Digitally Documenting Urban Renewal in Lansing, 1930s-1960s

The African American community in Lansing started small. The 1920 census recorded only 698 African Americans living in the city, 1.2 percent of the total population.¹ This community grew slowly but steadily through the middle decades of the twentieth century before sharply increasing in size starting in the 1970s. Today, the city has an African American population of almost 25,000, over 20 percent of its total, and Lansing is recognized as a diverse and welcoming city.² How it arrived at that diversity, and the cost of getting there, however, was borne largely and disproportionately by the black community in the mid-twentieth century. The early African Americans that arrived in Lansing were largely confined to a small enclave south of downtown and north of the Grand River in the area around the Oldsmobile/General Motors factory. They were unable to rent or purchase housing in other areas of the city because of a combination of residential steering, where realtors would only show them properties in this neighborhood, "redlining" practices by banks that would not offer them mortgages, and personal prejudice from homeowners who would not sell or rent to people based on skin color. These, of course, were not unique to Lansing, as housing discrimination happened in just about every American town and city in the years before the 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed housing discrimination.³ Much like other cities, the story of housing discrimination is not simply about the struggles of African Americans (and other racial minorities) to find

The Main Street/St. Joseph's Neighborhood in the 1950s, including the Oldsmobile Plant.

affordable or even available housing. It is also the story of how racial discrimination in real estate and employment combined to keep African American residents stuck in cycles of generational poverty, unable to lay claim to the wealth derived from real estate that many American families of European descent built throughout the twentieth century.

The area that this study examines—referred to as the Main Street/St. Joseph's neighborhood—contained most of the city's African American population from 1900 until the construction of Interstate 496 in the mid-1960s uprooted many.⁴ It was a strong and vibrant community that contained many churches (including the Bethlehem Temple at 835 West Main Street), thriving businesses (many owned by African Americans), and multiple schools. The neighborhood also was home to the region's "Syrian" community, a designation that included people from modern-day Syria and Lebanon. James Zarka, for instance, owned a grocery store at 928 Pine Street in the middle of the neighborhood and lived with his family around the corner at 524 William Street.⁵ The Zarka family, originally from Lebanon, were pillars of the small Syrian community and have retained ties to the state and region to this day.⁶ These communities were confined to this area not only by discriminatory real estate practices, which included redlining, but also via restrictive covenants: riders attached to property deeds that prohibited their sale to people from certain racial, ethnic, or religious groups. Racially restrictive covenants were legal until the 1948 Supreme Court case of Shelley v. Kraemer outlawed the practice, though there is strong evidence in Lansing that informal use of covenants continued long after 1948. These practices conspired to keep many African Americans from being able to purchase homes, and kept property values down for those who did, thus contributing to the inability of families to build, accrue, and pass along inter-generational wealth.

These macro-level stories of housing discrimination and residential segregation have been told before, but this article explores in detail some individual Lansing stories in order to describe at a micro level how housing discrimination played out in a medium-sized midwestern industrial city in the middle of the twentieth century. It does so via a unique set of sources: real estate records found in the Stebbins Collection, the paper records of the now-defunct Lansing-based Advance Realty Company that are located in the...