Being brown in a city of black and white

Kari Huus Reporter • Profile • E-mail

DETROIT - In a city that would become famous for segregation, Linda Hutcherson’s early memories of her household in Detroit are of carefree times amid a pastiche of skin colors. She had loving parents — a black father and a white mother. Her own skin was the color of caramel, and her sister, Cheryl, just a shade lighter than wheat. There was a steady stream of black visitors to the house, and a group of resident white women — prostitutes, as Hutcherson would only learn much later.

“It was pure joy,” she said. “We grew up in a house full of blacks and whites. We didn’t realize anything was wrong in the world of color.”

But race tensions were simmering in the city, and their inevitable eruption eventually transformed Detroit into one of the nation’s most polarized urban areas. For Hutcherson, the change has been depressing and disorienting. The neighborhood of her childhood long ago fell to the bulldozers of urban renewal. And now, at 55, the Detroit native feels alienated in her black neighborhood, and cut off from the city’s white population.

“I can remember how the city got blacker and blacker," she said. "Areas that used to have white people eventually became all black. Now the whites that do come in shoot down the freeway from the suburbs, straight downtown to (their) offices and never have to deal with blacks.”

When Gut Check issued a call for readers to share their views on the state of race relations in the U.S., Hutcherson was among the first to respond.

“I believe that the issue of race has been at a standstill for decades,” she wrote, adding that “overall there is a mutual distrust and misunderstanding continues between the races that keeps us from becoming a truly United States of America.”

High times in motor city
In the 1950s, Detroit was a great manufacturing city and a destination for black workers migrating from the South to work in its booming automobile factories. Hutcherson’s family lived at the heart of Paradise Valley — a community bursting with black-owned businesses, theaters, nightclubs and churches.

Hutcherson’s father, Leroy Pope, had ridden the city’s fortunes, parlaying his early shoe shining profits into a multi-million-dollar business operating vending machines. Her mother, Nelva, had come from a poor farm family in the South to become legendary in the city — both as a successful madam and as generous benefactor to schools, churches and other causes.  As a young woman she had lied and claimed she was “mulatto” in order to marry Leroy at a time when white-black marriages were prohibited.

Multimedia Shades of experience Six multiracial families from around the country discuss their challenges, triumphs.

Linda and Cheryl led privileged lives, attending private schools, studying piano at the music conservatory, and generally were pampered by their adoptive parents. They had each other as companions as they raced around town, playing in the history museum, eating ice cream at the Woolworth’s and attending performances at the Fox Theatre and Orchestra Hall. Every evening, Hutcherson recalls, the family sat down together for dinner.

At the height of her family’s prosperity, the Popes owned a six-story apartment building on Farnsworth Avenue. The family lived in one large apartment and rented others to other families. The basement apartment was where the prostitutes turned tricks.

When Hutcherson and her sister were out playing, they were instructed to bang on the window if they saw a police car in the area and shout: “Momma, the insurance man is coming!”

Hutcherson was fascinated by “the girls” and sought out their company. The women always wore prim housecoats and sipped cold drinks in the parlor between private sessions with their "guests," who were always black men. In their free time, the young women doted on her and complimented her on her golden skin.

“Growing up around them was pure joy," Hutcherson said. "To this day I’m more comfortable with white women than with black women. Oddly enough, I think it raised my self-image.”

Harsh lessons
But outside their home, it was hard to fit in. A lot of the early abuse was aimed at Cheryl, who skin was so fair that many of the black kids thought she was white. Even the old black women heckled her, assuming she was the daughter of one of the white prostitutes.

“‘Hey trick baby, go back where you belong,’” Hutcherson remembers them shouting.

“I was always just trying to defend my sister,” she said, even though she was younger by four years. “It just made my heart ache… because of her color (Cheryl) caught it worse than me in the neighborhood.”

Pope family photo Linda, right, and sister Cheryl pose for a photo with Leroy Pope circa 1956.

Their most alarming confrontation came in 1959, when Leroy Pope took the girls for a Sunday drive in his big beige Ford. They were headed to Belle Isle, a popular picnic destination when a group of young white men pulled up behind them in a car, with the horn blaring. They were nudging Pope’s car with their own, threatening to run him off the road, and shouting obscenities.

“Hey nigger,” Hutcherson remembers them yelling at her father as they pulled alongside. “What are you doing with that white girl?” They were referring to Cheryl, then 10 years old.

“It was that moment that jarred my sense of security, my utopian world that I lived in,” she said. “That was my awakening to racism.”

Rattled by the incident, Pope turned the car around and returned home, but the conversation that followed was almost as unsettling.

“Mama blamed me,” Cheryl remembers.  “She said ‘When you saw them come up alongside, you should have ducked down so they wouldn’t see you…. You almost got your daddy killed because of you. You know how these people are!”

The two girls attended private schools to avoid being harassed by black students in the public school, Hutcherson said.

Longing to look different
Her sister longed to have darker skin, and Hutcherson said she remembers her squashing her nose down with her finger to encourage it to look more “black.” Cheryl’s one reassurance was that she knew her biological mother who lived in Detroit — and she was black.

Hutcherson also got to know her birth mother, who also lived in Detroit, but there was nothing reassuring about it.

Her mother, Jean, was a white woman from an Orthodox Jewish family in Cleveland. She came to Detroit with her white husband. After he was thrown in jail for attempted robbery, she was planning to return to her wealthy family with her two young sons. The problem was that she was pregnant again, and couldn’t return to Cleveland with this child — not least because the baby’s father was black. Through contacts, she arranged to give up the baby to Nelva Pope, who could not have children of her own.

Jean eventually returned to Detroit, and to Hutcherson’s father — with whom she had two more children. Hutcherson stayed with the Popes, but got to know her birth mother as a volatile, angry and openly racist woman.

“To Jean,” Hutcherson said, “we children were ‘niggers.’”

Jean also made no secret that she was ashamed of her black husband, and would order him out of sight when a white person came to the door.

“She had a horrible mouth,” Hutcherson recalled. “The things she would say, and the disdain she had of living in that situation.”

MORE FROM GUT CHECK AMERICA

Gut Check America Section Front

Minn. economy buffeted by crosscurrents Still in a home, by the skin of her teeth Is it really just 'the economy, stupid?' FirstPerson: Minnesota readers discuss economy High energy costs cut two ways in Colorado Struggling at a million-dollar horse stable FirstPerson: Colorado readers discuss economy How are you faring in Colorado, Minnesota? Gut Check America Section Front   Add Gut Check America headlines to your news reader: