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The Rise and Fall of Detroit: Motor City History for Sleep (1900–2013) | Rain Sounds · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Sleepless History.
• 0:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to travel to a city on a river, a city that sits at the narrow waist of water between two great lakes, a city that looks south across that river into Canada.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to spend a long, unhurried evening with Detroit, Michigan, and we are going to follow it through more than a century of change, from the year 1900 to the year 2013.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story of engines and assembly lines, of factory whistles and street cars, of families who packed their belongings into suitcases and rode north on the trains, hoping for something better.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story of great wealth and deep hardship of music drifting out of small houses on grand boulevard's of summers when the city boiled over and of long slow decades when the factories grew quiet.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the neighborhoods emptied out.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And finally, it is the story of a courtroom, a set of accounts that no longer balanced and a city that had to reckon with everything that had come before.
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we begin, if you enjoy these long, quiet journeys through history,
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would be grateful if you would consider subscribing to or following the channel.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you feel like it, leave a comment and let me know where in the world you are listening from tonight.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or what story you would like to fall asleep to next, it truly helps the show and I read every one of them.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, before we begin tonight's story, I wanted to say that sleepless history is independent with no network behind it, just careful research and quiet evenings.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine,
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can support the show on Patreon, linked in the show notes, early access, add free listening and your favorite episodes with different or no background audio are waiting for you there.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if that's not for you right now, that's okay, simply commenting or following the show helps just as much.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you all so much.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate each and every one of you listening.
• 2:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, let us settle in and let us go back to the very beginning of the 20th century to a mid-sized city on the Detroit River where something new was beginning to rattle and cough its way into the
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: chapter one, the Motor City rises.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the year 1900 Detroit was a pleasant prosperous and fairly ordinary American city.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was home to roughly 285,000 people, which made it the 13th largest city in the United States.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not a small place, but it was not a giant either.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Visitors often remarked on its wide, tree-lined avenues, and its tidy neighbourhoods of wooden houses with deep porches.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some called it the Paris of the West.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: a nickname that had to do with the way it's Main Street spread outward from the centre, like the spokes of a wheel.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: That wheel-shaped plan had its own history.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Detroit had been founded in 1701 by a French officer named Antoine Delamoath Cadillac, who built a small fort on the river bank
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: For a century, it was a modest frontier settlement, changing hands from the French to the British and finally to the Americans.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, in 1805, a fire swept through the town and burned nearly all of it to the ground.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the aftermath,
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: A judge named Augustus Woodward drew up a new street plan inspired by the design of Washington with grand avenues radiating from circular plazas.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Only parts of that plan were ever built, but its bones remained.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the greatest of those avenues still carries the judge's name.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Woodward Avenue runs straight out from the river, northwest, through the heart of the city and on toward the farmland beyond.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: by 1900 Detroit made many things.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was known above all for stoves.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cast iron cooking stoves and heating stoves poured out of its foundries by the hundreds of thousands.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for a time.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city proudly called itself the stove capital of the world.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It built railroad cars.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It rolled cigars, it brewed beer, it made paint and varnish and pharmaceuticals.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It shipyards turned out freighters for the great lakes and its carriage makers built buggies.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: and wagons for farmers and merchants across the Midwest.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had skilled machinists, experienced foundry men, woodworkers, and metal finishes.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had money in its banks from lumber and copper and shipping, and it had the river.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: which carried iron ore and coal and lumber past its docks every day of the shipping season.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of these things mattered because they meant that when a new kind of machine came along, a machine that needed engines and castings and bodies and wheels, Detroit already had nearly everything required to build it.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first automobile to travel the streets of Detroit rolled out in March of 1896, driven by an engineer named Charles Brady King.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: A few months later, in June of that same year, a young engineer who worked for the Edison Illuminating Company finished a small light vehicle in a brick shed behind his rented house on Bagley Avenue.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He called it the Quadricycle.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had four bicycle wheels, a two-cylinder engine, and a seat that looked like it belonged on a buggy.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: When he finished it, he discovered that it was too wide to fit through the door of the shed, and so he took an axe to the brick wall to make an opening.
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, in the rainy darkness of the early morning, he drove it out onto the street.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: That young engineer was Henry Ford.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was 32 years old, the son of a farmer from the township of Dearborn, just west of the city.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had always been more interested in machines than in plowing fields, and he had a quiet stubborn determination that would carry him through a number of early failures, and there were failures.
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It built only a handful of vehicles, most of them delivery wagons, and it closed within about two years.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then came the Henry Ford Company, formed in 1901, Ford quarreled with his backers and left within months.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The investors brought in a careful, precise, grey-bearded machinist named Henry Leeland to evaluate the factory and Leeland advised them to keep going.
• 7:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They renamed the company after the city's founder.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It became the Cadillac automobile company and under Leeland's direction it became famous for precision.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1908, in a demonstration in England, three Cadillacs were taken completely apart.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their parts mixed together in a heap, and then reassembled into three working cars that were driven away.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a small spectacle, but it proved something important.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The parts were truly interchangeable.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: A part made for one car would fit any other car of the same kind.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That idea would turn out to be one of the foundations of everything that followed.
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, another pioneer had already shown that people would buy automobiles in real numbers.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ransom Eli Ols had built his first cars in Lansing, the state capital, and in 1899 he moved his company to Detroit and built a factory on East Jefferson Avenue near the bridge to Belle Isle.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: In March of 1901, that factory caught fire and burned, according to the story that was told for decades afterward.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: A single prototype was rolled out of the flames.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A small, light runabout with a curved front that swept up like the toe of a slain.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether or not every detail of that story is true, the curved dash-old's mobile became the first American automobile to be produced in large quantities.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1901, the company sold several hundred of them.
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within a few years, it was selling thousands.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: To keep up with demand, old-bought engines and transmissions and other parts from machine shops all over Detroit, and in doing so, he helped create the web of suppliers that would make the city the natural home of the industry.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were skilled machinists who ran a busy shop, and they were known for their tempers as much as for their workmanship.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: They built transmissions for olds, and before long, they would build nearly the entire running gear for a new company that Henry Ford was starting.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: That company was the Ford Motor Company, incorporated in June of 1903.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its backers included a cold dealer named Alexander Malcolmson, and its business manager was a sharp, serious, tireless man named James Cousins, who would do as much as anyone to turn forwards mechanical ideas into a profitable enterprise.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first factory was a small rented building on Mac Avenue.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Workers there assembled cars from parts delivered by the Dodge brothers and others, and the company turned a profit within months.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1904, Ford moved into a larger building on Piquette Avenue, a long, three-story brick factory with rows of tall windows.
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was there in a small room on the third floor that Henry Ford and a handful of his engineers designed the car that would change the country.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: They worked on it for months, with Ford sitting in an old rocking chair that had belonged to his mother.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: watching and suggesting and revising.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Model T was introduced in October of 1908.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not beautiful.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was tall and plain and high off the ground so that it could handle the rated dirt roads that covered most of rural America.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It used a strong, light steel alloy containing
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its planetary transmission was operated with foot pedals, which took some getting used to, but which almost anyone could learn.
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It came to be called the Tin Lizzy, and farmers used it not only to drive to town, but also to run soars and pump water and churn butter.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: jacking up a rear wheel and fastening a belt around it.
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: At first, the Model T cost $850, which was a good deal less than many other cars but still a large sum for an ordinary family.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Henry Ford had a clear goal.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to build a car so inexpensive that the men who built it could afford to own one.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: To reach that goal, he needed to make cars faster and in greater numbers
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1910 Ford opened an enormous new factory in Highland Park, a small town just north of Detroit that would soon be entirely surrounded by the growing city.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plant was designed by the architect Albert Khan, who had already built a remarkable factory for the Packard Motorcar Company on the east side of Detroit using reinforced concrete.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cannes buildings were long and open and full of light.
• 13:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: With wide spans supported by concrete columns and walls, made almost entirely of glass.
• 13:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: People called the Highland Park plant.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: the crystal palace.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside, the machinery was arranged not by type, but in the order in which each operation was performed so that parts moved in a steady flow from one station to the next.
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the next few years, Ford's engineers experimented with ways to make that flow continuous.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They looked at the way flower mills moved grain, the way breweries moved barrels, and the way the great meat packing houses of Chicago moved carcasses along overhead chains.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: With each worker performing a single cut as the line went by.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 1913, they tried the idea on the assembly of a small part called the Flywheel Magneto.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The work was divided into small steps, and the part was passed along a waste-high line from worker to worker.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The time it took to build one magneto fell dramatically.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: They applied the same principle to engines, to transmissions, and at last to the chassis of the car itself.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the autumn of 1913,
• 14:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: They began pulling car frames along the floor with a rope and a windless while workers walked alongside adding parts.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soon the rope was replaced with a powered chain and the workers stayed in place while the cars came to them.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The time needed to assemble a single chassis, fell from around 12 and a half hours to about an hour and a half.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: before long, it fell further still.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The moving assembly line was one of the most consequential inventions of the 20th century.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It made the Model T cheaper and cheaper, until by the middle of the 1920s, a new one could be bought for under $300.
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It filled the roads of America with automobiles, and it changed completely and permanently
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the line, a worker no longer built anything home.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He tightened the same few bolts or fitted the same part, hundreds of times each day.
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: at a pace set not by himself but by the speed of the chain.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The work was physically exhausting and mentally numbing.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The foreman was strict, the rules were many and the noise was constant.
• 15:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many men simply could not stand it.
• 15:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would work for a few days or a few weeks and then they would walk out and not come back.
• 15:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1913, the rate at which workers quit and had to be replaced at Ford reached a staggering level.
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: To keep a workforce of around 14,000 people, the company had to hire more than 50,000 over the course of the year.
• 16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every new worker had to be found, hired and trained, and every departure slowed the line.
• 16:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ford and Cousins came to see that high turnover was costing the company a great deal of money.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their solution was announced on 5th January 1914.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ford Motor Company would pay its workers $5 for an 8-hour day.
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the time, the usual wage in the industry was a little over $2 for a 9-hour day.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The new pay was in effect more than double.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, the company would switch from two nine-hour shifts to three eight-hour shifts, so that the plant could run around the clock.
• 16:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: the news traveled around the world within days.
• 16:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers called it a revolution in industry.
• 17:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some businessmen called it Madness, or worse, and predicted that it would ruin the company and unsettle every other employer in the country.
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the cold of that Michigan January, thousands upon thousands of men began to gather outside the gates of the Highland Park plant, hoping to be hired.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: the crowds grew for days, men arrived from across Detroit from the surrounding towns and from farther away.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of the 12th of January, the crowd outside the gates was estimated at more than 10,000 people.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the men pressed forward and a disturbance broke out, the company turned fire hoses on the
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the bitter cold, the water froze on their coats.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a harsh and strange beginning to what was meant to be a generous policy.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The $5 day was also not quite as simple as it sounded.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Technically, it was made up of a regular wage plus a share of the company's profits.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that profit share was only available to workers who met certain conditions.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: A worker generally had to have been with the company for six months.
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He usually had to be at least 22 years old, unless he was supporting a family.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he had to live in a way that the company considered proper, clean, sober and thrifty.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: To check on this,
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ford created what it called the sociological department.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It employed investigators who visited workers at their homes.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: They asked about savings accounts and household budgets.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: They looked at the cleanliness of the rooms.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They asked whether the worker drank, whether he took in borders, whether his marriage was in order.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Workers who did not meet the standards could lose their profit share until they changed their habits.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: many workers resented these visits.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Others accepted them as the price of an extraordinary wage.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The company also ran an English school for its many immigrant workers.
• 19:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: men from dozens of countries learn to read and speak English and they learn lessons about American customs and American work habits.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the graduation ceremonies, the students were said to file into a large prop shaped like a great cooking pot, labeled as a melting pot.
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They entered wearing the clothing of their home lands and emerged on the other side dressed in American suits, waving small flags.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a vivid piece of theatre and it captured the spirit of the age with all of its optimism and all of its insistence on conformity.
• 19:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever its complications, the $5 day worked as intended, turn over dropped sharply, productivity rose, and the promise of high wages drew workers to Detroit in astonishing numbers.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other automakers were eventually forced to raise their own wages to compete.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Detroit became known around the world as a place where a man with strong arms and a willingness to work could earn a good living.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other companies were growing alongside Ford.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1908, a restless businessman named William Durant, who had made his fortune building carriages in the nearby city of Flint, formed general motors.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He gathered together Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and eventually many other firms, buying companies as quickly as he could raise the money.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Durant was a brilliant promoter and an unsteady manager, and
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: but General Motors grew into a giant, and in the early 1920s, it built a vast headquarters on West Grand Boulevard, north of downtown, a building so large that for a time it was one of the largest office buildings in the world.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Dodge Brothers, who had grown wealthy supplying Ford, began building cars of their own.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: under their own name, in 1914, in a huge factory in Hamtrak, another small town that the growing city would soon surround.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Packed, built luxury cars on the east side, Hudson built cars on the east side as well.
• 21:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1925, a former railroad mechanic named Walter Chrysler,
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: founded the Chrysler Corporation, and a few years later he purchased the Dodge Company, creating the third of what would come to be called the Big Three.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Around these companies grew hundreds of smaller firms that made bodies, wheels, glass, springs, bearings, a poultry, paint, and every other piece of a finished automobile.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Fisher Brothers,
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: built car bodies in such quantities that their company became one of the most important parts of general motors.
• 22:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city's machine shops multiplied, its rail yards grew, its skyline began to rise.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Henry Ford, meanwhile, had begun work on something even larger than Highland Park.
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Along the Rouge River in Dearborn, on land he had bought during the first
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: He began building a manufacturing complex that was meant to take in raw materials at one end and send out finished automobiles at the other.
• 22:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ships would arrive carrying iron ore from the mines of northern Minnesota and Michigan.
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Blast furnaces would turn that ore into iron.
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Steel mills, glass plants, foundries, stamping plants, and assembly buildings.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: would stand side by side, connected by miles of railroad track and conveyor belts.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the war, the site built submarine chases called Eagle Boats for the Navy.
• 23:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Afterward, it grew and grew.
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Until by the late 1920s, it was the largest industrial complex in the world,
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Visitors came from every corner of the globe just to walk its catwalks and watch it work.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Rouge became a symbol of the age and so did Henry Ford himself.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the 1920s he was one of the most famous men on earth admired by millions as a practical genius and a friend of the common worker.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he was also a difficult, suspicious, and increasingly
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He fought with his own stockholders, including the Dodge Brothers, who took him to court to force him to pay dividends.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: he eventually bought out all of his outside shareholders, so that the Ford family owned the company outright.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He clung to the Model T long after its competitors, had moved ahead with newer styles and more comfortable features.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Finally, in 1927, he stopped production of the old car and shut down his plants for months to retool for a new one, the Model A.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time the last Model T rolled off the line,
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than 15 million of them had been built.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: He also used his newspaper The Dearborn Independent to publish a long series of anti-Semitic articles in the early 1920s.
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: a dark episode that would stain his reputation permanently and that he later issued a public apology for under legal pressure in 1927.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout all of this, Detroit grew at a pace that is difficult to imagine.
• 25:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1910, the city's population was around 465,000.
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1920, it had more than doubled to nearly 1 million.
• 25:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1930, it had reached more than 1.5 million people, making Detroit the fourth largest city in the United States.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The newcomers came from everywhere.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: They came from Poland and Italy, from Hungary and Greece, from Lebanon and Syria, from Russia and Germany and Ireland and Malta.
• 25:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The small town of Hamtramik built up around the Dodge plant filled with Polish families, their church spires rising above rows of narrow houses.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: White families came in great numbers from the farms and mountain hollows of Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, bringing their music and their churches with them, and Black families came from the cities and farms of the American South, in a movement that would reshape Detroit as deeply as the automobile itself.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will follow their story closely in the next chapter.
• 26:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: To house all these people, builders put up tens of thousands of small, sturdy homes.
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them simple wooden houses set close together on narrow lots, with a porch in front and a garden or a garage in back.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city expanded outward mile after mile, swallowing farmland and orchards, street car lines stretched along the major avenues.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The wealth of the automobile age rose upward in stone and steel.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the late 1920s, a remarkable cluster of skyscrapers appeared.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Penop Scott building, the book tower, and the fuel building rose over the financial district.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Guardian building,
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: completed in 1929, was sheaved in bright orange brick and filled inside with colourful tile and mosaics, so richly decorated that people called it a cathedral of finance.
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Up on West Grand Boulevard, across from general motors, the Fisher Brothers built the Fisher Building, a tower of marble and granite with a gold leafed roof.
• 27:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's lobby painted
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1929, the Ambassador Bridge opened across the Detroit River, linking the city to Windsor Ontario, on the Canadian shore.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next year, a tunnel was completed beneath the river as well.
• 27:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Detroit had become a great city in every sense.
• 27:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: a city of engines and ambition and restless growth, and then in the autumn of 1929 the stock market collapsed and the long boom came to an end.
• 28:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter two, Arrivals and Borders
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let us step back now a few years before the crash and go down to the train station.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: In December of 1913, a grand new railroad station opened a short distance west of downtown Detroit.
• 28:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Michigan's central station was built in the Boart style, with a great waiting room modeled on the bars of ancient Rome.
• 28:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's vaulted ceilings rising high overhead.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: and behind it, an office tower of more than a dozen stories.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: For many thousands of people over the coming decades, this station would be their first site of Detroit.
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: They stepped off long distance trains carrying suitcases and bundles.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: and some of them had come a very long way.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Among those passengers in growing numbers were black southerners.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: They came from Alabama and Georgia, from Mississippi and Tennessee, from the Carolinas and Arkansas.
• 29:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were taking part in what historians call the Great Migration, a movement
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: that would ultimately carry around 6 million black Americans out of the rural south to the cities of the north and west over the course of the 20th century.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were many reasons to leave.
• 29:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the south, Black families lived under the laws and customs of Jim Crow, a system of segregation that kept them out of good schools, out of the voting booth, and out of most well-paying work.
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many were sharecroppers, farming land that belonged to someone else, and staying perpetually in debt to the landowner.
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1910s, a small beetle called the bowl weevil spread across the cotton fields of the south, destroying crops and making a hard life harder still, and there were reasons to come north.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the First World War began in Europe in 1914, the stream of immigrants crossing the Atlantic slowed to a trickle.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, factories in the north needed more workers than ever.
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Labor agents travelled south to recruit.
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black newspapers, especially the Chicago Defender, carried stories of good wages and greater freedom in the north, and Paulman Porter's quietly distributed those newspapers along the railway lines.
• 30:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Letters from relatives who'd already gone north were passed from hand to hand and read aloud in churches and kitchens.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1910 Detroit had fewer than 6,000 black residents.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1930, it had around 120,000.
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The $5 day was a powerful draw, and Ford Motor Company became, for a time, one of the largest employers of black workers in the country.
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Henry Ford's reasons were complicated.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did hire black workers in large numbers, and in some cases he placed them in skilled positions that were closed to them elsewhere.
• 31:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But much of the work opened to black men at Ford was in the foundry, the hottest, dirtiest, and most dangerous part of the plant, where molten iron was poured into molds.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the air was thick with smoke and dust.
• 31:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ford also developed close relationships with a few prominent black ministers, including the Reverend Robert Bradby of Second Baptist Church, one of the oldest black congregations in the city, and farther ever our Daniel of St. Matthew's Episcopal Church.
• 31:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Men who came, recommended by these ministers, were more likely to be hired.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: In return, the company expected loyalty, and in later years that loyalty would be tested when the unions came.
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The newcomers found work, but finding a place to live was another matter entirely.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most Detroiters did not want black neighbours, and the city's real estate agents, landlords,
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: To keep black families confined to a small number of neighbourhoods, Deeds on many houses included restrictive covenants, legal clauses forbidding the sale of the property to black buyers.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Real estate agents refuse to show homes in white areas, banks refuse loans.
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when those barriers failed, white residents sometimes turn to intimidation and violence.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: As a result, the great majority of Black Detroiters in the 1920s lived on the lower East side in a neighborhood called Black Bottom.
• 33:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The name came from the rich, dark soil that early French settlers had farmed there long before, but by the 1920s, it had come to describe the people who lived there.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just to the north was a commercial and entertainment district called Paradise Valley.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: the main street running through both was Hastings Street.
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black Bottom was crowded.
• 33:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of its houses were old wooden structures.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of them built in the previous century.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: and landlords knew that their tenants had few other choices, so rents were high and repairs were few.
• 33:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Families took in borders to make ends meet, and it was not unusual to find several families sharing a single house.
• 33:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Health problems spread easily in such conditions.
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: and yet black bottom and Paradise Valley were also places of great vitality.
• 33:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Along Hastings Street stood barbershops and beauty parlors, grocery stores and funeral homes, insurance offices and pool halls, churches and social clubs.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black doctors, lawyers and businessmen built careers serving the community.
• 34:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dunbar Hospital opened to care for black patients who were often turned away or poorly treated elsewhere.
• 34:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Detroit Urban League founded in 1916 helped newcomers find jobs and housing and adjust to city life.
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Churches like Second Baptist and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal grew enormous congregations and became centers of social life, organising everything from charity drives to pickmix.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the evenings,
• 34:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Paradise Valley came alive with music.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nightclubs, theatres and hotels hosted jazz bands and blues singers and dancers.
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the years, some of the most celebrated musicians in the country would pass through its clubs.
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a place where people dressed in their best clothes and stayed out late and were, for a few hours, the pressures of the factory and the landlord could be set aside.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: still, as the black population grew, black bottom could not hold everyone.
• 35:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Families who had saved some money began looking for homes elsewhere, and when they did, they met resistance.
• 35:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most famous case began in the summer of 1925.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: A black physician named Dr. Ossian Sweet had grown up in Florida, studied at Wilberforce University and Howard University, and continued his medical training in Vienna and Paris.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He and his wife Gladys had a young daughter and they wanted a home of their own.
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: They bought a modest brick bungalow on Garland Avenue on the east side in a neighborhood where all of their neighbors were white.
• 36:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: the sweets knew that there might be trouble.
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: That same year, several other black families who had moved into white neighborhoods had been driven out by mobs.
• 36:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: A group of white residents near Garland Avenue had formed an organization for the purpose of keeping their neighborhood white.
• 36:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when the sweets moved in on the eighth of September, they brought with them several friends and relatives and they brought guns.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the first night, a crowd gathered outside.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the second night, the night of September, the crowd grew larger.
• 36:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: People began throwing stones at the house, windows shattered.
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside, the people in the house felt that they were under siege.
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then shots were fired from an upstairs window, and a white man standing across the street, a man named Leon Breiner was killed.
• 37:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Police arrested everyone in the house, including Dr. Sweet and his wife, and they were charged with murder.
• 37:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: the case attracted national attention.
• 37:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The national association for the advancement of colored people took up the defense and hired the most famous trial lawyer in America, Clarence Darrow, who had only recently finished defending a Tennessee school teacher in the case about the teaching of evolution.
• 37:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The trial was presided over by a young judge named Frank Murphy, who would later become mayor of Detroit, Governor of Michigan, and a justice of the United States Supreme Court.
• 37:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Darrow argued that the defendants had acted in self-defense, that a person's home was their castle regardless of the color of their skin, and that the fear they felt was reasonable given everything that black Americans had suffered.
• 37:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first trial ended with a jury unable to agree.
• 38:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a second trial, Dr. Sweets younger brother Henry, who admitted to firing a shot, was tried alone.
• 38:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the spring of 1926, he was acquitted.
• 38:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The charges against the others were eventually dropped.
• 38:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The case was a landmark in the history of civil rights, but it did not open up to Troit's neighborhoods.
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lines around black neighborhoods remained firmly drawn.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, in the 1920s.
• 38:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Ku Klux Klan found considerable support among some white Detroiters, and in the mayoral election of 1924, a candidate backed by the Klan came remarkably close to winning, even though he ran as a writer, the borders of the city, the invisible lines between neighborhoods, which shaped life in Detroit for the rest of the century, then came the depression.
• 38:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The automobile industry depended on people having money to spend.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when the economy collapsed after 1929, car sales collapsed with it.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Across the country, automobile production fell by roughly three quarters between 1929 and 1932.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ind Detroit, which depended on the auto industry more completely than almost any other city depended on any single industry.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The effects were devastating.
• 39:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: factory after factory cut shifts or closed entirely.
• 39:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the early 1930s, a very large share of the city's workers had no job at all, and many who still had work were working only a day or two each week.
• 39:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Families who had bought houses on installment plans lost them, people lined up at soup kitchens and relief stations, some slept in parks, or in the shacks of makeshift camps.
• 39:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city government, led by that same Frank Murphy, who was elected mayor in 1930, tried to help, spending money on relief as quickly as it could be found.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the city's tax revenues were falling as fast as its needs were rising.
• 40:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Murphy became one of the first big city mayors to call loudly for federal help.
• 40:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black Detroiters, who were so often the last hired and the first fired, were hit especially hard.
• 40:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So were the newest immigrants.
• 40:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: On a cold windy day, in March of 1932, several thousand unemployed workers and their supporters gathered into Troy and marched west toward Dearborn and the Ford Rouge plant.
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The March had been organised by the unemployed councils, which were connected to the Communist Party.
• 40:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the marches carried a list of demands, including jobs, an interracial discrimination in hiring, and relief for laid off workers.
• 40:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: They intended to present their demands at the employment office on Miller Road.
• 41:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the Dearborn City line, police tried to stop them, firing tear gas.
• 41:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The marches threw stones and pressed on.
• 41:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Near the gates of the Rouge, the confrontation grew worse.
• 41:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dearborn Police and Ford's own security men opened fire.
• 41:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: four marches were killed that day, and a fifth died of his wounds some months later, many more were injured.
• 41:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The funeral procession that followed a few days later drew tens of thousands of people walking slowly through the streets of Detroit to the sound of a band playing a revolutionary funeral march.
• 41:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The event became known as the Ford Hunger March.
• 41:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it hardened the feelings of many workers toward the company that had once been celebrated as their benefactor.
• 41:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: In early 1933, the state's banking system came close to collapse.
• 42:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two large banking groups in Detroit were in serious trouble and to prevent a disastrous run-on deposits.
• 42:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The governor of Michigan declared a statewide bank holiday in February, closing every bank in the state.
• 42:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Michigan closure helped set off a wave of bank closures in other states, and it was one of the crises that greeted Franklin Roosevelt when he took office as president a few weeks later.
• 42:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the midst of all this hardship, something unexpected and beautiful was taking shape on Woodward Avenue.
• 42:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a stately museum built in the style of an Italian Renaissance palace.
• 42:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Mexican painter Diego Rivera spent much of 1932 and early 1933, painting a vast series of frescoes on the walls of an interior courtyard.
• 42:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The project was paid for by Edsel Ford, Henry Ford's only son, who was the president of the Ford Motor Company and a devoted patron of the arts.
• 43:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rivera had spent weeks sketching inside the Rouge plant, and his murals showed the blast furnaces, the stamping presses, and the assembly lines in extraordinary detail,
• 43:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Above them, he painted the raw materials of the earth and allegorical figures representing the races of humanity.
• 43:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The murals called Detroit industry, stirred controversy at the time.
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some critics called them vulgar and some religious leaders objected to one panel in particular.
• 43:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Edcil Ford stood by them and they remain on those walls today a quiet monument to the city's industrial soul.
• 43:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the 1930s went on, the workers of Detroit began to organize.
• 44:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The auto companies had long-resisted unions.
• 44:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their workers had few protections.
• 44:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: They could be laid off without notice, fired for any reason, and made to work at whatever speed the form and demanded.
• 44:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the Depression, those grievances sharpened, and in 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which protected the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively.
• 44:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: That same year, the United Auto Workers Union was formed.
• 44:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Union's Great Breakthrough came not in Detroit, but in Flint, about 60 miles to the north.
• 44:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the last days of December 1936, workers at two general motors plants in Flint sat down at their machines and refused to leave.
• 44:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was a new tactic, the sit-down strike.
• 44:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because the workers occupied the plants, the company could not easily bring in replacement workers.
• 45:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The strikers slept on car seats and in the aisles.
• 45:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their families and supporters passed food in through the windows.
• 45:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were clashes with police and the governor of Michigan by then Frank Murphy sent in the National Guard but he refused to order them to drive the strikers out by force.
• 45:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: After 44 days, in February of 1937, General Motors agreed to recognize the Union.
• 45:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The victory set off a wave of sit-down strikes across Detroit.
• 45:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Workers sat down at Chrysler plants, workers sat down at parts suppliers, clerks sat down in dime stores,
• 45:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: waitresses in restaurants and workers in hotels and laundries.
• 45:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within weeks, Chrysler, two, recognized the union, Ford was a different matter.
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Henry Ford had placed a man named Harry Bennett in charge of what was called the service department.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, in plain terms, a private police force made up in part of former boxes, athletes and men with criminal
• 46:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its purpose was to watch the workers, to spot union sympathizers, and to discourage organising by whatever means seem necessary.
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: On 26 May 1937, a group of union organizers went to the Rouge plant to hand out leaflets to workers changing shifts.
• 46:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Among them were two young union leaders.
• 46:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Walter Ryther and Richard Frankenstein.
• 46:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: As they stood on a pedestrian overpass above Miller Road, posing for newspaper photographers, a group of Ford service department men approached and attacked them.
• 46:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wrother and Frankenstein were beaten badly and thrown down the stairs.
• 47:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Others, including several women who had come to hand out leaflets, were also beaten.
• 47:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: the service meant tried to seize the photographer's film, but some of the photographs survived and when they were published the nation saw what had happened.
• 47:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The event became known as the Battle of the Overpass, even so Ford held out for nearly four more years.
• 47:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not until
• 47:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the workers at the Rouge walked out in a massive strike.
• 47:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was an especially delicate question during that strike, because many of the black workers at the plant had long felt a debt of loyalty to the company and some remained inside.
• 47:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leaders of the National Association for the advancement of colored people and younger black activists in the city urged black workers to support the union.
• 48:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: arguing that their long-term interests lay with organized labor.
• 48:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the end, the strike held, the workers voted overwhelmingly for the union.
• 48:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in June of 1941, Ford signed a contract that was to the surprise of many, more generous than those at general motors or Chrysler.
• 48:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: By then, much of the world was already at war, and Detroit was about to be transformed once again.
• 48:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: chapter 3, Arsenal and Fire.
• 48:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 29th of December, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the nation over the radio in one of his fire-side chats.
• 48:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He spoke about the war in Europe, about the danger posed by Nazi Germany, and about the role that American factories could
• 48:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: and other nations resisting the Axis powers.
• 49:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United States, he said, must become the great arsenal of democracy.
• 49:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: No city would take that phrase more literally than Detroit.
• 49:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The president had already recruited the head of General Motors, William Canootson, to help lead the nation's defense production.
• 49:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Canootson was a Danish immigrant,
• 49:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: who had once worked for Henry Ford and knew as much about mass production as anyone alive.
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He and his colleagues believed that the methods that had built millions of automobiles could be turned to building tanks, airplanes, engines, and guns in quantities no one had ever seen.
• 49:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the change came swiftly.
• 49:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: In February of 1942, the production of civilian automobiles stopped entirely.
• 49:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The last cars rolled off the lines, and the plants were stripped and refitted.
• 50:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Machinery was moved, rearranged, or replaced.
• 50:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the rest of the war, almost no new cars were built for American drivers.
• 50:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, the factories of Detroit, and its surrounding region, built the machinery of war.
• 50:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chrysler operated a vast tank plant north of the city, in what was then the township of Warren, a long, low-building, designed by Albert Khan.
• 50:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: whose firm designed a remarkable number of the country's wartime factories.
• 50:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Detroit Arsenal Tank plant turned out tanks by the thousands, including a great many of the Sherman tanks that would roll across North Africa and Europe.
• 50:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: General Motors plants built aircraft engines, machine guns, trucks, and muchels,
• 50:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: built engines for fighter planes and for fast patrol torpedo boats.
• 51:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hudson built parts for aircraft and naval guns.
• 51:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Smaller firms made shell casings, helmets and countless components.
• 51:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most famous of all the wartime plants was built by Ford on farmland west of Detroit near the town of
• 51:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it was designed to build the four-engine bomber known as the B-24 Liberator.
• 51:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The main building was so long that it was said to be the largest factory under a single roof anywhere in the world.
• 51:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: At first, Willow Run struggled.
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The airplane was far more complicated than an automobile.
• 51:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The design kept changing and it was hard to find and keep enough workers so far
• 51:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: newspapers began to mock it, calling it Will It Run.
• 51:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: But gradually the problems were solved, and by 1944, Willow Run was completing roughly one bomber every hour.
• 52:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the end of the war, it had built thousands of them.
• 52:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The workforce that did all of this was different from the workforce of the 1930s.
• 52:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: With millions of young men in uniform, the factories needed new workers and they found them.
• 52:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Women went into the plants in enormous numbers, riveting, welding, inspecting and operating heavy machinery.
• 52:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of them, a woman from Kentucky named Rose Will Monroe,
• 52:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: worked as a riveter at Willow Run, and she was chosen to appear in a promotional film becoming one of the real women associated with the popular image of Rosie the riveter.
• 52:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And once again, people poured into Detroit from the south.
• 52:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: White families came from Appalachia and the Ozarks.
• 52:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black families came from Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia.
• 53:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: hundreds of thousands of newcomers arrived in the Detroit area during the war years.
• 53:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city, which had barely built any new housing during the long years of the depression, simply could not hold them all.
• 53:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: People crowded into rooming houses.
• 53:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: They rented beds by the shift, so that a worker coming off the night shift would sleep in the same bed that a day shift worker had just left.
• 53:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: They lived in trailers, in converted garages, in basements, in addicts.
• 53:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The strain touched everyone, but it fell hardest on black families who were still confined to the same narrow set of neighbourhoods as before.
• 53:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The borders had not moved, but the number of people inside them had grown dramatically.
• 53:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: In some places, those borders were drawn in concrete.
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1941, near 8-mile road on the city's northwest side, a developer who wanted to build homes for white buyers, next to an existing black neighborhood, could not get federally ensured loans because of the nearby black residents.
• 54:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: His solution was to build a war about half a mile long and roughly six feet high, separating the new development from the black neighborhood.
• 54:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: With the war in place, the loans were approved.
• 54:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The war still stands today.
• 54:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Much later, residents would cover it in murals, but for decades, it was a plain grey reminder of how housing in Detroit had been divided by policy, as well as by prejudice.
• 54:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: To relieve the housing shortage for black defense workers, the federal government built a public housing project on the northeast side of the city.
• 54:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was named for Sojourner Truth.
• 54:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: the 19th century abolitionist and advocate for women's rights who had spent her last years in Michigan.
• 55:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the site was next to a white neighborhood and many white residents objected fiercely.
• 55:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a period of back and forth in Washington over whether the project would be for black or white tenants.
• 55:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the first black families tried to move in, on the last day of February in 1942, they were met by a crowd of white protestors.
• 55:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were clashes and the move in was halted.
• 55:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was only at the end of April with more than 1,000 police officers and state troops standing guard that the first black families
• 55:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: were finally able to move into their new homes, tensions, spilled into the factories as well.
• 55:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the war went on, some black workers were promoted to positions that had previously been held only by white workers, and some white workers responded by walking off the job.
• 55:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were called hate strikes.
• 55:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The largest
• 55:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: came in early June of 1943 at the Packet plant on the east side.
• 56:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: When some 25,000 white workers stopped work, after three black workers were promoted to jobs on an assembly line.
• 56:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Union leadership condemned the walkout and insisted that the workers returned, and the federal government threatened to fire strikers.
• 56:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the episode left the city shaken.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A few weeks later, on the 20th of June, 1943, it was a hot Sunday.
• 56:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The temperature climbed into the 90s and thousands of Detroiters went looking for relief.
• 56:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them went to
• 56:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: the large island park in the Detroit River with its shady lawns, its canals, its casino building and its long bridge back to the mainland.
• 56:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: On that day, it was estimated that around 100,000 people visited the island.
• 56:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black and white alike.
• 57:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the evening, as the crowds were leaving, fights broke out between groups of young black and white men, near the bridge, and along the park's edges.
• 57:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fights spread.
• 57:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: By late evening, there were brawls on the bridge, and at its foot on Jefferson Avenue.
• 57:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: then the rumours began.
• 57:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a nightclub on Hastings Street in the heart of Paradise Valley, a man took the microphone and told the crowd that white men had thrown a black woman and her baby off the bell aisle bridge.
• 57:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not true, but people believed it and a crowd poured out into the streets in anger, attacking white-owned stores and some white people who happened to be passing
• 57:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, among white crowds, a different rumour spread that a white woman had been attacked by black men on the island.
• 57:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: That too was not true, but it also was believed.
• 58:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the early morning hours of Monday, the 21st of June, crowds of white men had gathered along Woodward Avenue,
• 58:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they began pulling black passengers off street cars and out of automobiles and beating them.
• 58:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the east side, stores in Paradise Valley were looted and in some places set on fire.
• 58:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The police, who were almost entirely white, concentrated their efforts on the black neighborhoods.
• 58:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And many of the people they shot and killed were black men accused of looting.
• 58:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout Monday, the violence continued.
• 58:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The mayor Edward Jeffries and the governor Harry Kelly went back and forth with federal authorities over the legal procedures needed to bring in the army.
• 58:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Finally, late on Monday evening President Roosevelt issued a proclamation and federal troops entered the city.
• 59:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Several thousand soldiers with jeeps and armored cars took up positions along Woodward Avenue and throughout the affected areas.
• 59:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the next day, the streets had grown quiet.
• 59:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: When it was over, 34 people were dead.
• 59:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: 25 of them were black and nine were white.
• 59:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: of the Black victims, 17 had been killed by the police, hundreds more were injured and well over a thousand people had been arrested.
• 59:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Property damage was extensive.
• 59:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the aftermath, city and state officials largely blamed Black residents and outside agitators for the disorder.
• 59:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many black leaders and their allies saw it very differently.
• 59:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: A young attorney for the National Association for the advancement of colored people named Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first black justice of the United States Supreme Court, wrote a sharp report criticizing the police for their conduct and for their unequal treatment of black and white rioters.
• 1:00:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city formed an interracial committee to study the causes of the unrest and for a time there was talk of reform.
• 1:00:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the underlying conditions, the crowding, the segregation, the unequal policing remained and the war went on.
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The factories kept running day and night,
• 1:00:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the war ended in the summer of 1945, Detroit could look back on an extraordinary achievement.
• 1:00:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The arsenal of democracy had been, in large part, a Detroit arsenal.
• 1:00:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: With the war over, the factories were refitted once more, and the long pent-up demand for new cars was unleashed.
• 1:00:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Americans had been saving money for years, and they had been driving old, worn-out automobiles.
• 1:01:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now they wanted new ones, and they wanted houses in which to raise the families that were suddenly being born in such large numbers.
• 1:01:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The auto industry roared back.
• 1:01:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The late 1940s were turbulent years for labour, with major strikes in 1945 and 1946.
• 1:01:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Walter Ruther, the union
• 1:01:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: became president of the United Auto Workers in 1946, and he would leave the union for more than two decades.
• 1:01:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In April of 1948, he was shot through the window of his kitchen by an unknown gunman and badly wounded, but he recovered and returned to his work.
• 1:01:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1950, the Union and General Motors agreed to a five-year contract that brought steady raises, pensions, health insurance and automatic cost of living adjustments in exchange for labor peace.
• 1:02:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: A magazine writer called it the Treaty of Detroit and the name Stuck.
• 1:02:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It helped to make auto workers, many of whom had not finished high school, into solidly middle-class Americans who could buy homes, cars and appliances and send their children to college.
• 1:02:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1950, the census counted the population of Detroit at around 1,850,000 people.
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the fifth largest city in the United States.
• 1:02:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the capital of the most important industry in the most powerful economy in the world.
• 1:02:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its factories were busy, its workers were among the best paid industrial workers anywhere.
• 1:02:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And its downtown streets were full of shoppers with the great J.L.
• 1:03:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hudson's department store on Woodwood Avenue, more than 20 stories tall
• 1:03:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: no one knew it then, but Detroit had reached its peak.
• 1:03:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Never again would so many people call the city home.
• 1:03:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4 The Long Hot Summer
• 1:03:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The changes that would reshape Detroit in the second half of the 20th century did not arrive all at once.
• 1:03:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: They came gradually and many of them were hard to see at the time.
• 1:03:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of them looked from certain angles like progress.
• 1:03:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the most important changes was the movement of the factories themselves.
• 1:03:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The old plants inside the city were multi-story buildings on crowded lots, built for the methods of an earlier era, they were hard to expand and awkward to modernise.
• 1:03:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: After the war, the automakers increasingly preferred to build new plants on open land in the suburbs and in other states, long, single-story buildings with plenty of room for parking and for rail yards.
• 1:04:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Land was cheaper there, taxes were often lower, and in some cases, the unions were weaker.
• 1:04:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, the automakers were introducing more and more automated machinery.
• 1:04:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Machines that could transfer engine blocks from one operation to the next, without human hands.
• 1:04:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ford engineers coined a term for it, automation.
• 1:04:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The new machines were efficient, but they required a few of workers.
• 1:04:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of the smaller automakers struggled to compete with the big three and began to fade.
• 1:04:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hudson merged with Nash to form American motors and in 1954 the old Hudson plant on the east side of Detroit closed.
• 1:04:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Packard, the maker of elegant luxury cars, merged with Studobaker and in 1956 the great
• 1:05:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: the one Albert Khan had designed so many years before, ended automobile production.
• 1:05:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's enormous buildings would stand for decades afterward, slowly decaying.
• 1:05:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other suppliers closed or moved.
• 1:05:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, Detroit lost well over 100,000 manufacturing jobs.
• 1:05:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The recession of 1958 hit the city especially hard and unemployment soared.
• 1:05:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those who were most vulnerable were, once again, often black workers, who had generally been hired more recently and so were the first to be laid off under seniority rules.
• 1:05:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the people of Detroit were moving to, across the country, the federal government
• 1:06:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: through mortgage insurance programs that made it possible to buy a house with a small down payment and a long steady loan.
• 1:06:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But those programs were administered according to maps and guidelines that rated neighborhoods by their perceived risk and neighborhoods with black residents or even nearby black residents were often marked as hazardous and denied
• 1:06:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The practice came to be called red lining, after the red shading used on some of the maps.
• 1:06:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the new suburbs, meanwhile, builders and residents often used restrictive covenants and informal pressure to keep black families out.
• 1:06:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even after the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that courts could not enforce racially restrictive covenants, the patterns persisted through other means.
• 1:07:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, as the decades passed, hundreds of thousands of white families left Detroit for the new suburbs, places like Warren, Levenia, Deerborn Heights, Southfield and many others.
• 1:07:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: for newer schools and for jobs that were moving out with two.
• 1:07:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And many left in plain terms because they did not want to live near black neighbors.
• 1:07:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black families meanwhile moved into the neighborhoods that white families left behind.
• 1:07:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Often paying high prices for older homes and sometimes facing harassment and violence as they did.
• 1:07:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The suburbs were connected to the city by new highways.
• 1:07:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Detroit had built one of the first urban depressed expressways in the country, the Davison Freeway in the early 1940s.
• 1:07:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: After the war came many more, the John Lodge Freeway ran north west from downtown.
• 1:08:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Edsel Ford Freeway ran east and west across the city, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Chrysler Freeway was built heading north from downtown.
• 1:08:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: following a path that ran directly over the route of Hastings Street.
• 1:08:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black Bottom and Paradise Valley had already been partly cleared in the 1950s, under a program of urban renewal, which aimed to replace what planners called Slums with modern housing.
• 1:08:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Part of the cleared land became Lafayette Park.
• 1:08:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: A handsome development of apartment towers and townhouses, designed by the architect Ludwig Mies van Dereau, surrounded by lawns and trees.
• 1:08:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was well built and well regarded, but it was not built for the families who had lived there before.
• 1:08:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The freeway finished the job, hasting street with its churches, its shops, its nightclubs,
• 1:09:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: and its long history disappeared beneath the concrete.
• 1:09:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The families who had lived their scattered, many of them moving to other crowded black neighborhoods on the west side, including the area around 12th Street.
• 1:09:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yet even as the old neighborhoods vanished, new things were taking shape.
• 1:09:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1959, a young man named Barry Gordy, who had worked on the assembly line
• 1:09:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: and had tried his hand at running a record store, borrowed $800 from his family, and started a record label.
• 1:09:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soon afterward, he bought a modest two-story house on West Grand Boulevard.
• 1:09:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Turn the garage into a recording studio, and hung a sign across the front that read hitsville U.S.A.
• 1:09:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The company came to be called Motown, a shortened form of Mototown.
• 1:09:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gordy had watched the assembly line at work, and he brought some of its methods to the making of music.
• 1:10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Songwriters, producers, and musicians work together in a steady, disciplined flow.
• 1:10:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Young singers from the housing projects and neighborhoods of Detroit
• 1:10:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And out of that small house came an astonishing stream of songs.
• 1:10:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Supremes, the temptations, the four tops, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, and the miracles, Martha and the Van Dellers, Stevie Wonder, and many others recorded there.
• 1:10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Houseband
• 1:10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: a group of jazz-trained musicians later known as the Funk Brothers, played on hit after hit.
• 1:10:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Motown's music was heard on radios in every corner of the country and around the world, and it carried the name of Detroit with it.
• 1:10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1961, Detroit elected a young, energetic mayor named Jerome Kavanaugh.
• 1:11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was only 33 years old.
• 1:11:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he won with strong support from black voters who had grown tired of a police department that treated them with suspicion and hostility.
• 1:11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kavanaugh promised reform.
• 1:11:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He appointed a new police commissioner who spoke of changing the department's ways.
• 1:11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He sought federal money for anti-poverty programs and Detroit became one of the first cities to receive large grants under President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty.
• 1:11:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Journalists and federal officials began to speak of Detroit as a model city, a place where black and white residents were working together, where labor and management had reached a lasting peace and where a new generation of leaders was tackling the problems of urban life.
• 1:11:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: On 23 June 1963, a great march made its way downward would have a new
• 1:12:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had been organised by local Black leaders, including the Reverend Clarence Franklin, the pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church, and the father of a young singer named Arytha Franklin.
• 1:12:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the front of the march,
• 1:12:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: walked the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• 1:12:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crowd was enormous.
• 1:12:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Estimated at around 125,000 people.
• 1:12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: They called it the walk to freedom.
• 1:12:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the end of the march in a large hall near the river, Dr. King gave a speech that included an early version of the words he would speak two months later at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
• 1:12:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The words about a dream, but beneath the hopeful surface, many of the old problems remained, and some had grown worse.
• 1:12:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black Detroiters still faced discrimination in housing and employment.
• 1:13:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: the neighborhoods where they lived were overcrowded, and many of the stores in those neighborhoods were owned by people who lived elsewhere and were accused of charging high prices for poor goods.
• 1:13:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The schools were crowded and unequal.
• 1:13:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the police department, despite the promises of reform, remained overwhelmingly white.
• 1:13:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And many black residents regarded it less as a protector than as an occupying force.
• 1:13:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stories of rough treatment, insults, and unjustified stops were common.
• 1:13:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 12th Street neighborhood on the near west side was one of the most crowded parts of the city.
• 1:13:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had once been a mostly Jewish neighborhood, and in the years after the war, it became a mostly black one, absorbing many families displaced from the east side.
• 1:13:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a busy commercial strip, with bars, restaurants, pawn shops, and small stores, and it was known for its nightlife, including a number of unlicensed after hours drinking clubs.
• 1:14:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: which Detroit has called blind pigs.
• 1:14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the early morning hours of Sunday, the 23rd of July, 1967, officers from the police vice squad raided one of those blind pigs in a second floor space at the corner of 12th Street and Claire Mount Avenue.
• 1:14:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had expected to find a small group of people.
• 1:14:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: a gathering to welcome home two local servicemen who had returned from Vietnam.
• 1:14:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were more than 80 people inside.
• 1:14:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The police decided to arrest them all and they began loading them into police wagons.
• 1:14:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It took a long time to bring enough wagons and as the minutes passed, a crowd gathered on the street to watch.
• 1:14:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a warm summer night and people were still out.
• 1:15:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Words were exchanged.
• 1:15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then someone threw a bottle and it shattered near the police.
• 1:15:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: More objects were thrown.
• 1:15:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the last wagon pulled away, the crowd broke store windows and looting began.
• 1:15:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: At first the police held back, hoping the disturbance would burn itself out, but it did not.
• 1:15:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the sun rose on that Sunday morning, the crowds on 12th Street grew larger, and the looting spread to other blocks.
• 1:15:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: By afternoon, fires were burning.
• 1:15:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Firefighters who arrived to put them out were sometimes met with stones and bottles and some were shot at.
• 1:15:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fires spread from building to building.
• 1:15:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The governor of Michigan, George Romney, ordered the Michigan National Guard into the city on Sunday afternoon, Mayor Kavanaugh and Governor Romney asked President Johnson for Federal Help, and after a long and politically tense exchange between Washington and Lansing.
• 1:16:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The president sent paratroopers from the 82nd and the 100th and 1st airborne divisions under the command of Lieutenant General John Throckmorton.
• 1:16:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The paratroopers, many of whom had combatic experience, were deployed mainly on the eastside and that side of the city grew karma relatively quickly.
• 1:16:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the west side, the National Guard remained.
• 1:16:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of the guardsmen were young, inexperienced, and frightened, and they fired their weapons often.
• 1:16:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes it's shadows, sometimes it reported snipers who were never found.
• 1:16:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The violence went on for five days.
• 1:16:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of the deaths were among the most tragic of all.
• 1:16:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: A four-year-old girl named Tania Blending was killed.
• 1:16:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Gardsman fired into the apartment where she was staying, after mistaking a flash of light for sniper fire.
• 1:17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the Algae's motel, on Woodward Avenue, a group of police officers, Gardsman and a private security guard responded to a report of gunfire, and during a long night of beatings in interrogation, three young black men, Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard, and Fred Temple,
• 1:17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: no one was ever convicted for their deaths.
• 1:17:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the smoke finally cleared, 43 people were dead.
• 1:17:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: 33 of them were black, and 10 were white.
• 1:17:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than 1,000 people had been injured.
• 1:17:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than 7,000 had been arrested.
• 1:17:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And around 2,000 buildings had been damaged or destroyed.
• 1:17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Entire blocks along 12th Street and other commercial corridors lay in ruins.
• 1:17:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The event has been called by many names.
• 1:17:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some call it a riot.
• 1:18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some call it a rebellion or an uprising.
• 1:18:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many Detroiters simply call it the events of 1967.
• 1:18:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: What everyone agrees on is that it marked a turning point in the life of the city.
• 1:18:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Detroit was not alone.
• 1:18:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: That summer, violence erupted in many American cities, including New York, New Jersey, just a few weeks before.
• 1:18:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: President Johnson appointed a commission, led by the Governor of Illinois, Otto Kernner, to study the causes.
• 1:18:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: released in early 1968 was blunt.
• 1:18:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It concluded that the unrest was rooted in the deep inequality between black and white Americans.
• 1:18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: In discrimination, in segregation, in poverty, and in the frustration of hopes that had been raised and then disappointed.
• 1:18:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: In its most famous passage,
• 1:18:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.
• 1:19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Detroit, business and civic leaders formed a group called New Detroit to address the problems the unrest had revealed.
• 1:19:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Money was raised, programs were launched and meetings were held.
• 1:19:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some things improved.
• 1:19:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the years that followed, more black officers were hired onto the police force and black Detroiters gained more political power.
• 1:19:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The following year, in 1968, the Detroit Tigers won the World Series, coming back from a deficit of three games to one to defeat the St. Louis Cardinals.
• 1:19:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many Detroiters later remembered that season as a moment when the city came together, listening to the games on transistor radios, on portures and in kitchens, black and white alike.
• 1:19:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether baseball could truly heal the wounds of the year before, is a question that historians still debate.
• 1:20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the memory of that autumn remained a warm one for many who lived through it.
• 1:20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still,
• 1:20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The movement of people out of the city already well under way accelerated.
• 1:20:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the years after 1967, white families left Detroit at an even faster pace.
• 1:20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many businesses left too, especially along the commercial streets that had burned.
• 1:20:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The long, slow, unwinding of the city had begun.
• 1:20:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5 The long, unwinding
• 1:20:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1970, the census counted around 1,500,000 people in Detroit.
• 1:20:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was still a very large city, but it was more than 300,000 fewer than in 1950.
• 1:20:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the city that remained was changing quickly.
• 1:20:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black residents were becoming a majority.
• 1:21:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they were increasingly determined to have a voice in how the city was run.
• 1:21:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The early 1970s were tense, crime was rising, and the police department created a plain clothes decoy unit, known by the name Stress, which stood for, stopped the robberies, enjoy safe streets.
• 1:21:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its offices posed as easy targets, hoping to lure robbers.
• 1:21:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the unit killed a large number of people in a short span of time, most of them young black men, and it became bitterly controversial.
• 1:21:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1973, Detroit elected Coleman Young as its first black mayor.
• 1:21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Young was a former auto worker, a Tuskegee Airman during the Second World War, a union organizer and a state senator.
• 1:21:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was sharp-tunged, combative, funny, and fiercely devoted to the city.
• 1:21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He took office in January of 1974, and one of his first acts was to disband the stress unit.
• 1:22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He worked to integrate the police department and the city's workforce, and he gave black Detroiters a sense that city hall belonged to them.
• 1:22:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would serve as mayor for 20 years through 5 terms, longer than anyone before him.
• 1:22:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: His relationship with the suburbs was often strained.
• 1:22:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many suburban residents viewed the city with fear or hostility and young often responded in kind.
• 1:22:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The divide between Detroit and the surrounding communities between a city that was growing poorer and more black and suburbs that were largely white and more prosperous.
• 1:22:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: became one of the defining features of the region.
• 1:22:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: That divide was reinforced by a decision of the United States Supreme Court.
• 1:22:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Detroit's public schools had become heavily segregated and a federal judge had ordered a plan to integrate them, that would include not just the city.
• 1:23:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: but many of the surrounding suburban school districts, bushing students across district lines.
• 1:23:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1974, in the case of Millican versus Bradley, the Supreme Court struck down that plan by a vote of five to four.
• 1:23:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The court ruled that suburban districts could not be included in a desegregation remedy, unless they themselves had been shown to have caused the segregation.
• 1:23:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ruling meant that the city's schools, with their shrinking tax base, would largely have to solve their problems on their own.
• 1:23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Along the river front meanwhile, a group of business leaders led by Henry Ford the second, the grandson of the company's founder, was building something ambitious.
• 1:23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was called the Renaissance Centre, a cluster of gleaming glass towers, the tallest of them, around hotel rising 73 stories above the river.
• 1:24:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's first phase opened in 1977,
• 1:24:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was meant to be a symbol of the city's rebirth and to draw offices and visitors back downtown, with its concrete berms and its fortress-like entrances.
• 1:24:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some critics felt it turned its back on the rest of the city, but its towers became the most recognizable part of the Detroit skyline, and they remain so today.
• 1:24:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The auto industry meanwhile was entering a very difficult period.
• 1:24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the autumn of 1973, oil-producing nations in the Middle East imposed an embargo on shipments to the United States.
• 1:24:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gasoline prices shot up and drivers waited in long lines at filling stations.
• 1:24:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly, Americans wanted small, fuel-efficient cars and the companies that made them best were not in Detroit.
• 1:24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were in Japan and in Germany.
• 1:25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Japanese automakers, especially, had spent years improving the quality and efficiency of their cars, and their products were small, reliable, and economical.
• 1:25:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1979, a second oil crisis struck, following the revolution in Iran, and the pressure on Detroit grew still greater.
• 1:25:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chrysler, the smallest of the big three, came close to collapse.
• 1:25:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under its new chairman, Lee Ayakoka, who had been fired from Ford the previous year, the company asked the federal government for help.
• 1:25:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: In late 1979, Congress approved loan guarantees of $1.5 billion on the condition that the company's workers, suppliers, lenders, and others make their own sacrifices.
• 1:25:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United Auto Workers agreed to wage concessions.
• 1:25:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chrysler survived, and within a few years, it repaid the loans ahead of schedule.
• 1:26:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But thousands of jobs were lost along the way.
• 1:26:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1980, the old Dodge Main Plant in Hamtramic, where the Dodge brothers had built their cars since 1914, closed its doors.
• 1:26:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: General Motors, meanwhile,
• 1:26:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: announced that it would build a new assembly plant on a site straddling the boundary between Detroit and Hamtramic.
• 1:26:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the city could provide the land, the site chosen included a neighborhood that Detroit is called Poltown, a long-established community of Polish and other families, with churches, shops and a few thousand residents.
• 1:26:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: using the power of eminent domain, the city acquired the land and in 1981 the Michigan Supreme Court upheld the taking.
• 1:26:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Residents fought to save their homes and especially their beloved church immaculate conception, but in the end the neighborhood was cleared.
• 1:27:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: the new plant opened in the mid-1980s.
• 1:27:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It employed far fewer people than had once been hoped.
• 1:27:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The anxieties of those years sometimes turned ugly.
• 1:27:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1982, a young Chinese American draftsman named Vincent Chin was celebrating his upcoming wedding at a bar in
• 1:27:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: one of them, an auto worker who had recently been laid off.
• 1:27:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Witnesses said the men blamed him for the success of Japanese automakers.
• 1:27:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: After a fight, the two men followed him and beat him with a baseball bat.
• 1:27:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He died several days later.
• 1:27:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The men who killed him received probation and a fine and never spent a day in prison for his death.
• 1:27:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The case became a rallying point for Asian Americans across the country and a painful memory in the history of the region.
• 1:27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Through the 1980s, the city's population continued to fall, and the effects could be seen everywhere.
• 1:28:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stores closed, houses emptied.
• 1:28:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the night before Halloween, a tradition of small pranks had gradually turned into something far more destructive.
• 1:28:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: as people set fire to empty buildings and sometimes to occupied ones.
• 1:28:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The nights came to be known as Devil's Night, and in the worst years of the mid-1980s, hundreds of fires burned across the city over the course of just a few nights.
• 1:28:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later, in the 1990s, the city organised tens of thousands of volunteers to patrol the streets in the days around Halloween, calling the effort, Angels Night, and the number of fires fell considerably.
• 1:28:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1983,
• 1:28:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Great J.L.
• 1:28:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hudson's Department Store on Woodward Avenue, which had once been one of the largest department stores in the world, closed its doors.
• 1:29:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would stand empty for 15 years before it was brought down by a controlled implosion in 1998.
• 1:29:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1988, the last train departed from Michigan Central Station, the grand building
• 1:29:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: its windows were broken, its interior stripped by scavengers, and it became for many years perhaps the most famous abandoned building in America, photographed endlessly by visitors who came to document the city's decline, and yet in many small ways people kept building and creating
• 1:29:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1986, an artist named Tyree Gaiton, together with his grandfather, began covering the abandoned houses on Heidelberg Street, on the east side, with Polkadot's stuffed animals, bicycles, old shoes, and all manner of salvaged objects.
• 1:30:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Heidelberg project was controversial, and parts of it were torn down by the city more than once.
• 1:30:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it drew visitors from around the world and became an emblem of stubborn creativity.
• 1:30:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the neighborhoods, people planted gardens on empty lots.
• 1:30:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Block clubs kept watch over their streets.
• 1:30:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Churches fed the hungry.
• 1:30:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Musicians in the city developed a new style of electronic dance music called Techno.
• 1:30:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: which traveled across the Atlantic and found enthusiastic audiences in Europe.
• 1:30:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Coleman Young retired in 1993.
• 1:30:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was succeeded by Dennis Archer, a former justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, who took a more conciliatory approach to the suburbs and to the business community.
• 1:30:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1996, Detroit voters approved a proposal to allow casino gambling.
• 1:31:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And over the next few years, three large casinos opened in and near downtown.
• 1:31:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: General Motors bought the Renaissance Centre and moved its world headquarters there.
• 1:31:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Detroit Tigers moved to a new ballpark called Comerica Park in 2000, and the Detroit Lions moved to a new stadium called Ford Field in 2002.
• 1:31:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were new lofts and restaurants downtown, and for a time there was talk of a revival, but the city is a whole kept shrinking.
• 1:31:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the sense of 2000,
• 1:31:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Detroit's population fell below 1 million, for the first time since 1920.
• 1:31:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: By then, the city covered 139 square miles, but large portions of that land were thinly populated.
• 1:31:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whole blocks had only a few occupied houses remaining, surrounded by vacant lots,
• 1:32:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: This pattern created a deep financial problem.
• 1:32:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: A city of 139 square miles still needed streets, street lights, water mains, sewers, fire stations, police patrols, and garbage collection, whether those streets held many people or few.
• 1:32:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the fewer residents there were, and the poorer they became, the less money the city could raise in taxes.
• 1:32:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, the city owed pensions and health benefits to many thousands of retired workers whose numbers had grown even as the number of active workers shrank.
• 1:32:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the state of Michigan, facing its own budget troubles, reduced the revenue-sharing payments its centre cities.
• 1:32:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: To fill the gaps, the city borrowed, in 2005, under Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit entered into a complex transaction to borrow roughly one and a half billion dollars in order to put money into its pension funds.
• 1:33:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: As part of the deal,
• 1:33:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city entered into financial agreements called interest rate swaps, which were meant to protect it against rising interest rates.
• 1:33:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: When interest rates instead fell sharply after the financial crisis of 2008, those swaps became enormously costly, and the city found itself owing large payments to the banks on the other side.
• 1:33:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kilpatrick himself
• 1:33:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: left office in 2008.
• 1:33:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: After a scandal involving text messages that revealed he had lied under oath about an affair with his chief of staff.
• 1:33:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: He resigned and served time in jail.
• 1:33:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later, federal prosecutors charged him with running a wide-ranging corruption scheme during his time as mayor, involving city contracts.
• 1:34:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: and in 2013 he was convicted and sentenced to 28 years in federal prison then came the great recession.
• 1:34:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: In late 2008 the financial system of the United States nearly froze and the economy sank into its deepest downturn since the 1930s.
• 1:34:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: car sales collapsed.
• 1:34:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: General Motors and Chrysler, already weakened by years of losses, ran out of money.
• 1:34:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The federal government extended emergency loans, first under President George W. Bush, and then under President Barack Obama.
• 1:34:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 2009, Chrysler filed for bankruptcy and a month later, General Motors did too.
• 1:34:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both emerged, restructured and smaller after rapid government supervised proceedings.
• 1:35:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ford, which had borrowed heavily a few years earlier, managed to avoid bankruptcy.
• 1:35:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Suppliers across the region failed or cut back.
• 1:35:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the city of Detroit,
• 1:35:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: the unemployment rates sought, and by some measures, a very large share of the city's adults had no work at all.
• 1:35:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city's new mayor, Dave Bing, a former basketball star with the Detroit pistons who had built a successful steel business.
• 1:35:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: took office in 2009 and tried to bring the city's budget under control.
• 1:35:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He cut costs, reduced services, and began talking about ways to concentrate city services in the neighborhoods that were still densely populated.
• 1:35:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the gap between what the city owed and what it could pay kept growing.
• 1:35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the census of 2010, counted around 713,000 people in Detroit.
• 1:35:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was fewer than in 1910.
• 1:36:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a single decade, the city had lost a quarter of its population.
• 1:36:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: State officials watched with growing alarm.
• 1:36:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2011, the governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, signed a law that strengthened the powers of emergency managers.
• 1:36:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: officials who could be appointed by the state to take control of cities and school districts in financial crisis.
• 1:36:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Voters repealed that law in a referendum in November of 2012.
• 1:36:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the legislature quickly passed a new version which took effect in the spring of 2013.
• 1:36:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the meantime, the city and the state had signed a consent agreement under which the state gained more oversight of Detroit's finances.
• 1:36:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: In March of 2013, Governor Snyder appointed a bankruptcy lawyer from Washington.
• 1:36:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: named Kevin Orr as the emergency manager of the city of Detroit.
• 1:37:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Orr was given sweeping authority over the city's finances and operations.
• 1:37:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: In effect taking over many of the powers of the mayor and the city council.
• 1:37:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Orr and his team studied the city's books and published a series of reports describing what they found.
• 1:37:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The picture was bleak.
• 1:37:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: By their estimates, the city's long-term obligations, including bonds, pensions, retirees, health care and other debts, came to around $18 billion.
• 1:37:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A very large portion of the city's budget was going to pay for obligations from the past, leaving less and less for the services that residents needed day to day.
• 1:37:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The emergency manager's reports described a city where a large portion of the streetlights did not work.
• 1:37:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: where police could take close to an hour on average to respond to calls and where tens of thousands of structures stood abandoned or in serious disrepair.
• 1:38:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: In June, all met with the city's creditors and proposed a plan in which most of them would receive only a small fraction of what they
• 1:38:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most painfully, the city's two pension funds, which represented many thousands of retired police officers, firefighters, bus drivers, clerks, and others who had spent their careers in the city's service.
• 1:38:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The negotiations did not produce an agreement.
• 1:38:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: On Thursday, the 18th of July 2013, with the governor's approval,
• 1:38:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city of Detroit filed for protection under Chapter 9 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code, the section that governs the bankruptcies of cities and other public bodies.
• 1:39:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States.
• 1:39:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The news traveled around the world, just as the news of the $5 day had traveled nearly a century before.
• 1:39:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: some saw it as the final chapter in a long story of decline.
• 1:39:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Others saw it as a necessary reckoning, a chance to clear away debts that could never have been paid and begin again.
• 1:39:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The case was assigned to a federal bankruptcy judge named Stephen Rose.
• 1:39:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first question before him was whether Detroit was even eligible for bankruptcy at all.
• 1:39:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the pension funds and the unions argued that it was not.
• 1:39:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They pointed to the Michigan Constitution, which contained a clause protecting public pensions from being diminished or impaired, and they argued that the state had not negotiated in good faith.
• 1:40:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The arguments went on through the late summer and autumn, meanwhile
• 1:40:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: attention turned to one of the city's great treasures.
• 1:40:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Detroit Institute of Arts.
• 1:40:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The museum on Woodward Avenue where Diego Rivera had painted his murals of the Rouge held one of the finest art collections in the country.
• 1:40:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: and much of it was owned by the city.
• 1:40:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Creditors began to ask whether the city's paintings could be sold to pay its debts.
• 1:40:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The emergency manager's office arranged for the auction house Christie's to appraise part of the collection.
• 1:40:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: art lovers around the world watched with anxiety, and people in Detroit wondered whether the works they had visited since childhood, the paintings by Van Gogh and Brugal and many others might be taken away.
• 1:40:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 3rd of December 2013, Judge Rhodes issued his ruling.
• 1:40:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He found that Detroit was indeed eligible for bankruptcy.
• 1:41:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: He found that the city was insolvent that it could not pay its debts as they came due and that negotiations with so many creditors had been impractical.
• 1:41:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he found that under federal bankruptcy law, the pensions of city retirees, despite the protections in the state constitution, could be reduced like other contractual debts.
• 1:41:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of whom lived on modest incomes and did not receive social security for their years of city work.
• 1:41:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the background, even before the ruling, a federal judge serving as a mediator in the case, Chief Judge Gerald Rosen had begun quietly reaching out to charitable foundations.
• 1:41:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: His idea was that if private foundations of the state and the museum's supporters could raise a large sum of money, that money could be used to soften the cuts to pensions and in exchange.
• 1:42:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The art collection would be transferred to an independent trust, safe forever from sale.
• 1:42:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the following months, the foundations of the Ford family, the Kreski family, the Knight family, and many others pledged their support.
• 1:42:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The State of Michigan agreed to contribute.
• 1:42:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Museum itself raised money from its donors, and so, in time, did the automakers.
• 1:42:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The arrangement came to be called the Grand Bargain, meanwhile, in November of 2013, Detroit voters elected a new mayor, Mike Duggan, a former hospital executive, who would take office at the start of the new year and begin working alongside the emergency manager.
• 1:42:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: the bankruptcy itself would continue for most of another year.
• 1:42:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: In November of 2014, Judge Rhodes approved the city's plan to emerge from bankruptcy, which shed roughly $7 billion in debt.
• 1:43:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reduced pensions.
• 1:43:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: for general city retirees by a modest percentage while protecting the pensions of police and firefighters from direct cuts and reduced cost of living increases and health benefits.
• 1:43:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The art was saved.
• 1:43:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: In December of 2014, Detroit formally emerged from bankruptcy and control of the city returned to its elected officials.
• 1:43:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But our story ends in the year 2013 with a city in the courtroom facing its accounts.
• 1:43:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let us linger there for a moment at the close of that long year and look back over the road we have traveled.
• 1:43:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1900 Detroit was a tidy city of stoveworks and carriage shops with fewer than 300,000 people.
• 1:43:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within a few decades
• 1:44:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had become one of the great industrial cities of the world.
• 1:44:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The place where the automobile was mass produced for the first time, where the moving assembly line transformed the nature of work and where the $5 day promised ordinary laborers a share of the wealth they helped create.
• 1:44:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It drew people from every corner of Europe and from the farms and towns of the American South.
• 1:44:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It gave them work and it gave many of them homes and it gave their children a future, but it also drew lines.
• 1:44:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It drew lines between neighborhoods between black and white, between the city and its suburbs.
• 1:44:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those lines were drawn by real estate agents and bankers, by federal map makers and suburban officials, by crowds of angry neighbors, and by the ordinary choices of millions of families.
• 1:44:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the pressures along those lines grew too great, the city broke apart in violence.
• 1:45:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: and again in 1967.
• 1:45:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The industry that built the city eventually moved beyond it.
• 1:45:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The factories spread to the suburbs, to other states, to other countries.
• 1:45:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The machines grew more efficient and they needed fewer hands.
• 1:45:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The people followed the jobs outward, or left for other reasons, and the city that remained was left with a great deal of land, a great deal of history, and not nearly enough money to care for all of it.
• 1:45:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet through all of it, the people who stayed kept living their lives.
• 1:45:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: They kept going to church on Sunday mornings.
• 1:45:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: They kept tending their gardens and mowing the lawns of vacant lots next door.
• 1:45:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: They kept playing music in basements and small clubs, and kept cheering for their teams.
• 1:45:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: They kept coming home from work on the freeways and the side streets, pulling into driveways and turning off their engines in the quiet of the evening.
• 1:46:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The river still runs past the city, carrying freighters between the Great Lakes, just as it did when Antoine Delamoth Cadillac first built his little fort on the bank.
• 1:46:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the far shore, the lights of Windsor still glow.
• 1:46:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: On Bell Island, the old trees still spread their branches over the lawns.
• 1:46:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the courtyard of the museum on Woodwood Avenue, Diego Rivera's workers still stand at their machines, painted in plaster, tending the blast furnaces and the stamping presses, frozen forever in the middle of their shift.
• 1:46:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story of Detroit did not end in 2013.
• 1:46:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cities rarely end, they change, and they carry their histories with them.
• 1:46:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: the proud chapters and the painful ones alike.
• 1:46:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: What came next is a story for another night.
• 1:46:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this long evening with me here on Sleepless History.
• 1:47:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hope the story kept you gentle company.
• 1:47:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good night, I will see you next time.