Racism in the USA: the wall that was built in Detroit 80 years ago to separate a white from a black neighborhood (and that still stands today)

When he was in high school in the 1960s, Robert B. invited Gerald Van Dusen to do chores at his home in the Eight Mile area in northwest Detroit.

At the end, the young people, about 16 years old, left the house to walk around the neighborhood and Van Dusen was surprised by the wall, almost a kilometer long, which had existed since 1941.

It was customary for visitors to pass a challenge: climb the wall and walk over it without falling.

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Van Dusen walked a section, tripped and slipped.

Already on the floor there was no doubt in his mind.

Why hadn’t the neighbors put up a cheap fence instead of that big wall?

His friend Robert told him that the “Birwood Wall” had been built to separate people like him from people like Van Dusen.

Robert was African-American and Van Dusen, who tells this story, is white.

***

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Detroit, in Michigan, had received a great flow of black population that escaped from the southern states of the United States, where whites applied the segregation allowed by the so-called “Jim Crow laws”.

Around the start of World War II, about 2,000 African-Americans a month came to Detroit to work in the manufacture of war material, among other tasks.

But it was difficult for them to find a place to live.

“Few areas in highly segregated Detroit were able to accommodate this tremendous flow,” says Van Dusen in “Detroit’s Birwood Wall: Hatred & Healing in the West Eight Mile Community” (“The Birwood Wall of Detroit: Hate and Heal in the West Eight Mile Community”), the book he published on the wall that Robert had taken him to.

At that time, in the 1940s, the US Federal Housing Administration (FHA) separated neighborhoods from cities according to the skin color of their residents, and an entity manual it prohibited the “occupation of the properties except for the race for which they were built”.

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The real estate authorities used a map with four colors: green (for the safest neighborhoods), blue, yellow and red (for the most “dangerous”).

“Red meant blacks lived there and in the red area you definitely couldn’t get [que las autoridades avalaran] a mortgage, “William Winkel, a member of the Detroit Historical Society, tells BBC World.

The FHA refused to guarantee mortgages or bank loans to buy houses or develop real estate projects in black neighborhoods or in places close to these areas.

The historian Richard Rothstein account in your book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America”(“The Color of the Law: A Forgotten Story of How Our Government Segregated the US”) that “the FHA believed that properties would likely be too risky to insure if they were in mixed neighborhoods or even white neighborhoods close to black neighborhoods that could have been integrated in the future. “

“In thousands of communities, FHA policy was the same, with very few exceptions: there was no mortgage guarantee for African Americans, or for whites who could take African American tenants, regardless of the applicant’s reliability,” adds Rothstein.

***

These and other policies were what a real estate developer found in 1941 when he wanted to build white family homes on the Eight Mile.

Since the area chosen for the project was largely black, the FHA refused to guarantee a loan to finance it.

“The developer had approached FHA the previous year only to have their application rejected, because the proposed project directly bordered on a ‘dangerous’ neighborhood, as defined by the City’s Loan Corporation’s City Assessment Program. for Homeowners, “says Van Dusen’s book.

“The FHA was reluctant to secure bank loans on those properties because the mixed areas, according to the agency, were prone to cause confrontation, lead to violence and jeopardize the fiscal stability of the investment,” the publication continues.

Given the situation, the developer had an idea to get the loan: build a wall to separate his project from black neighborhoods.

With this new proposal, FHA authorized the loan.

“The agency did not hide the racial basis of its decisions,” says historian Rothstein in his book. “The Color of Law” (The color of the law).

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A neighborhood organization “spoke to the man in charge of the real estate company” to try to stop construction of the wall, according to Van Dusen’s book.

But the man “said the wall was on his property” and that there was nothing the organization could do.

“He also said he was forced to block the view of our ramshackle houses to increase his chances of selling their houses,” the neighborhood board spokesman said at the time, according to the Van Dusen book.

Finally the developer built the wall in August 1941. LThe black population remained ofthe east side; and ofl west, the project for whites.

The wall ended up being almost a kilometer long, one and a half meters high and about 30 centimeters wide and stretched for three blocks.

This construction was the one that ended up being known as the “Birwood wall”, the same one that years later Robert and Van Dusen would play on.

***

But the segregation he sought to impose lasted a few years.

In 1948, the US Supreme Court abolished restrictions that included some property titles to prevent the sale of homes to black buyers.

From the early 1950s, blacks began to buy houses on both sides of the wall and the white population was leaving the area, recounts the book by Van Dusen.

When African-American Teresa Moon and her family came to live in this neighborhood in 1959, both sides of the Birwood Wall were already occupied by blacks.

“Many children played with the wall. A good friend lived on the other side. Instead of walking to turn the wall, one simply skipped it,” Moon tells BBC Mundo.

Neighbors, the woman recalls, also used to walk over the wall to see how far they could go without falling, just as Van Dusen had done that afternoon with Robert.

And so, “the people of the Eight Mile knew what the wall was built for and what it stood for,” says Moon.

“But there were no whites living here anymore, so it didn’t affect us, it didn’t affect how we lived,” he says.

***

Now the wall looks very different from when it was built and was just a gray concrete barrier.

In 2006, local artist Chazz Miller invited several painters to cover the Birwood wall with murals alluding to African-American history, and for about seven years, the building has become a tourist site.

“It is a mystery to me how it became a tourist attraction, people just started coming to see it. Tourists come from all over the world and most are white,” says Moon, who still lives on the Eight Mile.

“People are ashamed that this happened and some cry,” Moon tells BBC Mundo. But “I don’t care if they are sorry or ashamed if they do nothing to change the situation [de desigualdad]”.

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Moon assures that the wall does not bother his black neighbors and rather believes that he should stay there “so that [los blancos] see what they did. “

“It is something to remember, how much inequality, how much injustice, how people are treated differently by the color of their skin. It has to be on people’s faces all the time,” he says.

The Birwood wall “was one more form of racism that was unfortunately expected against African-Americans,” he tells BBC Mundo. Jeff Horner, a professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Wayne State University, Michigan.

“It was a wall designed to promote racism as a government policy,” he adds.

For Van Dusen, the wall “remains a monument – perhaps the most obvious one – of federal complicity with racial segregation in the 1940s.”

The population is now overwhelmingly black on both sides of the wall, and Detroit remains one of the most segregated cities in the U.S., according to data from the December 2018 Census Bureau Survey of American Communities, analyzed by the Brookings Institute.

Robert “got fed up” with Detroit, Van Dusen says, left town and has never heard from him again.

Van Dusen hopes to meet him again and share the book he wrote about a reality to which he had been blind until the moment Robert showed him the wall.

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