involved. In addition, a system of redlining was instituted, which made it nearly impossible for black Detroiters to purchase a home in most areas of the city, effectively locking black residents into lower-quality neighborhoods. These discriminatory practices and the effects of the segregation that resulted from them contributed significantly to the racial tensions in the city before the riot. Segregation also encouraged harsher policing in African American neighborhoods, which escalated black Detroiters' frustrations leading up to the riot. Patterns of racial and ethnic segregation persisted through the mid-20th century. In 1956, mayor Orville Hubbard of Dearborn, part of Metro Detroit, boasted to the Montgomery Advertiser that "Negroes can't get in here...These people are so anti-colored, much more than you in Alabama."[48] Recent reforms The election of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh in 1961 brought some reform to the police department, led by new Detroit Police Commissioner George Edwards. Detroit had acquired millions in federal funds through President Johnson's Great Society programs and invested them almost exclusively in the inner city, where poverty and social problems were concentrated. By the 1960s, many black people had advanced into better union and professional jobs. The city had a prosperous black middle class; higher-than-normal wages for unskilled black workers due to the success of the auto industry; two black Congressmen (half of the black Congressmen at the time); three black judges; two black members on the Detroit Board of Education; a housing commission that was forty percent black; and twelve black representatives representing Detroit in the Michigan legislature.[49] The city had mature black neighborhoods such as Conant Gardens. In May 1967, the federal administration ranked housing for the black community in Detroit above that of Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and Cleveland. Nicholas Hood, the sole black member of the nine-member Detroit Common Council, praised the Cavanagh administration for its willingness to listen to concerns of the inner city. Weeks prior to the riot, Mayor Cavanagh had said that residents did not "need to throw a brick to communicate with City Hall."[50] There were still signs of black disaffection, however; In 1964, Rosa Parks, who had moved to Detroit in the late fifties, told an interviewer: "I don't feel a great deal of difference here [from Alabama]...Housing segregation is just as bad, and it seems more noticeable in the larger cities."[42] The improvements mostly benefited wealthier black Detroiters, and poor black Detroiters remained frustrated by the