Avery and her parents rejoiced. For the next 10 years, they watched as new brick and wood-frame houses for Black homeowners grew where Shacktown used to be. Soon, they moved into a pair of brand-new side-by-side homes, financed with federally backed mortgages. Avery and husband paid their $5,200 mortgage in $28.91 monthly installments, records show.
Their victory was rare in a country where redlining wouldn’t be outlawed for another quarter century. Few Black neighborhoods at the time had access to federal housing programs.
But the push for justice wasn’t over.
‘Immeasurable’ consequences
White families didn’t last long in Blackstone Park No. 6.
Members of the neighborhood association vigorously defended the racial rules in their deeds for several years, even taking steps in 1944 to expel a Chinese war refugee who moved in with her children, according to newspaper articles.
But in 1948, the Supreme Court made it illegal to enforce racial deed restrictions, and by the following year, a row of houses intended for Black buyers had sprung up on Mendota, the street just west of the wall.
In 1953, Mary Binion Taylor and her 10 siblings were among the first Black children to move onto nearby Manor Street, she said.
Now 82, she remembers watching from her front yard as a pair of white real estate agents worked her block, encouraging white residents to sell.
“They were selling like hotcakes,” she said. “Every day, for weeks, there would be people moving out and Black people moving in.”
When she and her siblings enrolled in the local elementary school, they were among the first Black students there. Teachers gave them a second intelligence test because they thought their first scores were too high for Black children, she said.
But within a few years, Black families were the majority. Two Black neighborhoods — one built by Black activism, the other by white flight — became a single community, known as Eight Mile-Wyoming, with a wall in the middle.
Jeffrey Edison, 70, whose family moved to the neighborhood in the early 1950s, said everything he and his friends needed was in the neighborhood. The watchful eyes of family friends like the Binions meant they couldn’t make trouble without someone telling their parents.
Families in this part of Detroit sang in the choir, prayed together and sent their children to Sunday school at churches like Oak Grove African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was co-founded by the Crews family. Lifelong friendships took root at the Johnson Recreation Center, which became a gathering place for neighborhood children, including a Boy Scouts troop. It had a pool — rare for Black neighborhoods at the time.
