From 2009: Interstate 496 construction left a complicated legacy

It was chance that Lonnie Johnson was on hand to see a front-end loader cut into the roof of his childhood home.

It was 1965, a warm day in early fall. Johnson was late for work, driving from a new house in Churchill Downs, going fast. He passed 1212 W. Main St. just as the machine's claw came down.

"I slammed on my brakes right in the middle of the street," he said. "I don't know what I expected to do."

The house wasn't his anymore. It belonged to the state. That resounding crack of shingles and timber was still like a knife to the heart.

Johnson is 70 years old. He's lived for 20 years in the Indian Hills subdivision in Okemos, for 13 years in Detroit before that.

But when he dreams about home, he still dreams of 1212 W. Main, a house long torn down, a yard where the weeping willow trees have been uprooted.

And he dreams of a neighborhood cut in half to make way for Interstate 496.

It was the largest black neighborhood in the city, as it happens, created by the Realtors and mortgage men who upheld the written and unwritten rules of segregation, swelled by migrants who streamed into Lansing after World War II looking for work in construction or on the line at Oldsmobile.

And eviscerated by the unyielding logic of federal highway construction, which steered new roads down what urban historian Thomas Sugrue called "the paths of least resistance," places where people didn't have the money or the power to put up much of a fight.

Lansing's black leaders didn't fight the highway. But, as the project pressed forward, they fought for other things: open housing and affordable housing and relocation assistance for the people who were being displaced, which came, by some accounts, too late.

And, in that sense, the legacy of the highway is complicated.

It cut the heart out of a neighborhood with restaurants and grocery stores and dry cleaners, a hatter and a community center, and the record shop owned by Johnson's father.

Which, he says, was "the only place in town you could get rhythm and blues records, and if you wanted to buy a cool hat or some Johnny Walker shoes or some split toes, that's where you went."

People who lived there remember it as a neighborhood where the social fabric was knit tight, where folks didn't much lock their doors.

But driving 8.9 miles of asphalt and concrete through homes and businesses also forced the issue of integration, with the result that some black people gained a foothold in neighborhoods where they hadn't been allowed to live previously, a chance to own newer houses near better schools.

There are people from the old neighborhood who point to this now relatively integrated city and say the trade-off was worth it.

There are others, mostly the ones whose houses were cleared, who still bristle at the injustice of having to make that sort of trade.

Divided city

In the boxes of real estate records kept in the basement of the Capital Area District Library's downtown branch, there are reminders of the divided city that Lansing was.

Take for example the property report, a yellowed slip of paper about the size of an index card, recording the 1944 sale of the house at 710 S. Logan St.

Penciled across it - there was no designated space for this sort of information - are the words: "Sold to colored people. No other colored people in block."

Soon there would be. The 1940 U.S. Census records 1,638 black people in the city of Lansing. By 1960, there were 6,745.

"I came here as a college graduate working at the highway department, and I couldn't rent an apartment," said Cullen Dubose, 72, who today is the president of Painia Development, a company that builds multifamily housing.

"Every place I went to rent was either below the standards I grew up with in Mississippi or they simply just told me it was gone."

Dubose stayed at the YMCA for his first seven months in Lansing.

Most of the people who arrived in that 20-year span were funneled toward the west side, into a corridor that ran roughly from Townsend Street west to the city limits, a few blocks north and south of the highway's present route.

But the neighborhood didn't expand with the population. It got denser. Families created efficiency apartments on upper floors. Landlords and tenants subdivided houses to accommodate more people. Not in all cases, but in enough.

As Bruce Brown, who conducted a survey in 1965 of families who would be displaced by the highway, remarked in a subsequent master's thesis, "This situation hasn't resulted from a natural inclination on the part of these families to live like sardines."

Whites-only covenants, discriminatory mortgage practices, Realtors who steered blacks only to certain neighborhoods pushed the vast majority of blacks into three census tracts.

"You had to hit them over the head to get them to show you any other place, much less sell you a place," said Clinton Canady Jr., 87, the city's first black dentist.

He and his wife, Hortense, managed to buy a lot off Waverly Road in 1957, but only, he believes, because the former owner's development plans had been stymied by Lansing Township, "so he said 'I'll fix you. I'll put the blacks in there.' "

"We knew what he was doing."

Blight is 'subjective'

When the announcement came in 1963 that the neighborhood stood in the highway's path, it didn't come as a surprise.

"For many city planners and highway planners who wanted to eradicate what they called 'blight,' highways provided them with a tool," said Sugrue, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Blight," he added, "is a very subjective term. The very presence of African Americans and businesses that catered to them, regardless of the economic status, was to many planners a sign that the neighborhood was blighted."

Ralph Riddle, 81, is a lifelong resident of the city who spent the latter half of the 1960s watching the highway's giant ditch grow across the street from his home.

"Urban renewal was black folks removal," he said.

And just where they would be removed to was an issue from the start.

"We want to see them relocated into an integrated community. There will never be a better chance than this in Lansing for years to come," said Stuart Dunnings Jr., an attorney who fought many of the city's civil rights battles, at a City Council meeting in June 1964.

But not everyone wanted to grab that brass ring.

At the same meeting, a representative from the Chamber of Commerce read a statement denying that relocation was a racial problem, noting that the project would destroy more houses owned by whites. The whites, of course, could move where their money would take them.

Most of the city's leaders, "didn't care, and they didn't want it (integration) to occur," said Dubose, at the time the head of the NAACP's housing committee. "They felt you should be happy with what you had and where you were, and you would be told that."

Black leaders "raised the devil," said Joel Ferguson, who at the time was a playground director at Main Street School, but would be elected as Lansing's first black city councilman in 1967. "But the mass of people ... there was not a feeling of empowerment."

The fights over housing would drag on for years. In the meantime, people's homes were being bought and razed. Some fought it as best they could.

"Wasn't any of the home-owners in that area satisfied with what they got," said Albert Kelley, 86. "We had lawyers. We was meeting with them. Wasn't nothing we could do."

He bought the house at 1605 W. St. Joseph St. in 1960 for $18,000. The highway department gave him $14,000 five years later, he said.

"It was a nice house, well-structured house," he said.

Kelley would never buy another.

The sense of being done wrong was only exacerbated by the fact that people in another section of the city, whose homes were being bought by Oldsmobile, were getting comparatively princely sums.

Riddle bought his house on Main Street for $8,000 in 1962 and sold it to Oldsmobile in 1969 for $33,000.

Bill Lett didn't get anything at all.

He'd worked his way up from selling diapers and ladies' stockings door-to-door to opening a clothing shop. Lett's Fashions was at 627 W. St. Joseph. He'd been there a decade when the highway came, but he didn't own the building.

"It was really, really tough," said Lett, who now owns Lett's Bridal & Formal Wear, "and it just made you work that much harder for less. You worked 20 hours a day, and you ate beans at night and prayed that you lived to the next day."

As for other black-owned businesses in the neighborhood, "After the highway, just about all the people never reopened up," Lett said.

A 'blessing' for some

On the wall of the Canadys' home, there is a Norman Rockwell print, two black girls standing in a driveway with a moving truck beside them, exchanging curious looks with a group of white children.

Clinton Canady calls the highway "a blessing."

"It allowed us and a bunch of other blacks to be able to move away from there," he said. "It took out a whole lot of the place where we lived, but we were able to get other places that were better."

Hortense Canady, who was the first black person elected to the Lansing Board of Education and fought the battles of integration, agreed.

"We're here," she said simply, "and our children are better. They have better houses."

Still hurting

But the old neighborhood is not so long gone for some.

Johnson still tears up when he talks about it. He said he can't drive down Main Street "without thinking about my home, my life, my neighborhood. I guess being raised on the west side was very much who I am."

Standing in what used to be his front yard, the hum of traffic drifting up from highway below, Kelley said he'd rather leave it all in the past.

"I never thought about coming back to look at it," he said, "because you wasn't satisfied with the way you were taken out, and so it was a place you just didn't want to be thinking about."

Contact Matthew Miller at (517)-377-1046 or at mrmiller@lsj.com.