Bridge Magazine's Bill McGraw, who is a co-founder of Deadline Detroit, examines what's happened to black clout in a predominately African American city. The article is part of a series by the Detroit Journalism Cooperative this year examining Detroit in wake of the 1967 Detroit riot:
This is indeed a fraught moment for Detroit. The city’s short-term financial recovery, newly lit streetlights and restaurants that serve celery root Agnolotti in a short rib ragu have attracted a burst of positive international attention. Locally, Detroit has become so cool in some quarters that suburbanites who repeat the once-familiar boast that they haven’t ventured downtown in years come across as tone-deaf dinosaurs.
But to many black residents, the resurgence around downtown, while welcome, has done little to lift the despair that permeates desolate corners of their sprawling city. In their view, the rehabbed condos, rising hockey arena and farm-to-table dining establishments in the Woodward Avenue corridor cater to the pleasure of the young, mostly white professionals who have returned to live, work or party downtown.
African Americans may now control who’s elected mayor or to city council in this predominantly black city. But nearly 50 years after racial despair led to deadly insurrection and rioting, a view persists that white political and business interests (in Lansing, and in more affluent surrounding counties) continue to steer the city’s course.
