Today marks eight years since the beginning of the ongoing Flint water contamination crisis. The following is an excerpt from Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit by Josiah Rector, officially on sale tomorrow wherever ebooks and books are sold. Between 2014 and 2019, the City of Detroit shut off water for over 141,000 residential accounts, denying more than… Continue Reading Detroit and Toxic Debt
The following is an excerpt from Edward Onaci’s Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. On March 31, 1968, over 500 Black nationalists convened in Detroit to begin the process of securing independence from the United States. Many concluded that Black Americans’ best remaining hope for liberation was the creation of a… Continue Reading Birth of the New Afrikan Independence Movement: A Historical Overview
As you may already now, February is Black History Month. The history of black people should be celebrated at all times, but in February, we shine an extra special light on it. Black History Month began as Negro History Week in February 1926, created by historian Carter G. Woodson. In 1976, the celebration was expanded to a month. We’ll be… Continue Reading Black History Month 2022 Reading List: Black Resistance
In the end, it was the federal government that made the difference between bankruptcy and [Detroit] emerging out of the crisis, as Murphy put it, with credit and honor. Throughout the crisis, Murphy practiced his belief that government’s primary responsibility was to serve the social and economic welfare of people, whose basic needs must not be subordinated to corporate America’s agenda. Continue Reading Beth Tompkins Bates: What Happened the Last Time Detroit Faced Bankruptcy
Will a new Detroit rise out of the ashes of its current crisis? Some cannot imagine the city Forbes recently picked as the nation’s most miserable can reinvent itself. Others place their hopes in the rise of small businesses, including urban farms, manufacturing urban bicycles, hand-made jeans, and even luxury watches. Although new startups have, so far, created only a few hundred jobs, they represent economic diversification, which may prove significant for creating a viable new Detroit after depending on one industry to anchor the community’s welfare for a century.
This is not the first time Detroit has been reinvented. In the early twentieth century the City Council was reorganized and the judicial system was transformed when an autocratic structure that denied the majority access to due process was overturned. The issue of judicial reorganization emerged as the city’s industrial elite attempted to seize control of the courts. It was the last in a series of maneuvers created and led by Henry Ford to regulate and manage the lives of Detroit’s demographically diverse autoworkers. Continue Reading Beth Tompkins Bates: Will a New Detroit Rise out of the Depths of Despair and Hopelessness?
Murphy attacked the tight-fisted policy of Ford Motor Company (FMC) and its indifference toward unemployed workers. Henry Ford publicly maintained he would never cut wages or jobs, even as he proceeded to do both. Employment at the largest facility of FMC in Dearborn, just outside Detroit, fell nearly 50 percent between 1929 and 1932. But the overwhelming majority of laid-off Ford workers resided in Detroit, raising the question, who bore responsibility for assisting them? Continue Reading Beth Tompkins Bates: What is Society’s Obligation to Those in Distress?
To address the human element of production, Ford introduced his Five Dollar Day, Ford Profit-Sharing Plan. When the plan was unveiled in 1914, the world was stunned. Qualified Ford workers would receive five dollars a day, more than double the average wage in the auto industry at that time. When compared to lower prevailing wages in other industries such as steel, meatpacking, or coal mining, the Ford proposal was even more astounding. Simultaneously, FMC reduced the workday from nine hours to eight. Continue Reading Beth Tompkins Bates: The High Road to Economic Prosperity
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