Finding My Home in Motown’s Margins
By: Marissa Jackson Sow
Tags: Racism, Black In The Midwest, Equality, Detroit, Culture

I had tested into Detroit’s premier magnet school — Detroit Renaissance High School — and high school proved to be my big break. In the eighth grade, I was told that I couldn’t be valedictorian because I hadn’t attended my inner-city Lutheran middle school long enough, even though I had the same 4.0 grade point average as the student selected to be valedictorian. She was white, and her father was pastor of the parish church and the principal of the overwhelmingly Black school. He decided I couldn’t be salutatorian, either — that honor was bestowed upon another white student, too. Our families were friends, or so we thought until we realized that a condition of the friendship was our acceptance of their white supremacy.

Many Renaissance students — myself included — considered Michigan to merely be a safety school. Black excellence was common in Detroit. It was at Renaissance that I first read DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk, and began to understand the double-consciousness that plagued us — our pride in who we were as Black Midwestern Americans, weighed against the visceral bigotry and structural oppression of American Midwestern white supremacy.

The City of Detroit has, since the 1980s, been a Black oasis surrounded, and often interrupted, by some of the most deeply racist, anti-Black people and forces available. When Detroit elected its first Black mayor, white residents fled. Hizzoner told them to turn the lights out behind them, and they called his bluff, taking every opportunity possible to blight the city they’d abandoned because they would not share it on equal terms with Black people. They’d pop in whenever convenient for concerts, the Auto Show, and sports — all the while trafficking in a narrative that Detroit was deeply unsafe and that one only drove through with one’s windows rolled up.

Black Detroiters drove through the Motor City with their tops down and their ‘gaters on, in the cars their parents had quite literally engineered and manufactured. We rolled our windows up when driving through certain suburbs known to harbor right-wing nationalist cells, and we knew that while Detroit was ours, we’d never be sold homes in certain suburbs like Livonia.

The City of Detroit has, since the 1980s, been a Black oasis surrounded, and often interrupted, by some of the most deeply racist, anti-Black people and forces available.

Detroit’s current mayor, Mike Duggan, was living in Livonia when he ran for Detroit’s top job in 2013. I had moved back to Detroit that year to complete a judicial clerkship and brought my young Senegalese stepson along with me. I was profoundly frustrated by the narratives created around Mayor Duggan’s rise to power. The press portrayed the election as an achievement for Detroit — the first white mayor in 40 years — and even as a civil rights victory.

His election, folks said, was proof that Black Detroiters weren’t racist and were prepared for the type of progress that only White leadership could bring. Disgraced former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was being sentenced in the same federal courthouse I worked in at around the same time, and a white judge threw the proverbial book at him. It was supposed to be democracy and justice, but it felt a lot like revenge. Mayor Duggan has since been investigated and rebuked for his own corruption.

Detroit’s woes are real, it’s true: Not only has the city’s public school system been gutted over the years, but even today’s Renaissance students are susceptible to housing and food insecurity because of ever-deepening inequality. At its best, however, White flight created a vacuum in Detroit that Black folks have filled up gloriously. The legacy of Black Detroit is John Conyers and Mayors Coleman Young and Dennis Archer. Black Detroit is Judge Damon Keith, and a robust Black bar and bench. Detroit is Rosa Parks, Lila Cabbil, and Chokwe Lumumba; it’s Aretha Franklin, the Clark Sisters, and the Winans; it’s Martin, John Witherspoon, and Isiah Thomas. I’ve talked about my grandfather, but his younger brother, Robert Green — Martin Luther King, Jr’s education director, the first Black Dean at Michigan State University, and president of the University of the District of Columbia — also deserves an honorable mention. My own classmates have become accomplished leaders in their own ways, with one recently conquering the world by visiting every nation in it.