29 June, 2009

G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class


"They were among some six and a half million African-Americans who left the South from 1910 to 1970 in what became known as the Great Migration. They were drawn to the North by the promise of equal treatment but also by the hope of finding work: the mechanization of agriculture, in particular the advent of the cotton picker, decimated black employment in the South. As Nicholas Lemann wrote in his 1991 book, “The Promised Land,” what in fact awaited most blacks was a more subtle form of discrimination. But in Detroit at least, there were the auto plants. Ford started hiring African-Americans in 1914, offering them the same $5-a-day wage it paid its white employees, even as it limited them to sweeping the floors and pouring hot steel in sweltering foundries. To discourage African-American employees from improving their lot by unionizing, the company offered free coal to ministers of black churches who preached the Ford gospel."

Read the entire article here.

26 June, 2009

Don't Stop Till You Get Enough

The first person I thought of after I heard about MJ yesterday was the guy who you'll often find dancing to classic Jackson tunes off Liberty St. in Ann Arbor, in that graffiti filled alley across from Borders. This man, who will always smile or wave when you stop to watch him strut, devotes the majority of daylight hours to dancing to Jackson in public. I wonder what he'll do now. Will he hang up his moonwalking shoes, or continue to Dance The Night (day) Away?



As of yesterday evening, after the news, he wasn't on stage.

22 June, 2009

Stochasticity

Abandoned Places

Detroit Lives, a new design team/website is up and running. I met the founder, Phil, last month when he was spending his day off digging a trench in an eastside community garden. The site offers some really cool t-shirts, and a heartfelt mission.

In their news section, there's a post about places around the world that are far more "abandoned" than the D. Check out this picture below from Bodie State Park in California. Pretty stunning.

20 June, 2009

Distillation

19 June, 2009

The North End

Detroit’s North End might be best known as the birthplace of Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, and Diana Ross. The Gold Coast running along Oakland Avenue used to be a bastion of successful black owned businesses. But, as is the case in many places around Detroit, things aren’t like they used to be. The area has been blighted, disinvested from, and in many ways, ignored for decades. And now, the foreclosure crisis has compounded a lot of these issues. But maybe because of the hard times we’ve fallen upon, Detroiters are now be banding together more than ever. Really.

North End Vacant Lot Program by WDET

12 June, 2009

Full Power

I'll be concentrating my blogging for the next two months here, at WDET's Facing The Mortgage Crisis series page. My first of what will eventually be eightish stories aired this afternoon on DT.



More context here.

10 June, 2009

A Primer

A Primer, by Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

09 June, 2009

SBTB!