All Together Now: Metro Detroit Is in a Period of Unprecedented Diversity

Table of Contents I. ORIGINAL SIN. II. MACOMB COUNTY: BENEFICIARY OF BOTH BLACK AND WHITE FLIGHT III. SOUTHFIELD AND LIVONIA--A TALE OF TWO CITIES IV. SCHOOLS OF CHOICE V. HOPE FOR THE FUTURE I. ORIGINAL SIN It is impolitic to say at a time when the language of even playing fields and colorblindness and merit loom so large as to become public policy, and the rhetoric of equality of opportunity and level playing fields is so intoxicating that people believe equality of opportunity actually exists, but for a large portion of Metro Detroit's history, black people and white people have lived separate lives with divergent destinies. Before the growth of the suburbs, Detroit was Balkanized into ethnic neighborhoods. Blacks were more or less restricted to the center city area prior to 1950. (2) Jews, Poles, Italians, the Irish, and many more groups all had neighborhoods of their own. Until the late 1950s, the official policy of the Detroit Housing Commission was segregation, and attempts to create public housing for all people were shut down. Residential maps, from the 1930s on, tell the story of a black population that was boxed into ghettoes and only slowly fanned out into Detroit's stronger neighborhoods, eventually extending into the suburbs as the legal system, real estate practices, and economic opportunities opened doors that were once closed. (3) It all starts with housing. Where you live determines the worth of your home and which schools your children will attend. Bad schools tend to reside in bad neighborhoods. The school your children attend plays a big role in determining their lot in life, including college attendance and hire-ability in the job market. Restricting blacks to the worst neighborhoods with the worst schools ensured that they would grow up separate and unequal; a permanent underclass. Black residents of Metro Detroit have enjoyed lower social mobility than whites throughout the region's history. (4) When Dearborn was a boomtown and Henry Ford couldn't hire men for his factories fast enough, Ford made sure to prop up the neighboring city of Inkster as a bedroom community for black workers that no one wanted to see live in Dearborn. (5) Cities such as Warren, Dearborn, Livonia, and pretty much all of Macomb County were basically all white well into the 1970s. (6) Downriver Wayne County communities integrated even more slowly. (7) Some, such as Allen Park and Wyandotte, are still over 90 percent white today. (8) Macomb County did not have black residents in any meaningful numbers until the 1990s. (9) Just as blacks were once denied entry into the City's finest neighborhoods, even if they were able to overpay for housing, they were all but locked out of the suburbs--aside from cities like Inkster, Highland Park, and Pontiac--until very recently. Even if blacks have been late to the party on fleeing Detroit and embracing the safety and strong schools of the suburbs, they have made up for lost time. Formerly all-white communities such as Eastpointe, Roseville, Warren, and Center Line all boast black populations at or above ten percent these days. (10) Others, like Livonia and Dearborn, are approaching five percent. (11) These numbers are only likely to increase as seniors move on or pass away, and as the under-twenty minority population, currently at twenty-four percent in Macomb County, comes of age. (12) As metro Detroit now stands, it is in a period of unprecedented diversity. II. MACOMB COUNTY: BENEFICIARY OF BOTH BLACK AND WHITE FLIGHT I think we have a kind of frontier mentality that still prevails ... that if we can foul up an area and then move on, and if we can get away from that area which we have used up--well, this is fine for us, and let the other guy look out for himself ... we tend to look back with disgust at that which we have helped to decay, deteriorate. …

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