As in South Africa, there is a need for atonement in Detroit and its suburbs. We need a restorative movement to heal what has happened here, as the working people of this town competed against themselves over the right to the good life. We have to share stories about the experiences of the past era. As we move forward in Detroit, there must be a mending of the human fabric that was rent into municipal pieces with the divisions of city and suburbs. Small, continual acts of reconciliation are called for here, as sections of the city rise again.
As the children and grandchildren of the Kidnapped Children make their way to the city, I believe that it is the responsibility of the rest of us—those who, like me, never left—to welcome them; to tell our new residents the real city narratives, to share the truths of what happened here from all sides. There are deep schisms that never should have been, that were orchestrated by self-serving interests; we must work to mend these wherever possible. Our new residents have a contagious earnestness, energy, and hopefulness, reminiscent of the movements of our past, and there’s a difference between their sincere efforts for change and the machinations of those who would manipulate the urban crisis to their own benefit, casting us aside like flotsam in the name of progress.
Yet it is likewise the charge of our new Detroiters to acknowledge and respect those already here—to actually see longtime residents, for we are not invisible. Our new residents must learn from our history and experience; they must work alongside our earlier residents and their children in Detroit’s renewal, for they are the bedrock of the redeveloped city and the nexus of its future. Let us figure out—this time—how to live together, so that more children and grandchildren of the Kidnapped Children can come home to live in the city, so that more of our children and grandchildren might also be part of a truly new Detroit. Young people come to be freed from their lives of suburban isolation and the crippling divisions of this region; they want to be a part of a new urban reality. It is true that some say that they have come to save Detroit, but I say, they come to Detroit to be saved.
AMANDA SHAFFER
Busing, a White Girl’s Tale
THE CUDELL/EDGEWATER NEIGHBORHOOD WHERE I grew up was a land of immigrant hyphens in the 1970s: Italian-American, Irish-American, Polish-American, and Hungarian-American, just to name a few. Folks who didn’t fit any of these “ethnic categories” had come to Cleveland from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky to find work, and still called those other places “goin’ back home.” At the time, everyone I knew was Catholic; the Indian kids were actually Lakota, and no one had heard of diversity. Black History Month had just been invented and Martin Luther King Jr. Day didn’t exist yet. It’s easy to forget how different life was. Once upon a time, it was all I knew.
In 1976, the Honorable Frank J. Battisti ruled that Cleveland schools were racially segregated. When the Cleveland public school system implemented desegregation three years later, I was in middle school.
Desegregation meant that black kids would be bused across town to white schools, white kids would be bused to the black schools, and the Puerto Rican kids from the near West Side went in both directions. Busing meant that, for the first time, there was going to be more than one black kid in my school.
I don’t remember the angry demonstrations and protests that reportedly took place, as my family weren’t really march-in-the-streets people. As friends reported how their parents were putting them in parochial or private schools, my mother stuck to her “we are all God’s children under the skin” party line. She was a woman of deep faith and little money. While all five of my siblings attended Catholic school, I had somehow persuaded my parents to allow me to attend public. When busing went into effect, my parents offered me Catholic high school and again I refused.
The first phase of busing reassigned some students for ninth grade, their last year of middle school. I wasn’t one of them, which meant I’d be bused for all of high school. In September 1979, I entered ninth grade at Wilbur Wright Junior High School with only half the white kids who had attended with me the year before. Very little voluntary mixing with new students took place; in true teen fashion, everyone stuck with their crowd. There were quite a few after-school fights and a lot of assemblies about getting along with each other. I made one black friend that year. She seemed to slide into our group seamlessly.
In the summer of 1980, I found out I would be attending John Hay High School in a part of town I had only visited once before, on a school field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art Armor Court. That summer, the majority of the kids I’d attended school with my entire life were being transferred to Griswold Academy, which everyone referred to as “Freedom Academy.” Apparently they weren’t opposed to attending an unaccredited school and taking a GED to graduate, as long as it was all-white.
I probably should have been more worried when school started, but I worked very hard to be blasé and super-cool about the whole thing. I felt sophisticated and tough. Ready for anything. I’m sure there was a fat manila envelope delivered in the weeks leading up to the first day of school full of instructions and supply lists and emergency medical forms, but all I remember is receiving the train tickets.
Attending John Hay meant taking the Rapid Transit train to school instead of a school bus. I had only taken the Rapid a handful of times to go downtown to Higbee’s with my older sister
