Today, the medical and legal communities in Detroit are not what they used to be. They are not as tight-knit as they were when segregation kept all the doctors at DeWitt Burton’s all-black Mercy Hospital or all the attorneys in the Tobin Building on Broadway. Now, some are in white firms and some are in black firms. Some are downtown and some are in the suburbs. In addition, they no longer form the wealthiest black cliques that once ruled the community.
“Black-doctor money hardly reaches my radar screen,” says a black resident who owns a firm that supplies products to the auto industry. “People like me who own businesses have turned this town upside down because we make real money and can afford to not only to move into the top suburban neighborhoods, but also to outspend the white neighbors.”
Like this self-admitted millionaire manufacturer, there is a growing group of wealthy black entrepreneurs who have somewhat eclipsed other professionals because they own businesses tied to the city’s primary industry. In fact, although the auto business had been closed to blacks in its earliest years—with occasional jobs being handed out through an odd patronage system that involved Henry Ford and William Peck, a high-profile black minister—the most successful black businesses today serve the auto industry as vendors and suppliers. “Henry Ford was never enamored of black people, but he was friends with Reverend Peck,” explains Michael Goodin, “and when Ford visited Peck’s church, the reverend would sometimes point out some lone person in the pews who had lost his job, and he’d ask Ford to give him a job in the assembly plant. It was a condescending and insulting approach, but that’s how those first jobs were received by blacks.”
Today’s black Detroit business leaders are now taken quite seriously because of their ties to the industry and their important role in the auto fields. In fact, among the twelve largest black-owned business in the Detroit area, nine of them produce components or services for the auto manufacturing industries. Former Detroit Pistons basketball player Dave Bing owns and runs a $190 million empire that includes a steel processing company, a firm that manufactures and assembles automobile bumpers, and another that manufactures foam for cars and trucks. Founded in 1980, the Bing Group employs over six hundred people and includes Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler among its clients.
Also in the city is Mel Farr, who owns a $600 million auto dealership empire that sells Ford, Toyota, General Motors, Volkswagen, Hyundai, and Mazda cars. Founded in 1975, the company employs over eight hundred workers and forms the largest black-owned dealership in the United States.
Although he now spends most of his time in New York, former Ben and Jerry’s chairman Bob Holland has owned Detroit-area auto manufacturing and beverage distribution businesses for many years. Before serving as chairman of Spelman College’s board of trustees, he was a partner at the international consulting firm McKinsey and Company.
For the last thirty years, Don Barden has been in the media, cable television, and real estate businesses, and he now owns five radio stations as well as a computer-based education service that is used in over five hundred school districts. His wife, Bella, is an attorney who graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, sits on the board of the Museum of African American History, and runs their real estate company, Waycor Development. Among other structures, Waycor has built apartments, a medical clinic, and a detention center. One of its recent projects was a joint venture with New York developer Donald Trump to develop a riverboat casino business on Lake Michigan in Gary, Indiana, which serves over eight thousand people a day.
“But people around here started getting a little jealous of Barden’s power and money,” says a former Michigan Chronicle reporter, “and they kept him from opening a casino within Detroit. They gave the green light for white casino operators like MGM, but not to him.” Although Barden was blocked from establishing the first black-controlled casino in Detroit, he remains an influential player in both black and white circles.
Other prominent Detroit blacks in business today include William Pickard, chairman of Regal Plastics, a $40 million injection molding company; Donald Davis, head of the $100 million First Independence National Bank; Jon Barfield, a trustee of Princeton University and head of $62 million Bartech, an employment staffing company; and Donald Coleman, owner of Don Coleman Advertising, a $110 million advertising agency with one hundred employees based in Southfield. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Coleman serves General Mills, Kmart, Ameritech, and Shell Oil among his client base.
Just as the wealthy have followed a certain path from one group of professions to another, they have carved a specific path through certain residential neighborhoods as they have become wealthier.
“When I first arrived in Detroit, the two top addresses for well-to-do blacks were on Chicago Boulevard and Boston Boulevard,” says Robin Hamilton Sowell, who moved to Detroit in the 1940s and now lives in nearby Southfield with her husband, Myzell, an attorney who was born in the city. “Most of those large homes had originally been occupied by whites,” explains Sowell, “but as neighborhoods ended their restrictions on selling to us, many of the black physicians and attorneys moved onto those two streets.” Over time, as blacks became even more affluent, they moved west on those same two streets, into even more prestigious neighborhoods. So important were these two streets to a black person’s status that when the society columnists of the Michigan Chronicle reported on black elite gatherings or family celebrations, they would regularly list the specific Chicago Boulevard or Boston Boulevard address of the host in the newspaper.
A member of the Detroit Links remembers the parties that socialites Andrew and Beatrice Fleming Jackson used to host forty years ago in their home on Boston Boulevard. “We didn’t show up at their Christmas parties if we weren’t driving a Cadillac or wearing a mink. That was our version of Park Avenue, and we were unapologetic about the display of excess back then.”
The movement of many of the affluent blacks can be tracked by observing where middle-class Jews had moved. “At first, most blacks were in the southeast,” says an attorney who lives in the Rosedale Park area. “Then we moved into Jewish homes that were vacated in the southwest. Then, as the Jews started moving farther north on the west side, we followed them—always just a few years behind.”
But even as affluent blacks spread out farther away from their core neighborhood, which began in the Black Bottom at Hastings, they inevitably came back to shop, eat, and socialize at black-owned establishments in the old neighborhood. What put an end to the bustling black neighborhood along Hastings was the construction of Interstate 75—the Walter P. Chrysler Freeway—which was built right through Hastings and all of its commercial establishments in the 1960s. Just as the city planners had done in other cities like Atlanta and Houston, Detroit officials dealt a lethal blow to a thriving black neighborhood when they razed businesses and constructed the four-lane highway.
Another major change to the black neighborhoods and the few upscale integrated sections occurred in 1967 after the police raided a black social club known as the Blind Pig. What began as a police raid and altercation between white officers and black patrons soon turned into the now-famous Detroit riot that led to mass burning and looting of property throughout the downtown area. The 1967 riot created dramatic consequences for whites and affluent blacks. Black middle-class families had already entered the mostly Jewish west-side Russell Woods neighborhoods in the early 1960s. But now whites who were, at first, a little uncomfortable about living near blacks were downright scared of living near blacks of any class. Whites fled to the suburbs, and the liberal, affluent whites ran to the northwestern edge of the city. As these whites left their homes—many of them still carrying restrictive covenants in their deeds—the residents sold them to blacks, who were now finally permitted to live in the best city neighborhoods. Prior to that time, most of the wealthiest of blacks were living in completely segregated black neighborhoods.
Although many members of the black elite stayed within the city limits
after the riot, they moved farther northwest, completely populating Russell Woods and venturing into the more upscale Rosedale Park.
And just as the black elite preferred certain new neighborhoods, they favored certain schools for their kids. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the preferred public schools were Mumford High and Cass Technical High School downtown. “I entered MacKenzie High in 1963,” says Michael Goodin, who grew up in Russell Woods, “but there was already a caste system that said that the high-yellow, penny loafer and khaki-wearing black doctors’ kids were at Mumford, while the jitterbug-Temptations-listening and conk-wearing blacks were at my school.” Some people called the Mumford blacks “e-lights” because they made up the light-skinned elite.
My wife, who never attended the city’s public schools, recalls that by the time she reached high school in the late 1970s, Mumford had been displaced by Detroit Country Day and Kingswood-Cranbrook, two private schools outside the city, as the preferred school for old-guard children. “Some Detroiters, though,” explains her cousin, Leslie Hosey Robinson, “try to find good schools within the city limits—places like University of Detroit High School, Renaissance, or Gesu—because they are usually more racially diverse.” Robinson, a psychologist who attended the Gesu School in the early 1970s before going on to Mount Holyoke College, recalls that her father, a Detroit dentist, saw great value in sending her brothers and sisters to good integrated private schools within the city limits.
Damon Keith’s daughter, Debbie, recalls that by the mid-1970s it was rather common for black Detroiters to attend private schools outside the city. “I was living in Detroit, but I went to Kingswood-Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills,” says the media executive, who returned to her hometown after graduating from Princeton University. Like the pricey Kingswood-Cranbrook, Country Day and Mercy are also outside the city boundaries; the Friends School is one of the few remaining prestigious private schools within Detroit. Palmer Woods resident Deborah Copeland says that the emphasis today is definitely on private schools. “When I was in high school in the sixties, the popular schools were Central, Mumford, and Cass, but I would say that two-thirds of my children’s acquaintances are in private or parochial schools.”
The even more prestigious neighborhoods of Greenacres, Sherwood Forest, and Palmer Woods opened up for the black elite slightly later, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
“There is no doubt that the greatest concentration of Detroit’s black elite today live in either Sherwood Forest or Palmer Woods,” explains a real estate broker who lived in northwest Detroit before moving to Birmingham, an upper-middle-class suburb just outside of the city’s boundaries. “While the three neighborhoods are almost indistinguishable,” says the broker, “Palmer Woods is slightly more prestigious, with larger homes.” Laid out on winding roads with names like Canterbury, Strathcona, Lincolnshire, and Gloucester, the 1920s Tudor and colonial houses are built on spacious lots. The exclusive northwest neighborhoods are buffered by the greenery of Palmer Park, Detroit Country Club, Evergreen Cemetery, and the Palmer Park Golf Course. The most famous street in the area is Fairway, which runs along the Detroit Country Club and includes the home of millionaire entrepreneur Don Barden. Located on the northern edge of the city limits, like the gold-coast upper Sixteenth Street neighborhood in Washington, these streets still have white residents who form the more liberal white coalition still living in the city.
Psychologist Leslie Hosey Robinson lives in a Greenacres colonial with her husband and children and is an unabashed supporter of the city’s residential areas. “Many people don’t realize how many choices there are when they are looking for nice neighborhoods within the city limits,” says Robinson.
In addition to the northwestern section of the city, there is increasing interest among the black elite in east-side and downtown locations. “There are many professionals who want to live closer to downtown, so they move to Indian Village, the Marina, Lafayette Towers, or Harbortown,” says Robinson.
Indian Village, a neighborhood of large older homes built in the early 1900s, does have some black residents. But it is one of the mostly white city neighborhoods that help to make up the city’s population of 250,000 whites.
When well-to-do blacks first had the opportunity to move beyond the city limits in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the choices were initially quite slim, but they most often settled on Southfield, a suburb that included the popular Northland Mall and that borders the northwest edge of Detroit. Similar to the New York suburb of New Rochelle in its ethnic and economic makeup, it had a relatively substantial, well-educated Jewish population that was more racially open minded than the other nearby suburban communities. In fact, today Southfield, Michigan, is often listed as among the more welcoming towns in the United States for professional blacks. Sociology professor Andrew Beveridge, of Queens College in New York, conducted a study in the early 1990s which identified cities where the black median household income exceeded the income of white households in the same area. With their large number of doctor- and lawyer-headed black families, Southfield blacks earned, on average, 20 percent more than their fellow white residents.
The downriver working-class white towns, or the “bubba suburbs”—as many members of the black elite refer to communities like Lincoln Park, Allen Park, Melvindale, and Trenton—have never been desirable for black professionals. The other middle-class and upper-class suburbs each have their own interesting story and thus reveal why Southfield had for so many years remained a favorite of blacks with money.
Dearborn, the home of Ford Motor Company, for example, is a much more welcoming place today, but throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, the city had a mayor, Orville Hubbard, who very openly expressed his views about keeping Dearborn a white community—no matter how many blacks moved into neighboring Detroit. As he pointed out in the late 1960s, “I don’t believe in integration. It leads to socializing with whites, intermarriage, and then mongrelization.” So strong was the antiblack sentiment that had carried over from the Dearborn mayor’s thirty-six years of vitriol that blacks were even uneasy about shopping in the town’s Fairlane Mall when it opened in the late 1970s. Today, the town is far more accepting of black residents.
The other two suburbs that would naturally have attracted the interest of affluent blacks are Bloomfield Hills and the Grosse Pointes. Bloomfield Hills, a community that is due north of Detroit, is considered to be the more progressive of the two. A very affluent suburb, it is also quite far from downtown and is considered a haven for “new money” as compared with the more aristocratic and Waspy Grosse Pointe. Bloomfield Hills received an ugly bit of national publicity in the early 1990s when the Bloomfield Hills Country Club refused to accept a black applicant who also happened to be the highest-ranking African American in the auto industry. The act was so blatant and insulting to Roy Roberts, then head of the General Motors Truck Division, that it drew public criticism from Jack Smith, chairman of General Motors. Smith and others dropped their memberships and denounced the blatant racism of the club’s decision.
Although Grosse Pointe is much closer to Detroit—bordering the city on its eastern edge—it is a community that was even more aggressive about keeping blacks out of its neighborhoods. It is often referred to as “the Pointes,” and there are actually five communities—Grosse Pointe, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Shores, Grosse Pointe Woods, and Grosse Pointe Park—that make up the twenty-square-mile suburban area. If Bloomfield Hills is “new money,” then Grosse Pointe is clearly “old money.” This is where the automotive barons built their estates along Lake St. Clair during the early 1920s. There are many other old and new million-dollar homes throughout Grosse Pointe.
“There are a lot of middle-class white families scamming over there in Grosse Pointe Park,” explained a Bloomfield Hills mother who tells of her difficulty in getting a broker to even drive her and her husband through parts of Grosse Pointe in the early 1970s. “When I saw the brokers refuse to even show me the middle-cla
ss housing in Grosse Pointe Park—homes that were well below my intended price range—I realized that the Pointes were very different from Southfield and Bloomfield.” As the woman coasts through the tree-lined streets in her car, it becomes obvious that there is a pecking order among the five sections of Grosse Pointe. They are not all as uniformly elite as one would expect. “Yes, they’ve got multimillion dollar homes in the Shores, the Farms, and the Woods,” says the woman with annoyance in her voice as she drives down a street named Kercheval, “but it just burns me up that they wouldn’t even let me bid on this stuff in the Park! And not that I would ever live in a house as small as those.”
Given Grosse Point’s close proximity to the city, many of its realtors had reportedly established a sophisticated method by which they kept out the nearby Jews, blacks, and other minorities for many years. This was a well-known point system for scoring potential buyers by evaluating their ethnicity, skin complexion, accent, and other characteristics. This formal system, which continued until the 1960s, is just a hint at this community’s determination to keep Detroit’s black population outside. Even the public parks are closely restricted: you must be a resident with a permit.
While many of these suburbs have a handful of black families, there are white residents who remember how Detroit was transformed from a 70 percent white population in the early 1960s into a 70 percent black population by the 1980s. Some worry that suburban demographics could change too.
Many city dwellers who did not escape to the suburbs did choose to escape to a resort in northern Michigan called Idlewild. In response to the black elite’s inability to vacation at white resort areas, many well-to-do Detroit blacks helped to establish this midwestern version of Oak Bluffs. Beginning in the early 1900s, blacks such as the intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois made the three-hour trek up to Idlewild and built vacation homes around the lakes in the area. “My parents started bringing me there when I was four years old,” recalls Detroit attorney Joseph Brown, who remembers seeing celebrities such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Dinah Washington perform at the Paradise and El Morocco Clubs. “During the forties, people went not just for the quiet fishing and the horseback riding,” Brown explains, “but also for the nightclubs and the bars.”
Our Kind of People Page 42