Detroit’s Birwood Wall

story.

INTRODUCTION

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

The morning of August 3, 1941, was oppressively hot. A construction crew working for a local real estate developer in northwest Detroit arrived in an assortment of commercial vehicles, including flatbed trucks with trailers carrying diesel excavators and other heavy-duty equipment. The first order of business was to dig a trench, beginning 120 feet from the sidewalk fronting Eight Mile Road. As the excavator moved south, its bucket biting into the rocky soil just deep enough to penetrate the frost line, a cement footing was poured.

Work on the trench continued along the utility easement located in the alleyway between Mendota and Birwood Streets. The morning passed quickly, and children from as far away as Wyoming, four streets away, were drawn to the sights and sounds of the heavy-duty construction equipment. Something big was happening before their eyes, but no one knew what to make of it; even parents of the children who approached the construction site in the early evening hours, long after the project manager had left for the day, gaped in wonderment.

The work on the wall would continue for several days as the excavator reached Norfolk, the first cross street intersecting both Mendota and Birwood. The trench work picked up again across Norfolk and moved southward to Chippewa. The final segment of footings began on the other side of Chippewa and extended all the way to 7½ Mile Road, which had been renamed Pembroke. Once all the footings had cured, the construction crew began erecting a wall, made of concrete blocks, six feet tall and one foot thick. The wall would run for half a mile, with interruptions for vehicular traffic at Norfolk and Chippewa.

Although no one on the Birwood Street side quite knew what to make of the wall at the time, its purpose would be revealed in the days following. The wall had been created as a barrier between the community east of the wall, predominantly African American, and a new real estate development being built for an exclusively white clientele just west of the wall.

The real estate developer had approached the FHA with plans to develop the property west of Birwood the previous year, only to have his application rejected because the proposed project bordered directly on a hazardous neighborhood, as defined by Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s City Survey Program. The FHA was reluctant to insure bank loans on such properties because racially mixed areas, the agency reasoned, were likely to stir confrontation, lead to violence and jeopardize the fiscal soundness of the investment. Undaunted, the developer approached the FHA a second time with a new proposal: he would construct a wall, six feet high and one foot thick, between the hazardous neighborhood east of Mendota and the proposed new development. The FHA agreed to the compromise.

A view of the Birwood Wall, August 1941, constructed to separate an existing settlement of African American homeowners and a new development of homes sold exclusively to whites. Library of Congress.

Behind the scenes, the Carver Progressive Club, founded and registered with the State of Michigan in 1940 as a neighborhood improvement organization, attempted to halt construction of the wall by making inquiries of its own and by confronting the developer. The club had set up a committee to investigate the purpose behind its construction and, hopefully, dissuade the developer from completing the project.

At a meeting called to discuss the committee findings, the committee spokesperson said, We talked with the man who is head of the developing company. He said the wall is on his property and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. He further said that he was forced to shut off the view of our dilapidated houses to increase his chances of selling those homes on Mendota. Those homes are FHA approved too.¹

And so the wall, built exactly as it was proposed to the FHA, was completed in August 1941. Members of the Carver Progressive Club were disheartened but not so discouraged to give up their fight to improve housing conditions within the community.

THE GREAT MIGRATION

Between 1910 and 1950, many roads led to Detroit. Migrants came from the East and from the South—especially the South—to claim jobs offered by zealous factory recruiters, posted daily on factory billboards and advertised in newspaper classifieds. Factories and suppliers were trying to compete with Henry Ford’s offer of five dollars a day for assemblers in his automobile factory and were having a hard time filling all the positions through much of the period before the beginning of the First World War and immediately after the Second World War.

This northern port city was already known to many African Americans in the South for the critical role it played in discreetly assisting runaway slaves escape across its namesake river to freedom in Canada. Migrating north through treacherous terrain, fugitive slaves sought to reach Midnight, the code name for Detroit, as the final stop on the Underground Railroad. Those who made it found respite at the Croghan Street Station, code name for the basement of the Second Baptist Church, one of the oldest black churches in the Midwest. Now, half a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks were arriving in Detroit to flee Jim Crow and find economic opportunity.

In April 1918 Cornelia Davis moved with her family from upstate New York to Detroit seeking a better way of life.² At nearly the same time, Antonio Rosa and Mary Gillem arrived from Piqua, Ohio, where they had been refused a marriage ceremony because they were an interracial couple.³ Both families managed to bypass the major settlement of working-class black families in Detroit’s crowded lower east side and settled instead on unincorporated land eight miles north of city center. Mary Gillem’s twin brothers, James and Luke, had settled there months before and were anxious for Antonio and Mary to join them. What Cornelia Davis, Antonio Rosa and Mary Gillem found upon their arrival was a sparsely populated community with few finished homes, some tar-papered houses, tents, farms and lean-to dwellings scattered among trees, muddy roads, ditches and paths. There were a few stores and restaurants on both sides of Eight Mile but not much else.

John Crews, on the other hand, knew nothing of the Eight Mile Road enclave when he arrived in Detroit the very same year as the Davis family and Antonio Rosa and Mary Gillem were settling in.⁴ For most working-class blacks who arrived in Detroit for work, the lower east side appeared to be the only residential option.

The Detroit of 1918 was both large and populous. Founded in 1701 as a French colony, Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit was mainly a trading post for the exchange of furs from Native Americans who had settled within the area and French settlers with goods supplied by traders from Montreal. Having changed hands with the British by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the settlement formally became known as Detroit. In 1806, 770 residents shared an area of just 0.33 square mile. Owing to substantial immigration from Eastern and Central Europe, annexation of adjacent land barely kept pace with the city’s growing population. By 1918, the city of Detroit would occupy 77.31 square miles of land to accommodate nearly 1 million residents, including more than 40,000 African Americans who had migrated north.⁵

Life for the Crews family would prove less of an adventure and more of a struggle to survive the vicissitudes of urban life. It was certainly a far cry from tenant farming in rural Barbour County, Alabama, or coal mining in Little Logan, West Virginia. But they had made these dramatic adjustments before, and they were prepared for the hardships that lie ahead.⁶

John had arrived first in Detroit with the intent of finding employment and obtaining accommodations for his family. He quickly secured employment with American Car and Foundry, which had previously manufactured train cars but now, during World War I, converted to war production. Jobs requiring physical labor were readily available, he quickly learned, but adequate accommodations were less easy to find. Finally, after many local inquiries and consultation with the Detroit Urban League, a new organization created to help people like himself, he had arranged, if only temporarily, to share the upstairs rear portion of a four-family flat with the Thisteltons at 1926 Russell Street on the lower east side of Detroit, an area known as Black Bottom. Very soon he was able to send Lizzie sufficient funds for two one-way train tickets to Detroit.

Second Baptist Church, on Detroit’s lower east side, functioned as a station on the Underground Railroad, providing sanctuary for fugitive slaves. Author’s collection.

State historical marker commemorating the site of the oldest African American church in the Midwest. Author’s collection.

Sculpture commemorating Detroit’s role in the Underground Railroad. Located in Hart Plaza on the Detroit River, the sculpture depicts six fugitive slaves ready to board a barge to freedom across the river in Windsor, Ontario. Author’s collection.

John was pleased that the train carrying his wife, Lizzie, and daughter, Burneice, was not due to arrive until after 6:00 pm, so he would not have to ask his employer to leave early. Employees at the foundry had already been criticized by management—with pointed reference to the Negro employees—for missing too many days of work, particularly after payday. The steady job meant too much to John to risk the wrath of his new boss.

Michigan Central Depot was a beehive of activity, with more than two hundred trains per day arriving and departing.⁷ Once he was able to locate the right track, John flagged down Lizzie and Burneice, who were so happy to be reunited. Outside the depot, along Michigan Avenue, the Crewses were able to catch a taxi that took them across Woodward, still without electrified traffic signals, into Detroit’s lower east side and onto Russell Street, a neighborhood teeming with crowded sidewalks and Jewish shops.

The new accommodations were cramped but workable when everyone was courteous and shared the work of keeping the flat neat and orderly. Adding to Lizzie’s frustration, however, was the constant reminder that nearly all the furniture in the flat belonged to the Thistletons and needed to be respected, with the clear implication that perhaps Burneice should spend more time in the bedroom and less time on the furniture in the parlor.

Realizing the strain the Thistletons were putting on his family, John began to look elsewhere in the neighborhood for more permanent and more spacious accommodations. On his way home from work one day, John noticed a coal truck being loaded with furniture just down the street from their flat. After inquiring from the truck driver of the whereabouts of the landlord, he was able to reach the rental agent and subsequently arranged to rent the entire downstairs flat at 2019 Russell Street.

THE CREWSES WERE HARDLY alone in their search for affordable housing within the city limits. Before the First World War, blacks in Detroit, numbering nearly 5,000, constituted less than 1 percent of the city’s total population, and these individuals were relatively easily absorbed within the area’s various ethnic neighborhoods. As the great migration of rural southerners took hold, competition for good jobs and desirable housing pitted white against black. By 1920, Detroit’s black population well surpassed 40,000 in a city of nearly 1 million, and white ethnic neighborhoods, composed increasingly of southern whites, were less inclined to welcome this large influx of southern blacks.⁸

Exterior view of Michigan Central Depot, September 10, 1980. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

Whatever difficulties they may have had in finding adequate housing in Detroit, African Americans had a double motive for abandoning the South. The plantation economy of the South—so dependent on sharecropping and tenant farming—offered little opportunity to advance beyond bare subsistence. Increased mechanization of farming, as well as the destructive impact of the boll weevil epidemic, created a labor oversupply, and what farm work was available now favored unemployed whites.

In addition to economics, blacks continued to suffer from ongoing forms of terrorism in the white supremacist Jim Crow South. Although the KKK had technically been disbanded in 1869, it merely went underground. Violence against persons and property continued as tools of intimidation and social control. Voting rights were routinely suppressed through the imposition of poll taxes and literacy tests. The court system offered little relief from injustice, particularly involving racial disputes. And the bifurcated southern educational system (separate but equal) left black children with overcrowded classrooms and a shortage of textbooks, desks, blackboards and basic supplies, as well as with overworked, underpaid and often poorly trained teachers.⁹

Child labor on tenant farm, Ellis County, Texas. Library of Congress.

Still, leaving the South was a difficult and courageous act, and many blacks who trekked north found work in large cities such as Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama, or Atlanta, Georgia, without ever having to cross the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, had relentless spring rains and melting mountain snow not burst the local dam, leading to a cave-in at the Little Eagle Mining Company, the Crewses may have built a life in Logan County, West Virginia, and never made it any farther north.

Tenant farm on cotton lands of Ellis County, Texas. Library of Congress.

Drinking fountain on the county courthouse lawn, Halifax, North Carolina. Library of Congress.

BLACK BOTTOM AND PARADISE VALLEY

Even on the near east side of Detroit, where the majority of African Americans were steered at their arrival, the accommodations John Crews found on Russell Street, at first and then again weeks later, was fortuitous. In the months and years to follow, the Crewses, like so many of their African American brethren who had escaped from southern oppression, would experience great difficulty finding housing that was neither substandard nor in need of major repair. Segregation had forced a growing number of black migrants to Detroit into the older, more dilapidated and overcrowded sections of the city, and city services like garbage collection and housing inspections were spotty. Add to this health concerns such as epidemics of tuberculosis, scarlet fever and influenza, which struck this community harder than any other area of the city. Despite these squalid conditions, blacks had few other choices and had also to bear the brunt of unscrupulous landlords who knew the demand was so great they could ignore requests for desperately needed repairs to these flats and apartments and still charge exorbitant rent.¹⁰

Inevitably, the Crewses’ landlord came calling not only to collect the monthly rent but to announce a ten-dollar increase beginning the following month. This was on top of the increase just the month before. Black renters like the Crewses had few options other than to search elsewhere for accommodations, which was becoming increasingly difficult; accept the rent increase, albeit begrudgingly; or sign a land contract with an owner or agent of the same or other property at a fixed interest for a specified period. On the surface, this third option seemed to have many benefits for the purchaser: the contract would eliminate the unreasonable