Detroit has a 78% black population and has become an intense focus for both candidates as election day approaches
, with its fabled music scene, its endless ghost line of workers who produced those gorgeous, ostentatious dream cars of the mid-century, and its lost splendour. There was the belle epoque and then, of course, the fall: the declining automotive profits, the escalating racial tensions, its defining riot in July 1967, the “white flight” to the suburbs, the spiralling murder rate, the crime and its languishing for decades as a place of infamy and ruin.
“Madame vice-president and Charlamagne tha God: whatupdoe – and welcome to Detroit,” began Zeke, president of New Era Detroit, a civic movement, who wondered if the vice-president agreed with the idea of reparations for black Americans. “We all know that America became great off the backs of free black labour.
“Look, I grew up in the middle class. My mother worked hard and raised me and my sister, and by the time she was in high school she was able to afford our first home. I know what it means for an individual and a family to have home ownership. I also know in the context of history that nobody got 40 acres and a mule. We have a history of a number of things including red lining – Detroit knows it well. Black families are 40 per cent less likely to be homeowners.
“And it created segregation. Why I love southwest Detroit so much is that in the Polish neighbourhood, the real estate guy would call up and say ‘you gotta move’ and they’d go ‘huh? What are you talking about?’ And hang up. So the neighbourhood stayed as it was. Eventually the Mexican immigrants moved in and kept it going.
He began building his business even as Detroit was caught in a maelstrom of social and racial upheaval. As most businesses fled he made the old factory his home. “I didn’t care,” he explains of his reasoning. “I figured: I am staying here no matter what. I put the store here. But I had to aggressively say: I am staying here and f**k anybody who tries to stop me. If you lay down and die, you lay down and die. Other stores were closing up, moving out. I was moving in.
Trump’s two-hour talk at the Detroit Economic Club drew international headlines because he had the temerity to diss the very city he was in by warning: “The whole country is gonna be like – you want to know the truth, it will end up like Detroit. The whole country is gonna end up like Detroit if she is president.”
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