Fans pick 97 books like Black Detroit

It’s hard to know quite where to begin with this book–there is so much to love.

This book tells the story of the Great Migration of African American people out of the South across the United States to Chicago, New York, California, and beyond; it transforms and fills in a crucial part of American history that every American should know to understand our present day. But for me, what I love most starts with the way Isabel Wilkerson cares for people’s stories. 

Wilkerson tells this decades-long, sweeping, under-told story through individual stories that are so detailed and compelling, so thoroughly contextualized with historical research, that I was completely enmeshed in these people’s lives, their struggles, their loves, and their feelings. I cared. In the years since I read it, stories from the book often come to my mind, teaching and guiding me like the words of a beloved relative. 

The Promised Land is written in an engaging, eloquent style that makes it an excellent introduction to the history of the Great Black Migration. A noted journalist, Lemann interviewed dozens of migrants and their descendants to create a richly textured story of their experiences. Layered onto this story is description and analysis of the political contexts for the migration, including the civil rights movement and the Great Society programs. He follows a group of Black Americans from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and, in some cases, back. He shows how the migration affected not just the migrants themselves, but America as a whole, for it shifted race relations from a regional to a national problem. Chicagoans like me will enjoy its wealth of local detail.

Perhaps the most “realistic” novel of this bunch, Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award-winning novel follows an unnamed black narrator’s life in a small southern town, as detailed through his memories, dreams, and desires.

Ellison didn’t intend to write a “protest novel,” apparently, but it has become exactly that: a protestation of the inequities of an American system designed to keep Black people in the shadows. The novel’s voice, though singular, is representative of an entire social movement. A perfect novel. 

Mining contemporaneous news accounts, personal letters and diaries, and dozens of in-depth interviews, scholar Marcia Chatelain explores the impact that the Great Migration had on a generation of young Black Chicago women, who coped with coming of age in the urban North while shouldering the expectations and aspirations of their uprooted parents. Anyone new to Chatelain’s work should also check out her next and equally original book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, a study of the deeply mixed legacy of McDonald’s restaurants in Black neighborhoods that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Slavery and its legacy is a northern problem too. Detroiters were slaveholders, but that is a fact that we’ve collectively spent decades, if not centuries, denying and neglecting. Tiya Miles’ gripping history of slavery and freedom reveals the stories of the enslaved Native and African American people who were present in Detroit since the city’s initial decades of European colonization. Her historical narratives, crafted from meticulous archival research, reintroduce readers to the long-forgotten people whose coerced labor laid the foundation for the city’s physical infrastructure and scaffolded the livelihoods of its free residents. The Dawn of Detroit is a stark reminder of how the roots of contemporary inequities run deep through the city’s history.  

Detroit 1967 is a compilation of twenty essays and reflections about the racially-charged uprising that began on July 23, 1967 and was, at the time, the deadliest civil disturbance in United States history. Until this volume was published during the uprising’s 50th anniversary year, there were few, if any, attempts by scholars to confront the falsehoods that confused understandings of the events and their lasting consequences. Fifty years on, there is no consensus about exactly how the uprising started. In fact, we’re not even at a point of agreement on what to call the events. The terms “rebellion”, “riot”, “uprising”, “disturbance”, and “insurrection” are used differentially, often according to one’s race, age, and place of residence. Detroit 1967 is one of the first conversations about the uprising to cross racial and generational lines, and to recognize the experiences of those involved on both sides. The volume is a critical… show more.

The name “Detroit” too often conjures images of poverty-porn: gorgeously crumbling buildings, post-apocalyptic urban decay, lost souls wandering cracked streets. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying shatters this image with unfettered energy. It chronicles the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the auto plants of the 1960s-1970s, a refreshing reminder of the power of intersectional labor organizing; a raw look at the racism of the mainstream labor movement; and a very human chronicle of the struggles and flaws of courageous everyday workers at this critical time and place in history.

I like this book because it forces us to rethink what the Cold War really was. The book identifies key figures in anti-communist crusades in post-World War II Detroit: workers, white homeowners, city officials, Catholics, and manufacturing executives, and argues that the core elements of their “anticommunism” were not fears of Soviet incursion, but sociocultural tensions at home that derived from drastic changes in wartime and postwar Detroit, which observed a sudden influx of African Americans, Southern whites, and immigrants. 

Thus, the book argues that Cold War Detroit’s “anticommunism” was not a new development in the postwar era, but a continuation of what had previously been labeled anti-unionism, white-supremacism, anti-secular Catholicism, and anti-New deal sentiments, all of which can be characterized as expressions of ongoing “anti-modernist” tensions within American society. Such a reexamination of Cold War anti-communism is significant because it could open up new territory for rethinking what anticommunism… show more.

This is a real battle of wills, between Dr. Viveca Lancaster, newly licensed physician, and Nate Grayson, manager of a newly-founded Michigan town in desperate need of a doctor. He hires her, sight unseen, and when she shows up, he tries to fire her, because he doesn’t want a female doctor, but Viveca is not having that. She’s going to prove herself, as one of the first Black women doctors in 1870s America, and Nate falls for her as a brilliant doctor as much as he does for her as a woman. It’s impossible to go wrong with a Beverly Jenkins book, but this one is extra delicious.

I adore this book as it feels deeply woven with the legacy of Octavia Butler: gripping, socially engaged science fiction that is full of brilliant information about how to survive societal collapse.

I appreciate how adrienne shines a light on grief as it relates to the various social conditions that create hardship for folks. This systemic lack of care makes it hard for many folks to have their needs met in life, let alone have a dignified death. I gobbled this book up and was very sad to have finished it.