We Don't Want Them - Traveling Exhibit : Home

"Black Detroit is a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that explores the city's past, present, and future and its significance to the African American legacy and the nation's fabric. Herb Boyd reflects on his life and this landmark place, in search of understanding why Detroit is a special place for black people."

Presents a dramatic new vision of metropolitan growth, segregation, and white identity in modern America and metropolitan Detroit.

This book "pays special attention to post-1967 social and political developments in Detroit, and expands upon the much-explored black-white dynamic to address the influx of more recent populations to Detroit: Middle Eastern Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans. Crucially, the book explores the role of place of residence, spatial mobility, and spatial inequality as key factors in determining access to opportunities such as housing, education, employment, and other amenities, both in the suburbs and in the city."

"Between 1914 and 1951, Black Bottom's black community emerged out of the need for black migrants to find a place for themselves. Because of the stringent racism and discrimination in housing, blacks migrating from the South seeking employment in Detroit's burgeoning industrial metropolis were forced to live in this former European immigrant community. It became a social, cultural, and economic center of struggle and triumph, as well as a testament to the tradition of black self-help and community-building strategies that have been the benchmark of black struggle."

"Expanding the Frontiers of Civil Rights" documents the "important shift in state level policy and makes clear that civil rights in Michigan embraced not only blacks but women, the elderly, native Americans, migrant workers, and the physically handicapped."

This book focuses on the impact of residential changes on the attitudes and behavior of African-Americans and whites around the metropolitan Detroit region.

A history of northern racial exclusion demonstrates the pervasiveness of racism throughout the entire United States, analyzing how sundown towns in northern states participated in racially oppressive practices and victimized black citizens with frequently violent attacks well into the late twentieth century. Includes sections on Grosse Pointe, Owosso, Warren and Wyandotte.

This "powerful and disturbing history" exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide.

"Freeman reveals the forces that caused the ghetto's role as haven or hell to wax and wane, spanning the Great Migration, mid-century opportunities, the eruptions of the sixties, the challenges of the seventies and eighties, and present-day issues of mass incarceration, the subprime crisis, and gentrification. Offering timely planning and policy recommendations based in this history, A Haven and a Hell provides a powerful new understanding of urban black communities at a time when the future of many inner-city neighborhoods appears uncertain."

Race and Real Estate brings together new work by architects, sociologists, legal scholars, and literary critics that qualifies and complicates traditional narratives of race, property, and citizenship in the United States. Rather than simply rehearsing the standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from homeownership, the authors of these essays explore how the raced history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship. While the narrative of race and real estate in America has usually been relayed in terms of institutional subjugation, dispossession, and forced segregation, the essays collected in this volume acknowledge the validity of these histories while presenting new perspectives on this story.

This book "uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income home ownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners."

"The turn of the twentieth century saw the most aggressive segregation movements yet, as white communities almost everywhere set to rearranging whole cities along racial lines. Nightingale focuses closely on two striking examples: Johannesburg, with its state-sponsored separation, and Chicago, in which the goal of segregation was advanced by the more subtle methods of real estate markets and housing policy. For the first time ever, the majority of humans live in cities, and nearly all those cities bear the scars of segregation. This unprecedented, ambitious history lays bare our troubled past, and sets us on the path to imagining the better, more equal cities of the future"

"Segregation by Design draws on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation. Contrary to leading theories of urban politics, local democracy has not functioned to represent all residents. The result is unequal access to fundamental local services - from schools, to safe neighborhoods, to clean water."

"In order to tell a more complete story, Detroit 1967 starts at the beginning with colonial slavery along the Detroit River and culminates with an examination of the state of race relations today and suggestions for the future. Readers are led down a timeline that features chapters discussing the critical role that unfree people played in establishing Detroit, the path that postwar manufacturers within the city were taking to the suburbs and eventually to other states, as well as the widely held untruth that all white people wanted to abandon Detroit after 1967."

The Dream Revisited brings together a range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of the nation's separate and unequal living patterns. Leading scholars and practitioners, including civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers, discuss responses to residential segregation.

"In Managing Inequality, Karen R. Miller examines the formulation, uses, and growing political importance of northern racial liberalism in Detroit between the two World Wars."

In fact, in this pursuit it is the community development movement rather that has the greatest potential for connecting to social change and social justice efforts.

"Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II."

Contents: Unfair housing -- The business of the urban housing crisis -- Forced integration -- Let the buyer beware -- Unsophisticated buyers -- The urban crisis is over, long live the urban crisis.
This work offers a damning chronicle of the twilight of redlining and the introduction of conventional real estate practices into the Black urban market, uncovering a transition from racist exclusion to predatory inclusion.

"In Suburbs under Siege Charles Haar argues passionately that all people--rich or poor, black or white--have a constitutional right to live in the suburbs and that a socially responsible judiciary should vigorously uphold that right. For various reasons, American courts have generally failed to question local zoning regulations that trap the urban poor in the squalor of inner cities, away from decent housing and jobs in the suburbs."

Unjust Deeds explores the origins and complex legacies of six African American families from St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., as they fought to keep their homes in non-minority neighborhoods. Their dramatic campaign, culminating in a landmark Supreme Court victory in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). Restoring this story to its proper place in the history of the black freedom struggle, Jeffrey D. Gonda's groundbreaking study provides a critical vantage point to the simultaneously personal, local, and national dimensions of legal activism in the twentieth century and offers a new understanding of the evolving legal fight against Jim Crow in neighborhoods and courtrooms across America.