Names have been changed, but all other details remain accurate to the interviewee’s words.
Brenda is an education specialist and mother of four, originally from Detroit, Michigan. She grew up on the southwest side of the city as the sixth of eight children, sharing her home with her parents, one set of grandparents, and her siblings. She says, “I know people think living in Detroit is horrible, horrible, but I loved growing up in Detroit.” While she was lucky to have a positive childhood, the city declined around her.
Brenda’s elementary school split the school day into two halves, between which all the kids would walk home to have lunch. The students would have reading and math with one teacher during one half, while the other half would offer social studies, art, music, and other activities. “We had a class called auditorium where we were taught to be good citizens. We did radio plays and things like that. At that time my art teacher had a program on PBS, on the local station. We built puppet theaters. We did all sorts of things. I always wondered what we were going to do in school that day.”
“Detroit had a very vibrant downtown in the fifties. One of the nice things about growing up in a city, as opposed to a suburb, is we would go shopping downtown.” The closest commercial district to the family home was only three blocks away. Decades later, Brenda and her sister would retrace their childhood steps, only to find that most of the houses and stores had been damaged and abandoned, if not completely burned.
The first hint of trouble came when Brenda was in junior high school. The city failed to pass a millage, a property tax, to boost the school’s finances.
“It was a very mixed school. It was about one-third Hispanic, and about one-third African-American, and one-third white. We were calm. I was editor of the Western High School newspaper and I really didn’t see that much racial tension, ever, in the high school. I don’t think I was blind to it either. We were a very cohesive group, but things started falling apart with the riots in Detroit, which came in 1967.”
Brenda’s family was driving home from their east-side church on a Sunday night when they heard on the radio that they should avoid their normal route to their home on the southwest side. The radio described how police had raided a blind pig, an unlicensed after-hours drinking establishment, and rioting had broken out.
“At night, when we tried to go to bed, we could hear the shooting. You could see the fires. Nobody knew what was going on. It just got worse and worse.”
What frightened Brenda the most was when the National Guard was stationed at Patton Park, only half a block from her house. The troops would point their guns at anyone who approached them, effectively locking down the neighborhood.
When school resumed that September, her school bus drove through the 12th Street area, which had been the epicenter of the violence. “It was completely burnt out. It was the scariest thing. And that seemed to be the end of Detroit. No one moved into Detroit then.”
“Everyone left the city. But my parents didn’t. My parents stayed there. They loved where they lived.” Brenda’s father only resigned himself to leaving in 1984 when his home’s aluminum doors and railing were stolen in broad daylight. “He didn’t want to leave Detroit, but he did. That’s the sad thing about the city.”
Conditions rapidly deteriorated for everyone. After Brenda had graduated, her younger sister was at a Western football game when someone from the opposing team brought a gun on the field. Western’s players ran off the field and forfeited the game.
When her younger brother, Jim, was nineteen, his best friend, Steve, lived next door. One day, there was a drive-by shooting. When Jim heard the shots, he ran out to find Steve had been critically injured, owing to his involvement in drug sales. He died in Jim’s arms. A false rumor spread through the neighborhood that Steve told Jim who shot him. Terrified for his own safety, Jim fled to attend the University of Colorado, only returning to Michigan years later.
However, it was not just criminal violence that terrorized the population. “Detroit police got to be very abusive. There was a little boy across the street I used to babysit. He was out one night by a store, and somebody robbed the store and he had nothing to do with it. He wasn’t part of it at all. He ran, and the cops shot him and killed him. It’s sort of like everything just piled up, one on top of the other. You felt like you weren’t safe in your own neighborhood, either from the police, or from the drugs—it’s sad.”
“We realized that the place we grew up didn’t exist anymore. It’s kind of sad when that happens. You’re not one of the people who want to leave. You want the place to survive. But you realize you just can’t fight it anymore.”
“I don’t know what the answer is. I’d like to think that they could rehab the old houses and start the neighborhood up again, but people have to feel like I did when I was a kid, where I felt safe, that I could walk to the park, and that I could play on the swings or go ice skating, or swim, and be free to live around the neighborhood.” With Detroit bankrupt and rapidly changing hands, the city has an uncertain future, but it came from great heights and has the potential to return.
