A “Most Conscientious and Considerate Method”: Residential Segregation and Integrationist Activism in Grosse Pointe,Michigan,1960-1970

Abstract

This article unearths a meticulous system of residential segregation operative in Grosse Pointe, Michigan—a wealthy suburb of Detroit—from 1945 to 1960. Potential homebuyers were ranked based upon their ethnic descent, nativity, accent, manner of dress, and “swarthiness” of skin, among other characteristics; as such, the Point System stringently measured and indeed vested real estate brokers with the power to construct suburban whiteness. After analyzing what I call the “work of white supremacy” that undergirded the Point System, this article then tracks its demise after well-publicized state and federal hearings. This article then details the community’s response to the first “move-ins” of black families in 1964, as well as longer-running liberal integration efforts spearheaded by local activists through the decade’s end. Ultimately, the Point System adds to our understanding of production of race and suburban exclusion in the midcentury United States.

“When it comes to fulfilling the promise of equal opportunity, housing is to the North what voting and education are to the South,” proclaimed Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams in a February 18, 1960, speech before the United Northwestern Realty Association in Detroit. ¹ “Realtors,” he continued,

more than any other profession north of the Mason-Dixie line, are in a special position to help America fulfill its promise of equal opportunity for all. . . . The relator can be the conduit of myths; or he can be the killer of this false folklore.

After this speech, Williams drove to his suburban home in Grosse Pointe Farms, where the realtors of the Grosse Pointe Property Owners Association (GPPOA) and the Grosse Pointe Brokers Association (GPBA) trafficked in the racial and religious “myths” that Williams censured. ² The revelation of their elaborate “Point System” would launch this quaint, wealthy suburb into national scandal.

With their colonial mansions, manicured lawns, tree-lined streets, and lakefront properties, the five communities (Grosse Pointe Farms, Park, Shores, Woods, and City) collectively referred to as “Grosse Pointe” or “the Pointes” embodied bucolic suburban affluence. Established in 1893 and incorporated in 1934, Grosse Pointe was a “romantic suburb,” sharing its southern border with Detroit and its eastern border with Lake St. Clair. ³ In 1960, this community of 55,000 residents boasted a median income of $12,800 (as compared with $6,256 statewide) across its just over ten square miles. ⁴ As white flight accelerated in cities throughout the postwar United States, including Detroit, Grosse Pointe constituted a “bourgeois utopia.” ⁵

As scholars have long documented, in so many postwar “bourgeois utopias,” “white people purchased not merely homes, but also a concept of space in which racial segregation and white superiority were taken for granted.” ⁶ Numerous studies have painstakingly interrogated the role of the Federal Housing Administration, block associations and civic leagues, real estate agents, police forces, and the suburban migration of capital in creating and incentivizing racially segregated metropolises in the urban North. ⁷ A study of Grosse Pointe and its “Point System” exposes the anxieties that shaped lily-white suburbia. Grosse Pointe’s real estate was underwritten by what Robert M. Fogelson has termed “bourgeois nightmares:” a community defined by its fear of racialized “others” whose presence would trigger market uncertainty and jeopardize the community’s unyielding quest for “‘stability and permanence.’” ⁸ In addition, Grosse Pointe offers a new lens into suburban integrationism. Histories of open housing in affluent communities in Greensboro, Philadelphia, and suburban Boston emphasize how white suburban activists worked to enhance their communities’ racially liberal stature. My examination of housing activism in Grosse Pointe—in reaction to the revelation of the Point System—offers the opposite case in which wealthy suburbanites sought to rehabilitate their elite community’s intolerant reputation. ⁹ Relatedly, while historians are well-acquainted with the ways in which working-class white communities resisted integration, Grosse Pointe turns our attention to how resistance manifested amid a more affluent population. ¹⁰ While Grosse Pointe’s homeowners remained carefully monitored, ideas about urban and suburban space traversed metropolitan boundaries, propping “artificial, and yet certainly consequential dividing lines between, among, and within cities and suburbs.” ¹¹ By fleshing out the checkered history of this community, this study clarifies the labor involved in ensuring the maintenance of segregated suburbs in postwar America, as well as the often ill-fated efforts of black residents and racial liberals to challenge metropolitan segregation.

The Point System Revealed

In 1960, Grosse Pointe was a nearly entirely white suburb. Its racial homogeneity was the result of a nationwide consensus on the necessity of maintaining segregation in real estate markets. Article 34 of the Code of Ethics of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, later enshrined in the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation redlining maps, penalized any disturbances to neighborhoods’ racial status quos. Illuminating what historian David M. P. Freund calls “the market imperative,” Article 34 conflated race and property value, specifying that “a realtor should never be instrumental in introducing to a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” ¹² Indeed, the GPBA quoted Article 34 in its 1945 bylaws.

But what made this suburb distinctive was the novel technique developed by the GPBA and the GPPOA to enforce Article 34. In 1945, Grosse Pointe realtors crafted a rigid “Point System” that ranked potential homebuyers’ desirability. ¹³ If realtors doubted an applicant would meet community standards, they hired a private detective, Earl H. Grady, to gather information and complete a screening form. The assessment was fundamentally concerned with “Americanness:” it allotted points based on descent, nativity, whether names were “typically American,” whether a potential buyer’s “way of living [was] American,” and whether one spoke with a “pronounced,” “medium,” or “slight” accent. Grammar was also scored under “additional information.” In addition, Grady ranked the family’s skin color as very, medium, slightly, or not at all “swarthy.” Appearances mattered: dress might be coded as “neat,” “slovenly,” “conservative,” or “flashy.” The upkeep of the family’s previous home (its grounds as well as its interior) was evaluated. Class mattered, too: Grady monitored the “public estimation” of the male head of household’s occupation, as well as both the husband and wife’s education. The form further functioned as mechanism to instantiate the heteronormative nuclear family. Several categories ranked “Mr.” and “Mrs.” separately, and should anyone beyond a married couple and their children have planned to live in the home in question, Grady completed a separate screening for those additional occupants.

Once the form was completed, Grady tallied the total points. While 100 constituted a perfect score, people of Polish descent required only 50 to 55 points; Irish 55; Italians, Greeks, Spanish, and Lebanese 75; and Jews 85 to buy a home. ¹⁴ While religion was—like grammar—only noted under additional information (and not accorded points in its own right), a separate “Blue Form” was used to evaluate Jewish homebuyers. Jewish applicants accumulated fewer points for the same accomplishments as their gentile counterparts. ¹⁵ For example, conservative dress earned a Jewish person three points, as opposed to four for a non-Jewish person. For a good education, a Jewish person was awarded four points, as opposed to five for non-Jews. Semitic last names were also penalized; for instance, a Jewish couple with the last name Smith received two points each, whereas the last name Feingold received no points. ¹⁶ The scoring system did not apply to African Americans or Asian Americans, who were not permitted to live in the Pointes.

A rotating panel of three Grosse Pointe–based realtors reviewed scores for final approval. ¹⁷ If a candidate failed to accumulate the necessary number of points, his name was circulated among local real estate agencies; this information was to include no mention of race. ¹⁸ And system had teeth: if brokers violated the system, they were forced to forfeit their commission, and if they refused, they then risked expulsion. Indeed, a former mayor of Grosse Pointe Woods, Paul Rowe, was expelled from the Brokers Association for selling homes to two families of Italian descent. ¹⁹ In all, Grady investigated and rated 1,597 prospective homebuyers from 1945 to 1960, and of those, rejected more than 40 percent (658). ²⁰

In the context of the postwar suburban boom, these 1,597 families may not seem worthy of our attention. But the screening form, by stringently monitoring ethnicity and assimilation, race, social stature, appearance (of self and home), speech, and family structure, rendered calculable postwar anxieties about race. Furthermore, as scholars including Peggy Pascoe and Khalil Gibran Muhammad have argued, racial categories do not merely reflect but in fact produce race. ²¹ In this way, the Point System constructed the illusion of an objective category of racial, ethnic, and economic others unworthy of elite suburban stature. By permitting some people of Irish, Italian, Polish, Greek, and Lebanese descent entrance into the Grosse Pointes, but barring those of African and Asian descent and most Jews, the Point System manufactured the complicated, in-between status of Americans whose origins had marked them as “not quite white.”

The Point System drew from a hierarchical system of racial classification that had solidified in the early twentieth century that ranked groups like “Celts” (of Irish descent), “Mediterraneans” (from southern Europe), and “Semites” (which included both Arabs and Jews) as inferior to those descended from “Teutonic” origins, among them the British, Germans, and Scandinavians. In this classification scheme, the racial identities of African and Asian descended people were immutable. But the Point System made it clear that in the middle of the twentieth century, it was possible, if difficult, for members of some stigmatized groups to earn the right to move to white suburbia through their speech, dress, education, and lifestyle. Potential homeowners could be granted recognition if they appropriately performed whiteness. ²²

The Point System complicates the all too neat black–white binary that has long been the template for mid-twentieth century metropolitan history. By scrutinizing not only skin color, but also family structure, outward appearances, accents, and grammar, the Point System evinced the many layers of the construction of suburban whiteness. ²³ One might imagine, for instance, two families seeking to buy a colonial home in Grosse Pointe Woods: one a middle-class family of Polish descent allotted fifty-one points, and the other a similarly situated Irish family assigned fifty-four points. While some Grosse Pointe residents might have considered the Irish family “whiter” than its Polish counterpart, this Polish family—teetering on the Point System’s precipice of whiteness—would have been granted entry into the neighborhood. This rather arbitrary three-point differential, perhaps due to a difference in “manner of dress,” granted one family a claim to proper whiteness and denied it to another. What mattered was less that both families were not black (or Brown or Asian), but rather how “white” and how “American” they were. In sum, much like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation that sought to distill and transform socially constructed categories into objective realities, the Point System anxiously monitored and indeed sometimes expanded the ever-elusive category of whiteness.

Grosse Pointe’s demography reflected the importance of distinctions between different degrees of whiteness. In 1960, the U.S. Census reported that about one-third of Grosse Pointe residents were of “foreign stock,” a percentage similar to many of Detroit’s other east side suburbs. But the mix was different. Most “foreign” residents of Grosse Pointe were of English, German, and Canadian origin, with smaller numbers of Polish, Irish, and Italian descent. ²⁴ Compared with some neighboring suburbs, Grosse Pointe housed fewer people of Italian descent (2.70% of Grosse Pointe’s total population compared with 9.38% in East Detroit and 8.44% in St. Clair Shores, for example). ²⁵ The Point System was thus not a simple, inflexible tool of inclusion or exclusion, but a mechanism for real estate brokers to evaluate and admit those “not quite white” ethnics to whiteness.

The Point System quietly policed Grosse Pointe’s boundaries until April 1960, when GPPOA executive secretary Orville Sherwood testified about it in detail in a civil suit regarding lakefront property on Windmill Pointe Drive. ²⁶ While the trial was largely ignored by the press, The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL) “precipitated a storm.” ²⁷ The ADL obtained a copy of a completed “score card” to which Sherwood had alluded in his testimony, and then organized a press conference to publicize the matter. ²⁸ In response, the state Attorney General, Paul Adams, and the Michigan Corporation and Securities Commissioner, Lawrence Gubow, called for hearings on the Point System in May 1960. Adams subpoenaed thirty-four individuals, and in May 1960, the architects of the Pointe System disclosed its methodology and relentlessly defended its aims. ²⁹

The hearings—and the subsequent debate surrounding the ill-fated administrative rule designed to guarantee fair housing instituted in its wake—rendered the unspoken system visible and articulable. Testimony, public statements, and interviews explicated the tacit logics that undergirded the Point System and named the anonymous “real estate men” who enforced it. These men’s strategy remained clear: deflect responsibility. The role of real estate, the GPPOA and GPBA claimed, was not to challenge existing prejudices, but to guarantee suburban tranquility and maintain taken-for-granted racial boundaries, thereby “protecting” property values. ³⁰ Refusing to admit culpability for their discriminatory practices, Grosse Pointe realtors argued that the community (not real estate) should take responsibility for teaching racial tolerance. They derided the hearings as baseless political showmanship. They emphasized their duty to protect property values. By routinely rejecting accountability for the creation of a vigilantly policed all-white suburb, Grosse Pointe real estate agents attempted to naturalize the segregation their own methodological grading system had created.

Real estate brokers claimed their work merely mirrored preexisting prejudices for which they harbored no responsibility. During the May hearings, Secretary of the GPBA Paul Maxon claimed that,

This plan is being conducted in fine residential communities all over the country but in a more informal manner—in a more haphazard, less fair, less intelligent manner than our own conscientious, sincere attempt to make the best of these well-known prejudices as they exist. ³¹

By virtue of its segregation, Maxon claimed, Grosse Pointe was not unique: its methodical system only transparently, rationally operationalized the maintenance of racial boundaries. Real estate brokers did not create nor exacerbate biases, but merely reflected community standards. To make the “best of” these prejudices, real estate agents were charged with maintaining suburban quiescence, upholding racial boundaries, and maximizing capital.

Yet there were possible exceptions. After claiming that the system was merely advisory, Maxon was asked for examples of persons who might be admitted to Grosse Pointe regardless of the points they accumulated. Maxon replied that Albert Einstein and Ralph Bunche might qualify as desirable neighbors. ³² GPPOA secretary R. Noble Wetherbee admitted that there were no scales for African or Asian Americans, but assured officials that, “no one wants them to move into the neighborhood anyway.” ³³

State officials were unmoved by the unrepentant testimony. Governor Williams denounced the Point System as an “odious situation” and Attorney General Adams dubbed the system “morally corrupt.” ³⁴ Adams ordered an immediate abandonment of the Point System for its violation of Michigan law (although his critics disparaged Adams for failing to identify which particular law(s) the Property Owners and Brokers Associations had violated). ³⁵ The Associations’ attorneys denounced the hearings as a “cheap political circus” that “reeked of political showmanship.” ³⁶ Attempting to usurp the language of civil rights, the Associations shielded themselves by claiming that unlike the state, they were rightfully protecting the rights of the many (the seller and his neighbors) over the rights of one individual (the purchaser).

The hearings persuaded Adams and Gubow that additional regulations were necessary to curb brokers’ discriminatory practices. ³⁷ Gubow introduced Rule 9, an amendment to the Real Estate Division Rule and Regulations, which prohibited brokers or salesmen from refusing to sell, appraise, or list residential property due to race, color, religion, national origin, and ancestry. ³⁸ Fair housing laws had been on the Michigan legislative docket in the previous three sessions, but failed to pass. ³⁹ Real estate brokers widely opposed Rule 9. ⁴⁰ Most claimed racial innocence and attacked Gubow for assuming broad powers rather than leaving policymaking to the legislature. Others claimed that Rule 9 violated property rights and was a “socialistic threat against all real property owners regardless of race, color, or creed.” ⁴¹ The Detroit Real Estate Board even claimed that “too much emphasis has been placed upon the civil rights of minorities and too little upon the civil rights of all,” deploying language of homeowners’ rights and white victimization commonplace in the metropolitan Detroit at the time. ⁴² In hearings later that year before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Detroit Real Estate Board president William Leudders reiterated the argument that Rule 9 eroded rights to private property, and by chipping away at this basic right, the United States would “eventually lose [its] democratic forms of government.” ⁴³ Red baiting thus conveniently deflected the central debate about the role and responsibility of real estate agents in creating a segregated metropolitan landscape. ⁴⁴

In addition to red-baiting, realtors also argued that any existing community prejudices were outside of their professional purview. In a letter to Governor Williams, the Southwestern Michigan Board of Realtors claimed that Rule 9 would render individual agents “‘whipping boy[s]’ for social reform.” ⁴⁵ The Detroit Real Estate Board asserted that their role was not to promote social cohesion, and stated that they took no position on any civil rights or integration issues. ⁴⁶ Maxon, meanwhile, identified churches—not real estate firms—as the appropriate organizations to foster tolerance and inclusion: ⁴⁷

The abuses recently heaped on the real estate brokers by persons having motives of their own seems to me like an unfair, unkind attempt to ignore the widely recognized issue in order to unload the sins of the world on real estate men’s shoulders. ⁴⁸

In letters exchanged with an integrationist activist years later, Maxon doubled down and asserted that integrating neighborhoods before prejudice was eradicated would only exacerbate bigotry. ⁴⁹ Again, Maxon conveniently shifted the guilt away from brokers and designated racial and religious prejudice a problem to be solved elsewhere.

This begs the question: were Grosse Pointe realtors simply perpetuating preexisting prejudices that existed outside of their influence, or were they reinstantiating spatially defined inequality? The overwhelming pattern of suburbanization in metropolitan Detroit led many whites to view racial homogeneity as natural. Prejudice need not be spoken (let alone recorded). Although Maxon and his colleagues would not admit it, the Point System in fact normalized and reified racial segregation. According to the ADL,

Certainly, it was entirely clear to those who followed the Grosse Pointe hearings that the brokers are not merely reflecting the social attitudes of Grosse Pointe residents, but that they had, in effect, initiated, controlled and maintained an elaborate system of discrimination before they had even given any opportunity to residents to express their preferences. ⁵⁰

The ADL similarly argued that the Point System was the result of “gross neglect and lack of social responsibility on the part of Michigan’s realtors.” ⁵¹ But what about the appropriate role of the state? While brokers nearly uniformly opposed Rule 9, they expressed hypothetical approval for a fair housing law drafted by the state legislature. But because Michigan had failed to pass such a law during the previous three legislative sessions, realtors understood the chances of passage were slim. ⁵² Instead, deflection was key. Whatever their personal prejudices (or lack thereof), brokers put their business interests first, which in this case, forcefully favored the maintenance of a racially segregated metropolis. ⁵³

A decade after the battle over Rule 9, Grosse Pointe’s brokers remained unwilling to take responsibility for residential segregation. In a 1970 interview with local journalist Kathy Cosseboom, GPPOA’s Orville Sherwood held tight to his belief that property values dropped when people of color moved into previously all-white neighborhoods. ⁵⁴ While maintaining that realtors had every duty to abide by fair housing laws, he nonetheless claimed, “The term ‘open housing’ is a misnomer . . . it should be ‘forced housing’ but ours is an unpopular argument and a forbidden one. You just don’t express yourself.” Sherwood maintained that “forced housing laws” should have no bearing on brokers, who merely execute sellers’ wishes. He ultimately claimed that there was, in 1970, no housing discrimination in Grosse Pointe because if there were, brokers would simply have their licenses revoked. Obviously, there are myriad reasons why housing discrimination might have gone unreported in 1970, but due solely to the fact that the law was on the books, Sherwood once more washed his hands of the issue.

Cosseboom also interviewed the head of the Grosse Pointe Real Estate Board, Robert Edgar, in July 1970. ⁵⁵ Like Sherwood, Edgar defended segregation: “It has been proven all over the world that when neighbors change to minority group members, real estate values go down. This has been going on since the recorded history of man. It is unfortunate, but a fact.” ⁵⁶ He argued that crime diminished property values, and insisted, “it’s not the white people causing the crime.” To bolster his point, Edgar cited examples of friends who recently relocated from Detroit’s posh Indian Village to nearby suburbs for fear of crime. ⁵⁷ Edgar furthermore berated pro-integration “do-gooders” for prompting integration prematurely and “making waves.” ⁵⁸ Freedom of choice and the right of association were compromised by fair housing provisions that “cram[med] civil rights laws down the country’s throat overnight.” ⁵⁹ Again like Sherwood, Edgar maintained that Grosse Pointe realtors had followed the law, abandoned the Point System, and extended every courtesy and fairness to prospective buyers of color. Yet even if the Point System no longer appeared in the GPBA’s bylaws, the prejudices that undergirded it remained intact a decade later.

“We Should Be Grateful”: Community Members Respond

Some community members, too, bought into the market imperative that real estate brokers promoted. In response to the first public report of the Point System, the Grosse Pointe News published an editorial titled “We Should Be Grateful” that unabashedly defended the GPPOA and GPBA. ⁶⁰ The article stressed the honorable objectives of “protecting property values,” enhancing “pride in their community,” and “guard[ing] the standards of which we are all so proud.” At the same time, however, the editorial overtly circumvented the discriminatory implications of the screening system:

We don’t want to get mixed up in any arguments over discrimination, particularly the racial angles to which many of the unfavorable comments have referred . . . We see these things in a far different light than that shed under the ugly appellation of racial prejudice.

The Grosse Pointe News thereby acknowledged, refracted, and rendered subsidiary the discrimination inherent in the Point System and instead prioritized the upkeep of property values and community standards.

The Grosse Pointe News continued to defend the Point System in the months to come. In September 1960, the newspaper editors argued that the GPPOA deserved “gratitude.” ⁶¹ The Point System was a “most conscientious and considerate method” to protect neighborhood real estate values. Indeed, the editorial identified the “underlying problem” to be “the economic understructure and the home-owner’s duty toward his neighbor.” The Point System—“maligned by many who have not troubled to study it”—measured potential buyers based on “general conduct,” not race. And yet the Grosse Pointe News acknowledged that, “the real problem of course lies in prejudice, which is not to be condoned. Like many other human failings, it does exist and constitutes a problem which all must fight, particularly our churches and educators.” Real estate agents remained blameless for their role in enforcing segregation; prejudice was instead a nebulous, immeasurable social problem “all must fight” yet for which no one was responsible.

The Detroit News also minimized the prejudice underlying the system. ⁶² The News dismissed state intervention as the meddling of Democratic politicians eager to embarrass a Republican-leaning suburb. The practice of excluding “undesirable” neighbors in the interest of maintaining property values, the Detroit News claimed, was “wholly understandable” and occurred in every community in one way or another. The Grosse Pointe brokerage groups, however, were guilty of a “ridiculous error;” the system was “nonsense to the nth degree.” Describing the Point System as “foolishness . . . not malevolence” stripped the Point System and its purveyors of any ill intent, let alone bigotry. The editorial also suggested the willingness to shame the Pointes stemmed from a desire to humiliate the “wicked rich,” emblematic of discursive currents that dismissed the Point System as nothing more than a tawdry scandal design to embarrass the wealthy suburbanites. The vast majority of Grosse Pointers were “good Americans,” the Detroit News maintained, who likely had no knowledge of the screening system—they were simply victims who should not be punished for their economic success.

Some individual Grosse Pointe residents defended the Point System in the midcentury language of homeowners’ rights that crossed urban/suburban boundaries. For example, Grosse Pointe Farms resident Avalo Petri supported the right of a property owner to determine to whom to sell his property. ⁶³ He asserted that “do-gooders” had singled out Grosse Pointe for attack to promote their “cause celebré,” again depicting this episode as a crude scandal rather than a violation of civil rights. Petri also situated Grosse Pointe in a specific metropolitan history of urban blight and white flight: unlike the “many once beautiful sections of the City of Detroit,” Grosse Pointe remained a “most beautiful suburb.” Petri recounted an example of friends who visited their former Detroit neighborhood and “came away sick at the sight;” they had since relocated to California. Grosse Pointe was thus positioned as a safe haven shielded from urban decay and demographic change.

But many residents disagreed with Petri, the Grosse Pointe News, the GPPOA, and the Detroit News. Some residents outright mocked the Detroit News’s perspective and considered the Point System a “nefarious conspiracy against morality.” ⁶⁴ Others condemned the system but nonetheless excused Grosse Pointe residents themselves from significant responsibility: “In all of this clandestine maneuvering no one has asked for my sanction or questioned me about my opinion as a resident and property owner,” wrote Douglas A. Sargent in the Detroit Times. ⁶⁵ Similarly, in the New York Times, Ben Nathanson expressed his doubt that the families of Grosse Pointe were aware of the Point System. ⁶⁶ Robin B. Prescott invoked the language of homeowners’ rights to claim that his rights were being violated by the implementation of the Point System. ⁶⁷ David H. Barker likewise opposed this discrimination, and was particularly perturbed by its class implications: “If an educated community such as this will not advance moral leadership, but is more concerned about its monetary investment, where is this country to look for its moral and spiritual strength?” ⁶⁸ Barker expected the presumably enlightened politics of a highly educated community to translate to racial liberalism—or at least the outward appearance of such. In all, these residents’ disapproval of the Point System undermined the GPPOA and GPBA’s claims that their methods merely reflected community prejudices. Sargent, Nathanson, Prescott, and Barker were not alone: in the decade following the revelation of the Point System, some Grosse Pointers mobilized to rehabilitate the beleaguered reputation of their community.

Community Activism and “Move-Ins”

As civil rights activism gained steam in the North in the early 1960s, Grosse Pointe could not easily escape the shadow of the Point System. Grosse Pointe was one of several suburbs targeted by the Detroit NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in a series of summer 1963 marches focused on housing discrimination. An estimated 500 to 700 demonstrators, among them an about equal number of black and white participants, including representatives from the United Auto Workers (UAW), local clergy, and Governor George Romney, peacefully walked a half-mile route along Kercheval Avenue. ⁶⁹ Along the route, the marchers stopped at two real estate offices: Silloway & Co., accused of recently discriminating against a potential black homebuyer, and Maxon Brothers, Inc., identified as “one of the ringleaders in the discrimination out here” by Detroit NAACP housing committee chairman Abraham Ulmer. ⁷⁰ John A. Maxwell, who filed the civil suit that ultimately unveiled the Point System, also spoke at the rally. ⁷¹ In his remarks during the concluding rally at Grosse Pointe High School, Detroit NAACP President Edward M. Turner stated that “Grosse Pointe represents the epitome of the sophisticated kind of discrimination, the kind practiced by every man, woman and child who lives in this community.” ⁷² Although the Point System was no longer operating by the time of the NAACP’s march, its legacy and symbolism clearly informed the location and tenor of this demonstration.

Yet another speaker at the rally was Dr. G. Merrill Lennox, representing the Grosse Pointe Human Relations Council (HRC). ⁷³ Within Grosse Pointe itself, the HRC—first organized informally in 1960 and reinvigorated in 1964—sought to “promote good will, understanding, and respect for human dignity.” ⁷⁴ The group boasted over 300 members in 1965, and over 500 by 1969. The Grosse Pointe Open Housing committee (OHC) was later founded in 1968. Unlike the open housing organizing historians have previously studied in elite, liberal locales such as Greensboro, North Carolina; suburban Boston; and Mount Airy, Philadelphia, Grosse Pointe represents an opposite case: a suburb notorious for its segregation. ⁷⁵ Like their integrationist counterparts elsewhere, though, the HRC and OHC were concerned with African Americans’ attainment of legal rights within existing institutions and on changing the hearts and minds of white Americans—what historian Abigail Perkiss refers to as a “Myrdalian vision of postwar racial justice.” ⁷⁶ Unlike the Point System, the HRC was mainly focused on fostering black–white integration, with little attention to whatever divisions existed among different ethnicities. Furthermore, while the HRC and OHC might have sought racial diversity, as the “move ins” of the first two African American families in 1966 attest, integrationists sought to achieve measured racial diversity while maintaining elite socioeconomic status.

Ironically in line with realtors’ contentions earlier in the decade that religious and educational institutions were the proper sites for cultural change, many of the integrationists’ programs took place in schools and churches, driven by the belief that their children would benefit from interracial contact that would characterize a future integrated world. ⁷⁷ For the HRC, a mixing of races alone would result in interracial harmony. ⁷⁸ A preschool exchange program that ran from 1966 to 1970, for example, recruited children of color from “professional families” so that its students would “be comfortable participants in society in the 1990’s.” ⁷⁹ The HRC also hosted interracial exchanges in K-12 schools, churches, summer camps, and YMCAs. In 1968, the HRC recruited Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to speak at Grosse Pointe South High School, where he addressed the future of integration. ⁸⁰ Meanwhile, outside of schools, HRC members hosted interracial dinner parties and escorted families of color when they visited open houses. ⁸¹

Based on the idea that simple interracial contact would produce racial harmony, these fleeting interactions left the structural underpinnings of racism untouched. Ironically, the very spatial proximity that enabled these exchanges also rendered the inequality demarcating the Detroit–Grosse Pointe boundary all the more stark. The need for “exchange” in the first place demonstrated that metropolitan racial boundaries fortified in part by the Point System remained firm. These boundaries might be crossed for a school day, religious service, or dinner party, but the entrenched inequalities were largely undisturbed by transient encounters.

Despite these efforts, Grosse Pointe struggled to shed its reputation of racial exclusivity. In 1966, HRC member John Fillion played an important role in ensuring that Grosse Pointers, for the first time, would not need to cross boundaries to engage in interracial contact. Six years after the demise of the Point System, Fillion, a white attorney for the United Automobile Workers, quietly purchased a $42,000 red brick colonial home in a new subdivision in Grosse Pointe Woods. ⁸² Shortly after his purchase, Fillion sold 743 Rosedale Court to A. Gordon Wright, the patriarch of Grosse Pointe’s first black family. ⁸³ The HRC and other progressive organizations were quick to respond to the Wrights’ move. In preparation for the family’s move, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission sent letters to Grosse Pointe Woods community leaders and clergy detailing the background of the Wright family to “calm any fears and reconcile the community.” ⁸⁴ The authors of the letter stressed the Wrights’ middle-class credentials: Wright was a thirty-six-year-old attorney and father of three. ⁸⁵ He was college educated and relocated to Grosse Pointe for his job as the Midwest Regional Director of the Economic Development Administration of the Department of Commerce. ⁸⁶ Wright’s wife, Patricia, was also college educated. ⁸⁷ In addition to their educational and professional middle-class qualifications, the letter established that the Wrights were likewise well-suited to carry themselves properly in Grosse Pointe as they had “moved from a comparable home in the northwest section of Washington, D.C.” ⁸⁸ (Wright—whose father was a wealthy Cleveland real estate executive—was raised in an otherwise all-white Cleveland suburb. ⁸⁹ ) As Perkiss has documented in Mount Airy, Philadelphia, in integrationists’ vision of equal choice and opportunity, “middle-class identity had become the focal point of race-based reform.” ⁹⁰ Similarly, Andrew Weise has observed that for its black denizens, “suburbanization was a conscious class-making act.” ⁹¹ In this way, moves of black families disrupted the racial configuration of formerly all-white neighborhoods, but not their class composition nor the values assumed to correspond. By stressing the class similarities connecting current residents of Grosse Pointe and the Wrights, the letter elided racial difference in favor of socioeconomic sameness.

The HRC also responded to the Wrights’ move by publishing its statement of purpose in the Grosse Pointe News accompanied by 353 signatures of supportive individuals and families. ⁹² This document provides a useful window into the HRC’s early guiding principles—which in some ways were reminiscent of the principles purportedly undergirding the Point System years earlier. ⁹³ The statement at once reflects community pride and a desire for improvement: members of the HRC were “proud of their community” and its “high standards,” and desired that Grosse Pointe “continue to flourish and prosper”—signaling its socioeconomic exclusivity. Like real estate, the HRC had no intention of compromising the Pointes’ elite status. The HRC’s principles of communal pride and unity, however, were juxtaposed against its highly individualistic ethos. “The dignity of the individual is the basis of our ethnic and community life,” the HRC stated. Community life was, “dependent upon the recognition by all of us of the individual rights of each neighbor.” ⁹⁴ This mirrors the focus on the individual accomplishments of Gordon Wright that merit his family’s moving to Grosse Pointe, and—as historian Lily Geismer has observed—“obscures the structures and forms of privileges and entitlements that link the people who ascribe to it together.” ⁹⁵

The published statement, drenched in the language of middle-class entitlement and rights-based ethics, failed to define the problem the HRC was attempting to address. Much like how the Wright’s blackness was elided, race was only mentioned in the midcentury refrain of “regardless of race, color, religion, or national origin.” ⁹⁶ The HRC sought to foster improved “intergroup relations” and to “become reconcilers in our community, a voice of calm and reason, a group uniting all people of good will.” ⁹⁷ This non-confrontational language alludes to rather than names the problem of (housing) discrimination, let alone racism, and exemplifies the evasive politics of the HRC and suburban integrationists more broadly—their tendency to myopically focus on the individual dynamics of systemic problems and in turn to dodge tackling the issue not of “good will” or “reason” but racism.

And the community’s reception of the Wrights illustrates this racism clearly. While some neighbors greeted the Wrights with freshly baked cakes, the harassment the pioneers faced was covered in press outlets ranging from the Detroit Free Press to the New York Times. ⁹⁸ Rosedale Court was lined with a “constant parade” of cars with jeering passengers. On July 24, two teenagers threw firecrackers on the Wrights’ property. Unidentified callers phoned police and declared there would be “trouble at Rosedale Court tonight,” and a separate caller falsely claimed that the Wrights’ home was on fire. Another car drove over the Wright’s front lawn. Rumors of impending violence swirled. Anticipating such a reception, the family’s three children—Cheryl, nine years old, Joyce, seven years old, and Gordy, five years old—moved to Grosse Pointe after their father. ⁹⁹ In light of this harassment, Wright admitted that he “did not expect the troubles to be so flagrantly open and hostile”—particularly in a community with “such a high degree of economic status and academic level.” Wright, nevertheless, maintained that,

I really couldn’t care less whether my neighbors love me or not. I just hope this will die down. I hope my neighbors will go about their business and let me go about mine. Then, we’ll all be very happy. ¹⁰⁰

Once the harassment and press coverage abated, the HRC wrote to the Wrights to welcome them to the community and invited them to join their organization. ¹⁰¹ A month and a half later, the HRC had not yet received a response. ¹⁰² During his brief four-month stint in Grosse Pointe, Wright focused on his professional life rather than community engagement; he claimed that he “didn’t have time to be a test case” and that he did not want community members to think his move was a part of an organized effort, “an expression of integration outwards from Detroit.” ¹⁰³ (Given that Wright moved from Washington, D.C., not Detroit, his comment evokes the extent to which Detroit was seen as the nexus of black life from which suburban migration would inevitably radiate.) Like so many black pioneers who integrated the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, Wright relocated to access the professional and economic advantages predominately available outside cities: excellent public schools, lavish parks, yacht clubs (Wright was a boat enthusiast), and—in his case—a lesson for his children about how to successfully operate in all-white settings. ¹⁰⁴ Indeed, Wright was adamant his children were “not going to be raised in that kind of environment” (referring to “the ghetto”). ¹⁰⁵ As Perkiss argues, pioneers who moved to all-white communities were motivated by a “dual recognition” of racial progress on one hand and individual material gain on the other. ¹⁰⁶ Wright’s motivation and apolitical gesturing likely endeared him to his fellow community members who preferred to see their commonalities with a wealthy, well-educated family rather than their racial differences. As Thomas Sugrue notes, “ideal pioneers needed to be as nonthreatening as possible.” ¹⁰⁷

Wright’s attitude about Grosse Pointe, however, is difficult to characterize summarily. As headlines shifted from “First Grosse Pointe Negroes Find Insults Are Alarming” to “Negro Family Living Quietly After Rough Start,” so too did Wright’s account. ¹⁰⁸ In July and August 1966, Wright complained to the press about the harassment he and his family faced: “there were women with babies and young children, teenagers and adults. It started the first day we got here.” ¹⁰⁹ Wright likewise told the New York Times that “I just couldn’t conceive of running into this sort of thing in 1966.” ¹¹⁰ Perhaps Wright’s surprise should have been mediated by his previous knowledge of the “notorious point system” that he ignored when deciding to move to Grosse Pointe because he was “a little stubborn.” ¹¹¹ Wright framed his decision as one born out of his personal “stubbornness”—a usually apolitical personality trait—rather than any ostensible interest in racial justice, again inflecting his move with nonthreatening individualism. In any case, Wright eventually changed his tune. By the fall of 1966, he reported that his family was “being treated with friendliness and courtesy. And our two girls have no problems in school.” ¹¹² Judge Blair Moody, Jr., president of the HRC, stated that “the Wrights seem to have been accepted as just another new family in the neighborhood.” ¹¹³ When Wright’s department was phased out and transferred to Duluth, he told local reporters that “we’ve met at lot of very wonderful people here, and we would hate to leave.” ¹¹⁴ Ultimately, Wright accepted an offer with Ford Motor Company and relocated to Beverly Hills, California. ¹¹⁵ Perhaps Wright’s reported change of heart was genuine: the harassment subsided, and his family settled into the normal suburban cycle of life. Yet, the Wrights’ quick move belies this possibility. This public-facing change of heart might alternatively be considered a performance of sorts in which Wright assuaged his anxious neighbors that highly-educated Grosse Pointers were indeed sufficiently tolerant to accept a black family in their midst.

While the Wrights attracted harassment and press attention, just two days later, the family of Glenn Brown began leasing a home in Grosse Pointe Park. ¹¹⁶ The Browns’ move was not reported on with the same level of detail (or salaciousness) as the Wrights’, perhaps because their leasing a home indicated a certain transience. Also unlike the Wrights, Glenn and Jeanne Brown dove into community activism, and joined the HRC in December 1966. ¹¹⁷ After Time Magazine published an article detailing the harassment faced by the Wrights, Glenn Brown and HRC member Patricia McFadden authored letters to the editor to combat what they claimed were Time’s unfair generalizations about the community. ¹¹⁸ First, McFadden in her letter titled “But Nice, Too” chided Time’s reporting for ignoring the sometimes warm reception that greeted the Wrights. ¹¹⁹ She then attacked the magazine for “ignoring the completely peaceful arrival of another Negro family, the Glenn Browns,” consequently leaving readers “with the impression that all Grosse Pointe is not only rich, exclusive, but nasty too.” ¹²⁰ The use of the word “nasty”—rather than “racist” or the more likely “prejudiced” or “bigoted”—again illustrates integrationists’ tendency to circumvent a transparent acknowledgment of racism. McFadden’s language also demonstrated the extent to which Grosse Pointers felt embattled after the discovery of the Point System, tired of being the “rich, exclusive” scapegoat. Brown echoed McFadden’s claims:

For the sake of fairness, you should know that we, a Negro family, moved into Grosse Pointe recently and have been received by our new neighbors with many gestures of friendliness and good will. In our experience, Grosse Pointe is a fine place for any American to live. ¹²¹

In this way, McFadden and Brown, both members of the HRC, mobilized to defend Grosse Pointe and refute its exclusive reputation on the national stage.

As the assistant editor for the HRC, not only was Brown more politically engaged than Wright, but there were other differences between these pioneers, as well. While they were employed at the same office, Brown came from a working-class family: his parents were laborers on a Missouri farm, and he secured middle-class status by serving in the military. ¹²² His wife, Jeanne, however, was from a firmly middle-class upbringing. “Somewhat on edge” due to the publicity surrounding the Wright’s move, the Browns wanted to relocate as quietly as possible, and so they moved into their home on a Monday. ¹²³ Their plan worked. Although some rumors flourished, years later, Brown remarked that “our experience was not trying in any way except we were burdened with goodwill and hospitality.” ¹²⁴ Like Wright, though, Brown moved to Grosse Pointe for the high-quality education and public services; indeed, his daughter attended Maire Elementary School and faced no harassment. ¹²⁵ Overall, then, the Browns’ quieter move seems to have gone far more smoothly than the Wrights’ dramatic relocation, and perhaps Brown felt safe engaging in local activism because of this.

Because both Wright and Brown worked in the same office, Brown, too, lost his job and left Grosse Pointe in February 1967. The HRC reported that “in spite of many offers,” Brown did not find the right position in Detroit, and instead returned to D.C. as an administrator for the Peace Corps. ¹²⁶ The HRC hosted a goodbye party for the family. ¹²⁷ Brown composed a goodbye letter for the HRC newsletter that publicly demonstrated his gratefulness for the generous welcome he received in Grosse Pointe:

Our reception to this community was marked by a warmth and spontaneity never to be forgotten. Thanks to the efforts of friends and neighbors, our arrival received no undue attention. On the day we moved into our new home, we were extended courtesy and assistance, including a complete dinner, flowers, and baby-sitters. Since that day friendships have been strengthened and increased . . . In short, we find Grosse Pointe an ideal community in which to reside. ¹²⁸

Brown urged black families to consider moving to Grosse Pointe and recommended they reach out to the HRC and OHC to ease their transition. ¹²⁹ Perhaps due to their more transient status as renters rather than buyers, perhaps due to their quick integration into community life, the Browns’ smooth move stands in sharp contrast to the Wrights’ comparatively sordid affair.

Six years later, Glenn Brown reiterated his sense of belonging in the Grosse Pointe community during an interview with local journalist Kathy Cosseboom for her book Grosse Pointe, Michigan: Race against Race. ¹³⁰ Gordon and Patricia Wright, meanwhile, declined to “rehash their experiences” in Grosse Pointe. ¹³¹ Perhaps the Browns’ quick and robust engagement in the community prompted them to be willing to reflect on their experience years later, unlike Gordon Wright, who considered his move as a personal decision outside of politics. Despite these differences, both Wright and Brown claimed Grosse Pointe would benefit from greater diversity rather than remaining a “sterile white community,” in Wright’s words. ¹³² Their observations point to the challenging task the HRC had assigned itself. Although the HRC’s letters, publications, and outreach efforts could not prevent the departure of Grosse Pointe’s first two black residents, and although no sea change of public opinion occurred, for the Brown family, the HRC provided a warm welcome, a sense of community, and a political home. Like its own meritocratic political ethos, the HRC succeeded in making at least one family of color feel welcome and at home in an unlikely place.

After the departure of the Wrights and Browns, the next black family to move into Grosse Pointe, the Thomases, did not do so until September 1972. ¹³³ The HRC had assisted the Thomases in their search for a home in Grosse Pointe for months. Indeed, the Thomases attended a party for prospective homebuyers in May 1971. Unlike the Wrights and Browns who moved to Grosse Pointe from out-of-state, the Thomases previously resided in Detroit, and were ushered to the HRC by Jacob Nyenhuis, the chairman of the Housing Committee, who was a colleague of Jane Thomas’ at Wayne State University. ¹³⁴ While Edward Thomas’s position as an administrator at Harper Hospital granted the family upper-middle-class cachet, it was his wife’s role at the College of Nursing that facilitated their move to Grosse Pointe. ¹³⁵ The Thomases’ move was quiet and smooth aside from rude comments from one older neighbor, and they were greeted with a welcome party. ¹³⁶ Also like the Browns, the Thomases readily engaged in the HRC’s work. ¹³⁷

In 1972, as in 1966, the HRC understood the Thomases’ move as an opportunity to mend Grosse Pointe’s fraught reputation. On the day that the Thomases finalized their purchase of their home on 838 Whittier Road, Jacob Nyenhuis sent a letter to the mayor of Grosse Pointe Park. In the letter, Nyenhuis stressed that “our community’s reputation as the symbol of such discrimination can either be confirmed during the next few days and weeks, or it can be quietly but firmly repudiated.” ¹³⁸ As such, Nyenhuis pleaded for the mayor’s assistance in maintaining peace by providing “through but unobtrusive police protection.” ¹³⁹ In response, the mayor agreed to deploy city resources to ensure an orderly move. ¹⁴⁰ Police intervention was ultimately unnecessary, but the focus on maintaining law and order illuminates the extent to which integrationists were committed to both racial equality and to maintaining the quiet, peaceful order that suburban life promised.

The 1969 Open Housing Referendum

Nearly a decade after the revelation of the Point System, and after years of integrationist activism, an open housing ordinance was on the ballot in Grosse Pointe Farms. In response to the 1967 Detroit Rebellion and the release of the Kerner Commission report that followed, the HRC felt its mission more pressing than ever. At long last identifying white racism as a problem HRC was positioned to tackle, the HRC decided that Grosse Pointe would take up the charge of melding “two societies, one black, one white.” ¹⁴¹ By 1968, thirty-five communities in Michigan had already passed local ordinances, and the Fair Housing Act had been signed into federal law. ¹⁴² Despite some internal disagreement about the utility of a largely symbolic ordinance, in August 1968, the HRC began advocating for ordinance using the template language provided by the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. ¹⁴³ Given that state and federal fair housing laws were already on the books, some thought the overlap rendered the ordinance moot. The key difference between preexisting laws and the proposed ordinance was that the ordinance would subject realtors who violated fair housing laws would to criminal rather than civil penalties. ¹⁴⁴ The HRC, though, argued that even the symbolic display of local commitment to integration was a worthwhile endeavor in itself. ¹⁴⁵ The HRC considered an open housing ordinance a signal to potential homebuyers of color that they would be welcome no matter Grosse Pointe’s reputation. ¹⁴⁶ It would be an emblem of tolerance and triumph over Grosse Pointe’s segregationist past.

Ultimately, the HRC only secured a vote in Grosse Pointe Farms. The City of Grosse Pointe council passed a fair housing ordinance in February 1969. ¹⁴⁷ By contrast, in April of that year, the Grosse Point Park council passed a resolution stating that a fair housing ordinance was flatly unnecessary. ¹⁴⁸ Grosse Pointe Shores and Woods, meanwhile, tabled requests for housing ordinances while all eyes were on Grosse Pointe Farms and its 12,000 residents. ¹⁴⁹ In effect, the Farms was positioned as a harbinger of public opinion on the issue. While the HRC was disappointed that only one of the communities took up their cause, Grosse Pointe Farms Mayor Butler’s support was steadfast. In March 1969—eleven days before the vote—Butler sent a letter to his constituents urging them to support the ordinance. ¹⁵⁰ In light of the “negative publicity—prejudicial to our City—[that] has already been published in the local and national press,” the ordinance would establish Grosse Pointers as people of “good will” rather than denizens of a “center of wealthy recreation.” ¹⁵¹ The mayor also stressed that the passage of the ordinance offered a chance for Grosse Pointers to exercise their “traditional leadership” in metropolitan Detroit and the nation; given that the Farms would have been the thirty-sixth Michigan community to pass such an ordinance, this claim was patently untrue, but was designed to appeal to Farms residents’ sense of influence. ¹⁵² The HRC likewise argued that an ordinance passed by a community of Grosse Pointe’s “stature may well contribute to the progress of racial harmony nationally.” ¹⁵³ At the same time, the HRC contradictorily urged voters to approve the referendum and vote yes to “move Grosse Pointe into the mainstream of America.” ¹⁵⁴

However influential Mayor Butler’s endorsement was, the HRC used its networks to mobilize for this campaign, too. On a cold January weekend, teenagers distributed open housing pamphlets to every home in Grosse Pointe Farms. ¹⁵⁵ To get the ordinance on the April 7 ballot in the first place, the HRC collected nearly 2,000 signatures. ¹⁵⁶ Deploying the familiar language of community pride, the HRC ran a recurring advertisement in the Grosse Pointe News that asked, “We are proud of Grosse Pointe. Are You?” with an increasing number of signatures in each successive publication. ¹⁵⁷ As the optimism of early-1960s racial liberalism waned, Grosse Pointe had yet another opportunity to rehabilitate its embattled reputation. ¹⁵⁸

Despite the HRC’s campaign, the ordinance ultimately lost by 700 votes out of 2,200 cast. The HRC was both optimistic and pessimistic. On one hand, they thought the vote evidenced substantial change in the community’s attitudes. On the other, too few citizens expressed sufficient “goodwill or enlightenment” to make concrete changes to Grosse Pointe Farms’ housing laws. Once more operating with the assumption that wealth and education were synonymous with racial liberalism, the HRC lamented, “It is almost unbelievable that so many people, from the highest social, educational and economic strata of the Greater Detroit community, could have voted to take a walk into the past.” Again, Grosse Pointe confounded the presumed association of class privilege and racial tolerance. While the historical record enumerates copious examples of belligerent white, working-class neighborhood “protection,” clearly, as Grosse Pointe illustrates, racism was not limited to the white working class. ¹⁵⁹

Conclusion

Forty years after the Point System’s demise, Grosse Pointe remained 97% white. ¹⁶⁰ In 2010, that figure dropped to 93%. ¹⁶¹ As someone raised in Grosse Pointe in the early 2000s, I recall the omnipresence of whiteness as well as whispers of the infamous Point System that somehow no one seemed to know much about. Long after the final points were tallied, Grosse Pointe retained the reputation as a bastion of racial exclusivity. The legacy of the Pointe System persists today in informal, unspoken ways that are more difficult to root out than realtors’ ranking schemes. But for as much as Grosse Pointers once underplayed the Point System as a tawdry scandal specifically designed to malign wealthy suburbanites, this system of segregation as well as later attempts to root out its impact have ramifications far beyond Grosse Pointe and metropolitan Detroit. The fifteen-year-long operation of the Point System transparently illuminates the work of white supremacy as well as the tracking and production of race and particularly whiteness in the context of suburban exclusion. Grosse Pointe’s history of segregation is a reminder of how elite communities maintained racial segregation in ways at once more deliberately calculated and less publicly visible than their working-class counterparts. Despite national scandal, despite the efforts of local activists to foster “good will,” despite the residence of three black families, despite attempts to change local housing laws, the methodical racism purveyed by realtors from 1945 to 1960 was etched upon the metropolitan landscape and created unspoken boundaries that far outlasted their “most conscientious and considerate method.” ¹⁶²