Floyd McCree and the Open Housing Fight

In nineteen sixty-six, the Flint City Commission selected Floyd McCree as mayor. McCree was a Black man who had worked as a foreman at Buick and served on the commission since nineteen fifty-eight. His selection made him one of the first African American mayors of any major American city.

McCree used the position as a lever. His central fight was for open housing. At the time, Flint's neighborhoods were rigidly segregated by custom, by contract, by the invisible architecture of redlining and developer agreements that simply refused to sell homes in most of the city to Black buyers.

McCree pushed for an open housing ordinance that would ban housing discrimination outright. The City Commission refused to adopt it. McCree responded with a threat that very few elected officials in American history have made: he told his colleagues he would resign as mayor unless the ordinance was passed.

The political pressure was extraordinary. Eventually, the ordinance went to a public referendum, a charged and contested vote in a city where the question of who could live where had been the fault line of every neighborhood fight for a generation. The ordinance passed.

Flint became the first city in Michigan to ban housing discrimination. The records on how thoroughly the law was enforced in its early years are mixed. The records do show that the structural damage of decades of redlining did not reverse quickly even when formal discrimination was banned. But McCree's willingness to stake his office on the principle put Flint ahead of the federal Fair Housing Act, which came two years later in nineteen sixty-eight.

He was honored in twenty twenty-two with a statue unveiled near city hall. The records of exactly how the open housing policy played out block by block in the years after passage go quiet in most archives. But the legal precedent McCree forced into place was real, and it mattered.