I was able to carry over these graphics from last year’s posts.
Harry Shiovitz visits his old house at 1956 Elmhurst. He moved his family out in the 1950s as pressure from realtors mounted.
By Nicholas Stix
[Previously, in this series:
“The White Devils Made Me Do It! Classic Detroit News Series Blames Whites for City’s Destruction”;
“The Black Conquest of Detroit, Part II: The Jews Played ‘Nice,’ but Got Destroyed, Just Like the ‘Racist’ White Gentiles”;
“It was the (Jewish) Realtors That Killed Detroit, Not Racist, Criminal Blacks! The Black Conquest of Detroit, Part III.”
“White Flight was Driven by Whites’ Completely Irrational, Racist Fears: The Conquest of Detroit, Part IV (Detroit News Propaganda Series).”
See also:
“Growing Up White in Detroit.”]
Reposted by Nicholas Stix
February 21, 2014
N.S.: Over the past 50 years, America’s leading social BS artists, alleged journalists, and media and political leaders have together woven a racial fairy tale, which they have used to suffocate white America: The blood libel, whereby whites are responsible for all (never mind any) of the pathologies that dominate cities with large black populations, and especially those cities dominated by blacks.
Note the damned if you do, damned if you don’t logic that is typical of “civil rights” (black supremacist) thinking: Whites were racist, for keeping blacks out of their neighborhoods, but since white racism is at fault for everything bad that blacks do (read: everything bad that befalls blacks, since blacks only do good), and the blacks defaulted on their mortgages, whites were also racist for letting them in. (Hmm. Where have I heard that?)
This item is part four of an award-winning, eight-part series, “Broken Detroit,” by alleged reporter Cameron McWhirter, all apparently published in one Sunday edition of the Detroit News, on June 17, 2001.
I had downloaded the entire series in 2008, and a good thing, too, since not only has The Detroit News sent it down the memory hole, but you can’t even find it via the newspaper’s online archive. I guess it has served its purpose. That’s yet another refutation of the myth that on the Internet, everything is forever. (I found it on an old backup drive last year, and just re-found it today.)
May 27, 2015
I just found the series again, on that ancient hard drive, only unlike last year, when I was able to recover the first four parts, including the photographs, I was only able to open this part with WordPad, and thus was only able to get the text.
Note that Cameron McWhirter asks Jewish former residents if their parents used any racist language to describe the neighborhood’s integration, but doesn’t appear to have asked blacks the same question. Likewise, he asks a black why the Jews wanted to move out, but doesn’t ask the black why his family wanted to move in.
McWhirter presents whites’ behavior as completely irrational, as if they had nothing to fear from blacks.
And if the only problem in blacks’ lives is whites, as lefties are always telling us, why didn’t blacks’ lives and the neighborhoods’ appearances improve, once they took over neighborhoods like Detroit’s Elmhurst?
And why would blacks buy houses they couldn’t afford? When a potential purchaser considers buying a house, he has to figure out how much he can put down, and how much he can afford in monthly mortgage and property tax payments, and act accordingly.
McWhirter also says nothing about black crime. In fact, throughout the series, he acts as if blacks were every bit as law-abiding, hard-working, and non-violent as the whites they ran off. He weaves a racial fairy tale.
Subject: Block by block, pattern repeats throughout city
The Detroit News
June 17, 2001
Detroit News
In this 1958 photo, members of Congregation B’Nai David take the Torah away from Elmhurst to their new Southfield synagogue.
5: Block by block, pattern repeats throughout city
Thomas Sugrue, a University of Pennsylvania professor, documents this in his award-winning book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. He shows that real-estate agents had the most to gain financially from whites deserting a city block.
Agents often bought the houses for less than market value, then sold them to blacks at a profit. [Is he saying that the agents sold to whites at a loss?] Sometimes, they provided financing, making more money on the mortgage. [Whoever provides financing is bound to make a profit, no?] If the new black family couldn’t meet the mortgage payments, the real-estate agent would simply call in the loan, have the sheriff seize the house, and then sell it again, earning even more profits. [And if a white family is delinquent in its mortgage payments, the same thing happens. Why does McWhirter act as if this is some conspiracy uniquely directed at blacks? Why does he not presume that black homeowners must carry out the same fundamental duties as white homeowners?]
In 1954, Shiovitz’s former house at 1956 Elmhurst was sold at the Sheriff’s sale for $849.32 to a Joel W. Josephson, who turned the house into a rental. Starting in 1954, through at least eight owners following Josephson, Tim Lewis, a black carpenter, lived in the house with his family. Lewis bought the house in 1970. Lewis had moved up from Arkansas after the war, like hundreds of thousands of other blacks looking for work.
His son, Curtis Lewis, lives in the house today. He said he remembers the lush trees and the quiet street. Most of the Jews had moved off the block, he recalls.
Why did they move? Lewis shrugged.
“Maybe they wanted to be bettering themselves,” he said. “Maybe too many blacks was moving in.”
The blacks who moved onto Elmhurst in the 1950s were generally poorer than the Jews who had left, but not by much. They were mostly working-class: factory workers, tradesmen, shop workers. They brought large families. On Sundays, they went to church and had cookouts. On weekdays, they went to work.
Those who were children on the block at the time remain baffled by the complex interplay of racial fear and economic incentive that led whites to leave Elmhurst.
Rita Vanerian Jury, who now lives in Birmingham, was only four in 1954 when her Armenian immigrant father decided to move the family off the street. She still doesn’t know exactly why they moved.
[Garbage.]
The new house was actually smaller.
She has only good memories of Elmhurst: walks with her father down to the corner store for ice cream; games with kids of all races in the open lots; and the beautiful flowing elms standing watch above the street and its inhabitants. She simply isn’t sure why they moved. “We were just kind of going in the same direction as the others,” she said.
Phyllis Shiovitz Weeks, now a school librarian living in Southfield, said she never heard her parents utter any racist words, nor as a girl did she ever consider race as a reason they moved away.
But now that she looks back on it, she said the predominant mood of older Jews on Elmhurst was worry and anxiety.
“It’s so complex,” she said, thinking about the move 50 years later. Racial differences were never mentioned in my house . . . but I think people find it hard to not be influenced by a natural fear of the unknown.”
[Bull. There was nothing “complex” about it, and there was nothing “unknown,” either. People knew exactly what was coming. "Shvartzes!"]
What happened on Elmhurst was repeated thousands of times, block by block, across the city and into the suburbs: whites “moving up” and away from blacks.
[The whites didn’t “move up”; they often lost everything.]
Most of the whites leaving Elmhurst didn’t move to the suburbs. They moved first to northwest Detroit. Later, they would leave the city altogether.
“A lot of black people were moving in. ... At that point there was this turmoil beginning,” Shiovitz, now 82, said sitting in his Southfield home. “If I look back ... I didn’t have the sense at that point, you could see all of this was brewing. Eventually something had to come about. The biggest thing was you would see all these people moving out.”
[The “turmoil” was racist black violence.]
All these years later, Shiovitz still remembers the work that he did on his house. He built an archway from the kitchen to the dining room. He fixed the porch. He put in a new sink cabinet. He replaced rotting wood under the house. He put new tiling in the kitchen.
“When I left that house, it was all in good shape, he said. There was nothing more I could do.
You can reach Cameron McWhirter at (313) 222-2072 or at mcwhirter@detnews.com.
2 comments:
Block to block pattern repeats itself not only in Detroit but THROUGHOUT THE NATION.
Theodore H. White wrote a chapter on this subject in his "The Making of The President" series concerning the 1964 election, published in 1965. White called this phenomenon "tipping" as a neighborhood has "tipped." It was taking place in large cities throughout the North and East.
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