This guest column by a native Detroiter is adapted with permission from a Facebook post this week. The writer is a sociology professor at MSU and a nationally prominent urban scholar. He also works with the City of Detroit Youth Violence Prevention Steering Committee.
By Carl S. Taylor
The accompanying picture, taken in 1974 on West Davison as my brother Virgil and I pose with our mother Mae, brings back many memories.
Carl S. Taylor is at right in a 1974 photo with his mother, Mae Taylor, and brother Virgil. (Photo by George Fleming)
In the background is a Detroit that nurtured and loved. My homeland was alive, working and loving that day. Now everything has changed, it seems, and not for the better. Urban communities are under siege from internal and external threats.
Today, it is just like Martha Reeves’ classic song from 1963, “Come and Get These Memories.” “What’s Going On,” Marvin Gaye's prolific theme album of 1971, never appeared with a question mark. Now, that question comes home to haunt us: What is going on?
The city remains pivotal in bringing me far.
My mother raised us by herself after my father Gene passed when I was 13 years old and Virgil was 8. Though a host of folks helped along the way, Mae essentially did it by herself. Thank God she gave us life, direction and most important a sense of being about more than ourselves.
I think of her many quotes every day, it seems. "I don't raise you for myself, I raise you for society" was one.
My father did everything for us against great odds. My parents sacrificed for both of us, their sons. If I can be half the man my father was, I will be elated. This dear man impressed upon me at an early age that I had to be a man if anything ever happened to him. Clairvoyance? Who knows, but he did his job in order that others could do theirs.
I received a great education in the Detroit Public Schools system. Mae and Gene, like many black parents, sent me and Al (Virgil) to school prepared to learn. Teachers were not responsible for catering to our parental failures. I am grateful for everything he did in my short life with him. Mae, our dear mother who died in 1982, did her job. I did mine and Virgil did his.
Carl S. Taylor: "I am forever grateful for my upbringing in Detroit. The city remains pivotal in bringing me far."
Our expectations were to abide by our family rules. My job as the first-born was to teach the younger sibling how to abide by the rules.
Today, our family lessons prevail. The fruit does not fall far from the tree. I owe much to my parents. My experience growing up in Detroit was not the roach-infested ghetto propaganda constantly cast on Detroit. That Detroit was and is my home, my native land.
It is my family and a neighborhood network of black Christian values from the South that allowed two black boys to become black men. It was my parents who instilled in us how to treat the world -- including women -- correctly. It was our parents who insisted that we owed something back to society for the good we had received.
I am forever grateful for my upbringing in Detroit. The city remains pivotal in bringing me far. I am forever a son.
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Note: The author's brother, who earned an economics degree from MSU in 1975, is founder and executive director of The Peace Project – a Detroit organization that serves young people with arts, literacy, fitness and healthy living initiatives. Carl and Virgil Taylor produce The Taylor Report, a quarterly urban affairs publication online.
