Vachon, John. Concrete wall, one half mile long, Detroit, Michigan. This wall was erected in August 1941 to separate the Negro section from a new suburban housing development for whites. Photograph. 1941. The Library of Congress. Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017813185/
This photograph and its sister photos (photos 39, 40, 41 in LOT 1055) in the collection serve as reminders of the history of segregation and redlining in our cities. The Detroit Wall stands as a reminder of white flight and the racial disparities that led to The Civil Rights movement. The wall still stands in Detroit today and is a powerful piece of history and art.
This photograph is from a series of three photos (photos 39, 40, 41 in LOT 1055) taken in 1941 of the Detroit Wall. The wall was built to separate the Black neighborhood from the white development and runs from the Northern boundary of Van Antwerp Park, on Pembroke Avenue between Birwood and Mendota streets, and extends north until just south of 8 Mile Road. It is 1 foot thick and 5 feet high. Originally built to border a new all-white subdivision, the goal was to attract new white homeowners, keep property values high, and separate this new neighborhood from the preexisting Black neighborhoods in the Eight Mile–Wyoming area. In 1948, the Supreme Court outlawed the enforcement of deed restrictions regarding race and other forms of discrimination. Today the wall is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2006, part of the wall was painted into a colorful mural, celebrating neighborhood children and Black civil rights leaders.
After World War I, industry was booming in Detroit. The “great migration” of Black workers flowed into Detroit, causing a shortage in housing. New Deal legislation made housing more affordable, but most funds went to white homeowners; Black families were excluded. White residents in Detroit were also concerned with maintaining racial homogeneity in their neighborhoods. The practice of redlining preserved racial homogeneity and increased racial tensions and inequities. Because of these policies, the Eight Mile neighborhood in Detroit was Black, extremely poor, and considered blighted. However, a white developer saw the opportunity to develop a new all-white neighborhood in the area and built the wall in order to attract and “protect” new white residents in the neighborhood.
- What implications and inferences can be made from the construction of a wall surrounding a new subdivision?
- Why do people build fences and walls?
- As a resident of the area, how would you feel if this wall ran through your backyard?
- Why might this wall have been added to the National Register of Historic Places?
- The Detroit Wall has also been named Detroit’s Wailing Wall, Berlin Wall, and the Birwood Wall. What do each of these different names suggest about the wall?
- Why might the wall stand as a mural today?
- Would it be better to keep the wall as a monument or to tear it down?
Michigan K–12 Social Studies
P3.1: Clearly state an issue as a question of public policy, gather and interpret information about the issue, analyze various perspectives, and generate and evaluate possible alternative solutions.
- Students can gather information about redlining, connecting segregationist policies to the construction of the Detroit Wall. As an extension activity, students can investigate the current racial breakdown of neighborhoods in Detroit, and discuss solutions to both the segregation that still exists, and the gentrification that threatens to disrupt Black neighborhoods.
P3.2: Discuss public policy issues, clarifying issues, considering opposing views, applying Democratic Values or Constitutional Principles, and refining claims.
- Students can debate the intentions and repercussions of segregation and gentrification, investigate public policy, and brainstorm solutions that center Democratic Values and Constitutional Principles.
P3.3: Construct arguments expressing and justifying decisions on public policy issues.
- Students can investigate public policy related to segregation and argue for or against rewriting existing policy, justifying their claims with Core Democratic Principles.
P4.3: Plan, conduct, and evaluate the effectiveness of activities intended to advance views on matters of public policy and to address local, regional, or global problems.
- Students can evaluate the effectiveness of the 1948 Supreme Court decision outlawing the enforcement of deed restrictions regarding race and other forms of discrimination. What were the intentions of this decision? What past precedence or Constitutional values was this decision based on? In what ways did this decision change the racial distribution in cities like Detroit? What were the positive and negative results of this decision?
- Photos and discussion of the Detroit Wall could pair with students reading and/or viewing A Raisin in the Sun, as the play takes place in South Chicago, another midwestern industrial city, and centers a Black family’s experiences with housing discrimination and racism. By including the story of Detroit, it helps students see that this history was not limited to a single time frame or a single city, but rather was a very common experience in cities in the United States.
- In social studies classes, including American history, economics, and government, using these photos as primary sources and discussion starters can help students visualize the practices of redlining, the racist implementations of the G.I. Bill, deed restrictions, Levittowns, and housing discrimination.
For many people, discussions of institutional and systemic racism can be unsettling. In discussing the Detroit Wall and the beliefs and policies that led to it, the history of systemic racism within the city and within our nation must be reckoned with, and many people find discussing race to be problematic.
- [Aerial view of Levittown, New York] | Library of Congress Aerial view of Levittown, New York, one of many housing developments built by Bill Levitt after WWII for returning WWII veterans and their families. 17,000 houses were built in six different communities in the United States and Puerto Rico.
- This is a photo of segregation on the streets of America in 1962.
- History of the Detroit Wall and Redlining in Detroit: Built to keep Black from white: The story behind Detroit’s "Wailing Wall" - BridgeDetroit
- The history of the practice of redlining and the 1968 Fair Housing Act: Redlining | Federal Reserve History
- Information on The Great Migration: The Great Migration (1910-1970) | National Archives
- A Storymap on Segregation and White Flight in Detroit: Segregation and White Flight in Detroit
- About the FSA Collection - a video Description of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress. It gives the History of the New Deal photographic unit and its creation of documentary images from 1935 to 1943, which portray scenes of the Great Depression, farms and small town life, and the buildup of American industry for World War II.
- The color of law : a forgotten history of how our government segregated America, a book by Richard Rothstein (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017) on the laws and policies enacted by the United States government that facilitated and supported segregation.