Lansing State Journal from Lansing, Michigan • Page 8

www.lsj.com 'MAJORITY OF PEOPLE GRIEVED BECAUSE OF THE MOVE' "The majority of the people grieved because of the move. Many still evidence about the same level of grief that they had at the time of tie move. Others have shown a reduction in grief to the point where their present move feeling ranges from moderately grieved to slightly happy. Only a very small number of the people evidence any real feelings of happiness about the move. Homer C.

Hawkins, dissertation, "Knowledge of the Social and Emotional Implications of Urban Renewal and the Utility of This Knowledge to the Practice of Social Work" (a study of people relocated by Interstate 496), 1971 'DECENTRALIZATION OF A FAIRLY LARGE SEGMENT OF BLACK POPULATION' Between 1961 and 1969, important changes and trends marked the Negroes' residential patterns in Lansing. Despite the first impression of increased Negro ghetto concentrations and expansion, the most significant change centers around the decentralization of a fairly large segment of the black population by 1969. Douglas K. Meyer Dissertation, "The Changing Negro Residential Patterns in Lansing, Michigan, 1850-1969," 1970 8A Sunday, February 22, 2009 Lansing State Journal Historic opening: On Dec. 18, 1970, the new freeway, called the Oldsmobile Expressway, opened.

It eased traffic flow in Lansing, but cut through the heart of what had been a historic black neighborhood in the city, displacing many families. 496: Black leaders fought for gains as highway forced residents to move Continued From 1A I-, i- 1 Lansing State Journal .1 file photo 1 II I'M'wi I 1 El 'Jin I I '6 Lr. 1 f) ft'- I 4 A ti 2 I it" ITn il HI ni if I I live at 832 W. Main the route of A good move for some: Hortense and Clinton Canady Jr. enjoy MATTHEW DAE SMITHFor the Lansing State Journal View of home: A teary-eyed Lonnie Johnson holds an old black-and-white photo taken in 1947 by his childhood home at 1212 W.

Main St. 'NEGROES BUYING PROPERTY AND MOVING IN' In 1945, at the Council of Churches Institute at Camp Kiwanis, Michigan, was held a discussion on Negroes Migrating into Michigan. Since the meetings were held near Lansing, examples were given using Lansing incidents. When housing was mentioned in this discussion it hinged on the fear of Negroes moving next door or of Negroes buying property and moving in large numbers into the community. Rose Toomer Brunson, Dissertation, "A Study of the Migrant Negro Population in Lansing, Michigan, During and Since World War II," 1955 Lansing State Journal file photo Taking shape: The Washington Avenue bridge takes shape in June 1967, one of several bridges to span the expressway that runs below ground level for some distance.

7 was raised in an all white neighborhood. When I was under 14 or 15 years of age, we were molded into the neighborhood just like we were family members. Then when we got to be 15 or 16, the parents of daughters didn't want the problem of guess who's coming to dinner, and they moved away." Ralph Riddle, 81 who grew up on Ohio Street north Lansing logic of federal highway construction, which steered new roads down what urban historian Thomas Sugrue called "the paths of least resistance," places where people didn't have the money or the power to put up much of a fight Lansing's black leaders didn't fight the highway. But, as the project pressed forward, they fought for other things: open housing and affordable housing and relocation assistance for the people who were being displaced, which came, by some accounts, too late. And, in that sense, the legacy of the highway is complicated.

It cut the heart out of a neighborhood with restaurants and grocery stores and dry cleaners, a hatter and a community center, and the record shop owned by Johnson's father. Which, he says, was "the only place in town you could get rhythm and blues records, and if you wanted to buy a cool hat or some Johnny Walker shoes or some split toes, that's where you went." The social fabric there was knit tight. People didn't much lock their doors. But driving 8.9 miles of asphalt and concrete through homes and businesses also forced the issue of integration, with the result that some black people gained a foothold in neighborhoods where they hadn't been allowed to live previously, a chance to own newer houses near better schools. There are people from the old neighborhood who point to this now relatively integrated city and say the trade-off was worth it.

There are others, mostly the ones whose houses were cleared, who still bristle at the injustice of having to make that sort of trade. Divided city In the boxes of real estate records kept in the basement of the Capital Area District Library's downtown branch, there are reminders of the divided city that Lansing was. Take for example the property report, a yellowed slip of paper about the size of an index card, recording the 1944 sale of the house at 710 S.Logan St. Penciled across it there was no designated space for this sort of information are the words: "Sold to colored people. No other col- ored people in block." Soon there would be.

The 1940 U.S. Census records 1,638 black people in the city of Lansing. By 1960, there were 6,745. "I came here as a college graduate working at the highway department, and I couldn't rent an apartment," said Cullen Dubose, 72, who today is the president of Painia Development, a company that builds multifamily housing. "Every place I went to rent was either below the standards I grew up with in Mississippi or they simply just told me it was gone." W.

Michigan Aye, TRACT 16 CD BECKY SHINKLansing State Journal the home where they have resided Interstate 496, project would destroy more houses owned by whites. The whites, of course, could move where their money would take them. Most of the city's leaders, "didn't care, and they didn't want it (integration) to occur," said Dubose, at the time the head of the NAACFs housing committee. "They felt you should be happy with what you had and where you were, and you would be told that." Black leaders "raised the devil," said Joel Ferguson, who at the time was a playground director at Main Street School, but would be elected as Lansing's first black city councilman in 1967. "But the mass of people there was not a feeling of empowerment." The fights over housing would drag on for years.

In the meantime, people's homes were being bought and razed. Some fought it as best they could. "Wasn't any of the homeowners in that area satisfied with what they got," said Albert Kelley, 86. "We had lawyers. We was meeting with them.

Wasn't nothing we could do." He bought the house at 1605 W. St. Joseph St. in 1960 for The highway de since 1957. The Canadys used to Dubose stayed at the YMCA for his first seven months in Lansing.

Most of the people who arrived in that 20-year span were funneled toward the west side, into a corridor that ran roughly from Townsend Street west to the city limits, a few blocks north and south of the highway's present route. But the neighborhood didn't expand with the population. It got denser. Families created efficiency apartments on upper floors. Landlords and tenants subdivided houses to accommodate more people.

Not in all cases, but in enough. As Bruce Brown, who conducted a survey in 1965 of families who would be displaced by the highway, remarked in a subsequent master's thesis, "This situation hasn't resulted from a natural inclination on the part of these families to live like sardines." Whites-only covenants, discriminatory mortgage practices, Realtors who steered blacks only to certain neighborhoods pushed the vast majority of blacks into three census tracts. "You had to hit them over the head to get them to show you any other place, much less sell you a place," said Clinton Canady 87, the city's first black dentist. He and his wife, Hortense, managed to buy a lot off Waverly Road in 1957, but only, he believes, because the former owner's development plans had been stymied by Lansing Township, "so he said 'I'll fix you. I'll put the blacks in "We knew what he was doing." Blight is 'subjective' When the announcement came in 1963 that the neighborhood stood in the high-, way's path, it didn't come as a surprise.

"For many city planners and highway planners who wanted to eradicate what they called highways provided them with a tool," said Sugrue, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Blight," he added, "is a very subjective term. The very presence of African S' W. Kalamazoo partment gave him $14,000 five years lajer, he said. "It was a nice house, well-structured house," he said.

Kelley would never buy another. The sense of being done wrong was only exacerbated by the fact that people in another section of the city, whose homes were being bought by Oldsmobile, were getting comparatively princely sums. Riddle bought his house on Main Street for $8,000 in 1962 and sold it to Oldsmobile in 1969 for $33,000. Bill Lett didn't get anything at all. He'd worked his way up from selling diapers and ladies' stockings door-to-door to opening a clothing shop.

Lett's Fashions was at 627 W. St. Joseph. He'd been there a decade when the highway came, but he didn't own the building. "It was really, really tough," said Lett, who now owns Lett's Bridal Formal Wear, "and it just made you work that much harder for less.

You worked 20 hours a day, and you Lett ate beans at night and prayed that you lived to the next day." As for other black-owned businesses in the neighborhood, "After the highway, just about all the people never reopened up," Lett said. A 'blessing for some On the wall of the Can- adys' home, there is a Norman Rockwell print, two black girls standing in a driveway with a moving truck beside them, exchanging curious looks with a group of white children, Clinton Canady calls the highway "a blessing." "It allowed us and a bunch of other blacks to be able to move away from there," he said. "It took out a whole lot of the place where we lived, but we were able to get other places that were better." Hortense Canady, who was the first black person elected to the Lansing Board of Education and fought the battles of integration, agreed. "We're here," she said simply, "and our children are better. They have better houses." Still hurting But the old neighborhood is not so long gone for some.

Johnson still tears up when he talks about it. He said he can't drive down Main Street "without thinking about my home, my life, my neighborhood. I guess being raised on the west side was very much who I am." Standing in what used to be his front yard, the hum of traffic drifting up from highway below, Kelley said he'd rather leave it all in the past. "I never thought about coming back to look at it," he said, "because you wasn't satisfied with the way you were taken out, and so it was a place you just didn't want to be thinking about." Americans and businesses that catered to them, regardless of the economic status, was to many planners a sign that the neighborhood was blighted." Ralph Riddle, 81, is a lifelong resident of the city who spent the latter half of the 1960s watching the highway's giant ditch grow across the street from his home. "Urban renewal was black folks removal," he said.

And just where they would be removed to was an issue from the start. "We want to see them relocated into an integrated community. There will never be a better chance than this in Lansing for years to come," said Dunnings Stuart Dunnings an attorney who fought many of the city's civil rights battles, at a City Council meeting in June 1964. But not everyone wanted to grab that brass ring. At the same meeting, a representative from the Chamber of Commerce read a statement denying that relocation was a racial problem, noting that the 111? St.

31 .2 Population characteristics Jooo 19actj6000 oStt Total population 8,268 2,162 1,924 1,156 1,443 619 White alone 3,330 640 1,298 316 1,362 356 Black alone 4,903 1,306 623 761 78 171 Number of households 2,707 1,047 543 468 744 435 Average population per household 3.08 2.05 3.54 2.51 L89 L58 Educational attainment (Persons 25 years and over) High school graduate 23.0 25.8 33.6 22.1 26.1 20.8 Bachelor's degree 5.1 19.0 16.9 27.0 9.0 32.4 Median household income (in 2008 dollars) $37,736 $18,158 $68,373 $63,244 $39,438 $14,928 I I TRACT 19 W. St. Joseph St 1-496 1 TRACT 15 f' Lansing Grand Lansing i River plant I Detail The 1960 census used four tracts to represent this geography. The 2000 census absorbed what had been previously defined as tract 18 into tract 15. The overall borders for the tracts remained the same.

The LSJ combined the data from tracts 15 and 18 of the 1960 census to make it comparable to the 2000 data. "Four or more years of high school. Four years of college..