Taking Charge of Our Story is a one-day event organized by New Detroit. Here are some basic questions and answers about the event. (Click ABOUT for a quick overview or AGENDA for a detailed schedule of the day.)
What’s the purpose of Taking Charge of Our Story? The day is being organized with two purposes: One is to focus disparate leaders of the Detroit community — the media, community organizations, government leaders, business leaders, academics and others — on the city’s current situation and its origins as well as how to share stories that accurately portray Detroit and its history. The second is to construct commonly understood paths to defining and resolving Detroit’s problems and to examine journalism’s role in that process.
Is there an underlying vision? The problems of Detroit and the region—inequality, racial division, chronic joblessness and industrial flight—are not Detroit’s, they are the nation’s. Our vision is that the proper telling of Detroit’s story will mobilize the attention of the city, the region, the state and the nation to the critical issues of economic survival for our industrial communities.
What’s the event’s general plan? Taking Charge of Our Story is a one-day meeting split into two parts. The morning session will explore Detroit’s history, separate myth from fact and demonstrate how we got to the community’s present state. The afternoon will explore what role journalism—whether practiced by mainstream reporters, bloggers or others—can and should play in the continuing crisis the community faces. We will use the results of the morning session as the basis for an open discussion of the areas of Detroit life that represent important untold stories. Once these areas are identified, participants will split into groups to create lists of specific stories that need telling. Someone or some group of people will take responsibility for telling each story. In several months, when the stories are finished, we intend to publish them in an ebook. Click on AGENDA for a detailed agenda of the day.
Who will be leading the look at Detroit’s history? The morning will be devoted to examining Detroit’s history, stripped of the myths and legends that too often have become accepted as fact. Leading the way will be the authors of two definitive studies of Detroit—Thomas Sugrue of the University of Pennsylvania, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis, and David Freund of the University of Maryland, author of Colored Property. Joining the morning sessions will be faculty members from Marygrove College’s Institute for Detroit Studies.
The Labor History Journal described Sugrue’s book as “A splendid book that does no less than transform our understanding of United States history after 1940.” Freund’s work was described by The Urban History Journal as “a most compelling volume to read and to contemplate. Its scholarship is prodigious. It findings are searing.”
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As one who grew up in the Detroit of the late 1930s and early 1940s, I still remember June 1941, when the lawns of the Art Museum and, across Woodward, the Public Library, were manned by National Guardsmen with machine guns deployed. Any story of post war Detroit’s glories and problems will, I hope, consider the roots in the Detroit that encompassed the race riots, Harry Bennett and the Ford River Rouge plant turmoil, the influences of Father Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith and the Purple Gang, to say nothing of Sen. Vandenberg and the U of M professors who reflected a very different vision of what Detroit and America should be.
Dear Kirk Cheyfitz and friends,
While your critique of Time Magazine and other national media reports moves in a positive direction, I wish you would have invited a panel of grass roots community pioneers, leaders and activists to share their stories. From Grace Lee Boggs (www.boggscenter.org) to Ron Scott (Peace Zones for Life) to Mike Wimberly (Hope District) to Jackie Victor & Ann Perrault (Avalon Bakery) to Invincible (Emergence Music) to Sandra & Charles Simmons of the Hush House to Julia Putnam of the Boggs Educational Center, you could have learned of the new Detroit emerging in both values and community building who are committed to a local sustianable economy and new forms of democracy.
I encourge you to consider organizing a follow-up gathering to listen to the stories, the voices and dreams of Detroit.
rich feldman
Detroit City of Hope
Rich Feldman–Good idea. This is exactly what everyone is looking for. We need for people from every part of the community to identify the untold (or under-told) stories of Detroit, to locate the sources for telling those stories and the voices that can tell them best.
–Kirk
I hope the usual suspects are not invited to this event such as those mentioned aboved…we need to hear new voices with new paradigms..I attended the law school 30 years ago and was involved in a classroom protest it was reported by the South End but no the MSM..