by Anne Trubek
I wonder if, sometimes, they suspect that decision itself, multiplied across Detroit, was at least part of the cause of all the mess here now. That maybe the mass flight, the leaving of property all over town, the years of being egged on by whispers and realtors to cross 8 Mile, was all part of a nasty, self-destructive Monopoly game involving real properties and real lives. I wonder what might have happened in Detroit if there had never been this flight—if whites had held on and resisted the racial manipulation; if blacks had been able to push back the plague of unemployment, drugs, and crime; if we had been able to live in Detroit, all at one time.
It is hard for many black Detroiters to comprehend the sense of belonging, or even entitlement, that many whites feel toward Detroit, even decades and states removed from living within the city boundaries. There are those—black and white—who have never lived in Detroit proper, or even in Michigan, who gaze (through Google Maps) at old family homesteads, and vicariously traverse old family blocks from afar. They regard Detroit as their city. And I believe that the sense of being part of Detroit proper—despite living well outside of its borders for generations—is rooted in that mass evacuation. Like the movement of blacks across the city after the destruction of Black Bottom—a predominantly black neighborhood razed in the early sixties in the name of urban renewal—this was an unprecedented transfer of community; and suburban parents did their best, as they understood it, to build better lives. But fear of a black city made my friends Detroiters in exile.
Folks ask the question, Will Detroit come back? Well, Detroit never left—but three generations did. Today, regardless of the city’s efforts at redevelopment, most know that they will never again live in the city of their affection. Most of the old neighborhoods are much too far from livability for them, and the city’s core and urban lifestyle holds no appeal for those accustomed to suburban sprawl. But more and more of the children and grandchildren of the Kidnapped Children are finding their way home. Yet despite ghost-town metaphors, “blank slate” pronouncements, and prairie-land descriptions of Detroit, they find the city already occupied, and these strangers in a strange yet familiar land must learn to share it with those who held on.
As the quality of life in the outer ring of the city declined, forcing more blacks to look outward to escape crime and to seek neighborhood stability, property values fell in the near suburbs—because of the age of those communities and their housing stock, because of the mortgage crisis, because of block-busting that is still alive and well (though sometimes with more subtle practices than before). As many of the suburbs become less “exclusive” and downtown living grows, owners who held on to core city properties during the crash of their values watch their fortunes rise, after contributing to the city’s vistas of decay and destruction. For decades, they held on to ravaged, abandoned structures as they waited for a time of profitability, contributing to much of the urban devastation for which black city dwellers have been reviled.
Younger generations of whites from the suburbs, who don’t have their forebears’ fear of the city, are moving in the opposite direction, proudly proclaiming their Detroit provenance and reveling in their new urban life. Some of them re-create suburban segregation in the heart of the city; they want life in Detroit—without Detroiters. But many more look to the city as the most exciting place in the world to live in diversity. They are led by the artists’ community, the creative seraphim of redevelopment; they are the coal-mine canaries of our scorched and burned land. This community of artists has been waiting and creating for such a time as this, for Detroit has always been a city of artists. Our extreme creative impulse in Detroit is now unfettered, no longer consumed by the past that propelled, yet devoured, so much of the city’s creative energy. The artists are side by side with those who’ve held on for decades, trying to make “a way out of no way.”
As in South Africa, there is a need for atonement in Detroit and its suburbs. We need a restorative movement to heal what has happened here, as the working people of this town competed against themselves over the right to the good life. We have to share stories about the experiences of the past era. As we move forward in Detroit, there must be a mending of the human fabric that was rent into municipal pieces with the divisions of city and suburbs. Small, continual acts of reconciliation are called for here, as sections of the city rise again.
As the children and grandchildren of the Kidnapped Children make their way to the city, I believe that it is the responsibility of the rest of us—those who, like me, never left—to welcome them; to tell our new residents the real city narratives, to share the truths of what happened here from all sides. There are deep schisms that never should have been, that were orchestrated by self-serving interests; we must work to mend these wherever possible. Our new residents have a contagious earnestness, energy, and hopefulness, reminiscent of the movements of our past, and there’s a difference between their sincere efforts for change and the machinations of those who would manipulate the urban crisis to their own benefit, casting us aside like flotsam in the name of progress.
Yet it is likewise the charge of our new Detroiters to acknowledge and respect those already here—to actually see longtime residents, for we are not invisible. Our new residents must learn from our history and experience; they must work alongside our earlier residents and their children in Detroit’s renewal, for they are the bedrock of the redeveloped city and the nexus of its future. Let us figure out—this time—how to live together, so that more children and grandchildren of the Kidnapped Children can come home to live in the city, so that more of our children and grandchildren might also be part of a truly new Detroit. Young people come to be freed from their lives of suburban isolation and the crippling divisions of this region; they want to be a part of a new urban reality. It is true that some say that they have come to save Detroit, but I say, they come to Detroit to be saved.
AMANDA SHAFFER
Busing, a White Girl’s Tale
THE CUDELL/EDGEWATER NEIGHBORHOOD WHERE I grew up was a land of immigrant hyphens in the 1970s: Italian-American, Irish-American, Polish-American, and Hungarian-American, just to name a few. Folks who didn’t fit any of these “ethnic categories” had come to Cleveland from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky to find work, and still called those other places “goin’ back home.” At the time, everyone I knew was Catholic; the Indian kids were actually Lakota, and no one had heard of diversity. Black History Month had just been invented and Martin Luther King Jr. Day didn’t exist yet. It’s easy to forget how different life was. Once upon a time, it was all I knew.
In 1976, the Honorable Frank J. Battisti ruled that Cleveland schools were racially segregated. When the Cleveland public school system implemented desegregation three years later, I was in middle school.
Desegregation meant that black kids would be bused across town to white schools, white kids would be bused to the black schools, and the Puerto Rican kids from the near West Side went in both directions. Busing meant that, for the first time, there was going to be more than one black kid in my school.
I don’t remember the angry demonstrations and protests that reportedly took place, as my family weren’t really march-in-the-streets people. As friends reported how their parents were putting them in parochial or private schools, my mother stuck to her “we are all God’s children under the skin” party line. She was a woman of deep faith and little money. While all five of my siblings attended Catholic school, I had somehow persuaded my parents to allow me to attend public. When busing went into effect, my parents offered me Catholic high school and again I refused.
The first phase of busing reassigned some students for ninth grade, their last year of middle school. I wasn’t one of them, which meant I’d be bused for all of high school. In September 1979, I entered ninth grade at Wilbur Wright Junior High School with only half the white kids who had attended with me the year before. Very little voluntary mixing with new students took place; in true teen fashion, everyone stuck w
ith their crowd. There were quite a few after-school fights and a lot of assemblies about getting along with each other. I made one black friend that year. She seemed to slide into our group seamlessly.
In the summer of 1980, I found out I would be attending John Hay High School in a part of town I had only visited once before, on a school field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art Armor Court. That summer, the majority of the kids I’d attended school with my entire life were being transferred to Griswold Academy, which everyone referred to as “Freedom Academy.” Apparently they weren’t opposed to attending an unaccredited school and taking a GED to graduate, as long as it was all-white.
I probably should have been more worried when school started, but I worked very hard to be blasé and super-cool about the whole thing. I felt sophisticated and tough. Ready for anything. I’m sure there was a fat manila envelope delivered in the weeks leading up to the first day of school full of instructions and supply lists and emergency medical forms, but all I remember is receiving the train tickets.
Attending John Hay meant taking the Rapid Transit train to school instead of a school bus. I had only taken the Rapid a handful of times to go downtown to Higbee’s with my older sister to shop and get a Frosty. Now getting to school every day would mean a walk to the Rapid, a wait for the Rapid, a ride on the Rapid, and then a walk to the school from the University Circle station. This required careful coordination in the morning so no one in our friend group would have to ride alone. Because we were too cool to ride the shuttle from the Rapid to Hay, a daily highlight was crossing the four lanes of rush-hour traffic on Carnegie in the morning. While everyone else made a mad dash, my girlfriend and I would stroll, slowly and belligerently, giving drivers attitude as we crossed against the light.
At first glance, compared to West Tech High School, which held close to four thousand students, John Hay was small and shabby. And it came with a security guard at the door who checked our IDs every morning. The ID-checking lasted for a few weeks at the beginning of each year and then was abandoned with a laxness that would be unheard-of now in our post-Columbine world. Then again, it was probably easy to remember twenty white kids in a class of 144.
Inside the classroom, I was back in the majority, as the 13 percent of white students translated into 87 percent of the class through the magic of honors courses. The sorting started early in my school career. In second grade, I was classified into what was called “Major Works,” and promptly started learning French. My friends and I, with the brutality of the young, broke it down to “smart kids” and “dumb kids.” There must have been Major Works in the all-black schools, too, but all through high school my honors classes had a majority of white students.
The only class without an honors section was tenth-grade Black Literature, one of the most miserable experiences I can remember in twelve years of schooling. Not because of the content, which at that time was new to me, but because the teacher usually taught the “dumb kids” so the class read aloud from the book one paragraph at a time. Being a “smart kid” meant I’d never experienced such a thing, nor did I know that some kids read so poorly they counted ahead on the paragraphs so they could practice before their turn. Being as snotty and dismissive as I could get away with, I arrogantly propped novels inside my book during this class, reading anything to distance myself from the reality. This class may be what folks imagine Cleveland public schools are like, but, aside from it, my reality was AP English, honors French, and chemistry. I got a fine education, graduated from college, earned a master’s degree, and am now a contributing member of society like most of the rest of the class of 1983, who became lawyers, teachers, business owners, and professional athletes.
The real education happened outside of class.
Growing up in a working-class, gendered household in the 1970s turned me into a feminist before I knew what to call it. The concept of “women’s work” and “men’s work” was just the tip of the patriarchal iceberg. As a baby feminist, I was highly attuned to sexist behavior and prejudice against women. What I had never paid any attention to was what it was like to be a minority. I had never noticed that my father called black kids “pickaninnies” or that my brother called Puerto Ricans “spics.” I didn’t see other kinds of oppression and discrimination. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
The first week of school I had trouble with a couple of black girls giving me a hard time, making comments under their breath and sucking their teeth at me. I don’t remember what started it or brought it to a head, but back then I wasn’t capable of backing down from a confrontation. Bumping turned into shoving, which turned into books slammed to the floor and then stepping up. Thankfully, the assistant principal magically appeared in that way that they do, shut it down, and pulled me into his office. He listened to my outrage at the unjust and unprovoked attack, and kindly explained to me what had happened. The hard stare and tough attitude that I thought said “Don’t challenge me” was interpreted here as “I challenge you.”
As ignorant as it sounds to be sixteen and not recognize that, this was the first time I glimpsed another culture. At sports events, I became one of two white girls on the black side of the bleachers and suddenly could see the unease, wariness, and race consciousness of the all-white teams.
The shifts in my perspective were slow but steady, and shaped who I am today. Walking around in my white skin, even female white skin, gave me the privilege not to see, not to hear, if I didn’t want to. Now that I knew some black people, I could hear comments like “Wipe that pop can; you don’t know if a black person touched it” for what they were—casual, deeply ingrained prejudice. I started to feel ashamed and embarrassed that my family and neighbors had these racist beliefs. And of myself, that I had never questioned them.
An undisputed benefit of court-ordered busing, among other things, was being given the opportunity to experience what it is like to be in the minority. Just a taste. I would never claim, because of this or any other experience, to know what it’s like to be a minority in Cleveland or anywhere else. I will never live in brown skin and cannot know. What I was given, and what I am grateful for, was the chance to understand how narrow and limited my worldview was before I spent three years crossing the mighty Cuyahoga to attend school.
If I hadn’t been bused, would it have bothered me when my brother sat with a shotgun on his front porch to “keep the black kids off the grass”? An equal-opportunity hater, he hated Jews, spics, niggers, towel heads, and gooks and never missed an opportunity to share his opinions. Busing meant groups of black kids got off the Rapid every day and had to walk past his house to get to West Tech. Seeing as he worked third shift at the factory, 8:00 A.M. would find him drinking beer on his front porch with his shotgun across his knees to stare down the black kids.
I never witnessed him with his gun, but I remember when he told me how he was “dealing with busing.” He was so gleeful that the kids looked scared. I left his house that day feeling sick. I don’t think I really believed that racism was “that big of a deal” before that day. It had seemed abstract, harmless, and deep in the past.
Not everyone had a good experience, even the other kids in our class. In fact, seventeen of the twenty white kids held their own after-prom over on the West Side. The rest of us danced at Vel’s to “Atomic Dog.”
Many people still blame busing for “ruining” the Cleveland schools, but for me the experience of getting out of my neighborhood was life-altering and incredibly positive. I consider myself lucky. Being bused is the reason I live in a racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhood and send my child to public school. It’s why I attempt to strive for equity and racial and social justice in any work I do. I am grateful, not to be white in America, but to know that I am.
JEFF Z. KLEIN
North Park, With and Without Hate
WALK DOWN HERTEL AVENUE AND see the mix of cultures: hipster cafés and old Italian red-sauce restaurants and halal butchers and louche interior design stores
and pubs where young Americans have decided they’re huge Barça fans. Maybe even a rainbow flag here and there. Walk down the side streets. The houses are filled with young families, different cultures—middle class, not rich, not poor—fresh ground coffee, organic groceries, craft beer.
Funny, though—it still looks exactly the way it did half a century ago. All the two-story houses. The attics topped by the same triangular or square roofs. The little backyards. The narrow driveways just wide enough to accommodate a Model T (from another fifty years before, when the houses were built). The five- or six-stair stoops. The trees shading the street, almost as tall and domelike as the elms whose arching boughs formed vast, block-long ceilings, like a great green cathedral. Late at night, the train horns, blaring distant and lonely from the raised embankments on either margin of the neighborhood.
The winter. Walking to school on the snowbanks. Bombing cars with snowballs. Grabbing the rear bumper of some unsuspecting Dodge and pogeying down the snow-covered street.
Jew.
Buffalo, the United States, the world, was different. Pinched. Small. Mean. North Park was made up entirely of white people—Catholics, Protestants, and a significant minority of Jews; no one else—and that made it just about the most diverse neighborhood in the city. There were two cuisines: regular food (meat and potatoes) and Italian food (spaghetti and pizza). We had a third, kosher. Separate sets of dishes and silverware, no mixing of milk and meat, no pork, no ham, no bacon.