Motives: Part Seven of the Black Conquest of Detroit (Classic Detroit News Propaganda Series)

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
Motives

Why did whites leave so quickly?
By Cameron McWhirter / The Detroit News

DETROIT — Why did the Jews leave Elmhurst in the 1950s?

Fifty years on, the participants in the block’s rapid transformation, both black and white, see Jewish motives at the time as confused, murky.

Some say the whites simply wanted a bigger home, or they were afraid of crime. Others say that Jews simply wanted to live near Jews. No one recalls any animosity on the block — but the Jews and other whites suddenly just left.

Many Jewish leaders actively supported a proposed Fair Employment ordinance then being debated in the City Council. The Jewish Community Council issued public statements against housing discrimination. Most Jews had voted against conservative Republican Albert Cobo, who had stopped expansion of the city’s public housing program and was strongly supported by white homeowners groups.

Jewish families knew blacks chiefly as domestics and laborers, as the women who cleaned their kitchens or the men who swept their shop floors. The Orthodox would hire black children in their homes on Friday nights, the Sabbath, to turn on electric lights and the stove, since their religion forbade them from doing so themselves.

Many Jews had a perception [?!] that blacks, who were generally poorer and less educated, were more likely to commit crimes. They lived in slums. They caused problems. Elderly Jewish apartment-dwellers often would not allow black paperboys in their building vestibules.

[N.S.: Blacks were more likely to commit crimes, and caused other problems. FIFY.]

Larry James, now 54, grew up one block from Elmhurst and used to deliver newspapers on the street and do other odd jobs for the Jewish merchants and homeowners. While Jewish children liked to play with black kids, he said, the older Jews seemed fearful. He remembers many older Jews immigrating from war-torn Europe. He remembers noticing numbers tattooed on their forearms as he handed them their paper or delivered their vegetables.

One white resident of German descent used to complain to her black neighbor Curtis Lewis about the Jews, claiming they were conspiratorial financiers. The young Lewis used to question the woman. “How do you hate someone you don’t even know?” he would ask.

Larry James, who is black, recalls playing with the Jewish kids in the street. “We played stickball, we played other games,” he said. “There was no problem because we were friends, until they moved away.”

Michael H. Traison, a downtown corporate attorney who is white, was a little boy in 1951 living with his brothers and immigrant Russian parents in a two-bedroom apartment in the Elmfour Court apartments at 2019 Elmhurst, across 14th from B’nai David, where they attended services.

Traison doesn’t remember noticing much when blacks started moving in. He doesn’t remember any concerns about crime. But by 1954, his father decided the family should move farther out, to the edges of Detroit.

Their synagogue, B’nai David, held its last service on Elmhurst in 1958. The temple leaders held a special ceremony to carry the Torah out of the building. They drove it up to the brand new Temple in Southfield.

Traison believes he was one of the last Jewish boys to live on the block, if not the last. Asked whether he was sad to leave his friends, Traison said, “By the time I moved, I didn’t have any friends.”