Newly listed historic sites reflect pain, progress for Black Detroiters

Feb. 27—DETROIT — Beneath the bright mural depicting happy citizens and colorful scenes of daily life in Detroit lies a lingering memory of Metro Detroit's painful racial history.

Constructed eight decades ago, the Birwood Wall was built to keep Blacks and Whites separated as African American families began moving into the area. If not for the mural, the cinderblock structure, which is 6 feet tall and a half-mile long, might go unnoticed.

But efforts to reclaim the wall from historical anonymity have led to the recognition of the Birwood Wall's significance by the U.S. Park Service, which placed the structure on the National Register of Historic Places last month.

"We have to preserve, protect and maintain these artifacts as indications of our history," said Gerald Van Dusen, an author and professor of English at the Wayne County Community College District. "We have to understand that the North participated in this separage of races as it did the South."

It's just one of several Detroit sites added to the register this year that carry historic and cultural significance for African Americans. The other additions, made in time for the observance of Black History Month, include the church where Aretha Franklin's father preached, a west side flat where Rosa Parks and her husband once lived, and the building that housed the nation's first fully Black-owned and operated TV station.

The listings came about as a result of a project to identify significant properties related to the Civil Rights movement in Detroit, said Todd Walsh of the State Historic Preservation Office, which was awarded a grant in 2017 from the National Park Service through the African American Civil Rights program.

The sites are among 277listings in Detroit on the National Register of Historic Places, according to James Gabbert, a historian with the National Park Service. "These range from individual buildings, sites, or structures to large historic districts and represent a wide variety of historic themes," he said.

To Kemael Johnson, 43, of Detroit, the wall's bright makeover doesn't mask what it represents: decades of oppression and injustice imposed on Black Detroiters.

"It was meant to keep people out (and) the racial implications of that symbolizes what has been done as well as the terror and racial strife," he said. "The wall has been turned into something else, but it really doesn't wash away what it was."

Historian William Dwight Smith, 72, who grew up in the neighborhood near the wall and still lives there today, said the barrier stands as a literal tool of segregation but also as a reminder of the thriving Black community that grew nearby in the years before World War II.

"It was put here more or less to camouflage the Blacks living east of the wall," said Smith, who belongs to the Eight Mile Road Old Timers Club, a group that helps to promote and preserve the area of Eight Mile and Meyers where the wall stands.

Van Dusen, who wrote the book "Detroit's Birwood Wall: Hatred & Healing in the West Eight Mile Community," remembers climbing the barrier with a Black friend as a child.

"It's an artifact of segregation in the North," he said. "You pretty much have to go down South to see such artifacts ... lunch counters, water fountains. It's a remarkable fact that there would be an artifact of segregation in the North, where supposedly segregation did not exist — at least not in the same way it did in the South."

More than 20 years before the Birwood Wall was constructed in 1941, Black families who arrived in Detroit during the Great Migration from the South bought parcels in the heavily forested area. "It was like a wilderness," Smith said.

The new arrivals built a bustling business district in that wilderness, much like Detroit's Black Bottom near the city's downtown, Smith said: "There were doctors' offices and other Black-owned businesses."

Several years after the Birwood Wall went up, a young Black minister became the pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in 1946. Under the Rev. C.L. Franklin, the growing Christian community became a force in the civil rights movement, helping to organize the June 1963 "March to Freedom" on Woodward Avenue led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The same year, the church moved into its current home in the old Oriole Theater at 8430 Linwood, now named C.L. Franklin Boulevard.

The Rev. Robert Smith, the pastor of New Bethel since 1982, said the recognition of the church's historic status was a longtime goal.

"It's something that we worked on for a very, very long time," he said. "It's getting recognized as a congregation impacting civil rights. It's very exciting. This will get us more eyes and more ears (for the mission of the congregation) and should be a model of the church to the community."

Also added to the historic registry this month: the Shrine of the Black Madonna of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church at 7625 Linwood.

The shrine's founder, Bishop Albert B. Cleage Jr., was a Black nationalist and a key figure in the struggle for racial equality and social-economic justice in Detroit. Cleage's church was an important center for Black political power and theology in Detroit and across the country.

Cleage founded the community in 1953 after he and 300 others left a Detroit Presbyterian church, questioning its commitment to the city's Black community.

Formerly the Central Congregational Church until a name change in 1970, the shrine became the cornerstone of Detroit's black nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements in the early 1960s. The church followed a doctrine of black theology and Christian activism and was credited with boosting the careers of Black political leaders such as former Mayor Coleman Young.

Cleage, who was known among shrine members as Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, died at the age of 88 in February 2000. As the community celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2003, his daughter, Pearl Cleage, told The Detroit News: "His entire life was devoted to the struggle for freedom for Black people."

Rosa Parks is best known for her refusal to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, sparking a boycott that ultimately desegregated the city's transit system. But afterward, she moved to Detroit, where she continued her civil rights activism while living with her husband, Raymond, in a first-floor flat at 3201 Virginia Park.

The couple lived in the 2 1/2-story red brick, Craftsman-style home, built around 1917, from 1961 to 1977, when Raymond Parks died; Rosa Parks remained there until 1988. While living there, she worked to secure funding for public housing and campaigned for John Conyers in his first run for Congress in 1964, persuading King to travel to Detroit and endorse him — a move Conyers credited with winning him the election and making him Detroit's second Black member of Congress.

King's public support "quadrupled my visibility in the black community ... Therefore, if it wasn't for Rosa Parks, I never would have gotten elected," said Conyers, according to the application for the historic designation.

In the years during and after the Civil Rights Movement, Black Detroiters gained increasing prominence in entertainment, with the rise of Detroit-based Motown Records and homegrown, chart-topping artists such as the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder.

The city's Black artistic and business community marked another milestone on Sept. 29, 1975, when WGPR-TV (Ch. 62) went on the air as the nation's first fully African American-owned and operated television station.

Among those recognizing the significance was President Gerald Ford, who called WGPR "a symbol of Black enterprise."

"This is truly a landmark, not only for the black broadcasting industry, but for American society," he said in a congratulatory message that aired on the station's first day.

The station's original home at 3146 Jefferson, now a museum of artifacts from its early broadcasts, was added to the national register last month.

For 20 years after its first broadcast, WGPR was a career-launching pad for young broadcasters and journalists looking for that first job in television, in front of or behind the camera. The station's dance show "The Scene" drew recording artists from Wonder to the Four Tops to appear with host Nat Morris.

WGPR was the first station in the market to remain on the air 24 hours a day, showing "All Night Movies" for viewers in the wee hours of the day.

WGPR also featured a variety of ethnic programs, including a Polish dance show, a Greek talk show and Arab American programs. Videos clips of those shows and other original programs are on display at the William V. Banks Broadcast Museum, named for the station's founder.

Banks was an attorney and businessman who also started the first Black-owned FM radio station in Michigan, WGPR (107.5) in 1964.

Former employees say it means a great deal to see their trailblazing work remembered.

"I'm very proud of the recognition," said Ken Hollowell, who was a vice president and general manager at the station.

Former WGPR programming director Joe Spencer said the national historic designation "is huge for us."

"It takes the museum to another level," he said. "The museum tells a significant history of Black businesses. The museum is the documentation of the development of WGPR-TV."

Spencer said the station was the first in Detroit to shoot video instead of film, which revolutionized TV news and programming because it allowed content to be broadcast faster.

He said the station plans to honor the museum's executive director, Karen Hudson Samuels, who died unexpectedly this month; he said Hudson founded the museum and pushed efforts to get state and national historic designations.

Progress and achievements aside, Black Detroiters have yet to win justice and equality, something Teresa Moon is reminded of every time she looks out her window on Griggs Street and sees the Birwood Wall.

Moon, who's 68, has lived in the neighborhood since moving there as a child with her family in 1959.

"They built a wall to separate from one group of people from another," she said. "To have it in our neighborhood is a reminder to be strong and diligent and to be a reminder that this country wrote a Constitution that this is everybody's country ... everybody's equal. That hasn't happened yet. The wall is a reminder we have to keep fighting as a race as a people and as a country. "