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There Went The Neighborhood - Studio Interview: Alma Wheeler Smith

When: August 24, 2022

Alma Wheeler Smith grew up in post-WWII Ann Arbor with two activist parents, Albert and Emma Wheeler. She recalls participating in picketing and demonstrations against segregation and redlining in Ann Arbor. She shares her perspective on her parents’ involvement in the decision to close Jones School.

This interview was filmed during the making of the documentary film There Went The Neighborhood: The Closing of Jones School, produced by the Ann Arbor District Library and 7 Cylinders Studio. More interviews are available in the There Went The Neighborhood Interview Archive.

Transcript

  • [00:00:52] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Alma Wheeler Smith. I'm retired and forcibly retired from the Michigan legislature by term limits. I'm still resentful [LAUGHTER] after all of these years.
  • [00:01:07] TOKO SHIIKI: Can you move a little bit closer to the microphone?
  • [00:01:11] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I could also speak up.
  • [00:01:13] TOKO SHIIKI: No, no, no. I think just a little bit closer.
  • [00:01:19] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I'm sorry. I am the world's worst when it comes to projecting.
  • [00:01:23] DONALD HARRISON: No, you sound great.
  • [00:01:23] TOKO SHIIKI: No, you're great.
  • [00:01:24] DONALD HARRISON: Is this okay Toko?
  • [00:01:25] TOKO SHIIKI: Yeah.
  • [00:01:27] DONALD HARRISON: That's pretty good. [OVERLAPPING]
  • [00:01:28] TOKO SHIIKI: Yeah, great.
  • [00:01:31] DONALD HARRISON: That's pretty good. As you know, the closer to the microphone, the better it gets. [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:01:34] TOKO SHIIKI: The better sound.
  • [00:01:34] DONALD HARRISON: Take 2. [LAUGHTER] I said we weren't going to do takes.
  • [00:01:41] TOKO SHIIKI: It sounds great.
  • [00:01:42] DONALD HARRISON: Yeah, there we go. Now we're ready. If, Alma, if you start with "My name is..."
  • [00:01:47] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: My name is Alma Wheeler--
  • [00:01:50] DONALD HARRISON: I'm just going to pause.
  • [00:01:50] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Slow down?
  • [00:01:50] DONALD HARRISON: So that they don't hear my voice.
  • [00:01:52] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Okay. My name is Alma Wheeler Smith. I am retired, I am forcibly retired from the Michigan legislature by term limits. I guess you're not going to include it, so I am going to say I'm resentful of term limits because if my constituency thought I was still doing a decent job, I would still be there.
  • [00:02:21] DONALD HARRISON: When were you born and where?
  • [00:02:24] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I was born in Columbia, South Carolina on August 6th of 1941. I was born an identical twin. My twin sister died when I was two. She caught her dress on fire and ran to mom for help. The ambulance that came to take her to the hospital turned around and left her because the family was Black. We were, after all, in South Carolina in Jim Crow era. My dad and mom moved the family to Ann Arbor shortly after that. Dad was up here doing his PhD in public health at the U of M and mom had finished her master's degree in Public Health at the University of Michigan. So the family was brought back together and I grew up in Ann Arbor, lived there all my life until I had kids and we moved into Salem Township, which is in the north-easterly most corner of Washtenaw County.
  • [00:03:40] DONALD HARRISON: You were maybe three or four. How old were you when you moved to Ann Arbor and what do you remember of coming?
  • [00:03:45] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I think I was probably late two maybe three. What do I remember? I think many of my memories are told memories or learned memories not my own. My older sister Mary, I remember playing with her. We lived on Brown Street up near the University of Michigan Stadium. It was one of the few areas where Black families could find housing. My parents found a house on Eighth Street that they wanted to buy, they would be integrating a neighborhood on the west side, but couldn't get a loan from any of the banks. They borrowed money from my maternal grandmother and put down a down payment on the house. I would say by and large, the neighbors were all right, they weren't openly hostile, there were no riots as we moved in. But there were a few tense situations with other kids primarily, things that they had heard from their parents, and so we spent a good deal of time showing the neighborhood that we were just people like they were, and that we'd be all right. [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:05:22] DONALD HARRISON: This isn't the old neighborhood. So you started at Brown over by the stadium and then moved to Eighth?
  • [00:05:28] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Moved to Eighth probably when I was four, and Nancy would have been a relative newborn, my younger sister.
  • [00:05:43] DONALD HARRISON: You were the only Black family?
  • [00:05:44] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: We were the only Black family there and remained so for my youth, anyway. We were very close to Slauson School, which was behind our house. We had a lot of school kids running through the driveways and across the yards, and so we got a good taste of public school life, but my parents had sent us to St. Thomas elementary and high school because they were working very hard to integrate the Ann Arbor public school system, and they didn't want blow back on their kids as they were making enemies with the upper echelon of the public school community, and probably many of the parents as well. I think one of the first things they were able to accomplish was bringing in Black teachers. I don't know if you've talked to Joetta Mial for this particular segment, but Joetta's husband, Harry, was the first Black teacher at Jones School and one of two Black teachers in the public school system. When I was growing up, Black folks generally had employment as maids, custodians, menial low-skill jobs because opportunities were not offered even if they had the education it was hard to get a job.
  • [00:07:28] DONALD HARRISON: Alma, what year are we talking for you growing up?
  • [00:07:30] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I was born in '41, so I would say growing up years were '45 to, well, high school. I went to the University of Michigan so I stayed in Ann Arbor but [OVERLAPPING] so '45-'59.
  • [00:07:55] DONALD HARRISON: So post-war.
  • [00:07:56] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Yes, definitely post-war. When the push for civil rights and equal opportunity really took hold and was driven by Black folks coming back from the war and looking at the situation and saying, "Wait a minute, I fought for this country, and now I can't drink at the water fountain, go anywhere as a free equal person." When we were growing up, Ann Arbor was segregated in it's housing pattern. Blacks were seated in restaurants near the kitchen or near the restrooms. We would go to Jacobson's to buy clothes. You couldn't try on hats. They were reluctant to let you try on shoes. It was really a soft Southern Jim Crow situation. Except for the housing patterns that were reinforced by the realtors who actually followed a red line in the city. The heavy concentration of that Black population was on the north side of the city, north-central around the Jones School area. There was another pocket down around Greene and Brown where the university has some administration buildings and the ice hockey rink is. There was a social center down on Greene Street for Black families. Then on Main Street, you had the Ann Arbor Community Center--the Dunbar Center originally--for Black families where the kids and families could get together and have some recreation.
  • [00:10:05] DONALD HARRISON: Growing up, what was your sense of that segregation? Was it something that you talked about? Or you were an outlier? Your family was not in the redlined areas.
  • [00:10:19] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Right. But we certainly talked about it because it was integrating Ann Arbor and creating opportunities for solid education for the kids and good employment for the parents was critically important to my parents. They started the--I'm going to forget the name of it--the Ann Arbor Civic Forum where Black people would come together and talk about the problems in the Black community and strategize how they would attack those problems, how they would create greater opportunity. Talked about things like creating a Fair Housing Ordinance, creating a drive to the schools to make sure that we had Black teachers, so that kids would see people who looked like them who were successful. To make sure we had Black administrators who could be understanding and sympathetic of some of the problems that Black families brought to school. We talked about that around the dining room table every night. It was part of our education process. We would come home and mom and dad would say, "How was school?" Like every kid we would say, "Fine." "What did you learn?" "Nothing." As long as our grades were okay, we would talk about the problems of the day and how we were going to work to resolve or at least mitigate the problems that Black families were facing.
  • [00:11:56] DONALD HARRISON: Were you friends with a lot of the kids who were in the old neighborhood in the west side near the Jones area? How aware were you of what they were experiencing [OVERLAPPING]?
  • [00:12:09] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: It's a great question because mom and dad had friends in the community we would know their kids, their offspring. We didn't have a tremendous amount of interaction with them because again, we went to St. Thomas which took us out of the community even though St. Thomas was on the edge of the Black community on Kingsley and what's that street? [LAUGHTER] Detroit.
  • [00:12:42] DONALD HARRISON: Detroit. Okay
  • [00:12:46] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: But in order to help bridge, the NAACP had a youth forum so that we played with Black kids--ice skating parties, sports, had actual conversations about what problems the kids were having in school. While we weren't in the public schools, it was also what problems are you having in that Catholic school where there are four of you? [LAUGHTER] But we were fortunate. The nuns were essentially very progressive. When Black kids were expelled from the Ann Arbor public schools, they found a home at St. Thomas, even though they might not be Catholic. Education was prized by the nuns and they made sure that kids had that opportunity to continue.
  • [00:13:50] DONALD HARRISON: Did you go to the Dunbar Center? I'm just curious.
  • [00:13:52] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Yes. We would go there for parties on a Friday or Saturday. One of my mom's great friends was Deborah Grubbs and her sisters and they lived kiddy corner from the Dunbar Center. It was just, "Okay, [LAUGHTER] we'll just hop across the street, we'll be there." Where we are and how to find us.
  • [00:14:17] DONALD HARRISON: Was that seen as a real anchor of the community for you or not as much for you?
  • [00:14:23] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: It was definitely an anchor of the community. I think it was the social outlet for many of the kids in the community. Did we feel isolated? Possibly, being on Eighth Street and outside of the neighborhood. Some of the kids would chide and say you just think you're too good for the community. I don't think we felt that way at all. But there were times we felt ostracized.
  • [00:15:04] DONALD HARRISON: Did you walk to school? Because if you walked, you were walking really close to Jones?
  • [00:15:11] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Right. We were on the fringe of Jones School at St. Thomas, so we would walk through often. My dad took us to school virtually every morning and God love him, he took us late, so we would miss Mass, I am sorry, Sister Mary Neil. [LAUGHTER] We would get there as it was time to go into the classroom. But we would walk home at the end of the day. We always walked through the neighborhood. But in walking through, that's what we did, we didn't stop. The kids were either just leaving school or hadn't yet been dismissed and we just walked home.
  • [00:15:59] DONALD HARRISON: Did you have an impression, or if you think back on it, now, as a kid, what your impression of that area was, of the old neighborhood or what's now called Kerrytown or up the hill, Summit, Elks, that area?
  • [00:16:11] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Now called Water Hill.
  • [00:16:14] DONALD HARRISON: Now called Water Hill. Or the Black Business District?
  • [00:16:17] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well, I certainly had an impression of the Black Business District, which was Ann Street, Catherine, just across from what is now the county building and the court building. There were some fascinating businesses when I was growing up. I remember an old harness shop with the harnesses and bells, and saddles and yokes in the window. I don't know if it was an antique store, I never went in. The barbershops. It was active. A lot of business going on, a lot of conversations going on.
  • [00:17:10] DONALD HARRISON: Then the park, Summit Park, did you ever go down there much? [OVERLAPPING]
  • [00:17:15] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: It wasn't Summit Park. There was a junkyard and a slaughter house in that area. And where NEW Center is now, was a junkyard. I think, now I'm stretching memory, the slaughterhouse was either adjacent to a junkyard on Summit where the park now is, or it was all associated with the what I remember as the junkyard by the railroad tracks. But that was definitely in the Black community and that's where kids had to play. There was not a park until decades later.
  • [00:18:13] DONALD HARRISON: You'd have been in your 20s as we get into the '60s and all of that started to happen. Yes, I think in terms of the neighborhood--Heidi, is there anything else in the neighborhood that we should hit on before we jump to--? You went to St. Thomas, we've actually covered that. You actually talked about, you're actually covering. You're way ahead. Any questions?
  • [00:18:43] HEIDI MORSE: Jump forward.
  • [00:18:47] DONALD HARRISON: Jump forward, yeah. It's interesting because depending on the era, the people we interview, it's a little different. Some of the people we interviewed went to Jones in the '60s before it closed. Some people went there in the '40s, and things have changed, they've changed over that time. I'm trying to think if there's anything else in terms of your perspective of Jones. Growing up, you didn't go there but did you have a sense for how it fit in the landscape of Ann Arbor? Because by the '60s, it was deemed not delivering a good enough education. But when you were growing up, was that something that you thought or heard?
  • [00:19:32] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: No. And I'm not sure that was a deep concern of parents because the kids were being directed into the business courses and the home economics courses as opposed to the college prep courses. There wasn't that challenge to the academic performance [NOISE] by most of the--do you want me to stop?
  • [00:20:05] DONALD HARRISON: [LAUGHTER] Your old producer instincts kicked in. There's the fire station about two blocks away.
  • [00:20:13] HEIDI MORSE: Also I remember sometimes like a [NOISE] really soft sound.
  • [00:20:18] DONALD HARRISON: Is that? Do you want to shut down my computer because that's?
  • [00:20:23] TOKO SHIIKI: Is it?
  • [00:20:30] DONALD HARRISON: Yeah. [NOISE] [BACKGROUND]
  • [00:20:36] DONALD HARRISON: And if you need to stand up and stretch at all.
  • [00:20:38] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I'll just grab a swallow of water [LAUGHTER]. I promise not to fall off the stool. [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:20:44] DONALD HARRISON: Yes, I have talked about getting a high-backed stool so that people can lean on it.
  • [00:20:51] TOKO SHIIKI: True.
  • [00:20:52] DONALD HARRISON: It's on the list. That's cleared. You were talking about the tracking of students at Jones.
  • [00:21:04] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Right.
  • [00:21:05] TOKO SHIIKI: Maybe it goes with this.
  • [00:21:07] DONALD HARRISON: Is it good?
  • [00:21:08] TOKO SHIIKI: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]. I'm hearing a [NOISE].
  • [00:21:14] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Know your equipment.
  • [00:21:17] TOKO SHIIKI: Right. Computer is ringing some signal.
  • [00:21:20] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: A high-frequency.
  • [00:21:24] TOKO SHIIKI: Yeah, I'm hearing that, but no more. Great.
  • [00:21:28] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: In terms of the neighborhood, there was a Greek Orthodox church on Main. Again, I'm testing my memory on Main Street, so there was a Greek community adjacent to the Black community or woven in, even. There were some very large houses around Kingsley, Division. I think that was a fairly integrated part of the neighborhood. I had some friends who went to St. Thomas who lived on Division. That was an area that had a blended population. As we moved up toward Gott and Summit and Miner you had a more densely situated Black population. But I think in '65, when the school was closed, the population and the demographic of the school was 75 percent Black.
  • [00:22:49] DONALD HARRISON: Yeah, I think that it evolved over those years.
  • [00:22:56] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Yes.
  • [00:22:57] DONALD HARRISON: As far as your growing up with your parents who were so involved, you talked about it already, but how would you describe their involvement with civil rights, as that all started to... And you traced that back to post-World War II, which I don't think I've heard anybody say that that was the start.
  • [00:23:17] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well, certainly it was the start in the South, and because mom was from South Carolina, we would go "home" every summer so we could see the change easily. I think with my parents, the work began in the late '50s, early '60s to break down the realtors' redlines for housing, to break down the banks' reluctance to offer mortgages to Black families, to create an opportunity for Blacks to own housing because it's a fundamental source of wealth, and housing wealth brought opportunities for kids to go to school because it was a foundation for loans and all of that was being denied to the Black community. It was always interesting to me--you think of civil rights, particularly from the South and watching the drive for civil rights in the South, as a Black issue. But it was an integrated issue in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw. It was great to see white people coming and bringing their knowledge and skills to help develop the strategies and the data needed to go to the school board and say, you have a problem, and it's our problem because our kids are not reading at grade level. They are not getting textbooks. The dollars being spent at Jones are not equal to the dollars being spent at the whiter elementary schools in Ann Arbor, and of course all of them were, I think the next school with the next highest Black population was probably Mack at around 40 percent. They could study the pattern and it was a little hard for the school board to say, well, that's not what's happening here. It was data-driven change and critically important. That research was driven by people who cared about other people being treated as human beings and having equal opportunities. Ann Arbor is always fascinating to me because it has a liberal myth about it. But the myth is often just that. There was a lot of conservative thinking, a lot of pushback, a lot of unwillingness to make change. I understand that that's pretty normal. People get used to the way things are and change is hard to create. But there was a deep impetus throughout the community for that kind of change for equity.
  • [00:26:45] DONALD HARRISON: So there is the myth of the liberal myth, but also the real myth of people pushing to make it better?
  • [00:26:51] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Right. I remember when I told my dad I was going to run for the school board in [LAUGHTER] South Lyon. South Lyon came in from Oakland County and took in Salem Township as part of its school district. School districts are amoebas. They just spread all over borders. There was a Black village population in Salem, and when Salem was looking for a school district to take the village school, they approached Ann Arbor Public Schools and they said "No." They approached Plymouth-Canton, and they said "No," although they eventually took a part of Salem Township, and then South Lyon came to the village and said, "We would like to take your kids." So we went to Oakland County [LAUGHTER] for school. But I don't know where I was going with that.
  • [00:28:02] DONALD HARRISON: In terms of [OVERLAPPING].
  • [00:28:03] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well I was talking you about my dad and I when I told him I was going to run for the school board, he said, "You don't want to do that." I said, "Why not?" He said, "I just don't want you to get hurt." He said, "It's a conservative area, it's a Republican area. They're going to be hard and cruel and not supportive." I said, "I've worked with the kids in the school district and with their parents now for three or four years. They want for their kids what I want for mine, and they seem willing to support my candidacy, so I'm going to give it a shot." I was fortunate enough to win. But he came back in 1994 when I said to him I was going to run for the state senate with the same concern, and I was running essentially from Ann Arbor. There is a myth in Lansing about the reality about Washtenaw County and its liberal bent. My colleagues used to call us the wing-nuts from Washtenaw. But my dad was very concerned about the conservative nature of the county, which would have been my senate district, and just said people perceive us as liberal and extraordinarily progressive on issues because the city and the county had taken leadership roles on fair housing. It was the first city in the state to have a fair housing ordinance and with many other issues, it was first, but it wasn't without a fight. But they got there. They had this perception of a very liberal community.
  • [00:30:04] DONALD HARRISON: You grew up-- As a teenager, this is when this was really starting to [OVERLAPPING] pick up. Were you very involved or was it something you would just hear about? What was your experience of that?
  • [00:30:18] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well, when we were younger, my parents were both involved with the NAACP, so they had no one to watch us, so we went to meetings. As we got older, we really began to know what was going on. We participated in pickets, we participated in all kinds of demonstrations, and we worked with the research. As we got older, we would work with the mapping for elections. This is where our population is, this is how many people we can turn out, this is what kind of literature and information we need to get to them to make sure they know how important their vote is. We were pretty heavily engaged as young people in the civil rights movement in Ann Arbor and the county.
  • [00:31:18] DONALD HARRISON: It really plays out in the Ann Arbor News, too, the '60s. You see this whole Jones report and then they finally decide to close the school. Then not long after you just see racial riots happen here and nationally. It's like things changed so quickly it seems [LAUGHTER] in this 10 years, but do you remember when that all was happening? You might have been in your early 20s, maybe in college.
  • [00:31:45] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Sixty-five, I would have been 20, 22. I do remember a couple of demonstrations at and around Jones, particularly around the busing issues, but we also had demonstrations going on on campus at the same time. Students saying, we're underrepresented. The same kinds of concerns that parents had for the elementary and high schools for St. Ann Arbor. I was definitely aware and not as active as my two sisters. They laugh and say "You were the last person we ever thought would go into politics," [LAUGHTER] because I did take a back seat.
  • [00:32:43] DONALD HARRISON: What did you study?
  • [00:32:46] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well, political science and journalism. My degree was in journalism and it taught me a lot in terms of how to research, how to look at issues in many perspectives as opposed to one opinion. It was a valuable learning process for me for my political career, if you will, because I certainly learned that there's more than one side to a story and often more than two.
  • [00:33:21] DONALD HARRISON: That's a good story. We don't have a specific point of view or there's not a story. I think it's more getting an understanding of how things changed and why and the impacts of those. I think that there's a sense that the Black community is predominantly in the old neighborhood and that it was very close knit and that then there was this fight for civil rights and desegregation open it up, like it was created this way through redlining and racism. Then as we desegregate and things start to open up more, then there's also a breaking up of the Black community. It's like both good and bad. It seems like it's what we hear in different ways. I guess I'm curious your perspective as you look back on that.
  • [00:34:18] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well, let me give you my mom's perspective, which I think initially surprised me. As the neighborhood broke up and we had more Black teachers coming into the system, she said to me one day, "Integration is good in a way because our kids will have more opportunity, their education will be more equally funded. But what I'm seeing is the Black teachers are harder on the Black kids than they are on the white kids." Because I think at heart they wanted them to be best and they were disappointed or their best was not good enough. There were a number of hurdles that Black kids had to overcome coming from a school that was undernourished if you will. They had to overcome that initial hurdle and then keep up with the crowd. The schools were still steering students away from the academic college track and the Black teachers were not necessarily pushing against their own administration for sometimes obvious reasons to make sure that those opportunities opened up. Mom was always concerned about integration in the South too in particular, but for the same reasons. Black kids were losing the teachers who focused on their education, taught them how valuable learning was and that it was lifelong. Losing that cohort of teachers was detrimental from her perspective. My initial thinking was, "Well, you're wrong. You're just seeing it in a very narrow perspective." But as I got older, I said, "You idiot." [LAUGHTER] With her years of experience and her wisdom, she was seeing the writing on the wall. There was a loss of concentration on the quality of education and nurturing that Black kids were getting in the school system because the teachers were being integrated into other schools as well. Their support base, the people who cared, who wanted them to achieve and win, were being pulled out and put it in other schools.
  • [00:37:18] DONALD HARRISON: Can you give us a sense of your father's take on it because I know what he was from what I read that he was pushing for Jones to be closed and thought that was a good move, and then later seemed to go on record as saying, gosh, I don't know if that was the [OVERLAPPING] best thing?
  • [00:37:39] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well, mom and dad were never that far apart. On their approach, they were far apart. They would talk about the issues that they were dealing with and consequences. For every strategy they proposed, they would look at the potential consequences and outcomes. I think there was probably a very intense conversation in the house about what is the long-range impact of sending our kids off to schools where they won't be necessarily valued and supported. What does that mean? I imagine they had some coming together of the minds, but could I honestly say that my dad thought closing Jones School was a mistake? I don't think so. I think there were--it certainly created different challenges, but those were challenges that could be mitigated if the will and the determination was in place to overcome them. I think sometimes that's what was missing, not that maintaining the status quo would have solved the problems, because it may not have. You may not have been able to convince a school board that they needed to dedicate, not just equal amounts of money to Jones School, but a bolus in addition to that because of the long-time neglect and what that fostered in the community.
  • [00:39:31] DONALD HARRISON: It was complicated?
  • [00:39:32] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: It is complicated. Wouldn't it be nice if the world weren't? [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:39:37] DONALD HARRISON: Well, and then I don't know if you have a take, Alma, as far as how things played out when Jones was closed. It really in some ways was like these dominoes started to fall in terms of that community and that neighborhood. Dunbar was moved to Main Street, churches closed, and things like that. Do you have a sense of that happening or your perspective on that?
  • [00:40:08] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well, I have a sense of the neighborhoods. It took a long time for integration to begin in the neighborhood. I was probably in my 30s when Black families started selling their homes to white families in the Water Hill community. Certainly Black families that were coming in with the university were buying in all areas of the city, but that core Black community that had been born and lived and nurtured in the north side remained there. But housing became very valuable. When Wheeler Park was dedicated, one of the--I want to say requests, but it was more of a challenge I think, that my dad made to the members of the community was to keep your houses, it's where your wealth is, it's where your community and culture is, and don't throw it away.
  • [00:41:39] DONALD HARRISON: It's tough when the prices start going up to not want to take advantage of that, but it's hard to know when. [OVERLAPPING]
  • [00:41:45] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: It's also tough when an ancient neighborhood gets older and older, and the cost to maintain becomes prohibitive. "Yeah, I'd like to tear down the old house and find something with the new footprint, but that's going to cost me my arm and my leg, and it might just be easier to sell. Let somebody else do that and I take the money and find another place."
  • [00:42:21] DONALD HARRISON: Do you have any feelings as far as how things have played out, how they've gotten to this point, since that big push in the '60s with like, we're going to fix things?
  • [00:42:33] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Yeah. My sense, and I have not done any studies, but my sense of Community High that replaced Jones School, was that it was predominantly white, upper income. A lottery system that was not quite a lottery. That many of the kids who had gone to Jones Elementary and Middle School, would not have been able to go to Community High School. I also have a concern that there is not enough data collection within the schools to say, are the kids getting an equal education? Is there something more we could be doing as a district to help assure the kids on an academic path, are doing the best they can? That's probably unfair. I think the school board in this day and age would be attuned to looking at issues similar to those. At least I would hope so.
  • [00:43:52] DONALD HARRISON: It's interesting, working on this project. Heidi's got even more knowledge in terms of being part of the library and working on this for even longer. But you see that the story after Jones closed, and kids are sent to different schools, fast-forward a few years, and there's still a race gap disparity in quality of education. That just keeps coming back into the '70s, '80s, '90s, and it just seems like, this is obviously a hard problem to fix, but it just seemed like--
  • [00:44:28] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: It's a hard problem to fix because it's an intrinsic bias. People don't believe that they are biased. "I'm just looking at things the way they really are. These kids aren't smart enough to achieve. They speak differently and they can't understand what I'm saying." I don't know if in the course of this process you've looked at the Black English suit that was filed against the Ann Arbor Public School district. Ruth Zweifler with the Student Advocacy Center kept copious amounts of data on expulsions and suspensions, finding that Black kids were disproportionately suspended and expelled, and that definitely has a serious impact on your learning process. It either ends it, or it interrupts it so frequently, and there's no support while you're out of school that you can't keep up. When there is a racial component to the disproportionality, who's being hurt? It's the kids that for some reason you don't want to be competitive. Unfortunately, it's ingrained. Are we getting better? I would like to think so. But in this age of Trumpism, and growing right-wing conservative politics, I hesitate to say that it is getting better. I think we're retrenching and going backwards, but maybe that's the vocal minority. [LAUGHTER] Forgotten the term that used to be used about the vocal minority. But I think we've got a way to go, but I don't think we have as far to go as we did when I was growing up in the '40s, '50s, and '60s.
  • [00:46:48] DONALD HARRISON: I think, going back to that time period, I don't know if you'd describe like two Ann Arbors or the amount of segregation that you grew up with. Thinking about, to what degree it has changed? And what amount of progress there is? I'm just curious to hear your take on that. Clearly there's a lot more that needs to be done. But how would you think back on that now? How far it has come, and what needs to be done? I know these are hard questions. [LAUGHTER] You're like, "Oh, that's an easy one."
  • [00:47:31] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: How far have we come? I've said for a long time that I think the South has come farther than the North because it was such a clear legal segregation. That you knew how to tackle at least the face problems. It was insinuated in the North, and even though there were hard and fast rules, there weren't laws you could take to court and say, "This is what's happening. This is definitely unconstitutional." You had to find the data that proved that de jure segregation existed in the schools, all of these Black kids. Isn't it intuitively obvious 75 percent of the population of the school is Black and it's in the Black neighborhood and there isn't much of another one. But intuition wasn't solid enough, wasn't good enough to cause action. There had to be documentation and data and you have to be hit over the head with it to see it. Have we moved beyond that? No. I'm working with a project here in Washtenaw County, the Washtenaw Equity Partnership that's looking at the criminal legal system and the disproportionate sentencing and prosecution of minority populations and minority populations in our case, it's 99 percent Black. Have we made strides? We were always willing to look at it regardless of the year. Because we had white folks working with Black folks to look at the education problem, the housing problem, the employment problems in Ann Arbor, and to address them. We have that same willingness today, but I think it's a greater number who are sensitive to the reality of that insidious inherent bias that people don't appreciate, find it hard to admit or believe. It works both ways. We have a little racial bias in the Black community too. [LAUGHTER] I don't want to hurl stones and not look at myself and say, you look at some folks and because they are extraordinarily wealthy, you attribute certain things to them. I have to remind myself that justice runs across the board. It's not just one facet of our community that deserves justice and fairness and thoughtfulness.
  • [00:50:48] DONALD HARRISON: Did your time in office and politics change your perspective on things like this in terms of what [OVERLAPPING]
  • [00:50:56] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: No, I wanted to kill all of my opponents [LAUGHTER] At first we kill the lawyers, then we kill my opponents. That means I would have taken--
  • [00:51:09] DONALD HARRISON: [OVERLAPPING] You had to start dealing with all these big systems and trying to change things to be just changing the status quo can be really hard.
  • [00:51:18] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: It is. And the legislature is a creature of the status quo. I think the legislature was created to maintain the status quo. It took a tremendous amount of effort to make a small amount of progress. It was certainly easier when I was in the legislature at the very beginning of term limits than it is now. Term limits has created a legislature of little experience and less wisdom because they don't have the time to learn the system, the process, to learn how to work with one another. They come in with a given agenda and boy they've got six years to get it done in the House and damn the torpedoes full speed ahead. "I don't care about consequences. This is what I came here to do, and that's what I'm going to do." When I started, people had worked across the aisle for decades. They knew that you would come together on one issue and fight one another tooth and nail on the next because your philosophies differed. One of the people I worked very well with was the most conservative Republican in the Michigan Senate. But we worked on corrections together and we were working on issues of why do we have so many Black folks in the prisons and why do we have such long sentences and why aren't we releasing people on parole and who gets released on parole? Working with Alan Cropsey, people would say, A, "How can you work with him?" and B, "How can you get anything done?" I said "Well, Alan and I want to see the same outcome. We're just getting there in different ways." But as long as you have some common ground that you've been able to establish, you can put aside a lot of differences to make that common ground better. We've lost that because of term limits, because of the loss of time, the loss of opportunity to work together and cross the aisle. Because of the political environment, that has nothing to do with term limits, but a whole lot to do with the lack of time to build bridges and understanding. I didn't answer your question.
  • [00:54:20] DONALD HARRISON: No. This is great.
  • [00:54:22] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I just aired my pet peeve.
  • [00:54:26] DONALD HARRISON: I want you to have space to do that. I don't want to take too much more of your time. I appreciate you coming in and you have plenty that you remember. You were like, "Oh, I'm not prepared," but you have an impressive amount of recall already and I'm curious if there's anything that for you feels important again especially for younger generations. We have a couple of students who are super interested in this topic, who grew up in Ann Arbor and are like, "I didn't know any of this." It's not something that I think is passed on and taught a lot. Are there things that you would want, especially younger generations to know in terms of the history of what the Black community fought for at Ann Arbor, or some of what has had to change and maybe still needs to change, or your perspective on what's called gentrification and how that's playing out in Ann Arbor. These are these bigger questions we're grappling with.
  • [00:55:33] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I think one of the most important things for kids is to listen to their grandparents, their parents, their experiences. To take the time to talk. To this day I regret not having asked my mom and dad certain things, gotten into the background and the history of why they did this. Their answer was always "We want a better world for our kids." But there were other driving factors. It's so important to value the experiences of the older generations. Because not only have they been through what they've lived through personally, but they carry their grandparents' stories.
  • [00:56:32] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Gentrification, it's a trend. The concern I would want the kids to watch is how your government approaches answers to gentrification. How they create opportunities for housing that's affordable for people within the same neighborhood, so there's an exchange of ideas and culture and expectations. There's nothing wrong with gentrification as long as other people are brought along, and given the same opportunity to reach beyond where they are. But for kids, it's being willing to listen, to being thoughtful, to having the courage to challenge. Without that, status quo looks pretty good. But if you see something wrong, you need to just say, "I think that's wrong. How do I prove to other people what's going on and that it needs to change?" That takes courage and imagination and creativity and ability to connect the dots, which [LAUGHTER] we don't always do as adults.
  • [00:58:12] DONALD HARRISON: You talked about the data, needing the data also. Putting the time and the research into showing--I can't just say it, and it does seem obvious, but I need to now get some research.
  • [00:58:25] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: And not being a one-person army, knowing that other people, even those you least suspect, might be interested and might have a bloody idea and be helpful. We can't be one-person armies. What's the John Donne? "No man is an island?" [LAUGHTER] I remember one of the last things my dad said to his high school, in Sumner High School in St. Louis, Missouri, when he was being inducted into the Hall of Fame when he was in his 80s. He looked at the kids and at the end of his speech he said, "Be kind to one another and have courage to right the wrongs." I think that's where our young people need to be.
  • [00:59:25] DONALD HARRISON: Is there anything else, Heidi, you'd want to offer, or anything we didn't ask you that you think would be important to say? Again, our film's going to zero in on Jones but telling the story of the Black community in Ann Arbor which really, for better, for worse, got dispersed, broken apart.
  • [00:59:49] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well, it's a great community and I think some of the stories I remember from my parents was how dad started building a relationship with the Black community as a person from the University of Michigan. First, he was viewed with some suspicion by some as an outsider coming into the community to make change, even though everybody in the community knew things needed to change. He told us he had a long conversation one afternoon on the porch with an older woman who was in the community and she looked at him and she said, "Doc, you need to get out and get to know the people before they'll work with you. Start a baseball team. Start doing things that they do." My dad played baseball, he bowled. It was a learning opportunity for him. How do I get into this community that views me with a certain amount of suspicion to let them know that what I'm doing is not meant to upset the apple cart and make your life difficult, but to create opportunities for you and your kids for a better existence. It's getting in the trenches and doing the job.
  • [01:01:32] DONALD HARRISON: He was in a pretty unique position in this community.
  • [01:01:36] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: He was. I, with great bias, think he did a great job with what he faced. The opposition continuously from the Ann Arbor News. Everything my parents would do was just anathema. It was like, "Who is this Satan in our midst?" And yet there were people that would come together from the churches, from schools who said, "You're right." I remember LeRoy Cappaert when the kids from Jones School were being bused into other schools. He was a principal at oh, dear. I'm sorry I mentioned it because I'm forgetting the school he was principal for. [OVERLAPPING]
  • [01:02:34] DONALD HARRISON: It's not important.
  • [01:02:34] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: The difference between his school and another one was that he was there at the door when the bus arrived to welcome the kids. He had prepped his kids to be open and kind. When this bus load of 20 Black kids arrived at the door they were welcomed, and they felt welcomed every day because LeRoy Cappaert made sure that happened. At another school that was like, "Well, these kids are coming. We have to put up with them. We'll put them in classes and they will be just like any other student. If they don't perform well, it's like any other student who doesn't get it." It was the attitude of the people who had to do the work that made the difference.
  • [01:03:32] DONALD HARRISON: Any thoughts as far as Wheeler Park and how that played out? [LAUGHTER] I know that that area was such a central part of the experience of that neighborhood.
  • [01:03:40] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well, it was a horrible part of the neighborhood in the beginning, because it was the source of rat infestations, odors that were unpleasant 24 hours a day. It was not a place where you would want your family to live. Yet, that was the expectation realtors had for the Black community. You will only live in this area. Unfortunately, we as a country haven't changed a lot. We find a lot of still incinerators and high heavy industries, heavy metal industries in communities surrounded by minority populations and low-income populations, regardless of race. Those are things that still needs to be tackled and changed. But going back to Wheeler Park, seeing that turn into a green space, and people of all colors come in to play basketball, run around the park, sit and talk to one another, is a sign of promise. That when you can bridge gaps regardless of what they are, there's hope. So I think Wheeler Park is a symbol of hope and growth.
  • [01:05:18] DONALD HARRISON: That's great.
  • [01:05:21] HEIDI MORSE: Can I ask you to introduce your parents to the viewers, just to say their names and the roles they held in Ann Arbor?
  • [01:05:27] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: My parents were Albert and Emma Wheeler. My dad was the first Black faculty member at the University of Michigan. He was very active in civil rights in Ann Arbor. Because of that, did not receive his promotion to full professor until he was about ready to retire. The university kept saying to him, holding up this promotion, saying if you stop rocking the boat, you'll get your promotion and the raise that comes with it. He said, "My job is to rock the boat." He said, "We'll make it." My mom, Emma Wheeler, had a master's degree in public health. They met at the U of M School of Public Health. She was probably the more aggressive boat rocker in the family, less patience and less diplomacy than my dad. When she went to the meeting, the city council knew that, "Oh, God, we're in for hell tonight." They were both extraordinarily effective in fighting for civil rights. At some point, mom and dad sat down and said, "We've got these three girls to raise. How are we going to do that and do the civil rights work." Dad was the breadwinner and mom was the homemaker. She sewed, she cooked, she canned, she froze and did all of the sustaining things for the family and the household, and she did civil rights with an aggression that was born of her own Southern upbringing and her family's experiences and background. They were both steeped in an understanding that education and a chance would change things for Black people in this country. I mean, they were driven.
  • [01:07:53] HEIDI MORSE: Thank you. Do you have time for another question?
  • [01:07:57] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Yeah.
  • [01:07:59] HEIDI MORSE: I was thinking-- [OVERLAPPING]
  • [01:08:03] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Did I bring a Kleenex?
  • [01:08:03] HEIDI MORSE: Oh, do you need one?
  • [01:08:03] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I don't know if I do. It feels like my nose is running. Well, is it running? You're on camera. If it's not, it's fine. [LAUGHTER]. Thank you. Just like my Kleenex at home.
  • [01:08:41] DONALD HARRISON: We need to get some official Kleenex.
  • [01:08:44] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Why these work great, and you can flush them. [LAUGHTER] Thank you. I'm just grateful I haven't started coughing.
  • [01:08:54] DONALD HARRISON: So, Heidi, what was your--?
  • [01:09:04] HEIDI MORSE: I was thinking a lot of folks, their perspective on or their knowledge of the history of the desegregation of schools in the US is about the Southern experience. You've mentioned thinking about civil rights in the South versus what was happening in the North. If you were to just summarize, for a general audience, what does school desegregation in the North look like or in Ann Arbor? How did that differ from the mainstream experience in the South that people see in movies.
  • [01:09:39] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I think desegregation in the North and South differ primarily because it was so visible in the South. I mean, the schools were segregated. You only had Black kids going to one school and white kids going to another. In the North we fell on this neighborhood school concept to define who would go to school where and then made sure that the neighborhoods were segregated because of redlining and inability of Black families to get loans to buy out of their neighborhood. If you could get a mortgage from the bank, you would get a mortgage that was connected to the neighborhood where you belonged. You had that, I call it an insidious segregation instead of a blatant one. In the South, it was so visible you didn't have to prove it existed. Certainly, based on the US Supreme Court case had to show that there was an impact because the schools were segregated. In the North, you first had to show that with data that the schools were segregated. People couldn't just say, well, that's the Black school and that's the white school because in the case of Jones, you at least had 25 percent of the kids who were white and it was only an accident of the neighborhood construction that that's the way the school was. You had to make the case that there was segregation in that school before you could even talk to people about the impact of that segregation on the education and the opportunities of the children in those schools.
  • [01:11:59] DONALD HARRISON: Classism or class, socio-economic, just adds this whole other [OVERLAPPING]--it's harder to tease that out.
  • [01:12:13] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: It is. I mean, in the South you had families of the doctor going to school with families of the cotton grower. It was fine because it was the Black school, it's where you went. There was all layers of economic wealth in that school. Here it wasn't just race, it was economics because the kids with wealth went to different neighborhood schools. That neighborhood concept was quite inventive for real discrimination and hard to break.
  • [01:13:06] DONALD HARRISON: You hit on this and I think that's really important to add into here as far as just that redlining--I think it was something that people were aware of but couldn't prove it till later. The impact of how that really affected what you just talked about.
  • [01:13:23] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Well, redlining was a federal design and the maps were very real. You could look at the neighborhoods and see where the red lines were drawn. Those maps were not made available to the general public. The realtors were very careful to make sure that the general community didn't know what they were doing, but it was very conscious and the federal government would not give VA loans or FHA loans or any other federally supported mortgage to a Black family that bought outside of those red lines, so they were constrained. Yeah, it was a federal crime. [LAUGHTER]
  • [01:14:27] DONALD HARRISON: And those ripple effects that you talked about when I heard you talk at the park, in terms of wealth.
  • [01:14:35] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Wealth essentially grows from that home ownership when the middle-class became a middle-class in the United States, it was because of home ownership. The opportunity to get a loan against your house, to send your children to college was something that was never allowed to Black people because they weren't allowed to own a home. Or if they owned a house, it was a very low value house in a low value area. With all of the things associated with that, and a school that provided a lesser education. Housing was the foundational wealth opportunity in this country, and it remains so today. You want to keep somebody poor, make sure they can't afford a house. I was at a bank board meeting today and the bank president was talking about Wall Street having bought up two-thirds of vacant housing stock and they're not reselling it. They're renting it. They've sucked up all of this housing opportunity for first-time owners so that they can rent it and they're not just renting it for 12 months or two years, they're turning them to BnB's because there's greater opportunity. It's even harder for families that need to rent a long time to find a place to rent. How do we keep people poor? We stop their opportunity for that first home. We stop their opportunity for education so they can begin to afford that first home. It's ongoing but why? [LAUGHTER]
  • [01:16:46] DONALD HARRISON: It's like you fix the one day, and then you realize there's always [OVERLAPPING]
  • [01:16:51] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Tentacles that come out from this thing, come out from this alien monster that's [LAUGHTER] completely unfathomable. I just don't understand. What's the expression? Why can't we all just get along? [LAUGHTER]
  • [01:17:12] DONALD HARRISON: I so appreciate you doing this. I know it was--
  • [01:17:16] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Thank you, it was fun. I always love a chance to just do a brain dump.
  • [01:17:25] DONALD HARRISON: Before we turn off the cameras, is there any last thing? I know I already asked you that, but sometimes there's that [SNAPS] "Oh!"
  • [01:17:31] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: A spark of genius? I have no sparks of genius. No but I always regret that I don't do these things with my sisters because they were first more political in their youth than I was, more aware, remained very active. My sister Mary was part of the revolutionary group on campus with Tom Hayden.
  • [01:18:13] DONALD HARRISON: You need the acronym.
  • [01:18:17] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: I know isn't that horrible, I've just gone absolutely blank. But she, Tom Hayden and Phil Power started this group on campus that, my dad would just sit there and shake his head. "You want to bring who to campus to talk? Why would you bring that person?" [LAUGHTER] "Because they have ideas we need to hear so we know how to confront them, daddy." [LAUGHTER] Mary would be an absolutely fascinating person to talk to about what was happening on campus. [OVERLAPPING] They have great ones. Nancy and her perspective on the law. She's just great in talking about how the treatment of juvenile delinquents creates criminals in our country and how schools contribute to that. I'm sorry but my grandkids are going to do this. They will take their old family members and try and capture memories before they're gone. But I think it's great that you all are doing this. Particularly from a Black community perspective, because it's so little known and so little valued.
  • [01:19:53] DONALD HARRISON: We've heard from a number of people who've said that this history just hasn't been captured and shared and taught. I know there's more efforts. This film is part of that. There's other things that are looking back and trying to make sure that this history is known in Ann Arbor and then hopefully more people can learn from it.
  • [01:20:17] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: There's the Legacies project with the kids at the Community High School, not Community High School, [BACKGROUND] Skyline. I talked to the producers and I'm blanking on every name today, and the teacher who worked with that project for the first couple of years about working with the Ypsi school kids to bring that about in the Ypsi program because those kids need the exposure to their older adults. Need to learn to value what experiences they've had and to understand video production and how you get people to bring their ideas to the table. It's just such a great program at Skyline. I'd like to see it happen here.