Dispossessed (Paperback) | Released: 19 Feb 2017

A 2018 MICHIGAN STATE LIBRARY NOTABLE BOOK NOMINEEThe deconstruction and death of a great city: In 1920, Detroit was a bustling city of almost a million people. Also the most technologically advanced and fastest growing city on the entire planet at the time. All thanks to the auto assembly line that had been invented there and had made the city a boom town ever since Henry Ford rolled out that first Model T in 1908. A city with the brightest of futures everyone agreed.By 1950, Detroit was known as Motor City, and was one the main engines driving American prosperity, the population had swelled to two million and Detroit still had the brightest future in America. But problems were already setting in. Unemployed blacks who began fleeing poverty of the Deep South in the thirties were arriving in larger and larger numbers through the forties and fifties. Even the success of the auto-making sector and all the spin-off industries that it created around Greater Detroit couldn't provide enough jobs for everyone arriving. Migration into the city was a slow-burning fuse. GIs ―both black and white―who had returned from WWII did not want to fight again for jobs on the lines. Nor did other blacks or whites already living in the city and lucky enough already to have jobs with the Big Three: Ford, GM, and Chrysler. So many new arrivals faced limited job prospects and simply gave up and went on the welfare rolls and on the hustle to survive. By the early 1960s, Motor City had become known as Motown, rising quickly as one of the new music capitals of the world. But the city was also slipping into a place of Darwinian struggle-survival of the fittest and the most desperate: too many still fighting for too few jobs available. But by the mid '60s bitterness and racial tensions had set in. Not just tensions between blacks and the still almost all-white police force, but just as much between blacks and blacks. Downtown Detroit began to empty of white people entirely as they fled by the thousands to the suburbs and the small towns outside the city, which left blacks to war with each other for very a very small patch of downtown turf black people came to know as Blackbottom. The city core was spinning out of control and Detroit was eventually overtaken by a mindless kind of violence never before seen in America. Daily attacks seemingly for no reason. Violence for the sake of striking out at someone. Anyone. I came to be that no one was safe downtown any more.By 1967 the city had earned an entirely new and sickening epithet: Murder City USA. The highest murder rate in America for many years in a row by then. A once great city with a once shining future turned into a disheartening soul-crushing urban hellscape. The people who lived there, feeling trapped and with no way out, could see and feel the city unraveling and that it had caused ordinary peaceful people to turn on each other. Black people of downtown Detroit knew they were living in a powder keg. Then, in the small hours of a searing Saturday night in July of that year, it blew. For four days Detroit was filled with gunfire and looting as the city burned. More a Vietnam battle zone than a once-great American inner city. When it was over, forty-three were dead, many hundreds were injured, and more than fourteen hundred homes, buildings, and businesses were burned and leveled. Much of the area around 12th Street was a burned-out smoldering ruins, the area black people knew as Blackbottom, the heart and soul of old black Detroit, died in those four days. Many had seen the trouble coming. Had lived with it with a growing sense of anxiety, unease, and dread as they saw where their city was headed. Saw the fuse burning. One of those who grew up there and saw it coming was my good friend Spider Jones. He was there that fateful night when the bottle smashed against the wall at 2:00 a.m. and he was sprayed with glass shards. And so it began.