Detroit: An American City

The struggles of Detroit city are remarkable and tragic to behold. They present microcosm of America's situation in the wider world. Once strong industries losing foot to foreign competition, the evolving difficulties in overcoming a racist history, high rates of gun violence, high drop-out rates and a steadily crumbling infrastructure.

Below are 5 different historical elements helpful to understanding this city.


Dynamism. Detroit was one of the most dynamic Midwestern cities in to the 1960’s and 1970’s. Open and welcoming of immigrants, with the opening of the Erie Canal it had one of the most cosmopolitan mixes of citizenry. Like all large Mid-western cities, the mostly 1st to 3rd generation immigrants that came were motivated and hardworking. Well before the auto industry Detroit was a powerhouse in all manners of industry, whether it was machining, stove tops, department stores or even shipbuilding. No surprise it came to be the city that popularized the automobile and built it in numbers never before seen. Detroit created the concrete highway, the stop light. It gave birth to modern suburbia, with two car garages and endless rows of cookie cutter housing (Pulte). It fulfilled long unimaginable dreams of people to be able to work and live in vastly different environments and even made the upper class luxury of a personal cabin on a private beach widely attainable. When World War 2 came to the United States shores, the federal demand for the mass manufacture of trucks, tanks, airplanes and munitions, pushed this growth to steroidal limits. The GI Bill and subsequent subsidized push for everyone to be able to afford the suburban dream, pushed sprawl faster to never before seen heights. However, the hang-over of such excess also came back to roost faster in this city. The community breakdown that results when people try and live with a foot in different worlds (in this case, Urban and Rural) is present not only in the city proper, but every suburb where most neighbors do not know each other. Homes are seen more as a temporary investment, a rung of a social climb than a tie to land or community. The lack of a more effective public transportation system exemplifies the individual character of the city. People drive to work, to school, to church, on vacation, people drive everyday from 40min-3hr.’s. The psychological and sociological effects of such dedication to a fast and wandering lifestyle have yet to be fully diagnosed, but if you want to see the results you need look no farther than Detroit. The breakdown in the inner-city is best seen in the massive violent crime and incarceration rates as communities handle problems with guns instead of a trusted common law. In addition the overburdened auto-industry reached a critical mass with non-competitive labor agreements and lower productivity rates amongst both white and blue collar workers through the 70’s and 80’s, the result of which has been a steady bleed of jobs. In this city defined by the mobility and independence of it’s populace the result has been a rapid exodus. The first stage was from the city proper and Wayne County most rapidly in the late 50’s- late 70’s, and now the entire region of Southeast Michigan, late 80’s-present. In the wake of this exodus remain many good industries amongst the aged and atrophied statist titans, like the many good citizens amongst the statist corrupt powers that hold public offices and codified cultured prejudices.


Racial. Detroit was a city of immigrants from Europe different parts of America and increasingly in the 1910’s-1960’s southern Blacks. Blacks were ghettoized and prejudiced against. Given the worst jobs at large factories, poor housing, unequal representation in government and law enforcement, but still many found enough economic opportunity to make it worthwhile. Detroit was an active fighting ground for civil rights. Powerful unions officially sided with black revolutionaries like Martin Luther King and many local religious leaders. Black nationalists and middle-ground liberals of all races made more rapid strides in Detroit than most cities of its size in the late 60’s and early 70’s. They overturned racist laws and legal practice, and came to prominence in the police, courts and local government more quickly in Detroit than most cities. However, these victories that publicly overturned the “traditional” racism of school, housing and courtrooms, also threatened the deep rooted preferences and prejudices of the majority of the affluent holders of capital. Steadily the factories and businesses were opened farther and farther away from the city proper. With the resulting suburban exodus of the 60’s and 70’s, city based industries reached a critical mass the corporate ranks became increasingly dense and hard to break into. Inner-city Blacks were left trying to make more with less: Lower savings, less education, more poverty, more problems. What evolved in the metro Detroit area was government enabled and enforced segregation. Judges might be able to force bussing within school district lines, but if a group of people choose to found their own district, in say Oakland County, a judge could not require inter district bussing. Oakland and Macomb County police forces are notorious for their racial profiling, but raise a suit on it and you will be subject to their courts and their juries. Nowhere is this system of discrimination more codified than in the body that daily decides civil and criminal rights, the Justice System. Here you see the bias that poisons all governments and civil services, that proper justice costs money. People facing severe penalties get court appointed attorneys often incapable of making the proper defense. While the counties might choose not to get involved in the collective education of youth in the region, they have no problem paying to detain them for decades when they feel threatened.

In my eyes the abuses of the prison system mirror the military-industrial complex we see in Washington, with the attached lobbyists, carrier politicos and seeming stance above the justice system.


Security. Without justice you will have no peace. For decades blacks lived without public recognition of their greatest civil right: Equal protection under the law. In rebellion for this the political climate of Detroit became extreme like much of the United States and not only on courts and councils. The actions of the 67 riots and police response, particularly the STRESS death squads, further radicalized the city dwellers into opposing parties. The war on drugs became a war on the urban poor and widespread gun ownership escalated rapidly. The federal government increasingly encroached on the cities jurisdiction with its harsh mandatory minimum penalties and FBI Surveillance of criminals, politicians and civic leaders. Funding went up for increasingly paramilitary police, and the public was encouraged to be desensitized to the rampant death and destruction as seen on the local news: the weekly reports of police shootings and brutal murders. In a city already politically and economically repressive to black youth, taking up arms and selling drugs was a natural outlet to prestige and power. The destructive underground characteristics engendered by the drug war turned neighborhoods into gangland war zones. Detroit Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings recently stated “…to put things in perspective, between 60 and 75 percent of our homicides in 2007 and the year before had a narcotics nexus, either through drugs, drug locations or people involved in drugs.” When prohibition against alcohol was enforced it was quickly repealed, because of the criminalizing effect it was having on society, paying for the ammunition in killers guns and bombs and giving them cause to use them. Drug prohibition has produced the same results, but it’s effects have been more segregated. For much of this suburban country the victims are like trees falling in the woods, the gun shots echo only so far and the media often fail to find its true source. It’s Detroit’s schools whose students are regular victims of gun violence, it’s the economically disadvantaged and politically weak who have all the more incentive to deal. A distant antisocial system of injustice was imposed on “criminals” that only resulted in a revolving door that escalated crime and depression. Meanwhile opportunists friendly with governments used increasing crime statistics to justify funding the construction of massive prison complexes statewide. The objective of these facilities and their officers was for-profit detention, not rehabilitation. This is just another dead end for the sick, illiterate and disadvantaged; one that leaves a permanent record to follow a person all their life. In Detroit a youth is more likely to spend time in jail or prison than to make it through college.


Political. With an exodus of so much of the educated, experienced professional class and the absence of economic stimulus came the growth of a political class. The Coleman Young election, turned into a 20 year era. His monopolistic political machine racially integrated, but gradually stagnated the ranks of police and government employ with political favoritism best seen by the debacle with his friend police commissioner Hart, his ban on city workers speaking to reporters and his refusal to allow suburban residents to serve on the Detroit Police Department. One of the demonstrable successes of Detroit was that the oppressed minority was able to freely organize, elect and re-elect their choice of politician. However, where the electoral process may have failed was in providing a false security; that elections would make preserving their quality of life any easier. Unfortunately by economic metrics Detroit was worse off in 1993 than it had been in 1971. Elections helped to more firmly establish certain rights and opportunities, but they could not help the rank and file to find employment in the city limits. The “conservative” voters whose candidates lost the elections voted with their feet and pocket books to find communities they could feel like winners in. Consider that John F. Nichols the founder of STRESS, the man who would lose the mayoral race to Young, would later become Oakland County Sheriff.


Economics. No politician controls the economy. The economy is a concert of a mass of individuals. Detroit’s greatest economic success, the mass manufacture of the automobile, was also it’s largest employer with a ten thousand company web of suppliers. They had a competitive advantage, but it was not sustained. Critical to an economic turnaround is the ability to re-educate and Detroit Schools have fallen short. In 2006 the Detroit School district, 11th largest district in the country, had a graduation rate of 21.7%, ranked as the last in the country for its size. Meanwhile Oakland County high schools have some of the highest graduation rates. While Oakland County currently has a 7% unemployment rate Wayne’s is closer to 10% with a quarter to a third of residents below the “poverty line.” Life is distinctly different across the county borders of Detroit. In Detroit you will find few of the traditional chain grocery stores or big box retailers that proliferate even in small towns. In Oakland County they build industrial parks and strip malls, in Detroit they tear buildings down. On top of that to have to pay an income tax and 67 mill property tax to the authorities, only to receive in return poorly functioning courts, schools and cops; it is little wonder businesses don’t move back. Take DFI, a family business founded in Detroit, employing mostly Detroiters, but to take advantage of Southfield’s tax system we are on the north side of 8 mile. The only reason for such disparity across an artificial border can be found in the underpinnings of the public system that people rely on or in many cases, suffer under.


For too long people have accepted these injustices as the tragic but natural results of a society experiencing hard times; that the people in the police and justice system are doing their best with a bad situation. While this may be the case for certain individuals, the failures of the local system of justice are so oppressive that one is left to call into question the very principles on which it operates. If a police man is convicted on corruption he will lose his job and possibly worse. So why should derelict divisions and prejudiced practices of the justice system continue to stand? Why do we accept mandatory minimums? What about dishonest cops shaking down drug dealers, dishonest city commissioners shaking down businesses, and dishonest mayors shaking down the city itself? The answer is that the majority of people do not accept these things. Nobody wants crime and mayhem on their streets or oppression in the halls of justice, but hand in hand no-one is born knowing the path to prevent these misdeeds. What we do know, is that bold-faced evils daily occur in this city because corruption is and had been an accepted currency of city bosses, be they Drug Dealers, Unions, Justices, Commissioners or Mayors. The best way to protect from such crimes is to reveal them. Free Detroit.