Detroit's Berlin Wall

Late last Monday morning, while I was listening to a show on AM 910, WFDF, Detroit's Superstation, the host (whose name I didn't catch--and I listened for an hour) and one of his guests, Tyrone (he didn't say his last name), and a discussion dressed in leftism about their favorite books on the Motor City.

Charlie LeDuff was on the show too--he is the author of Detroit: An American Autopsy.

Back to Tyrone, while discussing FHA loans issued in prior to when the Fair Housing Act of 1968, he remarked that these loans were an important ladder for homeownership for the working poor. However, this financing source was not available in neighborhoods viewed as "distressed." And of course that meant areas with a black majority. To work around that problem in north Detroit, developers in 1941 built a half-mile long concrete wall that is nearly six feet high as a demarcation between the black and white sections of the Wyoming Avenue and Eight Mile neighborhood.

It still stands.

The wall passes through Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground, where is is painted.

Most of the wall looks like this. It is usually referred to as the Detroit Wall or the Eight Mile Wall.

Eight Mile and Wyoming is better than many other Detroit neighborhoods, but there still are many abandoned homes, such as this one on Mendota Street. You can see a bit of the wall on the left.

Here someone painted the wall white.

The wall wasn't effective in keeping people in our out. Two streets pass through it. And a nimble person or someone with a short ladder can easily scale it. Both sides of the wall have been African-American majority areas for decades.

Back in Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground, the Civil Rights movement is recalled in this section. Entering the bus is Rosa Parks, who moved to Detroit soon after she refused to give up her seat to a white man on an Alabama bus.

That bus is now on display at the Henry Ford Museum in suburban Dearborn.

We end with peace.