A Home for the Dicksons
It’s been more than 60 years since David W.D. Dickson, Michigan State College’s first Black faculty member, and his wife Vera lived in East Lansing. The couple resided in the city in a time when racist policies and housing covenants kept Black residents from owning a home in East Lansing.
Originally from Maine, Dickson had earned advanced degrees from Harvard University before being hired by MSC’s Department of English as an assistant professor in 1948.
Dickson recounted his life in Memoirs of an Isolate, including many recollections from his time at MSC and in East Lansing.
“Fifteen years at Michigan State emboldened me as a ‘first and only’ Negro in a new environment which greeted one warmly,” he wrote, “applauded my teaching and made me in 1953 the first recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award.”
In 1951, Dickson met Vera Mae Allen, “a tiny young lady of beauty and sweetness.” They married five months later and delayed starting a family until she finished her teaching degree in social science.
The couple first lived in married housing on campus before moving into the Episcopal College Center, a church (predecessor to today’s All Saints Episcopal Church) and dormitory for 10 undergraduate men. But after Vera received her degree, the couple wanted to start their family.
As the Dicksons tried to put down roots, they were met with resistance from white East Lansing residents.
“East Lansing was by no means ready for a Negro homeowner,” Dickson wrote in his memoir. “Even some of my liberal departmental colleagues urged me not to buy a home in their neighborhood and, therefore, depreciate their only considerable capital investment. Several of my fellow Episcopalians urged the rector not to support my effort and thus to frustrate the drive for funds to build an appropriate church for a new, independent parish.”
It wasn’t only racist attitudes about Black home ownership and panic about home value that made it near impossible for the family to purchase a home. Many homes in the community had restrictive covenants in their deeds, forbidding sale to non-white buyers.
ELi spoke with Dr. Robert L. Green, a colleague of Dickson’s at MSC and a civil rights hero known for leading the battle against East Lansing’s racist housing policies.
“Dave and Vera Dickson were good people,” Green said, “but in those days, it didn’t matter how good or nice you were, if you were the wrong color, you were not welcome in many sections of East Lansing. East Lansing was a very segregated place.
“Students at Michigan State, both white and Black, were very supportive of myself and Dave Dickson in finding a home. Not faculty…students. I always felt good about that.”
Green said he and the Dicksons weren’t especially close, but they were good enough of friends for Green to kid Dave about his wife.
“Vera was very fair-skinned,” he said. “If you saw Vera walking down the street, you’d think she’s a white lady. We used to kid Dave and say, ‘Dave, you can get anything you want because your wife looks white.’ And he would be a little embarrassed and drop his head, but they were good people.”
The Dicksons attempted to find a home they could purchase. David wrote about a home in Okemos in which they showed interest, but the homeowner, a barber at the university, declined to sell because he feared backlash from his neighbors.
It wasn’t until John Hannah, president of Michigan State College, got involved that the couple were able to purchase a home.
Isabelle Gonon was Dean of Women at MSC and had taken a new job in Virginia. Hannah convinced Gonon to sell her home at 224 Elizabeth Street.
“Despite the opposition of some neighbors,” Dickson wrote, “we completed the sale and moved into her home only a few months before the arrival of our baby boy…That interracial crisis was over.”
The private purchase enabled the Dicksons to start their family in East Lansing, just a short walk from campus. But it would be another 15 years before Green would make his landmark home purchase in East Lansing.
Green recalls being urged to give up his fight in East Lansing, and instead purchase a home in Lansing.
“There was another Black faculty member in the English department,” Green said, “who came to me and said, ‘Bob, why are you giving yourself such a headache trying to get a home in East Lansing? Buy a home on the westside [of Lansing].’ Blacks on the westside took very good care of their properties, had very beautiful homes. My position was, ‘Look, I don’t want to live on the westside. I’m going to live where I work. I work in East Lansing, I’m going to live in East Lansing. I’m not going to be isolated to a reserve.’ The westside of Lansing was like a Black reserve; that’s where you’re supposed to live. I’m not going to accept that.”
Later in the 1960s, hundreds of homes in a mostly Black West Lansing neighborhood were destroyed after the properties were seized by the state to allow for the construction of I-496, as is chronicled in the Historical Society of Greater Lansing’s Pave the Way: The I-496 project.
After 15 years at Michigan State, the Dicksons moved on, first to Northern Michigan University and finally to Montclair State University in New Jersey where he served as university president.
Vera passed away in 1979 and David in 2003.