Detroit's Wall of Shame

Children standing in front of half a mile of concrete in Detroit. The wall was built with a simple aim: separate homes planned for middle-class whites from blacks who had already built small houses or owned land with plans to build in the neighborhood. It couldn’t separate people on its own, people and policies would see to that, but it was enough to satisfy the Federal Housing Administration to approve and back loans.

This 1941 photo shows a group of unknown children standing in front of half a mile of concrete in Detroit. The wall was built with a simple aim: separate homes planned for middle-class whites from blacks who had already built small houses or owned land with plans to build in the neighborhood. (Image: AP Photo/Library of Congress, John Vachon)

When Eva Nelson-McClendon first moved to Detroit’s Birwood Street in 1959, she didn’t know much about the wall across the street. At 6 feet tall and a foot thick, it wasn’t so imposing, running as it did between houses on her street and one over. Then she started to hear the talk. Neighbors told her the wall was built two decades earlier with a simple aim: to separate homes planned for middle-class whites from blacks who had already built small houses or owned land with plans to build.

“That was the division line,” Nelson-McClendon, now, 79, says from the kitchen of her tidy, one-story home on the city’s northwest side. “Blacks lived on this side, whites was living on the other side … that was the way it was.”

That’s not the way it is anymore. But the wall remains, a physical embodiment of racial attitudes that the country long ago started trying to move beyond. And slowly, in subtle ways, it is evolving into something else in its community, something unexpected: an inspiration.

To those in the know, it goes by different names. For some, it’s simply “The Wall.” Others call it “Detroit’s Wailing Wall.” Many like “Birwood Wall,” because it refers to the street and sounds like the “Berlin Wall.”

Aside from the mural that now appears at the wall’s midpoint, much of it is easy to miss. In fact, it’s impossible to follow it completely as the wall disappears behind homes and in spots is overgrown by vegetation. Where it’s exposed, it’s whitewashed or a drab earth tone — and sometimes marred by gang graffiti. On one corner it says, “Only 8 Mile,” referring to the divisive road just yards to the north.

The wall never fell, but it didn’t really have to. The area became primarily African-American in the decades to come, as most whites and some blacks left. The pattern was replicated across much of the 139-square-mile city that was built for two million people but fell to about 700,000 in the 2010 Census.

The story of the wall has been largely lost in larger narratives, such as the 1943 and 1967 race riots and Eight Mile Road. The wall ends, almost invisible, just shy of the thoroughfare that serves as the boundary between Detroit and its suburbs and symbolically represents the divide between black and white.

Still, the wall is not forgotten. An artist descended on it several years ago with an army of about 100 fellow artists and community volunteers to create a vast, eye-popping mural with images and messages of equality and justice on a section overlooking a playground. And now, a faith-based nonprofit is giving work to men who have struggled to keep a job or a home, having them make sets of coasters that incorporate images from the wall and use materials from abandoned homes that were razed in the city. Every sale of a $20 set of coasters helps to make something good out of something bad.

Tightly clustered one-story homes dominate the neighborhood around the wall, which still has well-kept houses like Nelson-McClendon’s but also suffers from a rising number of vacant, gutted structures. More tear-downs in the making. And, perhaps, more wood for the coasters.

Many blacks had moved into the area in the 1920s and 1930s because there was so much vacant land. By 1940, the gap had closed. A developer of a proposed all-white subdivision managed to hammer out a compromise with federal housing officials: The loans and mortgage guarantees would come in exchange for constructing a wall. It was the closest thing Detroit had to the segregated fountains or to the white-only swimming pools of the deep South.

Nobody had to tell Nelson-McClendon, who moved to Michigan from Alabama in 1951. “It was the same thing,” she says. “Separation.”

When it comes to the wall, Eva Nelson-McClendon knows about perseverance. For her, it was and remains the only option.

“Did it make me angry to see that wall up there? It was something you grow accustomed to seeing, you know, although you don’t like it. Getting angry over it is not going to solve anything,” McClendon says. “What was important to me was bringing up my kids and getting them to get an education so they wouldn’t have to be bothered with things like that in the future.”

She thinks about progress, and acknowledges some. But she knows there are still neighborhoods, mostly in the suburbs now, where African-Americans can move but they aren’t welcomed with open arms.

But on this day, she takes solace that people didn’t stay in place. Even if the wall did.

“It all depends on the people, the individual, the heart,” she says. “You’re not going to stop progress, don’t care how hard you try.”

Sources: AP Photo/Library of Congress, John Vachon; Detroit Associated Press