100 books like Detroit 1967

Detroit is a city shaped by social movements. Even in the city’s darkest times of violent uprisings, outmigration, and bankruptcy, ordinary Detroiters remained committed to transformative change - banding together to challenge issues of racial injustice, housing access, food sovereignty, workers’ rights, and accountable governance. A People’s Atlas of Detroit is community-based scholar-activism at its best.

The brilliantly illustrated collection of maps, essays, photographs, poetry, and interviews is the outcome of a multi-year project involving over fifty residents from all walks of life who are at the forefront of local social justice initiatives. Through its combination of radical cartography, historical perspectives, and firsthand reflections, A People’s Atlas elevates the voices of the underrecognized people who are actively charting courses for a more equitable urban future. 

If one were to travel in a time machine back to the early 1700s, to the French colony of Detroit, they’d arrive at a village inhabited by mixed French-indigenous families, where women were power-brokers and family ties were the basis for structuring business relationships. The village would be totally unrecognizable to those of us who have been taught to envision French colonial Detroit as a male-dominated outpost, where European soldiers and fur traders operated in the service of the Crown. Historian Karen Marrero digs deep into the archives to assemble an account that completely reorients our understandings of the cultural landscape and gender dynamics of early Detroit.

Drawing on a vast array of sources – from colonial records and oral histories to songs and indigenous stories – Detroit’s Hidden Channels is a remarkably inclusive history that unearths the enduring role French women and indigenous people played in the city’s development,… show more.

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.  

From Motown to techno, twentieth-century Detroit was an incubator for world-famous popular music, yet the city has not followed the lead of Memphis and New Orleans by investing in preserving its music heritage sites. Meanwhile, memories of the city’s once-vibrant music scenes are fading as the generations who experienced them pass. The Grande Ballroom: Detroit’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Palace is a tribute to the fierce ingenuity, creativity, and activism of Detroit’s music-loving baby boomers. Between 1966 and 1972 the ballroom was the city’s most iconic counterculture music venue. Local legends Iggy Pop and the MC5 took to the Grande’s psychedelic stage alongside soon-to-be world-famous groups, including Led Zeppelin, the Who, and Fleetwood Mac. In 2003, as the long-vacant building fell into a seemingly irreversible state of decay, musician and local historian Leo Early established the Friends of the Grande group.

Now with over 2,000 members, Early and the Friends have… show more.

An Alabama native who moved to Detroit as a young child, renowned Black press reporter Herb Boyd paints a lively, knowing portrait of the world that his fellow Southern migrants and their offspring made in his hometown. The sweeping study examines the role that Blacks played in shaping the American car industry and autoworkers union, and fleshes out the backstories of legends who were raised or came of age in Detroit and went on to transform our national culture, from Malcolm X and Aretha Franklin to record mogul Barry Gordy and the young local musicians who became the superstars of Motown Records.

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.

Lila Corwin Berman argues that for Jews in Detroit, the city includes the suburbs. Just because Jews moved outside the city limits did not mean that they abandoned the city in their own understanding. In this provocative book, Berman digs deep into the reasons why Jews moved and the arguments they had over moving. She thoughtfully discusses the politics of race (and racism), real estate, and religious change. Metropolitan Jews challenges accepted pieties, making you pause and think. 

Ex-cop August Snow scrabbles through the rubble of his beloved Detroit to solve a twisted murder case no one wants him to pursue. Snow is everything I like in my PIs: witty, empathetic, combat-ready, and damaged by life’s cruel blows. The action is extremely gritty, the social commentary dark and biting. The flavorful descriptions of Snow’s Mexicantown neighborhood and its contrast with the snooty suburbs tugged at my Midwestern heart.

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.

Love him or hate him, it’s undeniable that LeDuff is a tremendously charismatic writer. A Pulitzer Prize winner, a breathtaking reporter, and a denizen of Detroit for decades, this is one of the most compellingly written books on Detroit ever.

This book has a Mustang eight-cylinder engine on it, and I hoovered this up over just a couple of hours. If you want a barn-burning page-turner of a tale, showcasing Detroit as its most broken and beautiful, this is the one for you.