Monday's Opening Thought: May 17, 2021

This week's opening thought: At the age of 38 I just learned about the Detroit Wall, also known as the Birwood Wall, the Detroit Wailing Wall, the Eight Mile Wall, and Detroit's Berlin Wall. My mother, a Black woman in her 60s, told me about the Detroit Wall over the weekend after she had just learned about it herself.

The Detroit Wall was constructed in 1941 to physically separate Black and White homeowners on the sole basis of race. The primary concern of white Detroit residents was maintaining racial homogeneity, so local white politicians and the local officers of the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) interpreted the federal policies of the New Deal in their own way to engage in red-lining. They also created local policies to allow for the prevention of Black "infiltration" into white neighborhoods due in part to the HOLC members serving as federal appraisers. The HOLC identified areas that were "safe" for banks to issue loans to by giving each neighborhood a rating: A, B, C, or D. An "A", or "green" if you will, was practically guaranteed a loan; these areas were homogeneously white and affluent. In turn, a "D," or "red," neighborhood was occupied by Black residents who were systematically prevented from receiving a loan.

Due to redlining, the Eight Mile area of Detroit was extremely poor, predominantly Black, and viewed as a "blighted area". After World War II, a developer saw the area as a prime location to construct an all-white subdivision. HOLC appraisers viewed this as a risky proposition. Why? Because of how close it was to the "red" neighborhood occupied by Black people, of course. Because of this, FHA was unable and unwilling to lend out loans for home construction. But a compromise was made: home loans and mortgage guarantees for white folx in exchange for the construction of a foot-thick, six-foot-high wall, running for a half-mile on the property line separating the Black and white neighborhoods.

Contractors and realtors were able to attract whites to this area because the wall would "protect them". It served to keep property values high on the white side of the wall while keeping the neighborhoods racially segregated. The area is no longer segregated (both sides of the wall are predominantly Black now) but the wall still exists.

Why am I talking about the Detroit Wall?

It’s a lost and forgotten piece of the history of redlining and segregation in the United States.

It’s also a symbol of how we as a nation refuse to grapple with and learn about the truths of the pain whiteness has caused.

I grew up in Detroit. I lived on Eight Mile for seven years. I’ve never heard of the Detroit Wall or even seen the wall. None of my teachers in elementary, middle, or high school talked about the wall during U.S. History classes. We didn’t talk about it during Black History Month. There were no field trips to the wall with my fellow Black students, although there were plenty of field trips to the Henry Ford Museum. The Detroit Wall never came up.

I lived right next to this symbol of segregation in the United States until the age of 22 and I didn’t hear about its existence until I was well into my 30s. The fact that this new nugget of understanding isn’t a one-off situation for myself and many melanated people in this country isn’t shocking…but it is sad.

It’s 2021 and I learn something new about the history of racism and white supremacy at least once a week. And I get the feeling that I will be learning a new painful segment of untold/censored/silenced U.S. history at least once a week for the rest of my days. I’m a lifelong learner but constantly finding a new layer of generational trauma that our society and national culture has swept under the rug is honestly a traumatic experience unto itself.

It’s time for whiteness and our national culture to get comfortable with addressing the skeletons in the closet. I don’t want the next generation, my nieces and nephews, to have to continue the tradition of nonconsensual impromptu racist history classes at least once a week that my generation and generations before mine have and had to endure.

Learning while melanated should be growth and evolution, not pain and trauma.