Nearly a half century ago, as Detroit licked its wounds following the violent uprisings of 1967, the national Kerner Commission bemoaned the sad state of segregation in America’s central cities and the housing woes endured by African Americans and the urban poor.
And few regions suffered worse from the separation of races than Detroit.
Just after the 1967 riots, there were still large parts of west and east Detroit that were nearly all white, the vestiges of housing patterns that were cemented by federal housing policy and local real estate rules. For decades blacks had been confined to small slices of the city, creating tension that was a precursor for the anger that erupted. In 1970, 8 Mile was a real racial boundary; Warren, which bordered Detroit along that iconic road, had more than 179,000 people in 1970 but just 132 blacks.
Forced by federal housing policy and local practices into slums and nearly all-black neighborhoods, African-Americans lived apart from the city’s white population, which limited their ability to enroll in better schools in white neighborhoods or seize job opportunities across the city or suburbs.
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Nearly 50 years later,
experts say not much has changed in metro Detroit, even as many black Detroiters have spread into communities across the region. The Detroit metro area remains by some measures the most segregated in the nation and housing advocates say many communities remain unfriendly to people of color.
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Metro Detroit is not alone in its segregation: the Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee and New York City metro areas all struggle with segregation nearly on the scale of Detroit. In fact, there are few examples nationwide where communities have successfully avoided racial polarization.
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