Photo courtesy of bridgemi.com White residents of one northern Detroit neighborhood were not happy when a federal public housing development for blacks was announced in the early 1940s, during World War II.

Editor’s note: This story is the sixth in a series looking at racial disparity in Michigan.

In the 1980s, the American political scene was mostly dominated by President Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a former California governor, and a movie star before that. Reagan had movie star charm and a powerful “America can get it done” kind of attitude.

He was a strong Cold Warrior, notorious for his Brandenburg Gate speech where he said the infamous words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The Cold War escalated as Reagan went on a spending spree to outmuscle the Soviets, and Reagan’s second election campaign boasted that it was “morning in America,” and that America’s economy and social structure were on a massive uptick. But what did the 1980s look like for Michiganders of color?

American presidential historian Gil Troy shed light on the national outlook for African Americans in “Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan invented the 1980s” During the 1980s, one of the most popular TV shows in syndication was “the Cosby Show” starring Bill Cosby as Dr. Huxtable, the head of an educated, affluent African American family. The New York Times critic John J. O’Connor called the Cosbys “the most popular family in the United States.” Though not everyone of color was a Huxtable, African American success figures were on a rise.

“Blacks were entering the American middle class and joining important institutions,” said Troy. “From 1970 to 1988 the percentage of black youths aged 18 to 24 going to college jumped from 16 to 21 percent.”

The National Center for Education Statistics shows that from 1976 to 1990, whites were attending undergraduate programs at higher rates than Blacks; 8,480,661 enrolled whites compared to 1,018,840 blacks in 1980. An almost 8:1 ratio.

Troy also showed that the black high school dropout rate fell from 31 to 18%. More and more men and women of color were going into the military in the 80s, “with 20% of the overall force, 30% in the army, and 10% of the officer corps being black.”

This is a massive shift as compared to African American numbers in the Civil War, when blacks were not allowed the opportunity to be officers at all.

Black life expectancy rose by 5.6 years in the 80s, but was still only 69.7. The infant mortality was still shockingly high, but dropped from 32.6 deaths per thousand to 18 per thousand by 1986. All of these changes were despite the Reagan’s idea of “benign neglect,” which essentially meant focus on the voting majority and let minorities fend for themselves.

In the 1980s, Michigan looked quite different from the cozy, massive house of the Huxtables. The Center for Urban Studies’ “African Americans in the United States, Michigan and Metropolitan Detroit” laid out the living demographic of black Michiganders. As of 2000, the Census found Michigan to have a black population of 1.4 million, which is only 14.1 percent of the state’s population. Michigan’s metropolitan areas were reported to house 82% of Michigan’s population, and 98% of Michigan’s colored population. The Detroit Metropolitan Area holds 72% of the metropolitan black population.

Bridge Michigan helped explain what was going on, and what these metro areas looked like and why. After the 1967 riots, President Lyndon Johnson ordered a report to look into the causation of riots that had preceded Detroit’s the answer came up as racial provocation, explained by the Kerner Commission. The Kerner Commission exposed “the sad state of segregation in America’s central cities and the housing woes endured by African Americans and the urban poor.”

Detroit was one of the strongest examples. Earlier federal housing policies and local practices had segregated Detroit into nearly all-black neighborhoods. Separating blacks from whites, separating their incomes, caused serious funding problems and stripped blacks of their ability to enroll in better schools in white neighborhoods or seize the better job opportunities in white parts of the city.

The Kerner Commission submitted recommended policy changes to help the situation, including making affordable housing available across metro regions, improving the quality of housing, making it easier to own a home, and create policies that remove living segregation to allow blacks to live in areas with better schools and higher-paying job opportunities.

Michigan Bridge stated that, “Nearly 50 years later, experts say not much has changed in metro Detroit, even as many black Detroiters have spread into communities across the region. The Detroit metro area remains by some measures the most segregated in the nation and housing advocates say many communities remain unfriendly to people of color.”

Passing laws is one thing, but having them honestly acted upon is another.

Housing industry experts say that while there were segregation eases between 2000 and 2010, “it hardly feels like progress to those who monitor the housing industry.” Though struck from laws, segregation in Michigan is still alive. The Executive Director of the Fair Housing Center of Metropolitan Detroit says the number one complaint from “would-be tenants and homebuyers” is racial discrimination, with hundreds of complaints each ear.

While the 1980s may have been “Morning in America” for Reagan voters, segregation continued in America and particularly in Detroit, and as Bridge Michigan reported, “Segregated communities extract a disproportionate cost on people of color by limiting access to employment, to transportation that will get them to jobs, to clean water and air and to education, while making it far more difficult for African Americans to accumulate wealth.”