Being brown in a city of black and white

Racial fault lines
Discontent was on the rise in the city in the 1960s and a racial shift was well under way. As whites moved to the suburbs, many of the blacks who remained in the city were poor and overcrowded. The housing shortage was made worse by urban renewal projects. Huge sections of Paradise Valley and the adjacent Black Bottom were bulldozed to make way for Interstate 75, putting a real and symbolic hole in the heart of the black community. Amid growing police brutality and harassment of black residents, black militancy simmered, making it all but certain that there would be violence.

In 1967, when Hutcherson was 14, Detroit erupted into full-scale rioting. The catalyst was a police raid on a “blind pig” — an after-hours drinking party in a densely populated black neighborhood. The vice squad evidently expected to pick up a few people, but found dozens of black patrons inside the club at a party for some returning Vietnam veterans. As a major roundup ensued, an impromptu protest developed, followed by vandalism that quickly spread through the city.

Hutcherson watched in horror as the National Guard tanks rolled through her neighborhood. Initially, the effort to control the chaos sparked more violence. At the end of five days of rioting, 43 people had been killed, nearly 1,200 injured and more than 7,000 arrested.

“It was scary. I didn’t really understand it, because I never felt deprived, so I didn’t have that desperation of a lot of blacks,” she said. “I could see the despair, the oppression. But that wasn’t me. It wasn’t who I was or my life.”

INTERACTIVE Snapshot of the melting pot See how racial and ethnic groups are dispersed throughout the United States.

The upheaval accelerated the hollowing out of Detroit. People who could afford it moved to the suburbs or out of the area altogether, deepening the despair and poverty in the city. By 2000, more than 80 percent of the city’s total population was African-American, compared to about 40 percent in 1967, and one in four households was below the poverty line. Analysis of 2000 Census data also indicated that it was one of the five most segregated cities in the nation by several measures.

After graduating from high school, Hutcherson’s journey paralleled the downward trajectory of the city. She lost touch with her better off, better educated friends —white and black. Her first marriage was a disaster. Although it resulted in the birth of her first son, it also led her into an addiction to heroin that derailed her for most of a decade. She had a second son in another disastrous relationship — to a man who was both abusive and a drug user.

It was not until the 1980s that she was able to shake her addiction, remarry and pull her family together.  She had 20 happy years with her second husband, James, whom she credits for saving her life and stepping in to help raise her two sons.  She completed most of an English degree at Wayne State University.

In search of identity
When James suddenly died of a stroke in 2004, Hutcherson was left alone in their tidy brick house in a quiet section of Detroit. Because of a back problem and diabetes, she retired from her job at the courthouse and lives off a small disability income. Nelva and Leroy Pope died years ago, and her sons are grown and not often around. Even her sister Cheryl and her husband moved to the suburbs a few years back.

There have been some efforts to reconstruct and revive Detroit’s downtown, Hutcherson said, but the sense of community is just not there. Where her family’s home once stood on Farnsworth Avenue there is a vast asphalt parking lot for the African History Museum. Vacant retail space, empty lots and boarded up homes add to the sense of displacement.

Kari Huus / msnbc.com Linda Hutcherson and her sister, Cheryl Williams, discuss details of their childhood in Detroit outside Williams' suburban home.

There also have been efforts to start public discussions on race, she said, but so far she sees her hometown lagging. From her vantage point, Barack Obama’s momentum in the presidential race has been nothing short of stunning.

“I was shocked when he won those states that were mostly white states,” she said. ”I thought — wow! I thought 90 percent of white folks hate blacks. So he opened my eyes.”

But if the world is changing, Hutcherson sees little progress around her. Her neighborhood — on the other side of the Interstate from where she grew up — is nearly all black, she said, except for a few very elderly people. Her church congregation is black, and she rarely goes anywhere that she would meet non-African Americans.

She said she struggles to feel at ease with her black friends, who tease her for “dancing white,” and “talking white” and for having a “white butt.”

“Even the people that call themselves my friends, they tease me, and deep down it hurts," Hutcherson said. "But I don’t let them know. I just laugh with them.”

Embrace of race
It’s lonely, she concedes, but Hutcherson has a new passion. The little girl who was once entirely oblivious to skin color is now almost obsessed with exploring her roots—a complex racial and cultural stew.

“Race has colored my life from the minute I was born,” she said, beginning with the reason she was given up for adoption, and likely the reason she was adopted by a mixed-race couple.

“Mother’s business itself was based on race,” she said. The prostitutes were all white, and they catered specifically to black men, many of whom had moved from the South.  “It was a winning combination. The experience these men had was that if you just wink at a white woman you’d be lynched. So here, it was like they were in heaven.”

INTERACTIVE History: Race in the U.S.A. A look at the pivotal points in race relations from colonial times to the present

Now Hutcherson devours slave diaries, as well as books on Judaism, and dreams of traveling to Israel. Although she is a practicing Christian, she recently joined Jews for Jesus as a way of trying to connect with her Jewish heritage.

Spending long hours on the Internet, she has been able to find and communicate with white relatives on her biological mother’s side, foiling her birth mother’s best efforts to prevent her existence from being known.  She recently contacted a cousin on her biological father’s side by phone — a stockbroker — who was able to tell her a bit about the origins of her father’s family among sharecroppers in Mississippi.

She has long phone conversations with her half-brothers, and compares notes with Cheryl.

But unlike her sister, who views herself as African American, Hutcherson proudly embraces her biracial identity. She has been writing an autobiography in fits and starts — a little uncertain where to begin. But she knows there is plenty of material there.

“It’s funny,” she reflected. “Well, not really funny, but interesting — to have roots in the two most persecuted groups on Earth — blacks and Jews.”

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