Detroit 
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SOURCE: Detroit Free Press
9/7/2020
Rosie the Riveters gathered on Labor Day to Honor the Working Women of WWII
"The Rosies and veterans then told stories from the front lines. One Rosie said she was shocked at the idea of wearing pants to work. A veteran recalled being shot down from the sky in northern Italy and receiving notes from Rosies back home full of profanities toward Hitler."
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SOURCE: The New York Times
4/27/2020
Detroit Students Have a Constitutional Right to Literacy, Court Rules
A major ruling in a lawsuit involving the Detroit public schools comes at a time when school shutdowns are expected to affect poor children most adversely.
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SOURCE: The Jurist
4/25/2020
Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Rules Students Have the Right to Basic Minimum Education
The decision in a suit brought by Detroit students against the state of Michigan referenced a number of historic cases and revives the question of whether inequality among school systems violates equal protection under the Constitution.
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SOURCE: Michigan News
10/18/19
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson sees Detroit as central for carceral reform
We’re poised for positive change with incredible energy to make our criminal justice system more just, and nowhere are we seeing that more than in Detroit.
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SOURCE: AP
4/22/19
New Website aims to preserve Detroit’s civil rights history
Rise Up Detroit is scheduled to officially launch with a kickoff event May 14 at Wayne State’s David Adamany Undergraduate Library. The program is expected to include a discussion with civil rights veterans and experts.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
3/3/`9
Two prizewinning books detail slavery in the north: Washington’s fugitive, Detroit’s forgotten crime
The authors detail the life of a woman who refused to be a possession of the nation’s first president and the Michigan city’s troubled past.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
9-10-18
Police killings of 3 black men left a mark on Detroit’s history more than 50 years ago
by Jeffrey Horner
"I believe these events show that police brutality today, perpetrated disproportionately against blacks in urban areas, is more of a continuation of historic patterns than a set of novel events.”
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SOURCE: Medium
3/8/18
From Segregation to Gentrification
by Mike Green
Lessons from Seattle and Detroit: How city policies and NIMBYism lead to unimpeded market forces displacing poor people of color.
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SOURCE: The Chronicle of Higher Education
10-1-17
Tiya Miles is mapping forgotten corners of slave history
The MacArthur "genius" grant winner and author of "Ties That Bind” is digging into the history of slavery in Detroit.
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SOURCE: mlivecom
9-12-17
University of Michigan professor says Detroit's early history 'mired in a slave past’
Tiya Miles’s op ed on the subject, “The South Doesn’t Own Slavery,” drew more than 500 comments in the NYT.
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SOURCE: The Daily Beast
8-2-17
Detroit Remembers How The 1967 Riots Changed The City Forever
The Detroit Riots of 1967 resulted in at least 43 deaths and a vastly changed city. 50 years later, the city's people and officials commemorated the riots and what happened next.
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SOURCE: Associated Press
3-11-14
Final Demolition Starts at Detroit Housing Project
The Frederick Douglass Homes, first built in 1935, are meeting the wrecking ball.
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SOURCE: New York Times
2-24-14
Play About Detroit Riots Wins Kennedy Drama Prize
. The award includes a $100,000 cash prize as well as assistance from the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University Libraries.
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SOURCE: Detroit Free Press
8-20-13
$5 campaign aims to turn crumbling Model T assembly line into shrine
Less than seven weeks from now, Oct. 7 will mark the 100th anniversary of the moving automobile assembly line at the historic Highland Park complex, where Henry Ford first paid workers $5 a day to build Model T cars.But as with far too much of metro Detroit’s automotive heritage, the Ford Highland Park property has sat largely dormant and ignored for decades, sorely in need of restoration and renovation so it can be properly celebrated as a shrine of American ingenuity.Today, the Woodward Avenue Action Association (WA3) is launching an online crowd funding campaign, dubbed Five Dollars a Day, hoping to raise the final $125,000 needed to buy two historic structures on the site, the four-story Administration Building which fronts Woodward, and an adjacent 8,000-square-foot executive garage....
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SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
8-8-13
Nathaniel Popkin looks back at Tom Sugrue's "Origins of the Urban Crisis"
Nathaniel Popkin is the author of Song of the City: An Intimate History of the American Urban Landscape.Perhaps no book has better clarified the story of 20th century urban decline than the 1996 Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton Press) by Penn historian Tom Sugrue. That book, which won the Bancroft Prize in 1998 and cemented Sugrue’s place among the top urban historians, illuminated the ways in which racism, federal policy, and corporate disinvestment combined to send Detroit—and dozens of other industrial cities—into freefall. Sugrue, who grew up in Detroit and lives in Mount Airy, is a careful observer of both his cities.
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SOURCE: Deadline Detroit
8-6-13
NPR Podcast: Historian Kevin Boyle On The Dangers Of Seeing Detroit As A Metaphor
"On The Media," National Public Radio's weekly show, took on the way journalists and other commentators have used Detroit's bankruptcy to draw a larger picture of what is wrong with the country -- often with an ideological bent that suits their own purposes. "Pundits and pontificators have seized on the moment to lay blame on their favorite targets and reductively declare that what ails Detroit is a microcosm of what ails America," said co-host Bob Garfield, who interviewed Northwestern University history professor Kevin Boyle on the most recent show.Boyle, who grew up on Detroit's East Side and attended the University of Detroit and received his master's degree and Ph.D from the University of Michigan, is the author of "Arc of Justice," the award-winning 2004 book about the Ossian Sweet case and Detroit in the 1920s, when, as he wrote, Detroit experienced explosive growth and the whole city seemed to function as one, huge, automobile-producing machine....
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SOURCE: NYT
8-5-13
GM had version of OnStar in 1966
It has been nearly two decades since General Motors introduced OnStar. Since then, it has served as electronic emergency nurse, computerized auto theft detective and binary butler for millions of motorists. Sure, it’s had its problems – as when G.M. decided to make the switch to digital in 2008 and told all the analog customers their equipment would no longer work. But for the most part, it has been a functional system. It must be; OnStar has already cycled through nearly a dozen hardware and software updates over the years.But the idea isn’t even 20 years new. Bet you thought it was, but it isn’t. It existed, floating in the ether, somewhere between press release and reality, for at least 30 years before G.M. released OnStar for real in 1996. According to an old press release from 1966, it was called Driver Aid, Information and Routing system, and was promoted by G.M. as a revolutionary concert of existing technology....
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SOURCE: Indianapolis Star
7-29-13
Detroit-area plant where Rosie the Riveter worked facing demolition
YPSILANTI TOWNSHIP, MICH.—The Detroit-area factory where Rosie the Riveter showed that a woman could do a “man’s work” by building Second World War-era bombers, making her an enduring symbol of American female empowerment, will be demolished if money can’t be found to save it.The Willow Run Bomber Plant, a 135-hectare former Ford Motor Co. factory west of Detroit that churned out nearly 9,000 B-24 Liberator bombers during the Second World War, is slated to be torn down unless a group can raise $3.5 million by Thursday to convert at least some of the structure into a new, expanded home for the nearby Yankee Air Museum.“The younger generation needs to know what people went through and be able to go and see what they did and how they did it for our country,” Larry Doe, a 70-year-old Ypsilanti Township resident who has given to the cause, said recently before joining other donors for a trip on a B-17....
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SOURCE: WSJ
7-22-13
Detroit files bankruptcy (2013), Michigan defaults (1842)
The massive bankruptcy of Detroit last week could put bondholders in jeopardy of not getting all their money back.It isn’t the first time that the holders of bonds issued in Michigan have had problems: Something similar happened 170 years ago.In the aftermath of the real-estate bubble of the mid-1830s and the bust that followed, Michigan became one of nine states to repudiate at least part of their debts....
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SOURCE: HNN staff
7-22-13
Tom Sugrue, Kevin Boyle, and Daniel Okrent on the Decline and Fall of Their Hometown, Detroit
In 1945, Detroit was the American Dream.During World War II, the Detroit region was the center of American wartime production. The Willow Run factory near Ypsilanti, a few miles outside of Detroit proper, produced nearly half of the some 18,500 B-24 Liberator bombers built during the war. Ninety-one percent of all G.I. helmets were produced in Detroit. The city was home to the nation's first tank plant; a quarter of the nearly 90,000 tanks produced by the United States during the war were built in Detroit.That was the Detroit Tom Sugrue's parents and grandparents knew. But it was a city largely built on quicksand, reliant on the postwar auto industry for continued growth and which dealt with the large wartime influx of African American workers with discriminatory housing policies and at times brutal violence.The good times wouldn't last.
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