Over at Salon, Carolyn Edgar recalls a Detroit not often considered, when the city's black middle-class was at its peak.
Salon: I grew up in the Detroit that the common narrative gives up for dead – Detroit as it existed after the 1967 riots, white flight, and the end of auto manufacturing jobs. The Detroit of my childhood was a city of more than one million people who thrived, for a time, despite being reviled by our suburban neighbors and given up for dead by the national media.
My parents were born in Mississippi, raised on farms that were owned by their families for generations. Their families left the South not because of Jim Crow, but because subsisting on the income generated by a small farm was impossible. My father worked as a spray booth attendant in Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant for nearly 40 years before he retired in the early 80s. He was fortunate to retire with a full pension and benefits. Those union-won medical benefits came in handy as he faced post-retirement medical problems. Years of breathing in paint fumes and asbestos at the plant likely aided in cutting his life short at age 71.
The eight of us – my parents and their six children – lived in a house on Detroit’s northwest side that my father bought from his mother. Ours was a neighborhood of working-class families. Most of the fathers – and a few of the mothers — worked for the Big 3 in some capacity. Factory jobs made up the largest share of private sector employment for people who, like my parents, had at most a high school education. Most of our neighbors were married couples with children. Many of the fathers had served in the armed forces, like my dad; most of the mothers, like my mother, were part- or full-time stay-at-home-moms. Black middle-class Detroiters weren’t just “like” America – we were America.
