Majority-Black Detroit Matters
There is a new sign about town sparking a lot of controversy. In bold white letters on a black background, it proclaims “Majority-Black Detroit Matters.” For some this simple statement captures the growing concern that we are not only becoming two Detroits, but increasingly a Detroit dominated by and for white elites.
Much of the power structure dismisses these concerns about the white invasion of our city as paranoia. The current administration and their corporate supporters proclaim the increasingly whiter, wealthier population growth as the only path for development. A large part of the Detroit “Come Back” is the coming back into the city of people of white suburbanites.
“Majority-Black Detroit Matters” interrupts this thinking. It forces us to ask what kind of development matters? At whose expense? For whose benefit? For what reasons?
Such questioning about the direction of our city is essential. Detroit has the opportunity to demonstrate to ourselves and the country that it is possible to create entirely new ways of living in urban areas. We have the potential of being a self-sufficient city, reflecting new relationships with one another and with the earth that sustains us.
Signs of this new kind of urban life are everywhere in the neighborhoods. Urban gardens flourish to feed neighbors, elders open garages to share skills and develop art with children, and storytellers find bicycles to roam neighborhoods and evoke memory and enduring values. Creativity and critical thinking abound.
Most of this energy is unseen and undocumented by mainstream media, but increasingly people are coming to understand that these ways of surviving and thriving at the neighborhood level hold the best hope for our future.
With this new energy comes a resurgence of African American political power. And that is what the corporate power structure finds so threatening in the statement Majority-Black Detroit Matters.
In the spring of 1966, James Boggs published, “The City is the Black Man’s Land” in Monthly Review. He said:
Population experts predict that by 1970 Afro-Americans will constitute the majority in fifty of the nation’s largest cities. In Washington, D.C., and Newark, N.J., Afro-Americans are already a majority. In Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and St. Louis they are one-third or more of the population and in a number of others-Chicago, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Oakland they constitute well over one-fourth.
James Boggs went on to say these changes mean a new form of Black power. He wrote:
In accordance with the general philosophy of majority rule and the specific American tradition of ethnic groupings (Irish, Polish, Italian) migrating en masse to the big cities and then taking over the leadership of the municipal government, black Americans are next in line. Each previous ethnic grouping achieved first-class citizenship chiefly because its leaders became the cities’ leaders, but racism is so deeply embedded in the American psyche from top to bottom, and from Right to Left, that it cannot even entertain the idea of black political power in the cities. The white power structure, which includes organized labor, resorts to every conceivable strategy to keep itself in power and the black man out: urban renewal or Negro removal; reorganization of local government on a metropolitan area basis; population (birth) control. Meanwhile, since their “taxation without representation” is so flagrant, safe Negroes are appointed to administrative posts or hand-picked to run for elective office.
Over the next 40 years that white power structure struggled to reassert its political power in the urban centers of this land. By 2010 only 19 cities had majority black populations, and most of them are experiencing intense efforts at redevelopment. Detroit is the number one majority city, followed by Jackson, Mississippi.
The loss of African American political power in urban areas is no accident. The policies and processes to reassert white political power have been well documented.
We welcome Majority-Black Detroit Matters. It is a step in opening a critical conversation for all of us.