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Detroit



  • I Grew Up in a Black Liberationist Commune

    From 1973 to the early 2000s, the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church operated a communal home in a Detroit apartment building, dedicated to the collective project of replacing received notions of Black inferiority with a sense of possibility. 



  • Immigrant Merchants and Law-and-Order Politics in Detroit

    by Kenneth Alyass

    The Chaldean community of Detroit became a significant middleman-minority through the operation of small stores in working-class and majority-Black neighborhoods. As white flight and disinvestment created increasingly dire conditions, they also became a constituency for aggressive policing. 



  • Preserving Detroit's Native History

    Karen Marrero of Wayne State University discusses how oral traditions have kept indigenous histories alive even as many physical markers of that history have been destroyed. 



  • Adults Support Empowering Youth – Until Youth Dissent

    by Dara Walker

    American youth are seldom credited for having a clear understanding of the policies that affect their lives. COVID safety walkouts are the latest example of student activism to be dismissed.



  • Greening Detroit's History

    by Brandon Ward

    Urban historians are starting to recognize something that urban activists grasped in the 1960s: power and inequality are reflected in cities' environments. 



  • Detroit Bankruptcy Documentary Wins Library of Congress Prize

    Ken Burns, who collaborated with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden on the selection, called "Gradually, Then Suddenly" a "complex, nuanced, layered" examination of the city's financial crisis and the political divide between Detroit and the state of Michigan. 



  • Police and the License to Kill

    by Matthew D. Lassiter

    The history of the Detroit Police Department shows that police reforms won't reduce killing as long as departments can set priorities that result in racially targeted and discretionary enforcement and are allowed to investigate and sanction the conduct of their own officers. 



  • Rosie the Riveters gathered on Labor Day to Honor the Working Women of WWII

    "The Rosies and veterans then told stories from the front lines. One Rosie said she was shocked at the idea of wearing pants to work. A veteran recalled being shot down from the sky in northern Italy and receiving notes from Rosies back home full of profanities toward Hitler."



  • From Segregation to Gentrification

    by Mike Green

    Lessons from Seattle and Detroit: How city policies and NIMBYism lead to unimpeded market forces displacing poor people of color.