Sunday, January 13, 2002

Max Ortiz / The Detroit News Mary Winston, 73, is a lifelong resident of Detroit, a city with the second largest black majority in America. "We're all Americans,'' she says. "But we got a long way to go."

Exclusive Report
New segregation: Races accept divide
But experts say financial, social costs of living apart are just as detrimental

By Ron French / The Detroit News

Max Ortiz / The Detroit News Cliff Wagoner lives in Bloomfield Township, which is 88 percent white and 4 percent black. "I think it just happens that way," he says. The Cost of Segregation        Monday, The Detroit News will publish the first of three special reports examining the impact of segregation in Metro Detroit.    The eight-page reports, to be published on three consecutive Mondays, are the result of a seven-month investigation that included 15 News staff members, led by reporters Oralandar Brand-Williams, Ron French, Gordon Trowbridge and Jodi Upton and photographers Max Ortiz and Donna Terek.    Monday's installment will focus on the sometimes startling attitudes Metro Detroiters hold about segregation, the extent and reasons for our racial separation, and how that divide affects our daily lives.             On WDIV/TV4        * Watch for a report on the Cost of Segregation with WDIV's Emery King on tonight's 11 p.m. newscast.    * WDIV's Emery King and Roger Weber air a special report on the Cost of Segregation during the 5 p.m. Monday newscast.     Max Ortiz / The Detroit News This wall near Eight Mile and Wyoming was built in the 1940s to separate black and white neighborhoods. Federal officials wouldn't grant mortgage loans until it was built. Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

   More than four decades after Americans fought and died to end segregation, many in Metro Detroit are comfortable living apart.
   From Commerce Township to the Cass Corridor, our neighborhoods are starkly divided along color lines. Those divisions are dismissed by politicians and accepted by residents, despite evidence that segregation carries financial and social costs.
   This new segregation, by choice rather than law, has frustrated longtime civil rights leaders and raised new questions about the necessity -- and meaning -- of integration. Nowhere is the price for that racial divide as debilitating as in Metro Detroit, home of the most segregated neighborhoods in the nation.
   "I was born and raised here (and) we're still dealing with the same things," said Mary Winston, 73, a lifelong resident of Detroit. "I'm afraid I'll have to live to 100 to see things better."
   Today, The Detroit News begins a three-week exploration of the causes, costs and future of segregated housing in Metro Detroit. Stories will appear each Sunday, followed by special sections each Monday that will attempt to answer the questions our community faces.
   Do we now have a new kind of segregation, one not based on racism? Does segregation still matter in neighborhoods that appear separate but equal? Or is this a step on a long road toward true integration?
   Those are just a few of the questions addressed in an analysis of 2000 census data and more than 300 interviews with civil rights leaders, demographers and area residents.
   Segregation remains a prickly topic even today, long after the battles of the 1950s and 1960s. Legal restrictions on housing are gone, as is much of the outward hostility blacks sometimes face in white neighborhoods.
   Yet something compels blacks and whites -- even those of equal income -- to live separately.
   Livonia is the whitest city of more than 100,000 in the U.S., while Detroit has the second-largest black majority.
   More than half of Detroit's whites, not including Hispanics, left the city in the 1990s. In the suburbs, blacks and whites overwhelmingly live in separate communities.
   Only 6 percent of Metro Detroit residents live in neighborhoods that remotely resemble the racial makeup of the community as a whole. Yet the vast majority of residents interviewed by The News over a seven-month period do not consider their own communities segregated.
   
De facto segregation
   Typical is Cliff Wagoner, a retired Chrysler employee who believes segregation is bad, but doesn't believe his neighborhood in Bloomfield Township is segregated. Bloomfield is 88 percent white and 4 percent black, and there are no African-Americans on his block.
   "I think it just happens that way," Wagoner said. "I don't think people would scream (if blacks moved in). If you can afford to live around there, I don't think it's a problem."
   The lack of legal barriers has led some to insist that segregation no longer exists. Segregation, they maintain, is now an academic exercise with little impact on people's lives. If blacks and whites can live anywhere they want, there is no problem, they argue.
   But the racial divide of our neighborhoods amounts to de facto segregation, say those who study race relations. Laws may no longer divide us, but something does. And that division, even if it is by choice, continues to carry a heavy price.
   "The change is we used to think that kind of separatism was deplorable; now, we think it's acceptable, and perhaps preferable," said Tamar Jacoby, author of Someone Else's House, American's Unfinished Struggle for Integration, a book that takes a critical look at Detroit's failed attempt at integration.
   "Today, we don't call it segregation," Jacoby said. "We call it strong communities. The spin has changed."
   
King frustrated
   Martin Luther King III, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is frustrated by the lack of progress in the four decades since his famous father fought for integrated housing.
   "We have not made any great strides in truly integrating neighborhoods," King said. "When you see neighborhoods across America that are still segregated, and they're not coming together, I don't know what the reason is.
   "We were fighting for the right to live where one chooses," King said. "But today we have self-segregation. Everyone should have the right to do that ... but I think the goal in America is for people to live in truly diverse communities. Only then can we begin to understand each other.
   "We still have to break down some barriers," King said. "But I don't foresee that happening."
   In the past, the assumption has been that whites were overwhelmingly responsible for segregation. Today, a majority of both races are comfortable living separately -- and uncomfortable calling it segregation.
   "The whole concept of racial segregation assumes that the black people who live in the city are forced to live there," said Lyn Lewis, chairperson of the sociology department at the University of Detroit Mercy and a black Detroit resident. "I happen to live in a city that is heavily populated by blacks, but I am not racially segregated. No one in Detroit feels isolated. No one in Detroit feels segregated."
   There is less recognition of segregation as a problem in Metro Detroit than in municipalities such as Cleveland, Chicago or Atlanta, where segregation is lower.
   Few community leaders consider segregation a problem today, nor are they eager to question why blacks and whites live more separately in Metro Detroit than anywhere else. Segregated housing is frequently a taboo topic among politicians, many of whom either say segregation doesn't exist, or it no longer has a negative impact.
   Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson doesn't believe segregation matters in his county, and Wayne County Executive Ed McNamara has not attempted to remedy segregation in his 16 years in that office. Former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer said he doesn't believe segregation exists in Metro Detroit, and the fact that blacks and whites live more separately here than anywhere in the nation doesn't have a negative impact.
   "I've been asked what am I doing to break this segregated concept," Archer said in a Detroit News interview published in December, before he left office. "What do you mean, 'What am I doing?' ... There are no covenants in the city of Detroit that preclude anyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, from buying property. The housing patterns are what they are. People buy where they want to buy."
   But why do blacks and whites want to buy homes in different places? If wealthy blacks can afford to live anywhere, why are there so few in the Grosse Pointes? If white Gen-Xers feel welcome anywhere, why aren't they congregating in central Detroit, as they are in other major cities?
   The expansion of affluent majority-black suburbs such as Southfield has tempered the push for integrated housing in an era when, for a majority of blacks, segregation continues to have a very negative impact.
   "Part of the reaction from the black middle class is, 'My life isn't hell, so segregation can't be that bad,' " said George Galster, urban affairs professor at Wayne State University. "But the more seriously segregated cities have the most serious racial disparities."
   "Commerce Township (residents) may feel it (segregation) doesn't have an impact because they consider themselves separate," said Joe Darden, professor of urban affairs at Michigan State University. "But it is part of a whole."
   
Sept. 11 softens attitudes
   There appears to be a softening of racial attitudes since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, though it is unclear whether those attitudes will have an impact on where people choose to live.
   The new segregation has been easy to ignore, but it may not always be so, warns John Powell, University of Minnesota civil rights professor and a Detroit native.
   "The reality is, how do we prepare for a society where there's a decreasing percentage of whites and increasing numbers of people of color?" asks Powell. "How do we prepare for that future? By building gated communities and keeping people out? That portends a very troubling future."
   Winston, who has lived in Detroit through good times and bad, worries that we saw the future on Sept. 11. The retired nurse looked into the flames of the World Trade Center, and saw what happens when groups don't understand each other.
   "Because of the bombing, everybody is trying to get along," Winston said. "We're all Americans. But we got a long way to go."
   

You can reach Ron French at (313) 222-2175 or rfrench@detnews.com.