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Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick addresses the town hall meeting to discuss segregation in Metro Detroit at the Southfield Centre for the Arts Monday.
Metro Detroiters tackle race divide
Segregation forum participants vow to be catalysts for change
By Ron French / The Detroit News
SOUTHFIELD -- Calling segregation a silent curse that can no longer be ignored, more than 200 people from across Metro Detroit gathered Monday to look for ways to close the chasm between blacks and whites.
Keith Davis of Detroit, left, David Greenwood, center, and Euni Rose, both of Southfield, joined the session on community, where participants said inaccurate perceptions often shape how suburban and urban residents view and interact with each other.The Cost of Segregation
Jan. 14: Racial Attitudes
The Detroit News looks at Metro Detroit's sometimes startling attitudes toward segregation today, the extent and reasons for racial separation and how they play out in the lives of families white and black.
Jan 21: Paying For Preferences
Segregation is the norm for Metro Detroiters, but it carries heavy costs. From segregated schools to stagnant property values to a lack of exposure to the nation's increasing diversity, we pay for our preferences.
Jan. 28: Where We're Headed
Are Metro Detroiters fated to continue living apart? If so, what will the future toll be? The Detroit News looks at the factors that could break down racial barriers, the factors that keep them standing and how living patterns in other metropolitan areas have changed.Town hall video clips
Mark Silverman, Detroit News publisher and editor, on where we go from here
The forum drew a diverse group of Metro Detroiters, including Dorothy Montgomery of Detroit, left, and Laurie Munday of Troy.
Many called for a vastly improved mass transit system. Others recommended a massive cleanup of Detroit. Some advocated a return to the ward system in Detroit and a marketing campaign. There were heated discussions and lively debate, with only one notion unanimously agreed upon: The forum was a beginning, not an end.
"I remain optimistic that change will come," said Vincent Rose of Detroit. "This is the place it has to start, with the people."
Sponsored by The Detroit News and WDIV-TV (Channel 4) and led by the National Conference for Community and Justice, the community forum was an outgrowth of a recent three-week series exploring the cost of segregation.
That series was meant to be a "catalyst for community commitment," Detroit News Publisher and Editor Mark Silverman told the forum. "Even if people want to continue to live separate lives, they need to know the price they pay."
Segregation lowers housing values and causes higher health risks in black neighborhoods, and traffic woes and expensive infrastructure projects in white suburbs.
In an opinion poll, the issues people described as the biggest problems in their neighborhoods -- crime and poor schools in black communities, overdevelopment and traffic for white residents -- are directly linked to the area's polarized housing patterns.
"Separate is not equal," Silverman said. "Racism remains an ugly, if sometimes silent, curse. ... What it means for our children is chilling."
That isn't an easy sell in Metro Detroit. More than half of blacks and whites questioned whether segregation was a problem in a Detroit News/WDIV poll. Community leaders in recent years have taken a hands-off approach toward integration.
"A lot of our leadership is asleep at the wheel," said Dan Krichbaum, executive director of the National Conference for Community and Justice. "They would rather ignore this problem. This group (at the forum) needs to change that."
Many of those in attendance, including Detroit's new mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, cringe at census figures showing Detroit is the most segregated metro area in the nation.
Kilpatrick said it's time for the region to face up to its racial divide. He compared Monday's forum to the first step taken by alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous: admitting you have a problem.
"We continue to run away from this being a problem," Kilpatrick told the crowd at the Southfield Centre for the Arts. "This was a critical issue in Detroit in the 1950s, and, 50 years later, it is still critical. This is an issue we have to move past."
Kilpatrick urged Wayne State University to work with community leaders to study the issue. The mayor also set a goal of improving the region's diversity by 2006, when Detroit hosts the Super Bowl.
A hope for mass transit
Monday's forum offered an initial glimpse at the steps community members think could foster integration, as well as improve the debates that are sure to rage over those steps.
Poor mass transit was mentioned repeatedly as a hindrance to integration. The suburb's SMART and Detroit's department of transportation provide only limited, patchwork service between the city and its suburbs, hindering efforts by Detroiters to stay in the city but work in better-paying jobs in the suburbs.
Kilpatrick was a leading supporter of improved mass transit as a state representative, and plans to continue his push for improved service.
Forum participants split into sessions to focus on various topics. About two dozen people who discussed the role government should play in breaking down barriers to integration agreed on some points and disagreed -- often loudly -- on others. There was plenty of support for a public-relations role for government officials, promoting the virtues of neighborhood diversity and sending the message that their communities are open to all racial and ethnic groups. But more activist policies, such as subsidies to developers for including low-income housing in the suburbs, or boosting mass transit, found resistance.
"Government can encourage people. Detroit can look for ways to improve," said Allen Lewis of Detroit. "But government can't make people like one another. It can't make them want to live together."
A group exploring ideas to improve integration in education suggested cross-district programs and student-exchanges that would expose black and white students in segregated schools to different cultures.
But the group also demonstrated the difficulties that even adults at a community forum can have when wrestling with race. There were several sharp differences between blacks and whites over the blame for segregated schools.
"It was frustrating," said Ricardo Jefferson of Detroit, chair of the social studies department at Southfield-Lathrup High School. "People came to it very parochial and very partisan. But it just shows what's wrong with adults. Kids don't understand that, they don't approach things like that."
Economic planning urged
A group focusing on business urged Detroit to formulate a comprehensive action plan for economic development, and a push to convince major retailers to locate in the city.
Residents examining the roll of communities in integration suggested Detroit needs to clean up its streets, and then clean up its image with a national marketing campaign.
"I thought it (the forum) was super," said Alfred McPherson, 66, a diversity consultant from West Bloomfield. "The quicker we deal with it the better."
Haracio Vargis, director of Racial Justice & Cultural Collaboration for New Detroit, said the meeting was "a good start on some discussion of what people could do. It's really a beginning of an understanding of trying to build relationships."
To National Conference for Community and Justice officials, the forum was an important first step on a trying topic.
"This is a very difficult issue," said the group's Linda West. Opening the forum to all who were interested meant it was hard to keep the focus on segregation. "Given that context, even without that context, I thought it was very successful."
New-found ambassadors
West said she hopes the forum can lead to efforts on two tracks, one dealing with policy issues such as transportation and housing, and another on what she called "hearts and minds," the attitudes that keep Metro Detroiters so separated.
"That's what we do -- that dialogue to break down those attitudinal barriers," West said.
"A morning like this can make a difference, but there has to be more mornings like this," said Bernard Rivers of Detroit. Rivers was arrested seven times in 1963, during civil rights protests in South Carolina. He says things will change only if those who attend meetings such as the one Monday can convince others of the need for integration.
"The people you have here are the doers, they're always going to be involved," Rivers said. "The question is, how to get others involved?"
The National Conference for Community and Justice hopes to sponsor more forums, perhaps with neighborhood groups and other community organizations, to push harder on those walls of attitude. Both West's group and New Detroit, the community organization formed from the ashes of the 1967 riot, said Monday they plan to make the segregation issue a focus of their race-relations efforts this year.
Coron Houston isn't waiting for further meetings. The Detroiter scrambled around the art center at the close of the forum, collecting telephone numbers of those in her discussion group.
"If you leave here and just go home, what have we accomplished?" she asked. "We should all be ambassadors."
Detroit News Staff Writers Oralandar Brand-Williams, Gordon Trowbridge, Jodi Upton and Kim Kozlowski contributed to this report. You can reach Ron French at (313) 222-2175 or rfrench@detnews.com.
The forum offered a chance to mingle with those who share an interest in integration. Carol Bowie of Detroit talks to LaRon Williams of Ann Arbor.
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The Detroit News.
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