Grassroots Models of a Just Future: Learning from Black Radicalism in Detroit
by Scott Kurashige
This piece is a part of our Spark series: The Black Radical Tradition of Resistance
In November 2018, the glow surrounding Detroitʻs comeback was punctured by GM’s announcement it was shutting down production at five factories and eliminating over 14,000 jobs. It further exposed Donald Trumpʻs hollow promise that he “alone” could restore American manufacturing. In fact, Trumpʻs economic nationalism has offered little more than racist and xenophobic scapegoating for tens of thousands of working-class Americans in the Rust Belt unemployed or in a precarious state.
The Structural Bases of Inequality
Detroitʻs activists, however, have been grappling with a crisis that long preceded the 2016 election. The city exploded in the Great Rebellion of 1967 because of persistent problems with racism in employment, housing, education, and policing. James Boggs, a Black autoworker who migrated to Detroit from the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression, surmised from his own experience at Chrysler that automation was eliminating jobs and creating a permanent class of “outsiders.” The American Dream that had lifted millions of white workers into the Middle Class would not be attainable for most African Americans, especially the younger generations comprising a “street force” that would fuel the militant Black Power movement.
Those Black-led groups arising in the late 1960’s, such as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), could not sustain a mass drive for revolutionary socialism. Still, the combined effects of African American organizing and white flight set the stage for a new era of Black political power and “community control” in Detroit — exemplified by the 1973 election and two-decade reign as mayor of Coleman Young. While he made great strides integrating municipal employment, especially among the notorious Detroit Police Department, Young was hampered by regional, state, and national policies that gutted the power of unions, cut funding for social programs, and accelerated mass incarceration.
Now set to close in 2019, the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly facility was built in the early 1980’s with a desperate Young looking to stem the rising tide of poverty and unemployment. In the face of outsourcing and globalization, he convinced GM to build its new, high-tech plant at an astronomical cost to the city, including demolition of the Poletown neighborhood through an unprecedented use of eminent domain. For Black radicals in Detroit, the Poletown debacle was sadly just a preview of the massive redevelopment that would emerge in Detroit under the state takeover and “emergency management” regime installed in 2013.
Newly elected US Representative Rashida Tlaib has decried the political favoritism shown to billionaires like Dan Gilbert and the Ilitch family, while tens of thousands of Detroiters have suffered water shutoffs, housing foreclosures, and failing schools. Ford now expects nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in aid. As Tlaib wrote in Fortune, “The rate at which leaders roll over and beg corporations to set up shop in their communities, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars while neglecting the need for resources to support city services, is alarming.”
“We are the leaders we’ve been looking for”
Grace Lee Boggs struggled and theorized alongside James Boggs for four decades, continuing on her own until when she transitioned at the age of 100. Rejecting the notion that a savior was coming to save Detroit, she inspired grassroots organizers to believe that “we are the leaders we’ve been looking for.” When nearly 20,000 activists came to her city for the US Social Forum in 2010, she told Democracy Now! that Detroit was teaching an important lesson that “top-down solutions” were bankrupt because “the answers are coming more from the bottom.”
In opposition to a concerted campaign of disenfranchisement, Detroiters have continued to mount mass demonstrations and defiant protests. They have locked arms to defend homeowners from unjust evictions by predatory lenders. They have been arrested in acts of civil disobedience to expose the immorality of profiteering from depriving low-income families of water. For Grace Lee Boggs, what made Detroit stand out was its models of “visionary organizing” that advance a “two-sided transformation” of our structures and our selves.
African American women and nonbinary activists have been pivotal to “creating more participatory, empowering, and horizontal kinds of leadership.” They have challenged the “patriarchal culture” that has not only stained the dominant society but also “the charismatic male, vertical, and vanguard party leadership patterns of the 1960’s.” Grace saw urban farming as an exemplar of a {r}evolutionary movement that embodied the “quiet strength” of Detroit’s transplanted matriarch, Rosa Parks.
Self-Determination Through Urban Farming
Some marvel at the beautification of blighted lots transformed into community gardens but fail to see how they equate to much more than acts of do-gooderism with limited impact. They could learn a great deal from the literally ground-breaking work carried out by Black-led farms ranging from D-Town Farm on the far Westside and Feedom Freedom Growers on the far Eastside. They view their work as a continuation and advancement of the struggles for “self-determination” that defined the Black Panthers or the Republic of New Africa in the Black Power movement.
Whereas some policymakers see the city’s infamous vacant lots as “blight” that must be cleared and marketed to developers, Detroit’s visionary organizers stress the importance of de-commodifying the land and returning it to the public commons. While speculators seek to drive up rents and land values, they prioritize noncommercial ownership to benefit the community, such as through the establishment of community land trusts. This vision of solidarity economics has become integral to a Black radical agenda through formations like Cooperation Jackson and Black Lives Matter/Movement for Black Lives.
By providing healthy and affordable food, the urban farms also serve a critical pedagogical function. They promote food sovereignty to counter the negative effects of factory farming, consumer culture, and extractive industry. They reconnect youth to elders, shedding light on how diasporic African cultures have traversed slavery, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. And they especially help young people to see that they can have a brighter future in Detroit because they have the power within themselves to transform the city.
Ending the School to Prison Pipeline
It’s a lesson that the city’s most visionary educators are bringing to K-12 schools that are carrying on the face of an unprecedented assault on public education, led by deep-pocketed conservatives like Betsy DeVos who now are setting the federal agenda. As a high school student in 1992, Julia Putnam was the first volunteer to join Detroit Summer, a Freedom Schooling program cofounded by the Boggses to engage the city’s youth in grassroots leadership projects by planting gardens, painting murals, and discussing radical solutions.
Today, Putnam carries on this problem-solving work as the principal and co-founder of the Boggs School, which has quickly become renowned as a model of transformational place-based education. Growing out of an Eastside neighborhood stung by economic abandonment and population loss, the Boggs School invests in the creative capacities of its students — directly counter to the deficit model of urban education “reform” stressing standardized testing, harsh discipline, and individual advancement.
Such commitments to Detroit’s youth and communities are complemented by the work of the Detroit Justice Center. Founded by Amanda Alexander in 2017, it practices “a three-pronged approach” they call “defense, offense, and dreaming.” The center provides direct services to keep Detroiters out of jail and in their homes, as well as legal support for movement organizing. These activities are tied to a transformative goal to “incubate and amplify Just City solutions” that can end mass incarceration.
Love and Creativity in the Midst of Devastation
Collectively, these examples make clear that Black radical activists remember the 1967 rebellion and appreciate how the problems of capitalism and white supremacy have intensified. But they further demonstrate Grace Lee Boggs’s assertion that the projection of a grassroots revolution in Detroit “based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.”
It is why so many recite the words and deeds of two of the city’s most cherished ancestors. Charity Hicks saw the water crisis as a sacrifice of fundamental human rights to placate Wall Street. She called on us all to “Wage Love.” Ron Scott, a co-founder of the Detroit Black Panther Party and Coalition Against Police Brutality, understood that policy reform was necessary but insufficient. True community security requires deescalating violence and creating economic self-sufficiency by establishing “Peace Zones for Life.”
This is only an introduction to the dynamic range of Black social movements in Detorit. One should not miss the engaged scholarship of Monica White, Bernadette Atuahene, and Aimee Meredith Cox; the films and writings of dream hampton; or the multimedia artistry of Complex Movements. Many aspects of these ideas and actions come together in the work of Allied Media Projects.
Detroit’s radical vision is spreading to movement builders around the globe — most recently through the book Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown. This is a strategy brown says is designed “for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions.” As the walls of empire collapse, it is how people at the grassroots can see themselves as the makers of a new history.
Scott Kurashige is a professor of American and ethnic studies and senior advisor for Faculty Diversity and Initiatives at the University of Washington Bothell, and president-elect of the American Studies Association. Dr. Kurashige studies race in a comparative, intersectional, and transnational framework with a focus on urbanism and social movements. He is a member of the Diversity Scholars Network at the National Center for Institutional Diversity.
