Dr. Russell Rickford discusses what drew a generation of Black Americans to Guyana in the 1970s, and the political limitations they encountered while establishing post-colonial cooperative settlements in the newly-independent small South American country. Rickford is an associate professor of history at Cornell University and author of A Proxy Africa: Guyana, African Americans, and the Radical 1970s.
Dr. Cedric De Leon explains how, from the founding of the African Blood Brotherhood in 1919 through the 1963 March on Washington, Black workers linked racial justice to economic justice, challenging the American labor movement to become more racially inclusive in its fight for workers’ rights.
De Leon is Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity.
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 .
John Fabian Witt recounts how in the 1920s and 1930s Charles Garland donated his million-dollar inheritance to the American Fund for Public Service, or Garland Fund, to support progressive causes and organizations he believed could challenge inequality and reshape capitalism and democracy in America.
Dr. Witt is a Professor of History and the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale University and author of The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Dr. Say Burgin explains that contrary to the common belief that white activists were purged from the Black freedom movement in the mid-1960 and 1970s, Black-led organizations in Detroit – including the Northern Student Movement, the City-Wide Citizens Action Committee, and the League of Revolutionary Workers—called on white activists to organize within their own white networks to support Black self-determination in education, policing, employment, and labor unions. Burgin is an assistant professor of history at Dickinson College and author of Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit.
Dr. Matthew Lassiter shares stories uncovered in Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era, a collaborative digital exhibit created by undergraduate history students documenting nearly 200 civilians killed between 1957 and 1973 by the Detroit Police Department and other law enforcement agencies in the city. Because identifying information was rarely included in official reports or the city’s mainstream media, the students instead searched the archives of local activists and community organizations to identify the victims and the circumstances of their deaths. In the process, they also found that “get-tough” policies, investigative arrests, and policing units like STRESS (Stop the Robberies–Enjoy Safe Streets) encouraged police brutality, and that nearly all of the officers involved were exonerated despite approximately two-thirds of the victims being unarmed. They found patterns of racial abuse, including that 79% of the victims were Black, and that the killings were clustered in downtown and midtown Detroit, commercial corridors, and other “color lines” where the predominantly white and predominantly Black areas of the city converged. Beyond these patterns of state violence, the website also documents the activism and resilience of the Black community.
Lassiter is Professor of History, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, and the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan and director of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, an initiative of the University of Michigan Department of History and the UM Carceral State Project.
