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By Root 596 0

population, for the most part, remained. The line along 8 Mile Road, metropolitan Detroit’s east-west artery, was permanently drawn. To the north side of 8 Mile Road is Warren County, the city’s first suburb; on the other side is the city of Detroit. Warren runs the gamut from run-down trailer parks to middle-class homes, and it is overwhelmingly white. The city side of 8 Mile Road, or at least sections of it, looks identical to its counterpart to the north, but it is predominantly black and lower class. The surrounding neighborhoods closest to 8 Mile on both sides are poor and crime-ridden. Still, if the road manifested its symbolism to Detroiters, instead of a road it would be a wall. It is a true divide between the classes and the races, and the two sides do not mingle much. Residents in Warren, for example, removed basketball hoops from the township’s public parks to discourage Detroit kids from crossing the road to play there. Predictably, suburban police are more plentiful than city cops along 8 Mile Road. Though the statistics were worse a decade ago, the reputation of what lies south of 8 Mile Road in the Motor City—and the communal suburban anxiety about it—remains: lawlessness, robbery, and murder. In the film 8 Mile, the road was a metaphor to the same effect: Dividing black from white and rich from poor, it symbolized the hurdles between Eminem’s character Jimmy Smith Jr. and his dream, the border he must find a way to cross.

Since this country was founded, federal guards have been called to Detroit four times to quash black-white violence: twice in the twentieth century, twice in the nineteenth. A telling statement on Detroit race relations came from George Edwards, a liberal police commissioner in the sixties who tried to increase sensitivity to the racial divide among the city’s police force. Edwards concluded that a “river of hatred” ran between the city’s whites and blacks.

The Civil Rights Movement slicked that river with oil and torched it. The Movement was zealously supported by Detroiters and the Detroit United Auto Workers Union. Prior to the March on Washington, Detroit sponsored what was at the time the largest public display of support for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: a 1963 parade down Woodward Avenue. Nonetheless, in 1967, a four-day racial riot occurred that claimed forty-three lives.

Today, Detroit attracts few new residents, even among the country’s newest immigrants. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimated in 1998 that only one in a hundred Detroit residents were new to the city. The population of Detroit’s suburbs has dropped as well. These towns, however, are still not poor. There is a ring of mostly white counties in which the yearly income ranks seventh in the country out of cities of similar size. In a study done in 1997, the income of Detroit households in the well-to-do suburbs averaged about $56,000 a year, about $10,000 more than metropolitan families in New York and L.A.

While the suburbs are generally white and rich, the central city majority is black and poor. The 2000 census states that the city was 76 percent African-American, with only a 5 percent representation living in the suburbs. Of the 76 percent in the city, nearly half of those African-Americans are under the age of eighteen, living in impoverished homes, compared to just 10 percent of kids in the same straits in the suburbs.

This degree of racial and economic division is as close as a major American city gets to the kind of class imbalance found in Third World countries. During the years of the auto industry’s decline, particularly in the seventies, African-Americans were unable to find better housing, steady employment, and good schools. The tense undercurrent in Detroit today is a product of the decline of labor economics, definite unflinching patterns of residential segregation, and a tradition of racial upheaval and mistrust.

As the economies of the seventies and eighties wreaked havoc on Detroit, racial tensions eased a bit as blacks and whites found themselves walking the same poor middle ground. However,