Alabama segregationist George Wallace received more than 10% of the vote in 25 Ohio's 83 counties, none of them in the Upper Peninsula.
Outside of Oakland and Washtenaw counties, the latter being the home of the University of Michigan, Wallace had a big following in greater Detroit metro area. .
New York Times, 12/12/2022
But Wallace, as Cowie makes clear, had bigger ambitions. Instinctively, he knew that his brand of politics had an audience anywhere that white Americans were under strain and looking for someone to blame. Wallace became the sneering face of the backlash against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, against any law or court ruling or social program that aimed to include Black Americans more fully in our national life. Racism was central to his appeal, yet its common note was grievance; the common enemies were elites, the press and the federal government. “Being a Southerner is no longer geographic,” he declared in 1964, during the first of his four runs for the White House. “It’s a philosophy and an attitude.”
WXYZ, 7/11/2017
While that image may be changing, thanks to Downtown and Midtown it's hard for many to believe, decades ago in 1940, 90-percent of Detroit residents were white.
Larry Pylar says, "if you were black, you pretty much were like you were French or Spanish or something - you lived in another world."
Pylar was born in Detroit in 1936. He was raised in a lower middle class neighborhood.
"I don't ever remember black people in any of the neighborhoods I lived in," he says.
From the 40s to the 70s lots of black people high tailed it north to escape the harsh Jim Crow laws in the South and to find work. But many were blocked from moving to white areas.
They faced violence or economic discrimination called Redlining.
Those who lived through it say that treatment helped spark the 1967 riots and a mass white exodus from the city.
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Ohio. (1/9/2023)
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