Downriver Detroit: The Working Class, the Environment, and the Bonds of Place

August 6, 2026July 27, 2026 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Lisa Fine explains how the working class, local unions, and sportsman’s organization collaborated throughout the twentieth century to preserve the ecosystems and waterways located Downriver, a collection of working class industrial, exurban, and rural communities south of Detroit along the Detroit River. Fine is a professor of history at Michigan State University and author of Downriver Detroit: The Working Class, the Environment, and the Bonds of Place.

Episode Credits
Interviewee: Lisa M. Fine
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing

May 7, 2026May 1, 2026 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Michael Stauch explains how newly elected Detroit Mayor Coleman Young introduced “community policing” to the city in 1974, an experimental approach to law and order that included affirmative action hiring policies and neighborhood police stations to address community concerns about both police brutality and criminal activity in the neighborhoods. Despite these changes, tensions with the police remained, leading Black youth in the city to embrace labor radicalism from the shopfloors as they built informal economies and decentralized gangs to challenge and achieve political and social power in the 1970s and 1980s. Stauch is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toledo and author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing .

Episode Credits
Interviewee: Michael Stauch
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Music: Bart Bealmear

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The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North

November 17, 2025November 7, 2025 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Professor Michelle Adams describes the struggles to integrate Detroit’s highly segregated neighborhoods and schools in the 1960s, a federal judge’s ruling to alleviate that segregation by bussing students between the predominately Black schools in Detroit and predominantly white schools in the suburbs, and the Supreme Court’s subsequent 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision that acknowledged the segregated state of Detroit schools but overturned the “metropolitan remedy,” thereby allowing de facto school segregation to persist today.

Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and author of The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North.

Episode Credits
Interviewee: Michelle Adams
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Remembering the Detroit Feminist Women’s Health Center

October 30, 2025October 17, 2025 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Beth Widmaier Capo discusses the Detroit Feminist Women’s Health Center and the role health practitioners there—including her mother—played in empowering women to understand their bodies and take control of their health in the 1970s. Capo is the Edward Capps Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Illinois College, and author of the article, “The Detroit Feminist Women’s Health Center; Or, on Hearing Your Mom Described as ‘The Fucking Bravest Bitch I Knew.’”

Related Collections:
Detroit Feminist Women’s Health Center

Episode Credits
Interviewee: Beth Widmaier Capo
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Coach of Champions: D.L. Holmes and the Making of Detroit’s Track Stars

September 11, 2025September 10, 2025 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Keith Wunderlich shares the life and legacy of D.L. Holmes, athletic director of what is now Wayne State University from 1917 though 1958. With a meager budget and outdated equipment, Coach Holmes nurtured a generation of track and field Olympians and world record holders in Detroit, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religious background. Wunderlich is co-author of Coach of Champions: D.L. Holmes and the Making of Detroit’s Track Stars.

Episode Credits
Interviewee: Keith Wunderlich
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Seeking “Self-Determination” in Detroit: Housing, Race, and the Activism of the West Central Organization, 1964-1971

July 3, 2025June 26, 2025 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Anna E. Lindner discusses the rise and subsequent downfall of the West Central Organization in Detroit, a coalition of civil rights organizations, community groups, and church congregations that sought to bring attention to housing inequality and other social issues in the 1960s. Although founded with good intent, the group’s aggressive lobbying gained short-term results but turned local media and government administrations against them, and the predominantly white liberal leaders in the organization’s first early years struggled to fully understand and address the systemic racism faced by Black Detroiters.

Lindner is an assistant professor of Media & Communication at Nazareth University and author of the essay, “Seeking ‘Self-Determination’ in Detroit: Housing, Race, and the Activism of the West Central Organization, 1964-1971.”

Episode Credits
Interviewee: Anna Lindner
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Schools and the Rise of Mass Incarceration in a Post-Brown World

May 29, 2025May 22, 2025 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Matt Kautz explores how evolving school disciplinary practices, changes in crime reporting, and political pressure in the decades following school desegregation led to the rise of student suspensions, expulsions, dropouts, and the school-to-prison pipeline in Detroit and other cities. Kautz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Leadership and Counseling at Eastern Michigan University. His article “Schools and the Rise of Mass Incarceration in a Post-Brown World,” was published in the Summer 2024 issue of Harvard Educational Review.

Episode Credits
Interviewee: Matt Kautz
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Music: Bart Bealmear

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When Detroit Played the Numbers: Gambling’s History and Cultural Impact on the Motor City

October 17, 2024October 14, 2024 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Felicia George explains how number lotteries in the city’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods in the 20th century, although illegal and rife with exploitation, also raised some Black Detroiters out of poverty and created an important social support in a community stressed by racial discrimination and job insecurity.

Dr. George is an adjunct professor of anthropology at Wayne State University and the author of When Detroit Played the Numbers: Gambling’s History and Cultural Impact on the Motor City.

Episode Credits
Interviewee: Felicia George
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Hillbilly Highway: Charting White Migration from Appalachia to the Industrial Midwest

May 9, 2024May 3, 2024 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Max Fraser shares the often overlooked story of the “hillbilly highway,” the route nearly eight million poor, rural, white Americans took in the 20th century from economically depressed areas in the Southeastern and Southern United States toward higher paying factory jobs in the Upper South and Midwest. He explains how the social advancement and marginalization they experienced transformed American culture, the labor movement, and today’s political landscape.

Dr. Fraser is an assistant professor of History at the University of Miami. His book Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class received an Honorable Mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.

Episode Credits
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Interviewee: Max Fraser
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit

A poster on the back of an anti-incinerator publication proclaims: "Detroit Incinerator: We Say No!" From the Thomas Stephens Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

June 15, 2023June 7, 2023 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Josiah Rector explains that since the 1880s a confluence of unregulated industrial capitalism and racist practices in housing and employment in Detroit created pollution and environmental disasters disproportionately affecting the poor, working class, and particularly African Americans. He explores the resulting environmental justice movements in Detroit as residents have fought for clean air, water, and improved public health amid government and corporate divestment and Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy. Rector is an assistant professor of urban, environmental, and labor history at the University of Houston and author of Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit.

Episode Credits
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Interviewee: Josiah Rector
Music: Bart Bealmear

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