Detroit: there can be few more vivid placenames in all of America, with its fabled music scene, its endless ghost line of workers who produced those gorgeous, ostentatious dream cars of the mid-century, and its lost splendour. There was the belle epoque and then, of course, the fall: the declining automotive profits, the escalating racial tensions, its defining riot in July 1967, the “white flight” to the suburbs, the spiralling murder rate, the crime and its languishing for decades as a place of infamy and ruin.
Now, in the anxious autumn of 2024, Detroit is as much an attitude as it is a city. You see it everywhere: in the new condos and apartments, the pop-up businesses within ancient buildings, the entirely razed streets and in its wearing, in slogans emblazoned on the concrete walls of its reclaimed downtown, of a defiance and a determination to reinvent itself into a new, promising city without shedding any of its past. Even the Lions, the city’s loved and luckless football team, are winning again.
On Tuesday, Kamala Harris was in the city to give an interview to Charlamagne tha God, host of a phenomenally popular podcast that was broadcast live. It was a forum that suited Harris: substantive conversation and serious engagement with an obvious pitch to reach the black American male voter on whom winning Michigan – and perhaps the White House – counts. Detroit has a 78 per cent black population – not that you could tell from walking around its quiet downtown on a sharply cold Tuesday evening listening to the Harris broadcast.
In the closing weeks of the election Detroit has become an intense focus for both candidates wrestling for this battleground state. Donald Trump outraged Democratic sensibilities by disparaging the city during a public interview at the Detroit economic forum last week, but then said he would return to the city on Friday evening to hold a rally, sensing votes in the deeply disillusioned Arab-American population in the suburb of Dearborn, home to Henry Ford’s emporium – and mansion – back in the day. Harris, meantime, has spent most of this week in Michigan and is scheduled to hold a rally near Detroit on Saturday.
On Tuesday evening the scenester restaurants and bars on Woodward – the main artery of the downtown area – prepared for evening service as Harris and Charlemagne spoke.
Walking in Detroit is strange: the streets seem too vast and imperious for the scant footfall. But then, it was designed as a car-city that would thrive forever: in 1950 there were 1,849,000 people in Detroit. Now 633,000 call it home. Kerns’s Clock, a decorative feature rescued from the long-demolished department store, stands as a piece of street art and a salute to that period.
On the radio Harris spoke well (it was a prelude to her blistering turn within the hostile environment of Fox News the following night). But it was the live questions which reflected the concerns and mindsets of the young, black Detroiters who will carry their city forward.
“Madame vice-president and Charlamagne tha God: whatupdoe – and welcome to Detroit,” began Zeke, president of New Era Detroit, a civic movement, who wondered if the vice-president agreed with the idea of reparations for black Americans. “We all know that America became great off the backs of free black labour. How progressive are you in making it a priority in righting people’s wrongs? Black Americans are heavily asked to vote Democrat in every election for the past half century with very little in return.”
Another listener wanted to know it if was true that Harris had prosecuted black men during her time in San Francisco. Her host, Charlamagne, brought up the recent comments by Barack Obama, who seemed to scold black American men for a possible reluctance to vote for Harris on the grounds that she is a woman: “waving his finger at black men”, as the broadcaster put it.
“When,” he wondered, “are Liz Cheney or Hillary Clinton gonna wave their finger at white women; when are Bill Clinton and Joe Biden gonna wave their finger at white men? Because 52 per cent of white women voted for Trump in 2016.”
This was a world removed from the frothy, irony-laden late-night talkshow circuit and Harris handled it well, if cautiously. Answering that question on reparations, she said, at the beginning of a very long response: “Yes, I am running to be a president for all Americans. That being said, I do have clear eyes to the disparities that exist and the context in which they exist – meaning history. On reparations, it has to be studied. There is no question about that.
“Look, I grew up in the middle class. My mother worked hard and raised me and my sister, and by the time she was in high school she was able to afford our first home. I know what it means for an individual and a family to have home ownership. I also know in the context of history that nobody got 40 acres and a mule. We have a history of a number of things including red lining [denial of services such as mortgages and insurance loans to residents of certain areas based on their race or ethnicity] – Detroit knows it well. Black families [nationally] are 40 per cent less likely to be homeowners.”
According to Michigan governmental statistics, 49 per cent of black Detroiters own their own home. A recent university of Michigan study showed that black homeowners gained a collective $2.8 billion in value over the past nine years, an 80 per cent increase, attributed by city mayor Mike Duggan as down to the hard work of “600 organised block clubs and associations who have been working to rebuild their neighbourhoods”.
In 2023 the city had 253 murders – the lowest number in 57 years. Some 25,000 vacant homes have been removed over the past decade and another 15,000 have been remodernised. Talk to any Detroiter and they will say their city is on the up. The most obvious symbol of this is the renaissance of Michigan Central station, the tallest rail station in the world when it opened in Corktown in 1914. It was closed in 1988 after Amtrak relocated and it fell into neglect: a magnificent lightless wreck. Now, under the new ownership of Ford, it has been refurbished and hosted public tours all summer.
“I remember going in it when it had trains going in it,” says John King. “It was nice. And then it became ... it was ruin porn, basically. They were having tours all summer of people coming in. They fixed the park out front. They made it look beautiful. Look, every city has the same reaction. Oh, it was wonderful back then! It was beautiful back then! Detroit was a bigger let down when it started falling apart. But many cities have that experience.”
John King is a Detroit legend. His rare and used bookstore on Layfayette Boulevard is housed in what was once a glove manufacturers and elevator warehouse and now houses over one million books and artefacts. On the day I called in he materialised out of nowhere, offering a cheery hello from behind the big, cluttered desk that dominates the foyer. He was friendly and distracted by the requests on the walkie-talkie he carries to contact staff as he took me on a tour of the building, which is an enchanting maze of a place. It’s like walking through the combined imaginations of Albert Einstein and Iggy Pop.
As we moved he talked me through the city he grew up in.
“After the ‘67 riot, that was the big turning point. The real estate people would call and basically say ‘look, black people are moving in. You gotta get out!’ And a lot of f**king stupid white people said yeah. They had built the expressway so people could get in and out and so all of a sudden, overnight, there were neighbourhoods that turned from white to black. It was really disheartening to me – I’m not prejudiced or anything but it felt as if people were abandoning the city and all these real estate guys took advantage of the racial situation.
“And it created segregation. Why I love southwest Detroit so much is that in the Polish neighbourhood, the real estate guy would call up and say ‘you gotta move’ and they’d go ‘huh? What are you talking about?’ And hang up. So the neighbourhood stayed as it was. Eventually the Mexican immigrants moved in and kept it going.
“Here in Corktown they tried to demolish the rest of the housing. They got rid of vast lots of housing. They kicked people out for urban renewal because they wanted to make it an industrial section. The city knocked everything down and wrecked a good neighbourhood. They didn’t care. They did that to Black Bottom on the east side too, a tight-knit black neighbourhood with really cool stuff. They ran an expressway through it.”
King became interested in books through his school guidance counsellor, Elsie Freitag, and through visiting the coin shops and stamp dealers and used book dealers when downtown was thriving. “I got inspired. I probably wouldn’t have if I was in some other city. There were like broken-down eccentric people running them and I liked that. I thought, wow these people are crazy.”
He began building his business even as Detroit was caught in a maelstrom of social and racial upheaval. As most businesses fled he made the old factory his home. “I didn’t care,” he explains of his reasoning. “I figured: I am staying here no matter what. I put the store here. But I had to aggressively say: I am staying here and f**k anybody who tries to stop me. If you lay down and die, you lay down and die. Other stores were closing up, moving out. I was moving in.”
Now John K King Books is a Detroit fixture as famous in its own way as Michigan Central. Celebrities call in – King shows me a meteorite he happened upon when Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling were hanging out on a break “from some movie they were making”. He treats the famous and anonymous alike: with respect, as customers. When King was born he spoke only Ukrainian for the first four years of his life: his parents were new immigrants. “I can’t remember a word,” he says cheerfully.
But he has reached the point where he has forgotten about ethnicity and race: people are people. And he says he can feel a new stirring now in his city. “I think Biden has been doing stuff with the Recovery Act. He has been putting money in all over – including Detroit. I feel it is a really positive energy and you can see the change. I don’t think Trump did sh*t, you know.”
Trump’s two-hour talk at the Detroit Economic Club drew international headlines because he had the temerity to diss the very city he was in by warning: “The whole country is gonna be like – you want to know the truth, it will end up like Detroit. The whole country is gonna end up like Detroit if she is president.”
Republican commentators quickly cried foul: that one line from a long, nuanced speech had been stripped and repackaged for political uses. And it was true that at the outset Trump had indulged in a reminiscence of his days as a young blade driving one of Detroit’s prized cars.
“One iconic model off the line after the next. I had that GMR and ... awh, I thought I was the hottest guy around. It was crazy. I never got a Corvette; I was left behind. But I was somethin’ man – I’d put that top down – see, in those days I didn’t mind how the hair waved.”
But that was then. Once he returned to the now Trump was intent on the same bleak, anti-immigration message. In 2016 he won Michigan – a state with 10 million people – by just 11,000 votes. In 2020 Biden reclaimed it for the Democrats with a 154,000-vote margin. But the deep discontent among Arab Americans is one issue for the Democrats.
The old reliable vote is another. Many have interpreted Harris’s late emphasis on her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” as indicative of worrying internal polling among that demographic. Polls show she still enjoys the loyalty of some 70 per cent of black male voters. But if even a small percentage of that demographic in Michigan fail to vote or decide that Trump can bring back lower prices, it could make all the difference.
“When Trump says the whole country is gonna be like Detroit if she becomes president he is telling folk that they need to fear the whole country becoming too black. These are white supremacist bullhorns at this point,” Charlamagne tha God told his listeners the day before his Harris interview. “If you don’t see the play by now you don’t want to see it. Nobody plays into white racial grievances like Donald Trump. Saying America is going to be like Detroit if Kamala Harris wins is just coded language that attracts racists.”
But few cities have such a complex and evolving relationship with race as Detroit, described by David Blair, one of its late, beloved poets, as the “chocolate city where the mother ship landed”. And it seems to have occurred, belatedly, to Democrats and Republicans alike, that it is a city with an independent streak. And that however the election pans out Detroit will step on, always, to its own beat.
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