hippo eats dwarf.

bbook:

It’s an exaggeration to say that things have never been bleaker in Detroit. After all, this is a city founded in 1701 that literally burned to the ground 104 years later. From those ashes, Detroit rose as the city that put America on wheels at the start of the 20th century and epitomized the industrial muscle and mojo that beat back fascism mid-century. Despite the undercurrents of that rise—the epic battles of labor vs. capital, the bloody race riot of ’43—Detroit’s image as the arsenal of democracy dominated the American imagination for years. Even into the 1960s, the image of an indomitable (if conflicted) metropolis persisted. Never mind that capital was already fleeing, factories closing, new highways accommodating a white exodus to burgeoning and segregated suburbs like Bloomfield Hills and Troy. Motor City, as it was then called, continued to gain speed.

In the 1960s, as the plight of cities—made poorer and blacker by The Great Migration from the South—erupted, it seemed that Detroit could be a model where Martin Luther King, Jr.-style civil rights and Kennedy-Johnson liberalism could march forward accompanied by a raw soundtrack from Berry Gordy’s Motown Records, marketed as the Sound of Young America.

What happened next—and what’s happened until now—can be encapsulated in two songs.

Detroit Will Never Come Back…Or Will It