22 | NOVEMBER 11 • 2021 

OUR COMMUNITY

A

wall runs half a mile south from 
Eight Mile Road to Pembroke 
Avenue. The Birwood Wall is 
easy to miss. It runs down an alley between 
backyards, and it does not cross any inter-
sections. The physical wall seems incon-
spicuous, but it has a heavy history. The 
Birwood Wall is a segregation wall, one of 
the few of its kind still standing. 
NBC News Reporter Erin Einhorn and 
Olivia Lewis of BridgeDetroit explored the 
disturbing history of this wall in a joint 
special of NBC news and BridgeDetroit 
published on July 19. 
On Nov. 4, Einhorn did a presentation 
on Zoom for the Jewish Historical Society 
of Michigan, “Detroit Jews, Segregation and 
the Birwood Wall.
” 
Einhorn explains, “One of the reasons 
I wanted to do this presentation is . . . my 
reporting uncovered a lot of interesting 
Jewish angles . . . that were interesting to me 
as Jew from Metro Detroit.
”
Einhorn grew up West Bloomfield, 
“which at the time was very diverse ethni-
cally, but not racially.
” She notes that “the 
vast majority of America, Black or white, 
grew up in a segregated neighborhood with 
people who look like themselves.
” 
How did that happen? 
“There’s a myth out there that people live 
in segregated neighborhoods because they 

choose to, because they want to live around 
people who look like themselves,
” Einhorn 
explains. “In reality, there are decades and 
decades of federal housing policy, regional 
policy and urban policy that deliberately 
separated people, and the wall is a really 
concrete example.
“The wall was actually built in response 
to federal housing policies that date back to 
the New Deal under Roosevelt,
” she adds.
The well-known federal housing policies, 
mortgage guarantees that enabled work-
ing and middle-class families to own their 
own homes, worked for white families but 
explicitly shut Black families out. 

A HISTORY OF DISCRIMINATION
In the first decades of the 20th century, 
Detroit’s population tripled, as workers 
surged into the area attracted by plentiful 
manufacturing jobs. Black people came 
up from the South in the Great Migration; 
white people came from across the country; 
Jews and others who could escape Europe 
also came to Detroit. The housing supply 
did not grow fast enough to accommodate 
the influx of people. 
But federal lenders would not lend for 
housing in Black neighborhoods. Black 
neighborhoods were redlined, meaning that 
a buyer could not get help with a mortgage 
in those neighborhoods. Buyers would 

resort to predatory loans or a land contract, 
which put the borrower at a big disadvan-
tage. Deeds in white neighborhoods often 
had restrictive covenants, prohibiting sale to 
Black people and sometimes to Jews. In this 
neighborhood, the clause read ““by any per-
sons not of pure, unmixed, white Caucasian 
race.
”
Eventually, the federal government, as 
part of the New Deal, provided a network 
of programs to help lift working-class white 
families into home ownership — but not 
Black families. The problem was older 
than the New Deal. In 1925, when a devel-
oper wanted to put middle-class housing 
(Blackstone Park No. 6) in Greenfield 
Township, then just outside of Detroit, he 
couldn’t get financing because the area was 
too close to land owned by Black families. 
Black families, escaping overcrowding 
in Paradise Valley and Black Bottom in 
Detroit, had purchased land and put-up 
temporary housing in Greenfield Township, 
saving up to build more permanent struc-
tures. Bankers would not lend to housing 
so close to the Black neighborhood, that at 
least one resident called “shacktown.
”

THE BIRWOOD WALL
In 1941, the developers built a wall sep-
arating the Black community to the east 
from the new housing in the west. With the 

Reporter Erin Einhorn explains how Jewish people 
benefi
 ted from racist housing policies of the past.

A Wall in Detroit

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

KIRÁLY-SETH VIA WIKIMEDIA

View of the Birwood Wall from Alfonso Wells Playground, Detroit

