In Detroit, a campaign to get at least one streetlight per block working again in far-flung residential areas where homeowners describe their streets as war zones has finally gained some momentum.
David Goldberg, an assistant professor in Africana studies at Wayne State University who lives in east Detroit, ponders whether the barriers were a way of getting Detroiters who rely on the suburbs for basic amenities to stop shopping in those areas. “The idea is to get them on the highway and get them past Grosse Pointe and going somewhere else. To remove black visibility to make the area more attractive,” he said.
As black migration accelerated from the southern parts of the US to the north in the first half of the 20th century, white residents started cordoning themselves off in white neighborhoods and then, eventually, white suburbs.
The nature of low-interest federal housing loans starting in the 1930s, which excluded neighborhoods with even the faintest of black presence (a phenomenon known as redlining) created an economic incentive – above a simple racist one – to keep black families out of white neighborhoods. A black family arriving on a white block threatened the value of the entire block in a very real, federally sanctioned way.