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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Page 139
"During the 1940's, the Flint issued over four trhousand new building permits for homes located in racially restricted dubdivisions in the city's outermost census tracts. (Carroll, Jr.,Housing Characteristics in Flint in 1950)
Of these new permits, nearly half went to local developers Robert P. Gerholz and Gerald Healy, who together built sixteen hundred west side homes for white buyers on land previously owned by GM's Modern Housing Corporation. One of the city's most prominent real estate developers and civic leaders, Gerholz, at various points in his career, served as a trustee of the Urban land Institute, director of the Michigan national Bank, and president of the National Association of Realtors, the Michigan Real Estate Association, and the United States chamber of commerce. Gerholz was also a mapping consultant for the HOLC's 1937 survey of Flint and was thus an architect of the federal government's newly codified racial policies. During the 1940's Gerholz actively implemented the federal government's redlining initiatives by building and selling in neighborhoods available only to white purchaser's. By 1958, the federal Housing Administration hadrecognized gerholz's contributions to the local real estate industry by naming him an official government advisor,"
Gerald Healy interview by R. Schafer, August 7, 1987, Oral Histories GHCC
Last edited by untanglingwebs on Tue Mar 27, 2012 11:08 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 9:51 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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The FHA administrators worked with local advisors like Gerholz in order to determine where and for whom the new subdivisions Between 1940 and 1947, the city's black population nearly doubled and became about twelve thousand. In that same time frame builders constructed only twenty-five privately financed new homes for black purchasers and all of these homes were in the St John and Floral Park areas.
"Democracy is out in Flint" was the title of an August 9, 1941 column by an unnamed author in the Brownsville weekly, an African-american newspaper. The article described how 'Flint colored people cannot secure an FHA loan to improve their property nor to build any."
The Flint Spokeman, another black paper, in an 1946b editorial stated :
"The colored people were positively fenced in"...."He was allocated areas adjacent to the plants, where he was held in a vise-like grip. Fenced in by covenants and secret agreements, the Negro had to stay in his own juice.
(The Third Ward Enigma, Flint Spokesman, May11, 1946)
page 140 |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 10:06 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Black activists challenged the idea that racial integration would have a detrimental effect on property values and neighborhood stability. They organized education campaigns to show that black homeowners were also committed to improving their homes. Flint Urban League officials Frank J. Corbett and Arthur J. Edmunds announced results of a survey of black property owners in 1955 which they gave to local builders, bankers and real estate agents. About one-third of the 3,716 black-owned properties had recently upgraded their homes and over one-half had "attractive lawns and shrubs". Their demands for new housing were ignored.
(Flint Journal January 18, 1955) |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 10:15 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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federal officials rarely insured home mortgages for balck buyers during the 1940s and 1950s and then it was only after lengthy negotiations with local officials. In Flint blacks had to find developers willing to build and the acquissition of new segregated home sites.
The Urban League started in 1944 to secure federal funding for fifty new homes in Floral park. No local builders would give a commitment so they finally located a commitment from merrill and Company, a new York builder. It took ten months of negotiations before FHA agreed to insure on the condition the homes would be built in a "segregated, deteriorated residential area bound by Twelfth Street, Fern Avenue and liberty Street.
(Flint journal, April 8, 1944)
In 1949 the "Veteran's Administration and local builder Ira McArthur announced plans to build thenty-six federally backed homes for Negro veterans on Florida and idaho Avenues in the northern half of the st john neighborhood." (page 142 citing Flint Journal, December 18,1949)
Corbett and Edmunds wrote The Negro Housing Market-An Untapped resource in 1954. Aquote from that document:
"The main deterrent in the negoo's efforts to improve his housing conditions is not the lack of interest in or desire for adequate and decent homes. Instead it is controls that rstrict his housing opportunities to the extent that he can live in the worse (sic) neighborhood in the city," |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 10:32 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Activist from the NAACP, the Urabn league as well as other civil rights groups argued FHA should stop segregationist policies and they succeeded in 1947 when FHA officials deleted all racial references in their Underwriting manual.
In 1948, there was a landmark Supreme Court ruling, Shelley v Kraemer (334 U.S. 1), in which racially restrictive housing covenants were struck down and deemed not legally enforceable.
Although FHA Commissioners Franklin D. Richards and Walter l. Greene gave public speeches assurring open housing, they lied. They did rewrite the manual but they continued considering racial integration as a mortgage risk factor until the late 1960's.
(page 143)
Last edited by untanglingwebs on Tue Mar 27, 2012 4:36 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 10:42 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Local builders, realtors and lenders maintained adherence to segregated houing up to the 1970s. In the "first half of the 1950s Flint builders constructed fewer than a hundred new homes for Negro occupany-all of them within segregated black neighborhoods- out od nearly six thousand new homes built concurrently in the city." (page 144 from Corbett and Edmunds, The negro Housing market)
The FHA distanced themselves from the issue and blamed local officials for the maintainance of Jim crow housing policies. Corbett and Edmunds discuss a conference on Nero housing in Detroit during the late 1950s where Albert M. Cole, an administrator from the Housing and Home finance Agency, stated that racial discrimination "is not a federal problem....The real problem lies with citizens, the businessmen, the builders, the lenders, the realtors and the civic leaders."
Highsmith maintains the "truth is that private and public housing policies worked in tandem to maintain rigid racial segregation and poor housing in the city's growing black ghettoes." (page 145)
Highsmith demonstrats how Cole, while denying federal culpability, used the language of de facto segregation in an effort to describe a distinctive "northern style" of Jim Crow".
"Echoing Cole, officials from the Mott Foundation and the flint booard of education maintained that any racial imbalances between schools were the product of the local housing market." (pages 145-146)
Black professional, skilled craftpersons and business owners with adequate money were able to pierce the residential color line by purchasing homes with cash or informal land contracts. These properties were often on the all-white blocks on the borders of the ghettoes. Highsmith alleges the Board of Education routinely intervened to keep public schools segregated. |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 11:07 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Mott Foundation continued to play a key role in school districting decisions. In the mid 1940's Frank Manley was appointed by the Flint Board of Directors to the position of Assistant Supeintendent of Community Education. In the papers of the Olive Beasely collection is a confidential survey of Flint Schools from June of 1956. The report stated "Frank J. Manley is, for all practical purposes, the superintendent of Flint's schools and through him the influence of the foundation is applied.....to every sector of school programming."
Time magazine in an April 12, 1968 column "Model Use of Money" wrote "it [the Mott Foundation]contributed directly to the school board, but only after Mott and his aides study and approve of the board's plans for spending the money". |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 11:26 am |
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Dave Starr
F L I N T O I D
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| This may be a good time to look into why the Mott Foundation abruptly terminated all the after school & summer programs that were in place back when the Flint public schools were considered a model for the nation. |
_________________
I used to care, but I take a pill for that now.
Pushing buttons sure can be fun.
When a lion wants to go somewhere, he doesn’t worry about how many hyenas are in the way.
Paddle faster, I hear banjos. |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 12:56 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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| Good Point . residents also need to consider the role the Mott Foundation is playing now in Flint's political systems. When the downtown investment groups anted concessions, such as extensions of the Enterprise Zone tax credits and more liquor licenses, they went directly to lansing before they went to council. |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 1:34 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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According to Highsmith, white students could easily transfer from predominately black schools into white schools, but black students did not have these transfer options. (page 151)
Boundaries between schools were generally not codified. In 1935 the Board of education shifted the boundaries between Dort and parklans elementary Schools. Both schools were close to one another and both served Flint's north end. When several students from the integrated Parkland School moved into the all white area serving Dort School, the school board silently shifted the boundaries slightly to move the black Dort students back to Parkland. (page 151-152)
Both Dewey School, with fourteen percent black students, and Jefferson School, with forty-onepercent black students, served the working class neighborhoods in the north end in the 1950s and could be considered integrated. By the end of the 1950s, both schools were predominately black. |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 1:52 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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"nevertheless, the Flint Board of Education accepted no blame for pupil segregation. In defense of its construction policies, board members, Mott Foundation personnel, and school Superintendent William J. Early maintained that "de facto" segregation in newly constructed elementary schools stemmed exclusively from segregated housinhg in the city. In a 1966 speech to the Michigan Civil Rights commission, Early stated unequivacally, "The degree of racial imbalance that exists in some of the elementary schools in Flint Community Schools is a result of long-established patterns of housing segregation in the City of Flint."
William J. Early,"Presentation to the civil rights Commission of the State of Michigan"., December 1, 1966,Beasley papers, box 29, folder 21,GHCC
Page 154
Last edited by untanglingwebs on Tue Mar 27, 2012 2:21 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 2:02 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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In 1952 Pierce School was built in one of Flint's most exclusive and segregated east side neighborhoods and had 100 percent white enrollment despite the fact that the school was close to the black section of Sugar Hill in Floral Park. Sugar Hill was predominately middle class and located just southwest of Pierce School.
Instead of a policy that sent children to the nearest school, the board chose Gilkey Creek as a boundary- asmall strem that separated Sugar Hill from Pierce Park. Sugar Hill students were required to attend the dilapidated and overcrowded Clark School that had a 95 percent black enrollment.
"upon learning of the gerrymandered boundaries and the mismatched enrollments of the two schools, a number of black parents from Clark requested pupil transfers to Pierce, citing both its greater proximity and its modern amenities, Although Pierce did not reach full capacity until the early 1960s, the board, without explanation, refused all transfer requests from black pupils, granting them only to white students from Clark."
(page 156 and information gathered from Board of Education minutes)
* the Detroit free Press on June 14, 1965 wrote about how Gilkey creek became a symbolic racial barrier. Van G. sauter and John L. Dotson on "How Flint deals With racial Problems" |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 2:20 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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In Rhonda Sanders book Bronze Pillars she interviewed south side residents such as Ruth Scott and Minnie Simpson and they described the Pierce -Clark boundaries.
According to Scott (page 117 of Bronze Pillars):
"They drew boundaries around houses, down th middle of the street...When blacks moved onto a street they would change the boundaries."
By 1960 Pierce remained all white and Clark went from 76 percent black in 1950 to 99.5 percent black in 1960. (page 157) |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 2:30 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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The opening of Stewart School presented a similar problem, '"Stewart served the area south of the Lapeer Road residential color linein the eastern section of Sugar Hill. Prior to the opening of Stewart, the board refused all requests tyo send black pupils to Pierce, choosing instead to house nearly three hundred African-American students from the overcrowded Clark building in decaying frame houses known as the Crago and Elm park temporary structures. Through the careful drawing of erratically shaped boundaries between the three schools, the board relieved overcrowding at Clark while maintaining racial homogeneity at Pierce. In order to exclude the integrated neighborhoods that bordered Sugar Hill from the Pierce District, the board again violated its proximity policy by extending the Stewart boundary over a mile and a half to the north and east, resulting in an80 percent blacky enrollment at Stewart while Pierce remained under capacity and all white."
page 157 using Flint Board of education , Frequency Distribution of Pupils by Race, Mines to clancy, August 29, 1975 |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 2:46 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Stewart then established separate classrooms for white and black children. ( Edgar Holt)
Edgar Holt of the Flint NAACP signed an affidavit in the case of Holman et al v School District of the City of Flint,et al case # 76-40023, United states District court , Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division.
Holt stated "There were magic lines for racial discrimination. The Flint Board of Education used these magic-racial lines for establishing school boundaries as if they were sacred"
Flint formalized school attendance boundaries on February 9, 1954, just three months before the landmark Supreme Court Brown decision. These boundaries stood for twenty years before the federal government acknowledged they violated trhe court's ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
(page 158) |
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Tue Mar 27, 2012 2:59 pm |
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