Detroit Wall
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The Detroit Eight Mile Wall, also referred to as Detroit's Wailing Wall, Berlin Wall or The Birwood Wall; is a 1 foot (0.30 m) thick, 6 feet (1.8 m) high wall that stretches about .5 miles (0.80 km) in length. At the time of its construction in 1940, it was intended to serve as a wall of racial separation as a physical barrier between white and black homeowners in northwest Detroit. The neighborhoods on both sides of the wall have been predominantly black since the early 1970s.
The wall originates across the street from the northern boundary of Van Antwerp Park, on Pembroke Avenue between Birwood and Mendota Streets. It extends north until just south of 8 Mile Road. An exposed stretch of the wall with no homes to the east runs through Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground, between Chippewa Avenue and Norfolk Street. Community activists and Detroit residents collaborated in 2006 to paint on this portion of the wall a mural depicting, for example, neighborhood children blowing bubbles, a group of a cappella singers, Rosa Parks's boarding the bus from which she would help catalyze the Civil Rights Movement, and citizens protesting for equitable housing policy.[1]
Background
The 1930s and 1940s were times of great growth for the city of Detroit and the inner-suburbs. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), founded in 1934, pushed the idea of home ownership as an accessible goal for the average working class. Private home ownership soon became a building block for the "American Dream". Thomas J. Sugrue outlines Detroit's unique housing crisis and how the FHA's policies helped shape the face of the city: "New Deal rhetoric touched a deep nerve among Detroiters who had struggled, usually without the benefit of loans or mortgages, to build their own homes in the city. It reinforced the deeply rooted values of home ownership and family stability held by striving immigrants in the early twentieth century, and appealed to the seldom-met aspirations for landownership and independence held by blacks since emancipation. With government backed loans, they were able to attain the dream of property ownership with relative ease."[2] This push for private instead of public housing strengthened the outmigration from the city to the suburbs, sparking what was later coined as white flight.
Housing became a racially charged issue, as the idea of public housing grew to represent a threat to private housing. Affordable living for the lower class, usually minorities, meant interference with a successful, free market real estate. Community groups determined to keep their neighborhoods segregated lobbied against public housing projects, while contractors found construction business in private housing. In addition to the racial tensions already present, the FHA's policies of mandated racial homogeneity in housing developments and redlining made it difficult for African Americans to become home owners. Mortgage loans and other assistance was typically denied to African American neighborhoods and was unfavorably granted to the settlements of close proximity. Between 1930 and 1950, three out of five homes purchased in the United States were financed by FHA, yet less than two percent of the FHA loans were made to non-white home buyers.[3]
Eight mile community and construction
Public or private housing being hard to come by in the city, some African Americans were able to purchase land lots around the Wyoming Avenue and 8 Mile intersection with hopes of eventually building houses. By the late thirties development had reached the northern limits of the city and had surrounded this area with prosperous neighborhoods of single unit family houses. West Outer Drive, Palmer Woods and Sherwood Forest were the all-white neighborhoods in close proximity to this African American enclave. The area was mostly vacant and unattractive to contractors due to its residents as it violated FHA's policy of racially homogeneous neighborhoods. When the FHA was approached by a developer wanting to build an all-white subdivision west of the site, funding was refused because the area was too risky for investment. In a compromise with the FHA, the developer erected the wall that was to divide the "slum" from his new construction project.[2]
References
- ↑ Karoub, Jeff. "Wall that once divided races in Detroit remains, teaches." USA Today, May 1, 2013. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/01/detroit-race-wall/2127165/
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996. Print
- ↑ http://heinonline.org.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/jluenvl14&collection=journals&id=9814 J. Land Use & EnvtlL. 92 (1998-1999)Perpetuation of Residential Racial Segregation in America: Historical Discrimination, Modern Forms of Exclusion, and Inclusionary Remedies, The; Seitles, Marc
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