Room for Change: Ann Arbor's Fair Housing Protests in the 1960s

Fri, 12/27/2024 - 12:19pm

When: 2024

"In the early 1960s, Ann Arbor neighborhoods were still mostly segregated. Racially restrictive housing covenants, realtors, banks, and landlords quietly worked to keep African Americans confined to only certain parts of the city. Hundreds of individuals and groups, including the NAACP, CORE, churches, and student groups began picketing, marching, and organizing sit-ins in protest. This film presents some of their stories." - Filmmaker Jennifer Howard

Transcript

• [00:00:06] WALTER BLACKWELL: This song was one of the songs that we would sing when we would go out in the community and be picketing in Ann Arbor. We would be singing about freedom. [MUSIC]
• [00:00:39] SHIRLEY BECKLEY: When we were in high school, after the game, the coach would take the fellas to the Sugar Bowl, but the Black players couldn't go into the Sugar Bowl. We were not allowed, but the Preketes' daughter, Becky Preketes, we went to school with her at Pioneer. I never could understand how I was friends with Becky, but I couldn't go into the Sugar Bowl.
• [00:00:59] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Some of the department stores, Jacobson's, you couldn't try on shoes and I couldn't try on hats until there was one Russian immigrant who was the head of the millinery department at Jacobson's, and she said, "That's absolutely ridiculous," with her great Russian accent, she said, "You try on this hat."
• [00:01:19] WALTER BLACKWELL: I came to Ann Arbor in 1953 after serving three years in the army and was just like coming to a different world. In New York, there was no Black or White. There was just people. But coming to Ann Arbor, I discovered that I was Black.
• [00:01:36] EUNICE BURNS: You think of Ann Arbor as being very liberal and let everybody do what they want, well, it was not. Black families could live north of Kerrytown in that area or over near White Street, and that was all.
• [00:01:52] WALTER BLACKWELL: I couldn't buy a house. The realtors wouldn't show it to me, because they had a pledge to not show anything to people of color, only if it was in the North-Central area around Beakes Street, Fifth Avenue, Fourth Avenue. That's where y'all live. The Whites were saying that if I got a house, they would lose the value of their homes and things like that.
• [00:02:15] JOETTA MIAL: When we moved to North Fourth Avenue, we did not have a lot of options. It was very segregated. There were just Black people on the part of Fourth Avenue where Harry and I were living.
• [00:02:28] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: 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. We had banks that wouldn't make loans to Black families that were trying to buy housing outside of the designated Black neighborhoods, and my parents bought their house by getting a loan from my grandma.
• [00:02:52] WALTER BLACKWELL: I guess I got very frustrated with the conditions of trying to find a place. I just told myself, if I'm a veteran and I can fight a war for this country, I'm going to fight like hell to try to get my rights here in this community. [APPLAUSE] I got involved in the housing organization. I got involved in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. That's what shocked the community, demonstrating and showing that they will not tolerate the racism that they are allowed to persist in housing and employment, and so forth.
• [00:03:30] JOETTA MIAL: My husband got really involved in civic affairs and dragged me along with him. Black folks couldn't move in Pittsfield Village, and we marched out there. Went to Detroit where the big corporate people were and marched there. My husband was also on the fair housing, was very active there in terms of eventually loosening up housing for African Americans.
• [00:04:01] DOLORES PRESTON TURNER: I think we were one of the first Black families out there in Pittsfield Village. We owe that to people like Harry Mial and the civil rights organizations at that time.
• [00:04:12] JEAN CARLBERG: Pittsfield made the issue quite public, and then CORE took this up and said, we have to get a fair housing ordinance written. We started going to the picketing at City Hall. Our goal was to get a fair housing ordinance adopted by the city council, so it would be illegal in the city of Ann Arbor to discriminate in housing on the basis of race. We were there with hundreds of people on Monday nights when the city council met.
• [00:04:41] WALTER BLACKWELL: By being a federal worker, I was told I would be jeopardizing my job if I participated in civil rights, and I said, to hell with it, I don't care. I stayed with it. I said, the people in the South can stand up to all of that stuff. I can stand up to these people here.
• [00:04:59] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: With my parents, the work began in the late 50s, early 60s to break down the realtors' red lines for housing, to break down the banks' reluctance to offer mortgages to black families. You get this prank call from somebody calling the family a nasty name or saying, "We're going to kill your Dad," or people were not very kind when they realized there were children answered the phone. Whatever they were intent on saying when they placed the call, they said.
• [00:05:34] JEAN CARLBERG: It was pretty much a Republican-controlled city council at that time, and they were not interested in the Fair Housing Ordinance, which is why we had to picket for--I think it was over a year to get enough community pressure on them to say, "I guess we have to do something." Every two weeks, throughout the year, in the winter, in the summer.
• [00:05:55] EUNICE BURNS: That was my main thing when I was on city council was working for a Fair Housing Ordinance that would allow anyone who had the money to move any place he or she wished. Even though there were only two of us that were working for it at the beginning, we got the first Fair Housing Ordinance in the state of Michigan.
• [00:06:18] JEAN CARLBERG: You made a bond with the people you were doing this with that lasted through the rest of our lives.
• [00:06:25] BUNYAN BRYANT: I was in the market for an apartment, and there was a woman by the name of Jenny Schmidt, and she was renting an apartment at Arbordale Manor in Ann Arbor. She wanted to break her lease. I went over and I looked at the apartment. She said there was one problem. She says, "There's no Black people in this apartment complex." She said, "That might be an issue." She says, "But what I'll do is tomorrow morning, I'll call down and I'll tell them I want to break my lease. You go into the apartment manager's office tomorrow afternoon and you apply for this apartment." The next afternoon, I went into the management of Arbordale Manor apartments and I said, "I would like to rent an apartment," and I described the apartment and this woman said, "There's no apartment available." I said, "Well, what about any apartment?" She said, "No, there's nothing available." I said, "Are you sure? " She says, "I'm positive."
• [00:07:13] BUNYAN BRYANT: CORE thought that this would be a good test case. We went back to that apartment, went back with a White woman and White man, and we stood on the outside of the manager's office. White woman went in, and she described the apartment, it was available to her. About five minutes later, I go in. I describe the apartment, it's not available to me. Five minutes later, this White guy goes in, describes the apartment. It's available to him. We had him.
• [00:07:36] JEAN CARLBERG: Clear evidence of discrimination. We tried to get the rental person to change his mind. He said, "No, I can't." The owner was Cutler Hubble, a business located in Detroit. We tried to talk with them. They didn't want to talk to us, so we took picketers into Detroit on Saturdays and picketed their business, again, hoping to call the public's attention to what was going on there.
• [00:08:07] SHIRLEY BECKLEY: We did a lot of protesting. We did more protesting back then than we do now. I tell a lot of our liberal people here now, you don't really know how to protest. You need to learn from the people that protested back in the '60s because you're not doing a good job.
• [00:08:25] BUNYAN BRYANT: We found out the University of Michigan held the mortgage on this place. That was probably the most single radicalizing event in my life. The reason because I had a part-time job, I paid tuition, I paid state taxes and federal taxes, and the University of Michigan was a recipient of all three sources of funds. They were loaning this money out to this developer that said that I couldn't rent an apartment in that apartment complex. It was almost like I was paying for my own discrimination.
• [00:08:56] JEAN CARLBERG: We talked with a regent saying, "Don't you think you should intervene in this situation?" They said, "There's no language in the mortgage that would allow us to intervene and force them." We tried to cover all of our bases in a non-confrontational way to say, "This is wrong; it's illegal." When we couldn't get anywhere with that, we set up picket lines. We did that for quite a long time, for months. They did not change their mind. They also evicted two families that allowed us to get a drink or use their bathroom. Two families that were living there, they evicted them. That was a serious consequence for them. Bunyan also took his case to our city attorney because there was a Fair Housing Ordinance in place, so this should not have happened and took it to the Human Rights Commissioner, Dave Cowley, to say, "You have to do something about this." They started gathering information, talking to the same people we had tried to talk to. They wouldn't budge. They would not agree to change their policy. They took it all the way up to the Supreme Court of Michigan, which did agree that the Fair Housing Ordinance was enforceable.
• [00:10:19] BUNYAN BRYANT: What happened over a three-year period, I was living out of a suitcase because I wanted that apartment, okay? I wasn't going to sign any leases whatsoever. I'm going to get that apartment. Over a three-year period, I lived out of a suitcase, and the decision finally came down from the state Supreme Court. The local Fair Housing Ordinance was a valid one as long as it didn't conflict with housing is embodied within the new State Constitution. I never got the apartment. But what came out of that struggle was some clarity about Ann Arbor's Fair Housing Ordinance being a valid one.
• [00:10:53] SHIRLEY BECKLEY: We had different factions of community people protesting about the way rental property was being denied to African American people. I was working for Washtenaw Legal Aid. Landlords didn't want to rent to the single Black mothers with children that were on ADC, Aid to Dependent Children. When I marched with the mothers, the police arrested us. But we were prepared for that. We figured we were going to get arrested. But from that, at least they knew they weren't just going to be able to refuse us without some backlash.
• [00:11:36] JEAN CARLBERG: I think the city has become way more interested in activism during that time, way more interested in issues of equity, fair treatment. That it is the city's responsibility to be part of solving those problems.
• [00:11:50] SHIRLEY BECKLEY: But even though you tell people they can't discriminate, they find all kinds of other ways to do it. They act like we're not smart enough to see it or feel it. They just do other things and so you have to figure out how to combat that.
• [00:12:10] PATRICIA BLACKWELL: My dad and other people pushed for change. When we moved on this side of town, I had a whole bunch of people that were my friends, from Chinese, Jewish, Black, White, Mexican, Hawaiian, Indian. We enjoyed just being a child.
• [00:12:31] WALTER BLACKWELL: I just hope my experience will set an example for younger people to keep fighting, whatever it is, education, housing, whatever it is, they'll keep fighting.
• [00:12:52] WALTER BLACKWELL: Another song we would sing, we are "Singing For Our Lives."