I don't live in Detroit, but like many people in the sprawling 5 million person metropolis I've always called home, I consider myself a Detroiter. I was born in Detroit, I was baptized there, I lived there as a child. Some of my fondest childhood memories were in the Motor City. I love my city, but even on Thanksgiving, one of the few days of the year when Americans tune in to our home, it's a defensive love, the love of the underdog, the love of the beautiful girl with the big birthmark or the sweet boy with the stutter. It's a love that requires explanations and defenses. Detroit is seen as some kind of joke, a punch line for what's wrong or hapless in the world. Sometimes, like the last week, it's wearying being a Detroiter. Do us a favor; try to understand our city a bit, and maybe even cut us some slack. And maybe if you attempt to understand why so many of us love our hometown, you might even gain a greater appreciation of your own.
More below the jump...
Music is one of my passions, and whenever I hear Paul Simon's wonderful song "The Roots of Rhythm" I'm swept into the back seat of my Dad's old Bonneville, and the radio's playing "Bernadette" or "Standing in the Shadows of Love" or "I Just Wish it Would Rain." I grew up hearing the stories of people who worked at "Ford's," and by 6 years old I "knew" Jimmy Hoffa had "helped truck drivers [like my dad] more than any man alive." My paternal grandparents and two aunts lived in the city. I loved visiting my grandparents; grandpa on the porch drinking a Blatz, grandma giving me date bars and occasionally teaching me a word or two of the Quebecois-inflected French none of her children learned. As an only child, I always wanted to be with my fifteen cousins; one of my favorite birthdays, my 6th, was with my cousins at my aunt Dianne's house on the lower east side of Detroit. In all, a typical Detroit childhood for a working class kid whose grandparents came to Detroit in the 20's to work in the auto industry and who survived the city's Darwinian economics and stayed, married, raised their kids and made the place their home.
Everything changes, but in few places in America have the good memories of place and time been wiped out like they have in Detroit. In 1960 my Dad's neighborhood was still mostly Sicilian, and all white. By the time I started visiting my grandparents, they were the only "white" family left. ("White" because, like a lot of red-skinned, high-cheekboned, black-haired people from Canada, they insisted they were "pure" French but were in fact part Ojibwa.) Even before they moved to a working class suburb they felt a loss of hominess, of rootedness that they always associated with the old neighborhood. Like in neighborhoods all across Detroit, real estate agents preyed on the fear and economic insecurity and racism of people, and urged my family and their neighbors to sell their homes at losses and "get out of Detroit before the blacks take over." The speculators decimated neighborhoods by scamming lots of white sellers with low prices, and turned around and oversold the homes to black families desparate for a house in a highly discriminatory housing market. But those buyers eventually left as well. I drove through the neighborhood a few years ago, and many of the houses are completely gone. More than half the lots are empty, and the grass grows so high that it's one of the "neighborhoods" from which the MI Department of Natural Resources live-traps wild pheasants to interbreed with pen-raised pheasants to get hardy chicks to repopulate the rural areas outstate.
My aunts moved too...or at least one did. I think it was in 1973 that Detroit became the "murder capital of America." On at least one occasion there were six murders in one night, the night my aunt Dianne was killed by a gunshot to the face, fired by the husband who had abused her for years. My mom still has the discolored newspaper clipping; in a Detroit News article my aunt's murder warranted its own bullet point.
A majority of white people had left Detroit much earlier, even before the 1967 riot. 43 people died in what many call an urban rebellion, as did the conceit that Detroit was America's "Model City." Detroit was home to some of the world's largest corporations and to a vibrant labor movement led by the United Auto Workers' charismatic Walter Reuther, one of the postwar era's great liberals. It was a supposedly integrated city, and the mayor, elected at just 31 years old, was an exciting progressive named Jerry Cavanaugh (whose family came from outside Ottawa, three farms over from my paternal grandfather's family); folks were whispering that he might even be a Presidential candidate someday. But the city was really a seething cauldron of racism and racial resentment, and in July of 1967 it boiled over when a raid on a speakeasy provoked the chaos that resulted in the 101st Airborne Division occupying part of the city.
Detroit had already lost over a million people since the 1950's, as cheap housing (and the fact that anybody with a little money bought a car to drive on the new freeways) lured people west and north into the suburbs. But the 1967 riots were when most of the remaining White Detroiters gave up on the city, blaming "the blacks" for problems rooted in de-industrialization, the pent-up demand for housing that that had kept the burgeoning Black population bottled up in a few small neighborhoods for decades, unscrupulous real estate dealers, and the same suburbanization seen across the country. The Tigers' 1968 World Series victory brought a brief respite to the racial tensions, as whites and blacks celebrated together and almost every little white kid's favorite Tiger was Willie Horton. But white flight from Detroit, which began in the 1950's, rapidly sped up, leading to the situation today where Detroit, at 950,000 people, is over 80% black, and all but a few suburbs are over 80% white.
By the early seventies Berry Gordy had moved Motown Records to Tinseltown. We lived for a short time in West Michigan before my parents split up. My mom had grown up in housing projects until my grandparents bought a tiny bungalow on the far west side of the city. They eventually sold that house, and my mom and I ended up living with them in one of the non-descript working-class suburbs west of Detroit.
I had no family still living in Detroit. The 70's seemed to be one closing or loss after another. The train station where my grandmother and I would catch the bus to the train station in Windsor closed down and is now the city's most regal eyesore. Scores of factories, where hundreds of thousands of Americans' fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers toiled to make a good wage, were leveled and pulverized. Except for occasional visits to Tiger Stadium or Olympia for a Red Wings game with my uncle, Detroit had become to me a foreign place, a menacing place where the "other" lived amid violence and squalor, and where I shouldn't go if I cared about my safety and my life. In the early 70's a federal judge proposed busing kids between Detroit and the suburbs to mitigate the regional segregation (still among the worst in the country). For several years most of the picture windows in my neighborhood, including ours, displayed signs that said "Our Child Will Not Be Bused." I didn't fully understand it, I just knew the goal was to keep me out of Detroit.
My mom eventually remarried, my grandfathers both passed away, and I ended up living on my own in various suburbs of Detroit as I worked and paid my way through college. The hospital I was born in closed, as did the parish in which I was baptized. At various times I thought about moving but didn't. I had family and lots of friends, and I realized that I was deeply rooted here. My pursuit of live music led me back into the city, to places like Saint Andrews Hall, and as I rediscovered Detroit, it felt like I had reconnected severed ties. Through friends that still lived in the city, I found my way around and discovered where to get a coney island 2:30 AM, and where to get a good Mexican or Polish dinner. I became a regular at the Detroit Institute of Arts film theater. I worked nights on a warehouse loading dock near the bridge to Canada. I drove a truck, which helped me develop a mental map of the entire region. I eventually started working in politics, labor and community activism, and for a couple of years I even worked blocks from both the original recording studios of Motown and ground zero of the 1967 riot.
Like most people in the area, I think Detroit has come a long way from the despair of the 1970's. We've built new buildings (like the stadium where the Lions are getting slaughtered by the Colts), and restored old ones. Woodward Avenue, the city's main drag and site of the parade watched this morning by people across the country, is lined with new and freshened buildings and expanding business from Downtown to the Cultural Center near Wayne State University. There are even new homes and lofts for sale, and they go at a relatively hefty price. Detroit, while still full of severe problems--neighborhoods with ghastly rates of violent crime, overwhelmed public schools, an unceasing population drain, especially of the black middle class, a dearth of supermarkets and general services and retail, a continued absence of concentrated loft living that generates foot traffic and a sense of urban vibrancy--seemed like it was no longer in a freefall. Tensions between the suburbs and city are lower than they've ever been. Someday there may even be the kind of hip and diverse neighborhoods that lures people to the urban centers of other big cities. If that happens, I will probably reverse the course of so many families in the area, and move back to Detroit. I want to find out if you really can go home again.
The progress is mostly invisible to the rest of country, because about the only non-sports or crisis reason we're ever noticed is the North American Auto Show, which "shows off" the city in the middle of January, the most frigid and dismal time of year. We're only noticed when something happens to confirm the negative stereotypes. And we've been the butt of jokes my entire life. Murder capital of America. The home of Bubba, the beer-bellied loser who celebrated the Tigers' 1984 World Series win in front of a burning police car. The site of Devil's Night blazes, where abandoned homes by the score were torched in a bastardization of an old mischievous tradition of soaping windows and toilet papering trees the night before Halloween.
It doesn't matter if you live within the city limits of Detroit, or whether you're a Tigers' fan. If you're from this region, you learn to expect the smirks and cheap shots. In Europe I met two guys from Zambia who were studying in Ceauscu's Romania. When I told them I was from Detroit, their expressions turned grave and one said, very seriously, "I hear Detroit is a very dangerous place." In the south of France I saw shirts with fake bullet holes over the phrase "Detroit: Where the Strong Survive and the Weak are Murdered." In September a British reporter in town to cover the Ryder Cup golf tournament ridiculed Detroit as a bombed out pit; it was later discovered that he hadn't seen any of the city except what was visible from the cab window on the freeway between the airport and the golf course. This didn't surprise many Detroiters; when it comes to fairness, that's par for the course.
And now, in the aftermath of last Friday's brawl at the Pistons/Pacers basketball game, we're hearing it again. Because of one idiot with a plastic cup, one moron who threw a chair, and a bunch of professional basketball players from a visiting team who lack even a modicum of impulse-control, we're back to being a punch line. What happened last Friday was horrible, but only slightly worse than incidents in other stadiums in other cities in recent years. But now some sports announcers and talentless cheap-shot artists like Jimmy Kimmel are again mocking us...again.
Please, do us a favor: Go pick on another city for a while.
Detroiters are generally good people. Friends that leave for other big cities tell me that people from the Industrial Midwest--Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago--tend to stick together in NY, DC, San Francisco, etc. Like folks from those other cities, we tend to be sincere, but not simple. We're relatively free of artifice and affectations. We work hard, and respect people who do the same. People in Detroit tend to be loyal; we're not fair-weather fans of our sports teams, we're always there. We love our hometown heroes, and they tend to love us. (Except Madonna, but hey, anyone who has to fabricate a faux English accent shouldn't be taken too seriously.) We give respect, and expect it in return. We're a little more tolerant here than in some other parts of the country; our friends across the river in Canada have modeled behavior for us quite nicely. We're the home of Reagan Democrats that voted for Democrats after Reagan. We don't have the death penalty, and never have. We're a magnet for new immigrants from across the Middle East who come here knowing their quarter-million fellow Arabs in the Detroit area have greater acceptance here than anywhere else in America.
And we deserve a break. America, leave us alone, and extend a little generosity and respect. Try to understand why we love our city. We'd really appreciate it.
Happy Thanksgiving.