It built the thing that destroyed itself, the car. We built the car to leave the city, so isnt that ironic . Just 40the richest years ago. We were the richest city, and now we are the poorest, and now you cannot buy a cadillac in the town settled by cadillac. So what happened to detroit happened. I am more interested in what is going to happen and if i can make it better for all of our kids, and im interested in that. There used to be so much money here. They talk about the saturday night drives up and down woodward, and you got a new car every other year, and there were so many jobs that you could go across the streets to the other supplier i get another job until your boss to screw it. We were rocking. We had the greatest schools and graduates, so we did not take advantage of it because cars were our life and then things changed. After the oil, people did not want the cars. The cars were made poorly, right . The japanese and foreign car started catching us. Factories started moving out of detroit to the south. They are moving to the west. They are moving to the burbs, right . And you start to see plight, schools falling apart, and then andkheads, heroin heads, these become cartel and then it becomes blood. The first you homicide victim i ever saw, a young teenager, maybe 13 or 12. Went across the street. My mom had a flower shop on thoroughfare,n 1980s, 1970s early 1980s. I went in the liquor store and i will never forget this. This guy god up this guy got chain, and there was a black man lying there. A halo of blood coming out. And he says, dont let a man forget what you saw. Never. The other thing that happened to us, centuries here, corruption. You know, corruption started the mayor in 1930, removed from office because he was in bed with the purple gang and ku klux klan. The mayor of 1945 went to prison because he was named a doubledip dick because you had to pay for his kid, too. The sheriff had a goldencrested badge per he went away. The county prosecutor went away. 1969, the last republican mayor of detroit went to prison in 1969. He could not explain what 250,000 dollars was doing in his safe on a 25,000 dollars salary. The county executive was going at magnum to go to prison. He died. We were so rich that you did not notice. You know, the uaw was corrupt, everybody was corrupt. And we took until there was nothing left to take. Middle class left. And then over the course of the last 20 years, the black itll class has left. So it is black middle class has left. So it is basically poor, black, functionally illiterate. We have left too many people behind. You here now about detroit, come back, right . Are you hearing that out where you are at . Isnt it . Is it . But icement being poured, see the city that was also americas biggest municipal bankruptcy giving some cities giving subsidies to millionaires in the name of developments. But if you do the work and the math, the publics bank is never replenished. They give people work, and that is a good thing, but there is something called a public bank, which pays for it, schools, police, ambulance, fire, roads, water. If that is not there, where we going . Into trump tax law. All states have equal opportunity zones, laces that are down and you kind of pump investment to bring them up. But what they really are our tax shelters, capital gain tax shelters, so you will see development but nobody is moving into it. Build a hockey arena, but we are capturing taxes intended for the schools and now the schools are not allowed to evolve because they are so far in debt, and the schools are falling apart that we have to borrow to fix the schools. Yet, a very rich man gets it and does not share revenue. So you see downtown and everybody out there where detroit really is. 95 of detroit is outside downtown. And you see this, and they see it. Is at think johannesburg good model for development. I dont. You have got to do something for everybody. Or, you know, we had the riots in 1967. Some people call them the insurrection or uprising. People sit up,nt that is a riot or you think that was bad . They were Walking Around with 38 specials and now we have ar15s. Do the math. I am here to tell you we have got to do better by each other. That is not a liberal thing. I am a conservative. I mean, i have got a 12yearold girl. That makes you conservative. [laughter] bad things happen before they will happen again. It is the only city in the history of the United States that was occupied by the United States army three times during wartime. We had race riots in 1863, the civil war. We had bottom of the race riots. In history, you shrink things down. Lots of stuff was happening. We had riots in 1943 during world war ii. We had riots in 1967 during vietnam. I mean, we dont get a buck if you are busy. But we get pissed and we are in an interesting place. We were the greatest city in the world, and black people and crazy and burned it down until we white people had to leave but that was not any help. And i look at it now, ministry coming back . I dont know, or screw detroit, turn my back on it forever. No, no, no. Dont you know that you are paying for it . When we build a hockey arena and we say, they took it from the schools in detroit, and then we had to bail out the detroit schools, well, who bail them out . You did, suburbs. And they took it out of your school district. Suffering, your kid suffers, and we are all saying, i like hockey what about our kids . Or the bus system, or the zoo, or the art museum, or the roads . You know flint . Ok, you know what flint really was . The rich guys decided to build those redundant Water Systems and they did not need to make money. Union guys make money, financiers make money, and flint was going to pay for it. The cost was going to be this for the water, but they were going to charge the same price to pay for it. Where they get the water . Detroit, metro detroit. As we know, flint went to hell. Flint is now back on Metro Detroits water but there is a 7 million payment for the bonds. Do the math. Of joint broke as flints, is paying 7 million more except detroit water system gives them a credit to make a bond payment, so the rich man, the banker, the financier, is made whole. Normally, you are supposed to go broke, it was a gamble. We made them hold. Who pays for flint . Bailout. And nobody knows this. And nobody went to prison either. What is this . Is this what is going on in america . Right . We are not weird, but we can come back. We need to find a reason to leave. Cars we are not bringing them back. See, dont let the white, bluecollar go down voting for trump because he is not stupid. He does not really think their jobs are coming back to america. We all know they are not coming back, but what they voted for was, hey, my brother just walked in, he works at warren stamping. You know what i mean . You are not going to take what is left and ship it out. That was the calculus. Everybody is going to come here this year next year. Because this thing went red. It is a blue state and it went red and it may go red again. We have you been for the last two years . Do you really care who we are . Because we are just montana. We are just tampa. We are you. We are not a weird place. Weird things happen. So looking at the history of this town might tell you something about the future. Looting, writing and arson in the worst outbreak of racial violence this year. Entire blocks of homes. Damage topped the half billion dollar mark. Businesss industry and restricted and a tight curfew in the motor center. I do hereby officially request the immediately immediate deployment of troops into michigan to assist state and local authorities in reestablishing law order in the city of detroit. This from the beginning was a contested city, a city where at least 50 of the population felt to claimas theirs forever and in perpetuity. To 1967, thee get question of who detroit will be, can it be abide your biracial city, can it be all white, a black city . The city dubbed the model city, Lyndon Johnsons late society city. Behind that glitz and glamour was a real problem with inequality, a serious problem with Police Brutality, and a real problem with having the city represents all the people that lived inside of it. A lot of times we think about detroit in the 1960s as a time of great rebellion and uprising because we focus on the uprising of 1967 specifically, but detroit in the 1960s was more complicated than that. On one hand it was a city of economic disparity prosperity. Jobs were plentiful and the Auto Industry was running shifts around the clock. On the other hand it was a city with enormous tensions. An enormous population of africanamericans after world war ii seeking equality of jobs, housing. And were constantly shut out of that. They were always relegated to the worst divisions and departments. The paint department, the concrete room. Places where the conditions were bad. Places where it was very hard to get out of them and move up in the company. Similarly with housing it was not that people could not get housing, but the Housing Stock for black detroiters was much worse than for White Detroiters. Every time black detroiters wanted to move into established community of White Detroiters, they were resisted at every level, so it manifested itself very personally in peoples education, where they lived, how much money they made on the job. Probably the most intense way Racial Discrimination was obvious to anyone who lived in the city who was not white was the actions of the Police Department. Felt under detroiter siege by the Police Department. The 1940s,oughout 1950s and 1960s. Even though it was a city of prosperity, the arsenal of democracy, the best of that Lyndon JohnsonsGreat Society had to offer, behind the scenes was a city with a serious problem with Racial Discrimination, housing, jobs and the way Law Enforcement operate in the city. The naacp would file complaints, beg the Mayors Office to take seriously this problem. At least when we get to the 1960s and have mayor kavanaugh, there is an attempt to rein in the Police Department. Day, inhe end of the many respects, the police operated as proxy for White Detroiters and what they wanted. To take on the police was to essentially take on White Detroiters perceived prerogative. Not many mayors wanted to do that. Detroit is infamous because it has had not one but two major major riots or certainly explosions of racial conflict in the city. One of the first was in 1943, the second in 1967. For very similar reasons. There were taxes on the community by White Detroiters. This goes on for days and days where blacks were being singled out. It was less of an uprising of than it was ars real violent clamping down on black detroiters by White Detroiters. By 1967 the script was flipped a bit. There were a lot of black activists who had had it. There is an explosion of black anger in a different way by 1967. Notably, had any lessons and 1967 wouldom 1943, not have had the rage and passion behind it because those issues of housing inequality, educational inequality, and Police Brutality would have been handled 40 years earlier. Was the real, 1967 wakeup call that 1943 should have been. They will try, hopefully they will succeed. Next to this block of buildings now burning, a gathering station. They may get a truck here, hopefully. That block of building is gone and next with a gas station, and behind it, homes, people. A lot of times we focus on the very specific night that detroit explodes in an urban insurrection in july of 1967. That night at an after hours stringing establishment there is a police raid and there are lots of arrests made and in this case it was a party of a returning vietnam vets, so there was a lot of anger when this party was broken up and people start being carted away in paddy wagons. The irruption that followed cannot be understood on the basis of that one night and one raid. The anger that raid generated have been bubbling and brewing for decades actually in detroit after days and days of rioting. Nots really clear it is going to go away. Looks like key members of the black middle class asking people to go home, take these grievances up in a less dramatic fashion. And you have the white mayor Jerome Cavanaugh begging for peace. You even have governor romney begging for some level of order. At the end of the day, people felt they had been talking for a very long time. There was so much rage of the Community Level it was thentially taking in national card, Troops National guard, troops, to get any measure of calm. We tend to think of the uprising as being the end of the story, but one of the things my Research Made very clear to me beginning ofis the the really important battle for the soul of the city. This is when people come out of the uprising saying, now do you get it . We really are serious about desegregating schools. We are really serious about desegregating jobs, and equal pay. We are really serious about reining in the police. After the urban uprising many equallytroiters were serious about doubling down on Law Enforcement and those lines of segregation, so the period 73 were some and 19 of the most contentious years in detroit as that battle works itself out in the political arena. The next mayor that was elected was a law and order mayor. Had put someone in office that would double down on policing, rather than think about ways to make it more equitable. The most notable thing that happens is that there is the creation of an undercover decoy operation and the Police Department called stress. Stop the robberies enjoy safe streets. The acronym was stress. Armycame like an occupying in the black community of detroit. Tensions, existing existing Police Brutality issues escalate dramatically in the wake of the uprising. Now there is a real battle for actually who will have to run the city. The choicein 1973 comes down to the Police Commissioner running for mayor, the one who created s. T. R. E. S. S. , and Coleman Young, a black activist. And what is the central issue in 1973 . What are we going to do about the police . What are we going to do about desegregating the Fire Department, the Police Department, our schools . Eventually it works out in the political arena but it means detroit will have a black mayor. And in response to a black mayor winning office, the rest of white detroit, who had been kind of leaving because of urbanization and the movement of jobs, basically there is an exit this exodus. Young 20 years of mayor taking Office Detroit becomes a predominantly black city. Not because somehow detroit had faltered or was failing, but rather because most White Detroiters had chosen not to live under a black mayor. When Coleman Young becomes mayor this73, he has won election by a majority, but by a hairs breadth. When half left, they took their tax base, jobs. Coleman young in many respects becomes the captain of a slowly sinking economic ship. Detroit then becomes the city that is amazing and extraordinary on so many levels. It was only one of the only cities where a mayor promised to desegregate the Fire Department ended. Try to desegregate the Police Department and did. But with fewer and fewer resources and enormous divides between city and suburbs. In fact, what did detroit in over the next decade, was the combination of loss of tax base, deindustrialization, jobs that did not all go to mexico. Many went across the road to various suburban plants. It took a real toll on the city for decades and decades. Detroit wasdy in islands. On all sidesnded by white suburbs and was overwhelmingly a black city. It is only very recently that detroit has experienced what i think the media is calling a rebirth. Part of that rebirth is that white citizens are coming back into the city. It will be interesting to see what happens because this is still a city where 750,000 people have lived here all along. This is a city that has a long history, a city that welcomes newcomers. We will see how that history plays out. Hopefully those lessons of 1967 will be learned. If you are going to rebuild the city it has to have equitable and just policing policing that is equitably distributed. Jobs that are equitably distributing, housing equitably distributed. Of Real Community effort and activism to make that be, the just city it could and what folks always wanted it to be. While in detroit we visited various cities with author aaron foley. We are going to a neighborhood in detroit called west village. It is west of a larger neighborhood called indian village. Indian villages where a lot of Automotive Companies in the lived where motor city was first becoming the motor city. It became more of apartments, duplexes, flats. A lot of this neighborhood came 1920s. E 1910s and who is predominately in this area . About 60 black, 40 not black. Young professionals, people who are interested in community building, students live here a lotome of these of white students commute back and forth on the campus. Ais is like a first stop for new resident of detroit. Is there, but one block over his indian village, which is the really rich side of town. [laughter] that is what attracts people to live over here. You have apartments and duplexes over here, then you walk your youre in a completely different neighborhood. Indian village on the site is definitely, this is definitely a part of detroit that has looked the same all this time. It has never not looked like this. When the riots happened in 1967, the National Guard blocked off nethhborhood. Do not know why they did not protect the rest of the city the same way, but i cannot go back to 1967 and change that. When you make a left on south st. Paul you will see the villages. I remember back in the 1990s they were falling apart and now they have completely been turned around. Factoring the financial crisis, these were going for nothing. 200,000,re going for 300,000. Is that high for detroit . Home price isdian 45,000 or that range. You have all of this new stuff in west village and indian village, but as soon as we leave, cross this light, we have some more challenging areas. You can see straight ahead that empty building right there. There is new activity going on. You go up and down the streets, still homes that need to be torn down. Overgrown. Stuff over here. This is a part of living here as far as, it does not always look the same block to block. What are we doing about the . It is starting to reach a point where you are seeing more stuff being torn down and stuff spreading outside of the bigname neighborhoods, but we still have a very long way to go. How large is detroit . 143 square miles. One end and the other be closer to downtown. Any of these big streets we went up to eight mile. You can start at one end of eight mile and go all the way to the other end and still be in detroit after driving half an hour. Anywhere else in the country you are out of the city and into the suburbs. But you are still in detroit. Square milest, 143 and 2 Million People lived here at one point. Now there are only 680,000. That is why everything looks so spread out. You see these empty lots because a house or school used to be there. We reached a point these neighborhood started to empty out. If there is no use for it, you tear it down. Who was living downtown . Same people, young professionals, no kids. I meet a few people every now who may have had a big house in the suburbs and they wanted to downsize so they came downtown and they have a pension or some other retirement money coming in. A lot of people from outside the city who do consulting work or have some sort of agency or or who getike that, a lot of the higherpaying jobs there, are people who work in the arts. Higherwho have these incomes and want to move down here. The one conversation i have a people my age and slightly younger, who have been born and raised in this city, and want to live downtown, this is where i [indiscernible] been, peoplealways in our generation who were born and raised in detroit, we need to start going back to the neighborhoods we grew up in. Like i said, the average home price in detroit is still 45,000. We can all afford that. People say i want to live downtown, but i cant afford it. You do not lead to live in downtown. We came downtown to eat and hang out and we still went home and life was still good. A lot of people complain about the rising price of downtown with prices elsewhere. And west village are going up, but the rest of the citys cheat. You see what is going on everywhere else in the country. You see atlanta is doing this in brooklyn doing that. We still have an opportunity where you have make if youre making good income, but balking at the prices downtown, you can go everywhere and still have stake in, a staek detroit. I do not think people realize that yet, but i cannot force people to think one way or another. We are going to cross into a neighborhood called russell woods. You have dexter lynn one on one russell woods. Both of these places were predominantly jewish. Neighborhoodwish that changed to a black neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s. Was part of Dexter Linwood characterized by flats, duplexes. But you look around and see a lot of vacancies, a lot of abandonment. The foreclosure prices, everything, ravaged these because a lot of homes flipped to renter occupied units and the same kind of love and attention you would pay to a singlefamily house was just not there. I like this house, huge porch. When we cross that stop sign, we will get these were built in the 1930s and 1940s. There has been nothing new here. A lot of detroit looks like this. Colonials, and the thing i love about this neighborhood i tell people, all of the supremes lived one street over from where i grew up, at one point. When motown started getting money, i was actually interviewed. They had a Real Estate Agent that was buying homes for the people of the day. And wilsoniana ross all had property. They did not know they owned it until the real estate showed them, here is your new house. A lot of the funk brothers lived here. Many from motown called this place home. This is where you went if you were black and had money. The thing about this neighborhood is, you have all these houses, but dexter avenue has always been hit or miss with the commercial and business activity. Not a ton of retail over here. There are people here to support it, but back in the day when i was growing up, there was a corned beef place that was legendary. And it was right on the corner. Then it closed down, how did it closed down . That was a legend here. That is one of the things you could go to. The cvs used to be an arbor drugs. The fact that is the main store , that isneighborhood the disconnect between the people that live here and the style of homes and what is available to them. This was a neighborhood originally built for the g. I. s returning from world war ii. Because of that it was always meant to be temporary housing. I guess they wanted the g. I. s to start a family and then move. Well, they didnt and the housing is still there, but it was not good quality housing. It is a mix of flat board housing, very small bungalows and whatnot. , butple of brick houses because the Housing Quality was poor, not maintained the way it should have been for the decades after it was built. A lot of people care about tmoor, dore brigh not get me wrong. It is like people in my high school, you can talk about i can talk about my cousin, but you cant. For years in detroit it has been a challenged neighborhood. You see a lot of things boarded up here. Who mostly was in this area . Everybody. Anybody you can think of lived in brightmoor. Working class whites, older blacks, senior citizens, young people. When we talk about young people in detroit we think about a young professional that works in a suit. Young people that work in factories. A couple over there on the redford side. Single parents, married parents. I cannot think of a single demographic that does not live here in brightmoor. How far is this area from downtown . With all the things going on in the city, does any of it trickle down to the people here . We are about 25 minutes from downtown. The trickle down from how from downtown is not quite reaching here, but if you go back up the river, this whole neighborhood sits off of the grand river core door. You see all the new stuff popping up around the Rosedale Park side of grand river. There is a new store that opened closer to the side of the neighborhood. It may not be trickling down from downtown, but what is going on on grand river is starting to touch bright more a bit. R a bit. Ighmoo can you tell me about the challenges of a community so spread out, and can be drastically different from block to block . The size is definitely a challenge for everyone. You fix the city where there is so much land and so many different neighborhoods and not always enough resources to do so . [indiscernible] we are only just now starting to see a lot of the investment coming from the foundations, the corporates, and whatnot. We are in the very early stages, but a lot of people have been waiting a long time for this to happen. Well you see some more preserved areas like this one, what does that mean for people a few blocks away, where parts of brightmoor and other neighborhoods are not the same . The challenges patients, trying to get to everybody and trying to make it clear to everyone, you matter, you are importance, but it is going to take time. It took 60 years for detroit to fall. It could take just as much time to bring it all back. The neighborhood i live in is called pole town. It was originally settled by jews, and then the italians came in and then the polls poles really made it what it is, pole town. It was also white flight as well. People would literally abandon their houses and move to the suburbs because they did not want to live next to block people so the town is now predominantly black. The first thing i remember when i walked into this house, there were no windows, no electricity, no plumbing. It was filled with trash. 10,000 pounds of trash. When i first walked into the door, i knew this was going to be my home some town somehow, but i was stepping on all sorts ces. Asty stuff, human fe once i started to get into it and understand what this would take and where i was moving to, a white person moving into a predominantly black neighborhood, the ,esponsibilities came later something more than just live in a tree house. I am from a small town in michigan called adrian, michigan. What made me want to move to detroit, i was able to go to the university of michigan, perhaps the best Public School in the United States. Thatt very lucky to get education coming from the background i did, especially. A game of class consciousness at university and realized [indiscernible] 2008 when i graduated, the height of the economic downturn. I think 70 were leaving the state, so we have our best and rightist students splitting. I thought that i should stay and use that education for something good for my people at my home. So i made a moral decision to stay. At the time i looked at it as staying home. I moved to detroit after college actually before college. I had one extra semester. I was here with no job, no friends and money and i wanted to stay. First job i found was in the newspaper, of all places. I called the man who then became my boss and talked on the phone because he wanted to see if i sounded white or black. Detroit is the most segregated metro area in the United States and this was an all black construction company. I would be the only white person. I would work alongside everyone else for 8. 50 an hour. But i would also be the first face people in the suburbs would see because they were not hire a black man if the first person i saw was black. So my job was also to sell these jobs in the suburbs predominantly white, i think about 83 . That was my introduction to the city. I saw this black middle class which has remained buying homes for themselves, buying rental properties paradise said, i could do this too. I could buy one of these and fix them up. I had barely any idea how to do it. I knew there was something utterly sinister going on, in terms of the housing policy here, and had been going on. I did not understand it in quite the same way i do now, historically. I knew i wanted to buy something straight up abandoned. I did not want to push anybody out of their home. There were a lot of foreclosures. Helms just north of here are going for 300,000, that i looked at for 3000, threestory brick homes. I knew they put someone on the street for that and i did not want that. There are no realtors for abandonment. What is a realtors commission for a house that is 500, 20 . I went to a Halloween Party dressed as an organ grinder. I had an organ imade that played motown music. I snucki was broke liquor into this party at the contemporary art museum. Kick and and came back. Sitting next to the organ was a man dressed as an organ grinders monkey. It was kind of meant to be. We set up a conversation. I set i wanted to buy the house a house in poletown. He said, i just did. I lived with him the first summer, he let me live with him. We would ride our bikes around the neighborhood and look at houses. Neighborhoods are more empty now, but at the time you could throw a stone in any direction and hit an abandoned house. We just kind of wandered around so it felt right. Looking for a big porch because porch means community. I wanted a big kitchen because kitchen also means community. And i wanted a chimney for a woodburning stove because that also means community, you can set around. From bricks iney found. You might recognize the poletown plant. It was built in the 1980s. It was kind of the death rattle of american manufacturing. 100 assembly plant. People from200 their homes to build it. 400 small businesses, 40 churches. It literally leveled the neighborhood to build this place. I believe they are running one shift making the chevy voltaire. Far lessak it employed than the number of people they kicked out of their homes to build it. There of the house were houses in detroit that were worse, but not much. Here0 pounds of trash in this very room. I was up to my chest in trash. There was the better part of a Dodge Caravan cut into chunks with a reciprocating saw. They said it was probably an insurance job. Someone had good Car Insurance and needed quick money so they reported it stolen, cut it up in parts and deposited around the city. Most of it made it into my house. There were literally no windows, they had been stolen, the plumbing had been stolen. No electricity, copper scrap was huge. All the houses had been stripped of anything valuable. The foundation was crumbling. I dug up the foundation mostly with a shovel. It was just this crumbling pile of trash on this filthy foundation. That is what we started with. The neighbors thought i was insane, crazy. Most people, white and black, were moving out. A white kid in this neighborhood stood out like a snowball in texas. There were a handful of us. One of my neighbors said it looks like a lot of work. That is what i am good at. I am not perhaps the smartest person in the room or most well read, but i have the most courage and can outwork anybody. So they thought it was crazy. I thought i was crazy, too. I am sure my parents thought i was crazy. I remember when they were hooking up the electricity and electrician came in our member him looking at me and asking what i was doing. Loonid, you are crazy as a or brave as hell. I was not sure which of those i was either at the time. Because of who i am, my background, my skin color, i am able to reach people that others perhaps cannot. Not like being the 500 house guy, i do not like doing interviews, appearing in public, and makes me nervous, makes my stomach acidic and feel bad. The reason i do it is because 1 3 of the houses in detroit have been foreclosed the last 15 years. Think about that. A population about the size of buffalo, new york. 1 5 of the houses have had their water shut off. In the u. S. And on the largest the greatfreshwater, lakes. The United Nations came and said that was a violation of human rights. These are not things people necessarily want to Pay Attention to. I wrote a book about building this house, because people need an avatar to take them through these things. A lot of people just will not read about racism. An Academic Book about racism or class, a lot of people would not read it. Trying to tell people about houseslike, 1 3 of the being foreclosed, we call that spinach journalism. It is good for you and you need to understand this for democracy. I want to put that spinach in a nice pie like spanakopita. I can slip some of the narrative in here and say, what is going on . Folks that vote for donald trump will listen to me because it is who i am, but i have to put it into an appropriate package and package that right. People need someone to live vicariously through. Was less about plumbing or electricity or carpentry, though i did learn those things. It was about community and what True Community means. I learned a different way to live is possible outside of capitalism, somewhat, where people value things differently. Where the goal is not necessarily to make as much money as possible. Rather, to make sure your neighbors have enough. I learned it is unfortunate, but i learned in a very tactile way how america treats many of its citizens. The majority of those are people of color. That affects our humanity. None of us can be truly comfortable until our neighbors are, too. Cspanooting on like a rubber band about to snap back he about to just rap like a Subway Sandwich or jimmy johns cspan cities tour is in detroit learning about its history and culture. Coming up, we learn about the history of the city from an author. Right now we are in a place thatd 54 sound in a place is the main music studio. This is where George Clinton recorded a number of his albums prior to the eminem explosion. All the eminem music would come out of this room. This is where the romantics recorded and others over the years. This is a pretty iconic place. The detroit music scene does center around motown. That is what everyone knows. But interestingly, motown is the middle of the story. Of all the stories of the other genres of music. It plays a big role in the sound of detroit. It is known for motown, but it is actually known around the world for some of these other areas as well. But what was happening in detroit at that time, this is starting around the 1900s, 1910, 1920s, and into the 1930s. Detroit was starting to become the automotive epicenter. Before that detroit was a main your major manufacturing city. They were famous for ovens and cigars and things like that. Fordthe car company with turned into the Assembly Line, that is when people really started migrating up here. Musicians started to migrate up here from the south, kind of like the blues. And actually the motown people, a lot of them, started to migrate up to detroit for jobs. You would have a number of musicians who also work at often ford or dodge. Music atplayed their night at least initially and then became more famous and that became their career and so forth. Pepper adams was a really big name. Another big name came from here. In the jazz world many of the the funko later became machine fore sound motown, came up as jazz musicians, james jamison, oral dyck, and earl van others. What happens with motown in dy is a is, barry gor boxer, songwriter. He was way down on the card, thought, this is not so great, i am getting my head beat in and he already wrote songs and then started thatng writing songs already had hits. He discovered he was getting pennies on the record. His good friend Smokey Robinson from detroit, they were tight together. Making a couple pennies per record, whether you do your own thing and release a record . Group at looking for the detroit Public School system which had great music programs. He started scouting around for kids who were in the music programs and may be had singing group, the temptations or the guys that would stand on corners and sing and doowop. Inwould look for them particular. One by one he started signing these artists. Then motown is really catching audiences,te africanamerican audiences all over the country. It is all coming from detroit, which puts it on the map. Love dont come easy its a game of giveandtake m. L. after motown the sound comes to what some refer to as the origins of punk music, with dmc 5. They start to deconstruct the music. M. L. at that point with the mc iggy and the stooges, originally called the psychedelic stooges, detroit becomes the epicenter of that kind of music. Of time Everyone Wants to sign a detroit group. Think back to motown. Over that and signed everybody. Back then Record Companies were flooding into town after the mc5 were signed, as were the stooges. They all wanted their Britney Spears or whatever. They came here looking for the next mc5. A lot of bands were signed to major labels. A lot of groups came to the surface and then things started to change. Are you ready to throw down . Yes we are m. L. the next music thing that starts to happen in late 1970s is hiphop, rap. And they are being inspired by the sugarhill gang and people were some of who the early early rappers. They build their own little scene. To the concrete ground right here in motown m. L. eventually that scene brings into contact kid rock, who started as a hiphop guy. And of course Marshall Mathers started here. Im the real shady wont the real slim shady please stand up please stand up came throughinem it was like, what other hiphop . They wanted to sign the next eminem is what it amounted to. All the time that is happening in detroit, techno music is being developed by these High School Kids in michigan, known as the belleville three. They just liked mixing different records with and making sounds and connecting them and making them extended tracks for dance danceable things and to play. Then the techno thing starts to erupt. I would say after the eminem flurry of hiphop groups and everyone wanted one takes place, then internationally as the techno sound exploded. M. L. internationally people are coming to detroit to find the techno sound. Locally i do not know. It seems like some of my students are techno people, but not as many as you would think for it being in epicenter. Has not if it ever here caught on like motown did. Ofown would be the pinnacle detroit music development. If you look at it you can see what comes before contributes and what comes after knex back to it. Back to it. Mc5 they would do some motown stuff. They did johnny hookers motown burning motor city burning. They would perform that on a regular basis. Whichis a lot of mixing, is what techno music is, mixing different types of music together. You have to be innovative in detroit. That creates a different kind of artist who is always thinking outside the box. And when you think back to jazz all of thoseo, genres of music are happening in detroit because of people who think outside the box. To theoits connection Auto Industry is extremely deep. The automobile was not invented in detroit, but very early on a number of auto enthusiasts gathered here. Cameon nucleus of people together that wanted to build cars here just attracted more and more people. His first he created plant on the detroit river, there was the son of a railroad inon who convinced a company ohio to move their facility to detroit because he figured it was a fabulous place to do business for manufacturing. Horace dodge were key machine shop owners in ford Motor Company. They obviously have a car named after them now. All of these people coming together, like the Silicon Valley of its era. Henry ford was the sign of a farmer in the dearborn area. His father had a number of friends. One was the mayor of detroit and other business leaders, but henry ford did not want to be a farmer. He was more interested in machinery. One of his heroes was thomas edison. He eventually got to detroit and started looking working for the Edison Illuminating Company and in his spare time tinkered around with wanting to build his own motor. Build his own car. Personal transportation at the time henry ford got started. Ncluded the horse and buggy we also had streetcars at that time that operated and there s,re things called interurban little railways that would connect one city to another as opposed to just the big railway center. Not very well developed. You had bicycles, too. That was another major form of transportation that gave people mobility. And other entrepreneurs were building bicycles to give people that mobility, because typically in that time period, you did not go more than 50 miles from your home may be in that lifetime. There was a big need, people wanted to move around, they just did not have that ability until the car came around. Fords desire to build the model t started with the i diet idea of wanting to build cars for the masses to begin with. They started with a model called the model a, and then you had a progression of different models. This is not different than other companies which may have had a model a or b. Stockholderss wanted him to build more highpriced cars, like the rich mans toy, because that is who was buying cars. Eventually ford wanted to build a car high quality yet at a cost that more people could afford. That led to the creation of the model t here at this plant, the piquette plants. He first completed the model t around 1908. There was a period of experimentation before that. One of the places behind me is an experimental room where they secretly rolled off a corner of the factory as they did their different experiments creating the model t. The model t became innovative in a number of ways. One was using a lightweight steel called palladium steel. Featuresber of other that you could only get in a higher priced car. To start off with, there was not an Assembly Line at this plant when the first model ts rolled off. They were handbuilt. May have had different stations in this piquette plants where they would assemble different components, may be roll it to another section. The Assembly Line did develop here eventually. Initially there was not one. They were looking at ways to build cars faster and faster. That would eventually lead to experiments to do an Assembly Line. The public reaction to the first ford cars was pretty but you have to remember there might have been 100 automakers in the United States at the time that the model t was launched. Just in detroit alone you had packard, cadillac. Also a Company Called buick, oldsmobile, studebaker was getting involved in the automobile business. They were a big carriage maker. A lot of different companies. The model t did eventually become more and more successful because of the low price and perceived high quality of it for its time period. The success of the model t helped galvanize detroit and make it the motor city, the motor capital of the world, because eventually they were producing up to one Million Units or more model ts out of different plants in detroit or Branch Plants elsewhere in the country. Not really galvanized that detroit was the center of american the automotive industry, if not the world. There was no company in europe or elsewhere building one million plus units of one vehicle at a time. That drew more and more entrepreneurs to this area who wanted to be involved in the Auto Industry. Fromlped build the city up being a small hamlet originally, to maybe one of the top five cities in United States by the 1960s 1950s. The wealth of the Auto Industry got transferred to a lot of workers. Part of that is because of the rise of the Union Movement for people to earn a living wage to support their families. They could be working at the auto factories, but still have a middleclass type income. That allowed people to buy more than one car. Two carwo you had families. It allowed them to send their kids to higher education. There was a great number of benefits the Auto Industry provided to detroit and the surrounding community. The Auto Industry has gone through a lot of periods of challenges, ups and downs. Some authors write books such as the rise and fall of detroits Auto Industry. We have gone through a number of peaks and valleys over the years. At one time General Motors used to be considered the number one auto company in the world, based on its manufacturing, its income. Today arguably that is toyota. Ford Motor Company used to be considered number two in the world based on its manufacturing and profitability. I think it is ranked low volkswagen on that. That. Ow volkswagen on these things come in waves. Inroit has seen a resurgence the city itself because of the success of our Auto Companies here. For ford Motor Company and General Motors, they are concentrating a lot of their research and Development Efforts here in the detroit area. A lot of foreign automakers here toyota, nissan, honda. Euro, nissan, honda. They all have Technical Centers around the detroit area because we have this nucleus of talent, education and universities, all geared to helping the Auto Industry out. Our visit to detroit, michigan, is a book to be exclusive, and we showed it today to introduce you to cspan cities tour. For eight years now we have travel to u. S. Cities, bringing the book seem to our viewers. You can watch more of our visits at cspan. Org cities tour. President trump continued meeting with World Leaders today at the g20 summit in osaka, japan. He sucked on for a meeting with russian president Vladimir Putin for the First Time Since the 2018. Ki summit in they talked to reporters briefly before their meeting. [chatter] [glass