HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — Leslie Knox was a young girl in the 1960s when her Detroit-area city was accused of destroying neighborhoods to get rid of Black residents.
Decades later, the retired nurse has returned to Hamtramck, settling into a new two-story home on Gallagher Street and watching TV from a fold-up chair while she figures out how she wants to furnish it. She has no mortgage to pay, just property taxes and insurance.
Knox is one of the last people to benefit from an extraordinary legal settlement that requires the small city to build 200 homes for the victims of discrimination or their families. A lawsuit filed in 1968 became one of the longest-running civil rights cases over housing in the United States.
And it’s finally over.
“I feel like I’ve been given this house by divine intervention because no man in their right mind would just hand the keys to houses,” said Knox, 70, who placed two Black angel figurines on a kitchen window. “I believe God put me here.”
Amer Ghalib, a native of Yemen and Hamtramck’s mayor, said a “dark chapter” in the city’s history is now closed.
“This is not going to happen again,” said Ghalib, who was elected in 2021. “We are a very diverse community.”
‘We just want you gone’
In the early 1900s, Hamtramck’s blue-collar jobs attracted immigrants from Eastern Europe, especially Poland. The association was so deep that Catholic Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland visited the city in 1969 and returned in 1987 — as Pope John Paul II. A statue of him stands high above a public plaza.
Yet while white people felt welcomed, many Black residents said their civil rights were violated. In 1971, after a trial, U.S. District Judge Damon Keith ruled that the city had intentionally targeted certain Black neighborhoods by demolishing low-income housing.
“It was an attempt to eliminate a Black population,” said Michael Barnhart, a lawyer for the victims. “It wasn’t, ‘We want this land for something and therefore you’re in the way.’ ‘We just want you gone’ — that was the motivation, to get rid of people.”
Hamtramck spent years appealing before agreeing in 1981 to a remedy: It would build apartments for seniors as well as 200 scattered housing units for families. People with certain income levels and a connection to the class-action lawsuit would get priority.
The finish line was generations away
So why did the promise take until 2024 — more than 40 years — to fulfill?
“The city didn’t have the money,” said James Allen, an attorney who represented Hamtramck during the last stages of the litigation.
Indeed, city government twice was placed under state oversight, starting in 2000, due to financial problems. There still were dozens of homes left to build or rehab in 2010 when the judge and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm held a festive ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new address on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“Most if not all of the construction funding was through federal and state grants,” Allen explained. “If the city had been left to its own devices, they never would have been able to do it. They just didn’t have the resources.”
The total cost to build the last three houses was approximately $1 million, he said.
Throughout much of its history, Hamtramck rose and fell with the auto industry. More than 30,000 people worked at a local Chrysler factory, known as Dodge Main, in the 1950s. By 1980, the year the factory closed, the workforce was just a fraction of that number, and the population had plummeted. Polish Americans were slowly moving out, and Hamtramck became a gateway for new arrivals from Yemen, Bangladesh, Bosnia and elsewhere.
Still a gritty, dense community of just 2 square miles, Hamtramck remains defined by two-story flats with small yards and narrow paths between homes. Today, General Motors makes electric vehicles at a plant that straddles Hamtramck and Detroit, and the population has rebounded to 27,000, 20% higher than in 2010 and holding steady, though nowhere near the peaks of the early 20th century when it was double.
Median household income was $40,000 in 2023 compared to $71,000 statewide, the Census Bureau said.
A remarkable cultural change
Now, the mayor and city council members are all Muslim. A stretch of Holbrook Street was formally renamed Palestine Avenue during the Israel-Hamas war. Amar Pizza, influenced by Bangladeshi tastes, was named one of the best pizzerias in America last year by The New York Times.
St. Ladislaus Catholic Church, where a future pope had visited, is closed and for sale, while calls to Muslim daily prayer are amplified.
“Sometimes they’ll wake me up at 6 a.m. because it’s on a loudspeaker,” Knox said. “I’m Christian so when they pray in Yemeni I pray in my spiritual language.”
She couldn’t recall exactly what drove her Black family out of Hamtramck when she was a child. Knox said she applied to join the lawsuit settlement and was selected for one of the last three houses, moving from nearby Detroit in November.
