Michigan State Historic Preservation Office Staff Comments, July 28, 2020 Higginbotham School Local Historic District, Detroit This resource would also be significant under the areas of Education and Ethnic Heritage: Black as identified by the National Park Service. “Civil Rights” is not a recognized National Register category. It should be Social History, with a qualifier such as Civil Rights. The significance statement should more clearly state that Higginbotham School served as Detroit’s all Black elementary school for 30 years. This was a result of both de facto segregation commonly practiced in the city and of the de jure segregation that resulted from federal housing policies such as “redlining” that denied African Americans access to Federal Housing Administration (FHA) home mortgage funding and the locally supported racial neighborhood covenants that limited where Blacks could live within the city of Detroit. The term “segregationist policies” used in the report is too vague and should be expanded upon. Under Period of significance, the federal policies referred to should be identified and their influence explained. A short history that identifies other predominately black schools in Detroit like Lincoln Elementary and Miller High School should be included to provide the larger context for this school. Page 4, paragraph 2. A key part of the neighborhood’s history is that the land was purchased by Henry G. Stevens, the first president of the newly formed Detroit Urban League(DUL) who sold the land to black owners on land contract. Stevens may have been White, he was associated with the Associated Charities, a group that financially assisted the founding of the Detroit Chapter of the Urban League in 1916. See footnote 16, page 20 at this link https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5183/d5a75c47e0ce87bdafd51f4610140944ba10.pdf Also see page 28, paragraph 2 in Detroit’s Birwood Wall by Gerald Van Dusen. Page 4, paragraph 3 is a little unclear. The timeline in this paragraph is confusing. Black students began attending Birdhurst School in 1920 but it wasn’t until 3 years later, when the school was annexed by the city of Detroit that White parents protested the integration? This paragraph also states that Eight Mile-Wyoming was annexed in 1925. The paragraph above says the “area” was annexed in 1923. Is that referring to Greenfield Township or the Eight Mile-Wyoming neighborhood? Please make the language more concise. Is there more information available about the attempt to build an integrated school south of Pembroke and why it failed? Protests by White parents? Page 5, paragraph 1, was there no controversy around sending Black eighth graders from Higginbotham School to Post Intermediate school, which was predominately White? If there was conflict about an integrated school being built south of Pembroke, there would be probably be controversy and protests about this action. Page 5, paragraph 2, the last three sentences seem to be written from what today is referred to as a “White privilege” viewpoint. Children who are Black or that come from poverty can attain good test scores, have good attendance records, and win spelling bees. We need to be mindful about using this type of broad, sweeping language. Page 5, paragraph 3. There was a second influx of African Americans into Detroit during the 1940s to work in the defense plants. Some statistics on the city’s increasing Black population during this period should be included. The last line of this paragraph is significant. Steering Black students into a General or Vocational track over a College Prep track became a highly controversial practice in the 1950s. Is there more that can be added about the vocational curriculum? Educational historian Jeffrey Mirel indicated the Vocational track was established during the Depression to help the children of the rural populations migrating from the South find jobs after graduation. Was it employed for all students during the World War II era, both Black and White? After World War II it was used primarily to discriminate and limit the opportunities available to Black students, according to accounts by Detroit’s Black residents and historians like Mirel. Page 5, paragraph 4 misses what might be the most important part of the Eight Mile-Wyoming neighborhood’s narrative, that the neighborhood civic associations negotiated with Michigan’s FHA coordinator Raymond Foley and reached a compromise. The federal government would build temporary veteran’s housing in a small portion of the area, but Black property owners were granted the ability to apply for FHA home mortgage loans to construct single family residences on the remaining land. This was very rare for that period and a real victory for the Black community. A summary is provided on page 57 of Gerald Van Dusen’s Detroit’s Birwood Wall. Page 6, paragraph 2 seems out of place and better suited for inclusion in the description. A general observation on the Bibliography and what we will be looking for in the future. 20th century resources require more in-depth primary source research as there are few secondary sources currently available on topics from that period. When researching African American related properties, it is especially important to include African American-based primary sources. For example, newspapers such as the Michigan Chronicle, The NAACP’s The Crisis (available on- line), oral histories, or archival collections such as that of the Detroit Urban League. We understand that sources like the Detroit Free Press are easily accessed on-line (and the limitations imposed by COVID), and they are an excellent starting point, but their interpretation of events could sometimes be one-sided. Stronger efforts to consult primary sources that tell the story of Detroit as experienced by its Black citizens need to be made to ensure the history being presented is a balanced one. SHPO is adopting the policy of capitalizing the terms Black and White, as the APA Style Guide, the Chicago Manual of Style, and many news outlets have done. City of Detroit CITY COUNCIL HISTORIC DESIGNATION ADVISORY BOARD 218 Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, Detroit, Michigan 48226 Phone: 313.224.3487 Fax: 313.224.4336 Email: [email protected] Proposed Higginbotham School Historic District 8730 Chippewa Street Draft Preliminary Report (Photo dated 2009) By a resolution dated January 14, 2020, the Detroit City Council charged the Historic Designation Advisory Board, a study committee, with the official study of the proposed Higginbotham School Historic District in accordance with Chapter 21 of the 2019 Detroit City Code and the Michigan Local Historic Districts Act. The proposed William E. Higginbotham School Historic District consists of a single contributing building located at 8730 Chippewa Street, approximately nine miles northwest of downtown. It is situated on approximately three and one-fifth acres of land just two blocks south of Eight Mile Road, the city’s northern boundary, in the Eight Mile-Wyoming neighborhood. It is oriented eastward towards Johnson Recreation Center and Joe Louis Playfield, City of Detroit recreation facilities. Higginbotham School was built to house kindergarteners through eight graders by the Detroit Public Schools in 1926-1927 and expanded in 1944 and 1946. It was determined eligible for the National Register of Historic Places under the Public Schools of Detroit Multiple Property Submission in 2011 and included in the 20th Century Civil Rights in Detroit Reconnaissance and Intensive Level Survey, 2019. BOUNDARIES The boundaries of the proposed William E. Higginbotham School Historic District, outlined in heavy black on the attached map and corresponding to the legal description below, are as follows: On the north, the northern line, as extended east and west, of part of lot 274 of the Detroyal Gardens Subdivision, Liber 35, Page 77, Wayne County Records; On the east, part of the eastern line, as extended north and south, of part of the vacated alley east of the vacated Wisconsin Street; On the south; the centerline of Chippewa Street; and On the west, the centerline of Indiana Street. 2 [Legal description: E WISCONSIN ALL 205 THRU 214 275 THRU 284 PART OF 274 215 152 THRU 162 PART OF VAC WISCONSIN AVE VAC ALLEY ADJ DETROYAL GARDENS SUB L35 P77 PLATS, W C R 16/364; ALL DESC AS BEG AT SW COR LOT 284 DETROYAL GARDENS SUB L35 P77 PLATS TH N 00D 00M 24S E 427.78 FT TH N 89D 58M 00S E 324.33 FT TH S 00D 00M 24S W 427.78 FT TH S 89D 58M 00S W 324.33 FT TO POB 138,739 SQFT] Boundary Justification The boundaries described above include the William E. Higginbotham School building and cover the entire parcel associated with the property. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE: William E. Higginbotham School meets National Register Criteria A as locally significant for its community planning and development and civil rights history. The influence of national events and federal policy on community growth and segregationist policies is specifically reflected in the school’s first thirty years. Higginbotham School also meets National Register Criteria C for its architecture; it is one of only a few Mediterranean Revival-style structures built for the Detroit Board of Education. Period of Significance The period of significance, 1926-1955 reflects the construction period of Higginbotham School as well as the years that federal policy influenced enrollment in the school. HISTORY William E. Higginbotham School was built at the northern outskirts of the city of Detroit during a period of enormous growth in area, reaching 139 square miles through annexations completed in 1926, and population, topping 1.5 million residents as recorded in the 1930 census. This growth was the result of industrial expansion propelled by automobile production at the major plants such as the the Packard Plant in 1903, the Dodge Main Plant in 1911, and the Highland Park Ford Plant in 1914, leading to the explosion of the automobile industry with which Detroit became so much identified.