This post is something I have wanted to write for a long time. I have taken nearly a week off from the blog preparing for it, or more so hesitating to write it, but the last few weeks have seen some, well, aggravating developments in a long line of blunders made by the Detroit City Council, coupled by yet more media attention lavished upon former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
In 1701, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac was travelling up the Detroit river when he cast his eyes upon a length of short bluffs on the west bank of the river. They were covered in towering beech-maple forests pierced by even grander White Pines and were surrounded by ash swamps absolutely loaded with beaver. A defensible location approximately halfway into the Great Lakes teeming with fur bearing mammals featuring much milder winters than anything back in Quebec proper must have seemed like paradise to any resident of New France. Cadillac thought so, for he founded a city here. Fifty years later, it was to rival Montreal and New Orleans, the other two great cities of New France, in size. In 1760 she changed hands, but not cultures. Detroit remained a French-Canadian city into the early 19th century, and many residents in the metropolitan area still bear French last names, as do the city street names and grid pattern up and down the river on both banks. Though not as immediately recognizable as a heart of Franco-North American heritage, Detroit has every right to lay claim to being a part of this history.
Time and people have marched on. Lured by the same promise of free land that attracted the first Canadians here, Americans came to the region, if not in the same great numbers that they flocked to newly minted Chicago. Perhaps this was because Detroit and Michigan were north of the beaten path, and a little too close to Upper Canada for comfort. Still, immigrants and escaped, later freed African Americans came to settle here throughout the 19th century. Detroit was heard of a destination even in Mexico, and the city boasts one of the oldest Mexican communities in the northern United States, established now for over a century. While she grew alongside the other great old cities of the Northeast and Great Lakes, she positively exploded when Henry Ford and other industrial innovators set up shop here in the early 20th century. Ford and the other industrialists offered incredible opportunities, including high wages for even entrance-level factory workers and hiring policies that dismissed any notion of racial segregation.
Even as the mansions of the wealthy sprang up to rival the finest estates in New England and New York, even as skyscrapers and a cityscape to rival New York and Chicago rose from the lit, paved streets laid out in a Parisian pattern, the ordinary Detroiters saw a piece of the pie and could afford comfortable lives of their own. Relations with Canada had significantly warmed by the turn of the century, and while Detroit had once been off the beaten path, it was now an international gateway, one made even more prestigious by proximity to alcohol-loaded Ontario during a rather dry time in the United States. Best of all, Detroit was, and remains, on a powerful corridor running from Chicago to Montreal, a corridor which is every bit as urban, wealthy, and sophisticated as the east coast of the United States. By the second world war, she was the fourth largest city in the United States, and among the wealthiest. 48302, the zip code for Bloomfield, MI, in fact, is the second richest zip code in the country after 90210, made so not by celebrity but by the automobile.
So what happened?
Why do people now associate Detroit with something far more grim? Why do photographers come here only to take shots of urban decay and abandoned buildings that look as if they would have once been palaces and theatres to rival the sights in Vienna and Paris? Why do people associate the name Detroit only with what is wrong in America? When people think of the word they sometimes re-arrange the last two vowels to spell "riot". Well, Detroit sure did have a riot to end all riots.
Detroit might have been a northern city of a great dream of economic and racial equality, but it was still paralyzed by racial tension that gripped far more than just the southern United States. These days, the city has turned from a diverse population into one that is vastly Black, even as the ever-expanding suburbs have taken in that former diversity. Non-institutional segregation has given way to a seeming exclusivity, but this is not the sole reason why Detroit has changed so much, no matter how many people want to blame a race for the downward slope of a once great city. The wealth, power, development, and greatness just got so dispersed in the ever-expanding donut of the suburbs that it faded from view. Who cares about a suburb, after all, if the city it satellites is a second string attraction? Anyway...
What was that about race? Better yet, what was that about racism? Oh, and not just White on Black. Black on White. Everyone on everyone else. We have had so much racial tension here since the 1920's that it is hard to posit a place where the madness began, but I am going to say that two people encapsulate just how divided and exclusionary the lifeblood of Detroit has become:
Coleman Young, first black mayor of Detroit and an emblem of reverse-racism.
Orville Hubbard, segregationist mayor of Dearborn and an emblem of overt racism.
Young was the mayor of Detroit from 1974 to 1993, while Hubbard was the mayor of Dearborn from 1942 to 1978. On first glance, why yes, these times are far, far too long to be dominating the politics of any governing body. During Young's time as mayor, Detroit shrank in population by well over half, became known as the murder and arson capital of the United States, and presided over city-councils dominated by pro-Black segregationists and some of the most corrupt civic leaders, well, anywhere in the world. He personally fought to racially integrate the city's civil services and was committed to a crusade against racism, at least as he defined it. Most baby-boomers and older residents of the metro area consider him to be the worst thing to ever happen to Detroit. More neutral viewers of history consider him to be a man who did not try to veil his opinions and could hardly be blamed for just how volatile and dangerous the situation of the city became during his time in office. His motto might best be summed up as "integration and social-equality at all costs, <expletive>".
Hubbard, on the other hand, was determined to keep his neighboring city of Dearborn out of the hands of what he deemed to be forces that were killing Detroit, and yes, he very much disliked integration of Whites and Blacks. Ironically, Dearborn has since become a largely Arab-American city and largely added to the multiculturalism of the metro area. Whereas Young's intentions might at least be debatable, Hubbard's were never in question; he openly detested anyone who was Black. His motto might best be summed up as "keep your Black <expletive> out of my city."
So who do you think is talked about more when thinking about the history of the metro area? Young. Hubbard hardly even gets a mention, which is pretty sad. When suburbanites see abandoned neighborhoods, long deceased businesses and factories, crumbling churches and overgrown parks, they decry the remaining residents of the city rather than think back on what might have been had they, you know, stayed and worked things out. When city residents look out at the suburbs and look around again at their own neighborhoods, and I say this from personal experience in working in the city of Detroit, I have seen many look at the situation as if it were inevitable, and even inescapable because of race, rather than, you know, try to make a better city. It does not help when much of the city and county leadership is corrupt beyond the dictionary definition of the word.
I simply tell all of these "historians" the same message. It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with attitude. Race is simply an excuse. A powerful excuse, if the history of the world has anything to say about it, but an excuse. Detroit is no longer French-Canadian. Do I blame my own race for this downfall? No. Does this seem ludicrous to us now? Indeed it does. Back in the 18th century though, it would have been the talk of the town. The change in power and hands of one group into another would have been discussed as "only natural, seeing as how Catholics and Frenchmen at that hate liberty, modern advancement, and true, English (or later, American) civilization".
So what about the title? Is Detroit simply a third-world city and a scary place full of "those people"? Take a look at the scene below and tell me this is a slum and not a modern North American city:
No. Detroit has gone through some rough patches, and (especially in our older generations) is still a bit overburdened by racial tension, or more so, the racial excuse. There are some rather scary areas, but then there are scary areas in Los Angeles and New York as well. We also have so many amazing things about us too. Come by next post for a better look on what Detroit actually is, and even better, what it can become.
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