Leslie Knox was a young girl in the 1960s when her Detroit-area city was accused of destroying neighborhoods to get rid of Black residents.
Decades later, the retired nurse has returned to Hamtramck, settling into a new two-story home on Gallagher Street and watching TV from a fold-up chair while she figures out how she wants to furnish it. She has no mortgage to pay, just property taxes and insurance.
Knox is one of the last people to benefit from an extraordinary legal settlement that requires the small city to build 200 homes for the victims of discrimination or their families. A lawsuit filed in 1968 became one of the longest-running civil rights cases over housing in the United States. And it is finally over…