Michigan's Hiroshima--Black/White Distrust

I wrote yesterday about the chasm of distrust between whites and blacks in Detroit, in Washington and in most of the nation. I was telling the story of an experience I had in the 1960s when I tried to organize a community to keep it from being destroyed.
The immediate cause for this destruction was a white apartment management that had so much contempt for black Americans that they felt no need to continue to maintain apartment buildings blacks moved into. I was fighting to force them to.
I had come to rely on a wise old black preacher who was seated next to me when the door to our community meeting burst open and some drunken, angry white men advanced on me with clubs and ax handles, cursing me as a “dirty, commy, nigger loving Jew.”
The danger was real and serious. I didn’t know yet just how serious. Something happens to me when things get nasty—in a traffic situation or on the streets. It isn’t courage; I don’t know what it is. My insides go cold and I feel nothing. Time slows so much that it nearly stops.
But, I thought, I am not alone. I looked over at my “steering committee”, nearly all black. They were frozen in place, fear all over their faces. The old black pastor stood up suddenly, looked at the drunken deputy sheriff and pointed at me.
“If I had known,” he shouted, “what sort of a person this man was, I would NEVER have had anything to do with him.” It dawned on me that I was utterly alone. My black “allies”—even though they out-numbered the white bullies by a substantial number, and were mostly young and strong—were going to sit on their hands and watch me get pounded.
My eyes went back to the advancing drunk. He was half-way down the aisle, coming toward me, right where a cross aisle went from right to left across the auditorium. Somehow I felt moved to ask, “What are you so afraid of?”
His bully boy followers hawed and hooted. Him? Afraid? He’s not afraid of nothin’! The sheriff, however, came to a full stop. He turned to his left, ran down the cross aisle and out a side door. His bully boys stopped, looked confused, then turned and followed him out.
I felt the meeting had gone its full length. I dismissed them and they left (I would hope sheepishly). One of the younger, husky black men came up close to me and said, “We thought they were going to kill you.”
Well, duh, thanks for all your help—verbal and otherwise.
The next morning as I was going up the steps to my office one of the attendee’s slipped up side of me. He asked me to understand, “You’re a white man; you have options. You can live anywhere. We’re black—we don’t have options—so we couldn’t help you.”
I looked at him, “I thought that was the whole point of what we were doing. Helping keep the places you could live maintained and decent.” He gave me no answer. I took his brown arm, held it next to my white arm and said, “I guess we were born with our uniforms on.”
I moved out of the complex a few weeks later. Some of the black steering committee helped me load a U-Haul truck. I appreciated the help—but I do suspect they were just happy to be rid of me. I never saw any of them again.
Over the next years, the scales fell from my eyes. I made no further efforts to assist in areas where I would find myself alone and without backing. I expressed no surprise when a charming black hostess invited me to dinner and then went into a tirade about how all whites should be killed (I tend not to accept invitations to any more black homes—we smile and chat in public venues).
I learned in a hard and dangerous way that I am not trusted on their side of the fence (imaginary fence or real) and I learned the sad reality that I cannot trust them. Many of the million folk who have fled Detroit learned the same hard, unhappy lesson.
If somehow, someway, somebody doesn’t trust somebody, we’re going to have a lot more dead cities like Detroit—and it won’t be all the auto companies’ fault. God help us.
More later.

Detroit--Michigan's Hiroshima

I grew up in a Michigan where Detroit was the engine that pulled the rest of us along. Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second city, lived to make parts for the auto industry (which still included Studebaker, Packard, Hudson and Nash—as well as Pontiac, Oldsmobile and DeSoto.) If Detroit sneezed, West Michigan collapsed with pneumonia.
Today Grand Rapids looks fairly vibrant. Last week my wife and I took a stroll down Division Avenue—long a haunt of prostitutes and gangs. There were lots of couples and single women out walking. Construction cranes are all over downtown.
Detroit has eight supermarkets left within its 140 square miles—at least 40 square miles of which look like downtown Hiroshima right after the blast. Empty spaces, collapsing factories, streets that have no buildings on them.
A lot of this catastrophe can indeed be blamed on the collapsing auto market. GM’s market share is down from over 50% to around 20%; it has shed two out of five of its core brands. Chrysler looks a great deal like a dead company walking.
Ford is doing better but that is a very relative term for a company that once put a nation on wheels and created the largest auto market in the world. (China has that honor now.) If Huxley wrote “Brave New World” today, he would not refer to the “year of our Ford”.
The aerial photos of Detroit that were released online today were appalling. A chap named Jeremy Korzeniewski posted them on something called “autoblog”. If you didn’t get enough pictures of Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Hamburg, downtown Rotterdam or London after World War II, these are well worth looking at. These are taken right here.
It’s a city that died—without the help of an enemy air force. One of things they are thinking of doing there is clearing everything manmade out of whole sections of Detroit—and bringing back farming, for instance. After all, the city has lost nearly a million residents since 1950.
It would be much cheaper not to have to plow streets or maintain water lines and sewers that don’t service anyone any more. Fewer police and firemen would be needed—in numbers more in line with the present tax base.
But it isn’t just the car companies that did this. I remember walking through bustling business districts in the 1950s and turning off to walk through neat, prosperous urban homes to visit friends. No boarded up buildings, no thought of danger, no trash to kick my way through.
You wouldn’t do that today. Race relations played a big role. It wasn’t just bigoted whites fleeing. I was part of “white flight” out of a once lovely urban neighborhood in Grand Rapids. It was once chock full of college professors, business owners, MDs, dentists, teachers, executives and other professionals. If you are white, don’t walk those streets after dark today.
I’ve been mugged there twice, once in front of a 3,000 sq ft home, the second time in front of what was once one of the best men’s clothing stores in the city. I don’t recollect how many times a car pulled up along side of me or my wife and we were told, “You’re in the wrong neighborhood, white man, get out of here or we’ll kill you.”
When live ammunition started flying, our entire family moved out of the neighborhood my mother and then I grew up in. (Much “white flight” occurs for similar reasons.) The head of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission agreed with me that this was part of a deliberate strategy of terror to drive whites out.
Detroit went through the same thing. In schools, on sidewalks, with bricks through windows. And the tax base ran for its life. I watched a downtown mall die in Muskegon for similar reasons—mommies with money to spend would no longer go there.
If the hatred—not just of whites for blacks, but of blacks for whites—is not assuaged (and we can’t all wait for “them” to stop hating “us”—they may never), then we are going to have more and more Detroits and boarded up homes in places like Grand Rapids and Muskegon.
Mandela of South Africa, who spent nearly 30 years in a white prison for being black, understood this. We need a lot more people—on both sides of the color line—like him. Mr. Korzeniewski’s pictures are a good reminder.