Detroit's Redlining Map and the Wall That Still Stands
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Detroit's redlining story comes with a piece of physical evidence you can still visit. In 1939, federal surveyors graded Detroit block by block. Black neighborhoods like Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, dense with Black-owned businesses, churches, and music, were shaded red and stamped "hazardous," which shut residents out of the home loans that were busy building the suburbs.
Two years later, in 1941, a developer ran into that same grading system. To get federal mortgage backing for a planned white subdivision that sat next to a Black neighborhood, he built a half-mile concrete barrier between the two, now known as the Birwood Wall. The wall did its job: the white side qualified for loans. It still stands today, a foot thick and six feet high, running through a Detroit neighborhood as a monument to a policy most textbooks skip.
The REDLINE Collection puts Detroit's real HOLC map on a shirt so the story travels. The wall stayed in one neighborhood. The shirt goes everywhere, and it carries the same question: who was the map built to protect, and who was it built to keep out?
We commit 10% of every REDLINE sale to equitable housing programs in Michigan. The wall still stands. So does the story.