose” remark at his Senate confirmation hearing. “Urban renewal helped spark the riot in Detroit,” he said, leading to thousands of people being “bulldozed out of their homes.” Federal housing policies “built a high-income white noose basically around these inner cities, and the poor and disadvantaged, both black and white, are pretty much left in the inner city.” There are a number of good resources about George Romney’s role in fair housing, statewide and nationally, including Sidney Fine, “Michigan and Housing Discrimination, 1949–1968,” Michigan Historical Review 23, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 81–114; Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law,” ProPublica, June 25, 2015; Richard Rothstein, “From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits of Government-Sponsored Segregation,” Working Economics blog, April 29, 2015; and Mark Santow and Richard Rothstein, “A Different Kind of Choice,” Economic Policy Institute, August 12, 2012. Romney also championed fair housing and desegregation in his book The Concerns of a Citizen (New York: Putnam, 1968).
. When worried white homeowners sold their homes after a black family moved in, it caused others to panic—an alarm that was sometimes encouraged by real estate speculators, or “blockbusters”—and follow suit. The market was flooded with their houses, forcing the prices downward. Their fears of lowered property values were realized because of their own actions. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 59.
. St. John was razed for I-475 and an industrial park. Floral Park was largely sacrificed for the freeway interchange between I-475 and I-69. Many displaced residents were relocated to public housing complexes, like Atherton East in south Flint (opened 1968) and Howard Estates (opened 1969). St. John residents received a maximum buyout of $15,000. While the crowdedness of the old neighborhood had caused many complaints—neighborhood leaders and civil rights activists supported urban renewal, thinking it would give their communities better opportunities—people sorely missed it once it was gone. In the 1990s, former residents organized a number of St. John reunions. Sanders, Bronze Pillars, pp. 10–15.