Herb Boyd's Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination - 27:55
Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination
with
Herb Boyd, journalist, educator, author, and
activist. His articles appear regularly in the New York Amsterdam News. He
teaches Black studies at the City College of New York and the College of New Rochelle.
Herb Boyd excites
and stimulates us with his inspiring, illuminating book that will interest
students of urban history and the Black experience.
Detroit was surely
the capital of 20th-century African-America, as native son Herb Boyd
recounts, this centrality dates back to the American Revolution but became
pronounced at the time of the Civil War, when Detroit went from being an
important station along the Underground Railroad to become an important
source of abolitionism, industrialism, and sheer manpower for the war
effort—including Black soldiers bound for the Union ranks.
As the author
notes, however, the ascendancy of Black Detroit did not mean an end to
racial tension; though he grew up on a block with Italian, Irish, and Jewish
families, “our blackness was for our neighbors an object of derision and
insult.” Boyd celebrates the rising-above that accompanied this ethnic contest, the grit and determination that put Berry Gordy’s Motown on the
map, lifted the members of the Supremes and the Miracles from the projects,
and ushered in a second black literary renaissance through the pens of
Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni. As he reminds his readers, immigrants
and exiles rom other regions and countries did their parts to shape Black
Detroit: Malcolm X lived there before moving to New York and taking a
leading part in the radical wing of the civil rights movement, while Rosa
Parks moved there from the South in 1957. “Parks’s commitment to fight Jim
Crow—North or
South —was unrelenting,” writes the author. Though the city
has fallen victim since to outmigration, its population having fallen from
1.8 million in 1950 to about 670,000 today, Boyd writes confidently that the
city’s African-American population will be central to its revival,
concluding, “I’m proud to be a
Detroiter.”
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