“It was complex”: The Irrational Flight of Detroit’s Jews: The Black Conquest of Detroit, Part V (Classic Detroit News Propaganda Series)

 


 

The 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

homas 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. [This is neither illegal nor unethical. McWhirter and, presumably Sugrue, are implying that white realtors were obligated to donate homes ot blacks.] Sometimes, they also provided financing, making more money on the mortgage. [Ditto.] 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.

[N.S.: The same thing happened to white families who defaulted on their mortgages. Again, McWhirter is acting as though mortgage lenders were obligated to to take losses on black deadbeats. When you look to buy a home, you have to be careful not to buy one whose mortgage will be too high for you to meet the payments. The rule of thumb is that the buying price, after down payment, should not exceed triple one's gross annual income.]

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.

["Complex."]

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. 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.

[N.S., 2019: “She has only good memories of Elmhurst,” because her father moved the family in time. Thus, she has no memories of being raped, robbed, or maimed, or of any of her family or friends being raped, robbed, maimed or murdered.]

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.”

[It wasn’t at all complex. It couldn’t have been simpler.]

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.

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.”

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.

[N.S.: McWhirter hasn't worked at the Detroit News in years. In 2005, he was at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, where he covered black supremacist Brian Nichols' spree murders on March 11 of that year. McWhirter and his fellow operatives acted as if race had played no role in Nichols' four murders, even though he himself confessed as much. When last I came across McWhirter's activities, it was on July 1, 2017, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, in which he "reported" on a mass shooting and other pervasive acts of violent crime in Myrtle Beach, S.C., while refusing to tell readers who was committing the crimes (blacks).]