I wonder if some worried that their daytime public neighborliness contrasted with their nighttime kitchen table planning, their plotting to get out of the neighborhood as soon as they could manage. Perhaps they forbade their children to speak to their darker friends about the frenetic packing going on inside. Certainly they didn’t want to speak of the reason for the moves—though everyone, of course, knew why. Or they talked to their black neighbors pretending “those new people moving in” didn’t include those with whom they commiserated. But one by one, the white families left their old homes, tree-lined streets—and us—behind.
I’m sure that some of my friends listened to their parents in their homes, as they spoke of us with words of racial hatred, while outside they smiled across backyard fences, making small talk about sod and azaleas. Perhaps black and white neighbors rarely communicated at all during this time, when our neighborhoods were soon to be re-segregated. For there was virulent racism and ill-disguised violence in areas throughout the city, and even in the late sixties, blacks could not shop in many stores. Detroit’s history was replete with episodes of unrest and even terror in the competition over housing: whites demanded that blacks be stopped from moving into an east side housing project, which precipitated a race riot in 1943. A generation before that, Ossian Sweet, a black medical doctor, was met with mobs as he moved into his home in a white neighborhood on the near east side. Clarence Darrow would defend Sweet’s right to defend his hearth, and establish, “A man’s home is his castle.”
My grandmother told me the tale of how, in the early fifties, she had saved up the money she made as a domestic to buy a home on Clairmont and Woodward avenues. On the eve of the closing, the realtor came to her with the news that the white block club did not want her in the neighborhood. Grandmother refused to change her plans and sent him packing, but the realtor returned—the block club offered to pay her back the money for her down payment, plus some. Grandmother took the money and ran, to a neighborhood on the near east side.
She moved near Conant Gardens, a community developed on land that had been owned by an abolitionist named Shubael Conant, who refused to sell his land to developers who sold homes with the restrictive covenants that were common in Detroit. That community was one of the first strongholds of black middle-class home ownership. My grandmother chuckled at the end of her story, at the irony that by the time of her telling, thirty years later, Clairmont and Woodward was all black—the block club had obviously been unable to buy its way against the changing times.
Some whites, I’m sure, were not influenced by race baiting, but left the city solely to experience the new suburban living, or to be closer to the jobs that had moved across 8 Mile—though they knew that they were going to communities where blacks were not allowed. Some of my friends’ parents were surely anguished about the decision to move, sometimes leaving behind equity and often their own parents, who refused to go. Did my young white friends listen to their planning with conflicted feelings? Never mind; the torrent of change and fear that was driving white Detroiters could not be turned off.
And so, I say my friends were kidnapped; snatched away from their homes, often under cover of night or in rushed moves that split us apart for a lifetime. I watched Mary Martin fly as Peter Pan on TV, and it seemed my friends, too, had been lured to a Neverland. Did they cry when they were taken, missing their old friends? Did they think of what they’d left behind when they woke in homes with no deep porches or rich oaken banisters? On streets with no lush, ancient trees? Where it took a car—or two—to get anywhere, with lawns so new that grass had yet to grow? But my friends settled into their new neighborhoods, like children do, adapting and making friends, happy for the new. Glad to be in the modern houses on spread-out blocks, out of the brick behemoths, two-family flats, or frame houses of the old, dense Detroit streets they’d left behind.
One of my friends remembers the overwhelming fear that consumed his family’s 7 Mile and Wyoming household—a relatively new community even then—as they prepared to leave for Southfield. He confirms that, as in so many homes, there was a sense of panic as his family prepared not just to move but to escape, as if from some impending debacle. He recalls how, in the innocence of youth, he wondered about the reason for the terror; for it appeared to him that the black folks moving into his neighborhood were at the very least, in his child’s-eye view of social class, the most non-scary folks in the world: doctors, teachers, professionals. To him, they seemed to be of a clearly higher social standing than most of the folks who were desperately moving out.
It happened rapidly. An elder of my church remembers that he started school in his west-side neighborhood as only one of two black children in his kindergarten class; the rest were white, mostly Jewish. By the time he left elementary school, only two white children remained. The Jewish exodus (so to speak) was an integral engine of the movement of blacks across the west side, for they were willing to break the “restrictive covenants” in deeds that had prohibited homeowners from selling to blacks, and often Jews, too. Block by block, as whites moved out, Jewish homeowners replaced them and then blacks followed, with synagogues transformed into black churches.
After the 1967 riots (also known as the Rebellion, in which my own father’s record business was destroyed), the post-conflagration trauma was so great, and
