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WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

continued from page 13

Detroit’s “Wailing Wall”

Built to separate black and white neighborhoods,
the concrete wall still stands today.

ROBIN SCHWARTZ CONTRIBUTING WRITER

TOP: The Detroit
Wall, 1951.

INSET: Teresa
Moon has lived
around Detroit’s
“Wailing Wall”
since age 6. She
learned its true
meaning — to
separate houses
owned by blacks
from new white
subdivisions —
when she was 15.

Ben Falik

Jeff Horner

Y

ou don’t have to travel far or look
too hard to find a stark reminder
of racial segregation in Detroit. Just a
short distance from Royal Oak, Oak
Park and Southfield, near Eight Mile
and Wyoming, there is a park and play-
ground bordered by a mural-filled wall.
The artwork is colorful, whimsical
and uplifting with sketches of hous-
es, people and symbols of peace.
But there is more to this scene
than meets the eye. The 6-foot con-
crete wall that traverses the Alfonso
Wells Memorial playground along
Birwood Street also has an ugly side.
“This is governmentally sanc-
tioned apartheid,” explains Jeff
Horner, a senior lecturer with Wayne
State University’s Department of
Urban Studies and Planning. “The
government actually saw fit to put in
a barrier to separate the races.”
Detroit’s “Wailing Wall,” also
known as the “Eight Mile Wall”
dates back to 1941. It was built to
satisfy the Federal Housing Authority,
which would not guarantee housing
loans in “undesirable” neighbor-
hoods. At the time, that meant
communities with mostly African
American or Jewish families. So, a
developer proposed building the
half-mile wall as a dividing line
meant to keep black families out.
The FHA approved the loans and
construction began.
“At least in some parts of history
there’s a narrative of the federal gov-
ernment as an agent of progress and
there are examples of that,” says
Ben Falik, former manager of Detroit
service initiatives for the Jewish
social action group Repair the World.
“Then, there are concrete examples

of when the federal government
required and sanctioned segregation,
and not just in the South; this is right
here in Detroit.”
Falik often brought groups of
student volunteers to the wall for a
firsthand look at the city’s history.
Parts are not covered with art and
look exactly as it did 75 years ago.
Teresa Moon grew up with the
wall. Her family moved there in
1959, when she was just 6 years
old. She still lives on the street today.
“We had no idea it was a seg-
regation wall,” Moon says. “My
parents never talked about it and
neither did my grandmother.”
Teresa was about 15 when she
finally learned why the wall was
really there. She says it serves as a
painful reminder at a time when our
country is still very much divided.
“I can’t take away what it is,” she
says. “I can’t not tell the kids who
are growing up over here what it is
and why they built it.”
While not much is known about
the Jewish community’s response
when the wall was built, history pro-
fessor Lila Corwin Berman recounts
one instance where a Jewish builder
tried to extend the wall for his own
benefit. In her book, Metropolitan
Jews: Politics, Race and Religion in
Postwar Detroit, Berman writes that
Harry Slatkin tried to convince city
leaders to go along with the plan.
“Slatkin had hoped he might
snake the wall around the property
he owned to protect his investment
from black settlement,” she writes.
“The city rejected his 1953 effort to
elongate the wall.”

“STUFF STILL HAPPENS”
Moon says while it may be subtler
today, “stuff still happens” to
keep people apart.
“There are some places in this
surrounding community I won’t go
because I know I’m not going to
be treated fairly, and that’s like a
few miles from here,” she says. “Is
it ever going to change? Are we
ever going to be where the color
of my skin is not going to matter?
I’m 63 years old and I can’t see
that will happen in my lifetime,
and that’s sad. It brings tears to
my eyes.”
She remains hopeful things will
improve, especially for the younger
generation. Moon recalls being
a junior high school student in
1967, when she met and spoke to
white students for the first time.
“That’s when they started bus-
ing kids,” Moon recalls. “That was
my first experience going to school
with white kids — and they
were white Jewish kids. It was an
experience because neither one
of us knew anything about the
other one. I hadn’t been close to a
white person ever in my life.”
Detroit’s Wailing Wall runs
through a community that remains
predominantly African American.
Horner says, unfortunately, the
lingering lesson of the wall is still
relevant and timely today, more
than seven decades later.
“The lesson is let people live
wherever they want to live,” he
says. “Eliminate racial prejudice
and hatred — and I think every-
thing will be fine.” •

band bought a house on Snowden near
Schaefer in Northwest Detroit.
“People moved out quietly in the
summer and at night,” she recalls. “Real
estate agents had a lot to do with clean-
ing people out. They distributed fliers
that said, ‘Sell why you can.’”
Ira Harris, 78, a retired lawyer and
Huntington Woods resident, grew up
on Birchcrest and attended Hampton
and Mumford High School. He lived in
Detroit until the 1980s.
“It doesn’t take much
to stir people to white
flight; they feared black
people,” Harris says. He,
too, remembers scare tac-
tics by real estate agents,
some Jewish, who warned
homeowners: “You better
Ira Harris
sell now before it [the hous-
ing price] goes through the
cellar.”
Ruth Kahn, 89, who has lived in
Detroit’s Green Acres neighborhood
since 1957, says, “I never talked about
it with anyone. They had a
little more money so they
moved to the suburbs.”
By 1965, half of all Detroit
Jews lived in the suburbs,
according to Berman in
Metropolitan Jews, and some
Detroit-based synagogues
and temples had moved as
Ruth Kahn
well. Congregation Shaarey
Zedek built a sanctuary and
school in Southfield in 1962,
a move that was quite controversial,
according to Judge Cohn, and which
was reportedly not approved by Shaarey
Zedek’s Rabbi Morris Adler.
Kathleen Straus, a Downtown Detroit
resident, recalls Temple Beth El’s mem-
bership vote to purchase land for a new
suburban location. “I was one of only 14
members who voted against the move,”
she says. The temple completed a new
building in Bloomfield Hills in 1973.

DEDICATED TO OPEN HOUSING
While many Jewish Detroiters were leav-
ing for the suburbs, Jewish organizations
and religious leaders had actively sup-
ported efforts to provide equal housing
opportunities for all Detroiters. They
were mindful that discriminatory hous-
ing covenants and deed restrictions had
been used against Jews not many years
before and were still in effect in some
suburbs.
Mel Ravitz, initially an employee of the
Detroit City Planning Commission, was
elected to the City Council in 1961 — the
first Jewish member since 1920. He was
dedicated to open housing, stating that
“only in a liberal community can there
be real freedom and security for Jews.”

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January 26 • 2017

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