In 1963, my family moved from Ohio to the area of Flint, Michigan. In 1965, we bought a 700 square foot, two bedroom, one bath home at 525 West Russell Avenue. It was located in the north part of Flint. There were two homes just west of us. Both of the homes were vacant the entire time we lived there. One was strewn with graffiti, and the home other was boarded up. All of these homes, including my childhood home are now all gone. To the east of us was a two-story house with a well-manicured lawn. It was the best cared for home in the neighborhood. The black family of six who lived there kept primarily to themselves, at least when it came to interacting with neighbors. I can remember every Sunday seeing the adults and teenagers dressed up in their beautiful choir robes as they headed to church. They looked so diginified. All my life, I considered Flint a racially integrated city. Then, some years ago I came across a book, Demolition Means Progress: Flint Michigan and the Fate of the American Metropolis. In the book, author Andrew Highsmith wrote: “When the new southern migrants arrived in Flint, they discovered a rigidly segregated and poorly housed city that afforded black people few residential options. With a residential segregation index that reached 94.4 in 1960, Flint ranked as one of the most racially divided cities in the country—more segregated, in fact, than the cities of Atlanta, New York, Memphis, Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, Little Rock, Los Angeles, Charlotte, Boston, and Birmingham.” When I read this portion of the book, I was sure that Highsmith was wrong. I lived in an integrated neighborhood and attended a mixed race school in Flint, so I was just sure he had to be wrong. Besides, in the book, The Watsons go to Birmingham-1963, a reader for most 5th and 6th graders, the fictitious Watson family lived in Flint and they made a trip to visit family in Birmingham, Alabama. The Watson children seemed a little dismayed by the bigotry and racism in the south. I thought to myself, why should the Watson kids be dismayed, if according to Highsmith, Flint was more racially divided than Birmingham? My parents moved to Flint because jobs were plentiful. It was the birthplace of General Motors and home to Chevrolet, Buick, Fisher Body and AC Spark Plug factories. Just years before, Flint surpassed the 200,000 mark on population, making it the second largest city in Michigan. We were part of a boom city. My dad also had boodles of extended relatives in Flint who came from the Missouri “bootheel” looking for work in the 1920s and 40s. We were surrounded by kin, even if I didn’t know how we were all related. My family was a part of a much larger migration to Flint. Richard Manning wrote in Harpers magazine, “A mass migration from the south brought a volatile mix of hillbillies and black people. Between 1950 and 1960, Flint added about 13,000 white people, many of them Southerners, and the black population doubled. GM helped keep the groups apart by institutionalizing segregation. Real-estate transactions included specific language forbidding sales to African Americans in most neighborhoods. Banks redlined. Schools gerrymandered boundaries as rigidly as Jim Crow.” We lived just east of Dupont Street, and just south of Carpenter Road. A report produced in the late 1950s described this area: “On the city‘s far north side, just south of the Carpenter Road boundary that separated Flint from Mt. Morris and Genesee Townships, surveyors found a low grade peripheral white section, started as a series of cheap subdivisions and inadequately provided with such urban facilities as sewers, sidewalks and paving. Residents of this area are relatively uneducated. The area‘s housing stock contained many temporary, jerry-built homes of flimsy construction.” Yeah, that sounded like our neighborhood, except for "white peripheral section." This report came out in the late 1950s. We moved there in 1965, and it was an integrated neighborhood by the time we moved in. But, that had been fairly recent change, and it was continuing to evolve even as we settled into the neighborhood. I looked at the census records for 1950, 1960, and 1970 to try and understand what happened and why the neighborhood we moved into seemed to be different from the rest of Flint. Here are the demographics I found for our neighborhood (tracts 1 and 2): 1950 census: population - 9,552, less than 1 percent black 1960 census: population -15,529, 33 percent black 1970 census: population -14,891, 60 percent black In the 1960s, the combined effects of racial segregation, discriminatory housing pracfices, black population increases, and neighborhood overcrowding, pushed thousands of blacks out of the poor township adjacent to the Buick factory, to seek out homes in the more integrated sections of the city. In the Northside of Flint, the racial transitions occurred rapidly. I decided to look at the demographics for other Flint tracts just east and west of us. The area west of us was 98 percent white. The area just east of us was 94 percent black. I thought, how could that be? The distance between these areas was not much more than a mile. How could there be that much racial difference from areas located so closely together? I then located a 1970 demography study of Flint that visually represented what I was finding in the census records: Our neighborhood was at the top of the map, and it fell into the 30-79.9 percent range of the black population. There were some other areas of integration, but the areas at the bottom right were sparsely populated townships. Visually, Flint was a segregated city. I came across an article where the author posted his experience of growing up in Flint. He grew up only a mile west of me around the same time, and he shared, “Despite Flint's being home to a significant number of African-Americans, I didn't know a one until I went to college.” My experience was quite to the contrary. The ethnic make-up of our neighborhood (tracts 1 and 2) was substantially different from the areas around us. In a highly segregated city, we lived in the heart of an integrated area. I wondered: Was it possible that there were three Flints – white Flint, black Flint, and this small sliver of land we lived on – integrated Flint? Highsmith further added in his book: "The City of Flint and Flint School system tried hard to keep the city and schools segregated. In the northwest side of Flint, school administrators often turned to temporary structures known as “primary units” to preserve segregation in the face of racial transition and student enrollment increases. Unlike the temporary classrooms operated by many other boards of education in the United States during the postwar era, which often abutted permanent school buildings, Flint’s primary units sat in residential neighborhoods across the city." Highsmith and Erickson authored a journal article entitled, "Segregation as Splitting, Segregation as Joining, Housing and the Many Modes of Jim Crow." They wrote: "As black families from Flint’s overcrowded ghettos moved into white neighborhoods the board of education worked feverishly, if less successfully, to maintain segregation. For the elementary schools, the School Board maintained segregation by assigning African-American students to the primary “units,” thus maintaining an all-white population at the main schools of Gundry and Jefferson. Primary units made it possible to maintain such strict forms of segregation even when traditional school buildings reached their capacity." I attended school in the Gundry Elementary “primary units” during my first grade (picture left), second grade, and third grade years. I didn’t know how I got assigned to the “units” as we called them. Obviously blacks were assigned to the units, but how were whites selected to attend the units? Was it a lottery? Was it the proximity of our homes to neighboring black-occupied homes? I didn’t know, and it was puzzling. There were kids on my street who walked past my house on their way to the main school, while I attended the units. In actuality, Gundry’s main school was only a four minute walk from my house, whereas the units, located two blocks to the south, required an 8 minute walk, more than twice the distance from my home. Even more puzzling were the groups of kids, who were my age, who walked past the units to attend the main school, which was obviously further away for them. Years later, one of my relatives said the units were reserved for blacks and for the “white trash.” He continued, Why else would they have built them in North Flint? Below is a picture of my first, second and third grade units on Home Avenue. These pictures were taken in 2020. Since I had attended school, they have gone from being school units, to falling into disrepair, to abandonment, and now serve as a neighborhood church. I no longer have class pictures of classmates, but in each “unit” I attended, whites were clearly a minority. If Gundry main was reserved for whites, and our neighborhood was sixty percent black, the units had an even larger percentage of black students. Flint Schools were still segregating, but for me, it was integration. And, that was okay. It didn’t really matter to me since I had plenty of friends at school. My friends Jerry, Maurice, and Bobby attended the units. I guess that’s how we all became friends. I didn't know where they all lived because we were spread throughout the neighboring streets. Fortunately, my mother kept all my report cards for every school year. I dug around looking for some sort of indication on how relationships might have been in the Gundry units. I could find only one related comment, listed under “Teacher’s Observations” in the 3rd term of my 1st grade year. It said, “Eddie has many kinds of friends.” I did have fun with my friends, but it was apparent that some other kids were uncomfortable with the mix at school. On the blacktop play area there was a division. A group of black kids played on one end, a very small group of white kids huddled on the other end, and the rest of us were in the middle playing and kicking a ball around the playground. Simply, we were out there to have fun and to play. The strife in Flint wasn’t just racial. There was also a class struggle. The Flint River dissecting the center of the city was a very real barrier. Whites dominated the areas south of the river. I found a quote from the Flint Colorline Project that captured some of my feelings: “When I was a kid, if you were from the North Side you were a nothin‘. If you were on the South Side, you were somethin‘. It was kind of a class struggle between the North Side and the South Side.” Police made frequents trips to our neighborhood. Sometimes, it was for domestic violence, sometimes for a home break-in or vandalism, but more often it involved fights or altercations between neighbors, racial or otherwise. Racial tensions were always there, but they escalated in July 1967. In Detroit, 45 miles to the south racial riots broke out. The rioting carried into Flint. Hundreds of black protesters assembled at the corner of Leith and Saginaw Streets, a couple of miles from our home. The violence spread through Flint‘s North End, where angry protesters vented their accumulating frustrations against police brutality, housing segregation, and racial inequality. During the night, a number of rioters threw stones at cars, smashed windows, looted several commercial establishments, and firebombed at least seventeen stores and homes. The next day, Governor George Romney declared a state of emergency in Flint. The protestors and rioters in Flint were demanding access to better housing in the city. National Guardsmen came to our neighborhood. They didn’t stay long, but we were told to stay indoors until order was restored. The discriminatory housing situation became a referendum. On February 20, 1968, the referendum passed, but just barely. This achievement captured national attention for Flint because it was the first time the residents of a major city in America had approved an open housing referendum. The vote was close. With over 40,000 votes cast, the measure passed by only 30 votes. It was a victory for eliminating discriminatory housing practices, but it also showed the polarization on the issue for residents of the city. I’m sure, given the opportunity, that my mother voted for the referendum. I know my father didn’t vote for it. Less than two months later, Martin Luther King was assassinated. The next day demonstrations occurred at Northwestern High School, a mile from our home, and the school was closed. Riots began at Northern High School. We were sent home from school, and word spread quickly that blacks were targeting and beating whites for retribution. We were told to stay off the streets. The Flint Journal reported 13 assaults in the North end of Flint that day. The following month, George Wallace came to Flint, campaigning as an independent candidate for President. This is the same George Wallace who five years earlier as governor blocked the door of the University of Alabama campus to keep two black students from enrolling. In his gubernatorial inaugural address, he stated, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Not surprisingly, a 1970 study by the American Association of Geographers entitled, “The Spatial Response of Negroes and Whites toward Open Housing: The Flint Referendum,” found, ”that the lower income white residents of Flint reflected similar attitudes in their votes against open housing, and for George Wallace.” According to writer Joe Allen, “Wallace didn’t have to dig too deep to find the soil rich in racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and plain old parochialism. These lower-middle-class and working-class voters yearned for someone like Wallace to express their anger. . . .” Four years later in 1972, Wallace again pulled big crowds with his appearance in Flint. He also won the Democratic primary in Michigan. When we first moved to Flint, my mother enrolled my brother and me into swim lessons. For the next three years, we were spent a lot of time in lessons, practices and competitions. Right there with us was Patty. She began the same time as us, and her abilities pushed us to do better. Patty would eventually go on to set high school swim records. We would swim, and our mothers would sit side-by-side and visit. It became a regular part of our routines. Every once in a while, a rude comment would be directed at us as we would splash around or have fun in the pool. I guess we got used to it. By 1969, we had been swimming together for three years. As we walked out of the pool, we were laughing and nudging each other. Some teenagers, all white, walked by and shouted some racial expletives at us, and then spit at our feet. I’m sure our mothers some yards behind us saw what happened, because they quickly moved us along to the car. It's been hard for me to understand the source of the bigotry and racial division? Was it engrained in the Southern influence that came with people as they moved to Flint? Was it simply a product of the time when discrimninatory practices werre accepted? Segregation in schools was legal until the mid 1950s and ended with Brown v. Board of Education. And yet, the Flint School Board still found a workaround after the Supreme Court decision to create a de-facto segregation in the schools. It was quite evident that we lived in a lower-income neighborhood. Likewise, I suspected the education level was also low. I looked again at the census and found that only 35 percent of the adults in our neighborhood had finished high school, and that the median grade level completed was the 10th grade. But, still there had to be something more. It felt to me as if we lived in a bully culture in Flint. Walking to and from school had its challenges. I got jumped plenty of times after school. Some of them were racially motivated, but most were not. I was able run from some of the confrontations. With most of them, I talked my way out of the difficulty. And, for some situations, my only option was to fight. By the summer of 1969, our house was up for sale. My mother told me many years later, that they chose the home and neighborhood in Flint because it was the best they could do, and it was all they could afford. But, she added, living in Flint wasn’t easy. After four years, my parents decided it was time to look elsewhere for a home. When my parents went house hunting, I was happy to join them in the hosue hunting search. We eventually bought a home in the small town of Holly, located 18 miles south of Flint. It wasn’t long after the passage of the housing referendum, that “white flight” commenced from Flint. White families moved to the suburbs and to the small towns surrounding Flint. I guess we were a part of that statistic. I attended Gundry’s “units’ for three years. I don’t know if the separate school units were ever successful in accomplishing the aims of the Flint School Board. But, the School Board was certainly good at selling the advantages of the idea to the public: According to Highsmith: “Because primary units allowed the board to maintain pupil separation without shifting attendance boundaries, they were also useful tools for upholding the color line. . . Primary units made it possible to maintain such strict forms of segregation even when traditional school buildings reached their capacity.” The school board created 41 separate “units” in North Flint. I’m unaware if the other three elementary schools had wholly segregated units, or if they had some integration like the Gundry units I attended. In some small way, there were a group of us, maybe several hundred in Flint, who had an integrated school experience, while the rest of the city was still holding onto the last gasps of segregation. Left to ourselves, we got along fine at school and on the playground, In fact, better than fine. We were friends. It was when we all left at the end of the school day that bigotry, racism, and cultural norms just seemed to complicate everything. Even though we moved, racial tensions were still around us. In Pontiac, 18 miles to the south, a Federal judge found that Pontiac had "intentionally perpetuated segregation," and he ordered the schools to be integrated by Fall. That order involved the controversial move of "busing" students across town. Six months later, In August of 1970, just days before school began, 10 Pontiac School buses exploded. It was found that dynamite had been affixed to the gas tanks of the buses. In total, 13 buses were damaged. The racial issues and tension permeated the communities and schools around us throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, both Pontiac and Flint still deal with the legacy of actions and decisons made during these years. Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Andrew Highsmith and his scholarship which has enhanced my understanding, and provided context to my childhood growing up in Flint.
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Flint MichiganEd Adams Archives
March 2021
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