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The conversation is going fast and furious this afternoon… the topic is “Telling Detroit’s Untold Stories.”
So far, suggestions have ranged from more focus on Detroit’s positives like culture and the arts, sports, opportunities for young people, urban gardens… Here’s the deal, though – I see these kinds of stories reported every day. Panel moderators Bill [...]
Kirk Cheyfitz: In 30,000 BC, he who could harness communication technology was the shaman, high priest or village headman. Communication was power. The printing press changed everything, making communication a two-way street.
Even the Internet, he says, was originally conceived of as a tool for elites – the military and academia. But then regular folks got [...]
A question from the audience: Disgraced former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick once told Detroiters that help isn’t coming. Do our panelists agree?
Malcolm Dade: Help has to begin with us but doesn’t preclude our reaching out to wherever – you build coalitions locally and nationally.
Marcella Wilson: Help is coming, and it’s real… the Obama administration is demanding [...]
Black people couldn’t receive Social Security until domestic and agricultural workers were added in the 50s, says David Freund. I didn’t know that. I bet most of you didn’t, either.
People don’t know how key the federal government has been in shaping economic prosperity, says David Freund, a “Putting the Myths to Rest” panelist from the University of Maryland, so people believe that government is “the problem.”
That folks in the past got by just on plain, old-fashioned hard work is a myth, he says. People [...]
Oversimplifying the causes of Detroit’s decline makes us find the wrong solutions to Detroit’s problems, says David Fike, president of Marygrove College, moderator of the “Putting the Myths to Rest” panel.
If the “problem” is one leader – Coleman Young, for example – or the riots, then we get the wrong answer.
If our problems were caused [...]
Another key point, Sugrue says, is the “transformation of patterns of housing and residence in the metro area,” which also begins well before 1967 or the election of Coleman Young. “The story of the 20th century is the story of the division of the metropolitan area into racialized” sectors.
That Detroit has “black neighborhoods” and “white [...]
Detroit’s Packard Plant closed in 1957, says Thomas Sugrue, a decade before Detroit’s 1967 riots and even longer before the election of Coleman Young, two events often pointed to as the beginning of the end for the city.
It’s hard to separate myth and legend about Detroit’s decline from fact, he says, and most myths are [...]
If you’re a fan of seminal work “Origins of the Urban Crisis,” you’d be a pig in mud here at the Our Detroit Story event this a.m…. Detroit historian Thomas Sugrue is here, and talking about the neighborhood where he grew up, in a west side neighborhood over by Livernois.
Right now, he’s talking about the [...]
