Conant Gardens

Conant Gardens is a neighborhood in northeast Detroit, Michigan. Historically, the neighborhood was the most prosperous black neighborhood in that city, and of the black neighborhoods, residents of Conant Gardens were the most highly educated.

In the early 1940s the community protested against the construction of the Sojourner Truth Housing project, a federally funded public housing project. The residents of Conant Gardens allied with nearby white homeowners associations; Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, characterizes the alliance as "unlikely" In 1966 the Krainz Woods Neighborhood Organization, a mostly white organization, posted, in an African-American newspaper, an advertisement asking for Conant Gardens residents to go to a meeting at an area church to protest a proposed scattered-site housing and open occupancy. The Whites in Krainz Woods wanted to recruit middle class blacks in Conant Gardens to oppose public housing.

In 2001 the Conant Gardeners Club was writing a book about the neighborhood.

Conant Gardens is in northeast Detroit, Michigan located just west of Detroit's Krainz Woods neighborhood. It is located between Conant Street and the City of Highland Park, north of the City of Hamtramck. Seven Mile Road served as the boundary between Conant Gardens and a White working class area. The neighborhood boundaries are Conant Street, East Seven Mile, Ryan Road, and East Nevada Street. It is located almost 8 miles (13 km) from Paradise Valley. Due to its close proximity to Krainz Woods the neighboring community is often mistaken for Conant Gardens.Pershing High School is located in Conant Gardens, in proximity to the residential area.

Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, said that in its heyday Conant Gardens was "more suburban than urban, surrounded by open fields and remote from the city's business and industrial districts." The neighborhood had single family detached houses, many of which had large lawns. The streets were lined with trees. Sugrue said that the houses were modern, the lawns were "well-manicured" and the streets were "quiet".

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