target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">2 Whether you are in Wilkinsburg or Detroit, the neighborhoods where many of us reside are devalued, and our educational and career choices reflect the impacts of that extraction of resources caused by racism. As Notorious B.I.G. rapped in the song “Things Done Changed”:3
If I wasn’t in the rap game
I’d probably have a key knee-deep in the crack game
Because the streets is a short stop
Either you’re slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot
When societal biases lessen the value on homes in Black neighborhoods, residents and communities lose the wealth and revenue to develop themselves as well as the institutions that expand the number of options residents have. Home values drive property taxes, which generates the revenue that helps determine school quality, infrastructure improvements, public safety, and recreation.
Absent is the culpability that policy should share with behaviors. While de facto and de jure segregation and housing discrimination unquestionably influenced housing markets, the residents most burdened by U.S. policy continue to shoulder the blame of its effects. The retort “it all starts at home” should be about policies that devalue homes, people, and places rather than family behavior.
“Your father just got caught up,” explained Kergulin Cunikin, who ran the streets with my father in the 1970s. “It was a good time in Detroit. People worked; they had money. Drugs were flowing … People had a good time … Your father just got caught up.”
Getting caught up with heroin led my father, Floyd Allen Criswell Jr., to a life of crime that didn’t last very long. Floyd died in prison a day before his twenty-seventh birthday—stabbed in the heart by another inmate.
But Floyd didn’t just get caught up in his own personal issues—drug use and criminal activity—as many of my family members and his former friends believe. He lived in neighborhoods that were devalued, limiting his choices. My father made bad decisions, and he paid the ultimate price. Racism was also culpable for his development, but society has not paid its debt.
All my life, I never took the time to learn much about Floyd. I don’t think I had the chance to call him Dad. I can’t recall ever talking to him, even though my mother Karen charitably says I did. Floyd bounced between Detroit and Pittsburgh throughout his life, so if I did talk to him, it was fleeting. The only address of his I knew was the one on his criminal record: Whitcomb Street on Detroit’s west side. His father, Floyd Sr., and my Grandma Doris were both born in Detroit. Grandma Doris reared her four children—Sherdina, Raymond, Floyd, and Boo—in an apartment on Pingree and 12th Streets, also on Detroit’s west side. Floyd bounced between various apartments, the Herman Gardens Housing Projects, and single-family homes amid prison bids and trips to Pittsburgh.
Three of Grandma’s four children died before she did—two killed in the Detroit area. Floyd’s older brother Raymond was a pimp who was stabbed to death in 1963 by a woman who, I presume, he tried to traffic. Although Grandma Doris and Floyd Jr. moved to Pittsburgh when he was about eight years old, they stayed connected with Floyd Sr.’s brother, Uncle Rufus, in Detroit.
I don’t remember seeing Floyd or talking with him, but I frequently saw my immediate biological family throughout my time in Pittsburgh. I learned most of the details I know about Floyd’s life only recently, from my cousin Shante. Gregarious and sharp-witted, Shante interpreted for me the police records and other legal documents I had about Floyd. But she was a witness to his story too. At about twelve years younger than he, she was old enough to remember the major events in his life. Shante wasn’t sure when Floyd started using, but by the time he was nineteen, he was a father of three and a full-blown addict. Floyd and Karen conceived my older brother Kevin and me. In 1971, five months after I was born, Floyd had another child—Diona—by a woman named Bernice.
When I visited Grandma Doris on holidays, she repeatedly grabbed my face to tell me how much I looked like Floyd. It was like she couldn’t say hello without commenting on the physical resemblance. When she talked about Floyd the person, the exchange seemed to drift into a conversation about Detroit. Given the trauma Grandma Doris experienced in Detroit, you’d think she would avoid conversations about the Motor City. To Grandma Doris, despite it being the backdrop for much suffering, Detroit also represented a sacred land full of opportunity that attracted Black folks with its promise of freedom. Detroit may have been a painful place for Grandma, but it was a place she could claim for her own.
Grandma Doris represented a people’s unrequited love for Black-majority cities. Many of us are unquestionably committed to Black-majority cities, but that love is not reciprocated by public policy. Considering the devaluation of our lives and property, my family’s losses reflect an abject failure of policy to protect us against discrimination. History shows that policy proactively degraded us. The extent of White residents, politicians, and employers’ efforts to make conditions as difficult as possible for Black people to thrive in Detroit reveals how today’s $156 billion in losses is rooted in antagonistic policies and people bent on debasing our lives and property—in the past and present.
“There’s never been a place designed for Black people to live in large numbers,” said comedian D. L. Hughley in an interview on VLAD TV, an online video and news website run by DJ Vlad. “The only place they build for niggas to live was jail, was prison.”4 The history of White antagonism toward Black people in Detroit, including my family members, makes Hughley’s point.
Blacks relocated to Detroit largely from the South in two waves of the Great Migration: first after World War I and later with the coming of World War II, seeking jobs in the auto capital of the world. The rapid migration of Blacks who already had limited options where they could live created a severe housing shortage. In anticipation of grants from the federal government, the Detroit Housing Commission in 1941 approved two housing developments—one for Blacks and one for Whites—to provide some relief for a growing Black population. However, the federal government rejected Detroit’s plan to build homes for Black folk while allowing a development for Whites. Intense protests ensued from housing advocates, resulting in a single development for Black occupants that was to be named Sojourner Truth Homes in honor of the nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist.
Soon before the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA) planned to open the housing units, on February 27, 1942, a mob of dozens of White residents participated in a cross burning at the site. The next morning, approximately 150 White dissidents blockaded the lot to prevent Black residents from moving in.5 Chronicled in the book Black Detroit by City College of New York historian Herb Boyd, Blacks retaliated by driving two cars through the gang. What ensued is now known as the Sojourner Truth riot, which ended with police placing the Black residents under protective order. To allow for time to calm a tinderbox situation, the National Housing Agency took two months to ready themselves for another effort to move Black tenants, who were given temporary housing, into their permanent homes in Sojourner Truth. The mayor deployed 1,000 police officers and had 1,600 National Guard troops to assist and eventually clear the way. The many physical disputes and police envoys highlight the degree to which Whites fought to show that Black people didn’t belong in Detroit.
While racist Whites tried to make housing insecure for Black people, they also applied aggressive tactics in the workplace. In 1941, during World War II, car manufacturers had to convert assembly lines that made cars into lines that produced tanks. The war demanded more workers—regardless of race—to produce enough war machines. Before and immediately after World War II, Blacks were relegated to service work like janitorial services or given dangerous jobs in the foundries, pouring melted metals into castings.
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