The Real Detroit

Clarence Stone

English 325

 

I am from Detroit.

 

No, I am not from Ferndale. I am not from Dearborn. I am not from Troy. I am from real, actual city of Detroit, Michigan.  

 

I feel as though there is a need to state that every time I tell someone where I am from when I am away from home. Something that is very typical of metropolitan areas is for people who do not actually live in the city to claim that they are from there, like the way that a parasite claims it’s host. Yes, these people may have a general knowledge of the area, and yes we may root for the same teams throughout the year, but there is a large difference between the place that you live and where I grew up.  I am a Detroiter, born and raised on the west side.  This is something that I carry with me as a badge of pride, when many outsiders feel as though this is something I should try to hide, like a mark on a perfect face. Well, I say that it’s those marks that make people unique.

 

I am a third generation Detroiter. My grandparents moved here around during the 1950s. Although they reminisce about going back to where they grew up, they never moved away. My parents grew up in the city during the 1970s, and decided to continue living in Detroit even after moving away for college. As for me, until moving to Ann Arbor for college, I had no idea what it was like to live in an American city outside of Detroit.  Between these three generations, my family has lived through every phase of the city, from its highest highs, to its lowest lows. While hundreds of families left as the city got worse, we remained. This is why I am so protective of being true Detroiter. I’ve seen some of the worse and best things that living in Detroit has to offer. If you did not live through the issues that growing up in Detroit has brought, you have no right to claim it.

 

****

 

The history of Detroit is a tragic one.  At one point, the city was a place of possibilities; during the first half of the 20th century, Detroit was one of the busiest cities in America. Thanks to the competitive wages from the Big Three auto companies, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, people flocked to the city to earn a decent living. In the 1950s, the city was home to over 2 million people, and was the 6th largest city in America. However, as the city’s population and economy grew larger, its success had unintended consequences.

 

Thanks to Ford and the assembly line, cars became a common thing for families to own in America. This led to an expansion of roads and the creation of highways, which allowed people to live further from their jobs. Soon, suburbs were popping up around the city, which caused many people to start moving out. At first this was not an issue. Detroit was still a bustling city, even with some of its population leaving it. It had movie theaters, clubs, and even a huge department store in the center of downtown. It was still regarded as a well-to-do place to live.

However, because the city was based in the auto industry, the city began destroy what was once a very popular and frequently used electric trolley system, a decision backed by the big 3. This system was a public transportation system that had once had 543 thousand miles of track, which expanded to areas all over the city. During the 40s, this trolley system had a trolley moving through Woodward, Detroit’s major street, every 60 seconds.  To replace it, the Detroit Department of Transportation began using gasoline busses, which to this day have never been considered suitable public transportation.

 

Unless someone had a car, there was, and still is, no way for people to get around the city or to get to work in a time efficient way. This meant that not only were people leaving the city because of cars, but that without a car, it became difficult for people to get around inside the city as well. Detroiters were beginning to grow frustrated and restless. Then the riots happened.

 

****

 

Detroiters who were living in the city during the 1960s still remember what caused the riots to occur. My grandparents had moved from Norfolk, Virginia, where the segregation and racism had been more overt than Detroit. Still, they had not seen police brutality worse than it was in the city. “Detroit prior to the riots was a very unpleasant place,” my grandpa told me during dinner one evening the summer before I left of college. He and my Grandmother were telling me what it was like living in the city during the 1960s. “Many police officers would intimidate, stop and frisk, and question blacks on the street.”

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, the people that were leaving the city were primarily upper class and white. This meant that the people stayed in the city were predominantly Black. Yet, while the city’s population became more colored, the city’s police department remained starkly white. As the city was still working on solving many of the inequalities that had plagued the black community, the stark difference of race between the police force and the citizens only helped to exacerbate the issues.  Black citizens found themselves constantly at the terror of the police department, which would raid black nightclubs and “illegitimate” business and arrest several black patrons as a show of force.  It reached its boiling point in 1967. When Detroit police raided a club and tried to arrest the patrons, they refused to go, and chose to fight back instead.

 

My grandparents still clearly remember what the next few days were like. “I was at work that day,” Grandpa said. “I was working at Herman Kiefer Hospital downtown as a medical technologist. I had to be at work real early that morning, and then my friends and I heard the commotion. We ran upstairs to the roof of the hospital, and we looked toward 12th street. I could see all the smoke and the fire.  It was like nothing I had ever seen before.”

Meanwhile, my grandmother was watching it all unfold on the news. She was a teacher, and it was the middle of the summer, so she was off from work watching after my dad and uncle. “I got a call from your grandpa telling me, ‘Dear, don’t you leave the house today. These fools are burning everything!’ I turned on the TV, and they were saying that people were rioting and destroying business all over the place. “

 

“I wasn’t able to go home for 8 hours longer than usual,” Grandpa said. “When I came back the next day, as I drove down the John C. Lodge Freeway, I could see all the beautiful shops up and down the freeway that had been burned.”

The riots continued for 3 straight days. They caused so much damage that it took the National Guard to come in stop them. Grandma could still remember seeing the National Guard come through her neighborhood. “They were showing us that they were there to help us. The rioting really didn’t come near us, but they just wanted us to know that they were there.”  However, my grandfather was of a different opinion. “The National Guardsmen were ugly. They almost aggravated and caused a lot of problems that need not have occurred. As I remember it, they had to be restrained because there was overkill.” Either way, once they showed up, the rioting eventually was brought to an end. However the damage was done. Businesses had been destroyed, whites fled the city even faster than before, and Detroit would never be the same.

 

****

 

There is no doubt that Detroit is not a city without serious problems. Yet, in order to understand these problems, one must learn a few characteristics about the city. For starters, Detroit is one of the largest cities in the country – in actual size. At 142 square miles, Detroit is larger than several other major American including San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta. It is split into three distinct sections: the East Side, the West Side, and Downtown. The East Side is the oldest part of the city. It is also considered the poorer side of the city due to it being home to some of the cheapest housing is in the city.  The West Side was created after the boom of the auto industry, and has a reputation for being wealthier, due to the presence of higher end neighborhoods.  These two sections are divided by Detroit’s main street, Woodward, which starts at the center of Downtown. Downtown is about what you would expect from most major midwestern cities – several tall buildings stretching into the sky, hip restaurants every few blocks, and major sport arenas within miles of each other. Currently it is the most populated area of the city.  Yet, aside from size of buildings and the amount of people living there, all three parts of the city have suffered.

 

While the city is large in actual size, its population is a different story. If there is one thing that I witnessed while living in Detroit is the effect of what happens once the population of a city as large as Detroit disappears. While there was a time when Detroit had over 2 million people, but now it is roughly over 668,700. The riots caused many residents to leave and few saw any reason to come back. You will be surprised what happens when a major city’s population steadily becomes that small.  For one, the amount of blight in the city increases. When people move and there is no one to take their place, houses simply become abandoned. There are certain areas in every part of the city that could be taken for scenes from a zombie apocalypse movie. It is hard to go down a few blocks without seeing at least one abandoned, dilapidated house with a backyard that is so overgrown that the grass is as tall as a small child.

 

Population size also affects services such as schools. Detroit Public Schools is one of the poorest school districts in the country. If you weren’t able to tell from the fact that many public schools exist in old buildings that could have easily served as bomb shelters in the 1940s, all you have to do is look inside most of them to see that there is a money problem. Classrooms are overcrowded, teachers don’t have the resources, and the schools are lagging behind technology wise.  As the population decreased, schools received less funding from property taxes. As the schools got worse, more parents began to withdraw their students from the district. With fewer students, the schools continued to worsen. By the time everything was said and done, the school district was broke, and most people had little desire to put their child in the school system. Although magnet schools providing higher quality education exist, the district has some of the worst schools in the country.  As schools have always been one of the most important contributing factors to determining if a growing family will live in an area or not, a failing school district offered little incentive for parents to bring their children back to the city if they could avoid it.

However, population is not the largest issue that Detroit has to deal with. For years, Detroit has been among the most violent cities in the country; at times it was number one.  No one in the city will deny that the city has had an issue with crime. My parents were raised with that in mind, and have lived their whole lives that way. Every rule they imposed on me while I was growing up was a method of survival. Either the rule was to prevent me from being the victim of a crime, or accused of committing one.

 

“If you are out and about with your friends, don’t wear anything that looks expensive,” my dad would say. “You never know when someone might try to hurt you for your clothes.”

“ It’s kind of dark to take the trash outside,” my mom always warned. “Make sure Dad is watching you take it out, or do it in the morning.”

 

“When you go into the store, always grab a cart, and don’t grab stuff and walk around with it,” Dad would tell me when we entered our local Target. “You don’t want anyone to think you are stealing.”

“I do not want anyone I don’t know in this house,” my mom would say when I wanted to bring friends over in high school. “Unless I talk to their parents, it isn’t going to happen. They could end up telling someone about what we have, and then they might try to break into the house.”

 

Although sometimes I questioned their rules, I can’t blame them for their worries. My dad grew up in constant fear that someone was going to rob him, as he had seen it happen to his friends on different occasions walking to school. During the 1980s, my mom saw her older sister get stuck up with a gun directly in front of her house. My dad had a police officer draw his gun on him for being accused of something he didn’t do. Someone broke into my mother’s childhood house while her little sister was at home, and they all had a pretty good idea of who it was. These situations have left my family a tad more paranoid than many other people that I knew. Witnessing crimes first hand will do that to a person.  

 

Despite all of this, my parents chose to stay.  Although they lived in different places during and after college, they still decided that Detroit was the place they wanted to raise me. Their thought process has always made sense to me though. Detroit is where their family is; it’s a city that they knew better than some suburb. Not to mention, as long as I got into one of the magnet high schools, I was going to receive at least a somewhat decent education.  Aside from having to take extra precautions now and then, I cannot say that my upbringing was made any worse in Detroit then it would have been in any other place.

 

****

 

Living in Detroit has taught me something that I do not know I would have learned anywhere else – regardless of the bad, you always have to see the good inside of situations.  This mindset is necessary when you live in a place that people say is unlivable. Luckily, there is plenty of good left in the city. In the past few years, millennials began to move into the city, and services are improving. The city not only successfully negotiated its way out of bankruptcy, but after years of corrupt officials, there is a mayor, police chief, and city council that cares about this city instead of just themselves.   But aside from this, to truly see the good in the city, all you have to do is look at the communities and the people that live there.

 

I saw this first hand while I was in high school. In the area of the city where I lived, there was a community baseball league. I joined it my freshman year, and it opened my eyes to how good that people in the city could be. It starts by everyone pitching in on a chilly day in March to help clean up a whole fall’s worth of leaves from the fields. Neighbors bring rakes, shovels, bags, and whatever else they might have to help clean. For the majority of the day old friends are catching up, while new players get to know one another. Thanks to all of their work, at the end of the day, the baseball fields go from looking like swampland to sparkling fields ready to play. Once the season starts, every game people came together to cheer on their families, their friends, and to simply hang out. By the time my first season came to an end, I saw neighbors who didn’t know each other begin to look out for one another. During the season ending All-Star game, everyone, from the players to the parents to the coaches, was happy and joking around, already debating which teams were going to be the strongest next season.

 

A few years later, the mother of my teammate, Shane, passed away.  She had served as a coach in the league, and everyone loved talking to her. At her funeral, one of the coaches from an opposing team came to the podium.  A tall, dark skinned man with a shaved head, he was considered toughest coach in the league, but here, he couldn’t hide his emotions.

 

“Shane, we all loved your mother,” he started to say as tears formed in his eyes. “She was kind to everyone, and did an excellent job raising you. And I know that there is nothing that any of us could say that could say to make this loss feel any better. But I’m here to let you know that you aren’t alone. Could each person that is involved with the Rosedale Park community, please stand up.”

 

Slowly, almost like every person in the church stood up in solidarity. 

 

“Every person standing up right now has your back Shane. We are here for you whenever you need us, and we always will be.”

 

It was unlike any event I had seen before, and I knew that every word he had said was true. My experiences in this league showed me how good that people in Detroit could be.

 

It’s reasons like I am proud to be from Detroit. Although we live somewhere where blight surrounds us every day, and crime is always a constant threat, we Detroiters stand by each other when situations become hard. This is also why I loathe hearing when people who are from the suburbs claim “they are from Detroit.” By doing this, they are claiming that they experienced something they did not, while ignoring the damage that they have caused by living where they actually live. They are outsiders. They do not know the struggle of actually living within the city’s boundaries. They do not truly know what its like to live under the constant threat of violence and crime. The definitely do not know our strength.

 

 I have no problem with people moving back into the city.  As I said before, a city this large with a population this small is a problem. Their presence has started a sudden revival in interest in the city among outsiders and suburbanites. As the city improves, the population is going to grow as well. However, these new Detroiters are not the same as the old ones. They still don’t know the city the way I do. They will never understand what it was like to live there before things improved. In all honesty, they will have to live there a lot longer for them to say that they know real Detroit. 

 

Meanwhile, my family will continue to live in the city. No one has any plans of moving anytime soon. We have been there for generations, and regardless of its flaws, we will always be proud to say that Detroit is our home.