Black Bottom was a predominantly black neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan. The term has sometimes been used to apply to the entire neighborhood including Paradise Valley, but many consider the two neighborhoods to be separate. Together, Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were bounded by Brush Street to the west, the Grand Trunk railroad tracks to the east, south to the Detroit River, and bisected by Gratiot Avenue. The area north of Gratiot Avenue to Grand Boulevard was defined as Paradise Valley.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Carl Emil Schorske, known professionally as Carl E. Schorske, was an American cultural historian and professor emeritus at Princeton University. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), which remains significant to modern European intellectual history. He was a recipient of the first year of MacArthur Fellows Program awards in 1981 and made an honorary citizen of Vienna in 2012.
Detroit, the largest city in the state of Michigan, was settled in 1701 by French colonists. It is the first European settlement above tidewater in North America. Founded as a New France fur trading post, it began to expand during the 19th century with U.S. settlement around the Great Lakes. By 1920, based on the booming auto industry and immigration, it became a world-class industrial powerhouse and the fourth-largest city in the United States. It held that standing through the mid-20th century.
Augustus Brevoort Woodward was the first Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory. In that position, he played a prominent role in the reconstruction of Detroit following a devastating fire in 1805. He promoted an urban design based on radial avenues, as in Washington, DC and Paris. He is also known as one of the founders of the University of Michigan, established by the legislature in 1817.
Amy Gutmann is an American academic and diplomat who has served as the United States Ambassador to Germany since 2022. She was previously the president of the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2022, the longest-serving president in the history of the University of Pennsylvania.
Lizabeth Cohen is the current Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the History Department at Harvard University, as well as a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. From 2011-2018 she served as the Dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Currently, she teaches courses in 20th-century America, with a focus on urbanism, the built environment, and public history. She has also served as the Chair of the History Department at Harvard, director of the undergraduate program in history, and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, among other administrative duties.
Rogers M. Smith is an American political scientist and author noted for his research and writing on American constitutional and political development and political thought, with a focus on issues of citizenship and racial, gender, and class inequalities. His work identifying multiple, competing traditions of national identity including “liberalism, republicanism, and ascriptive forms of Americanism” has been described as "groundbreaking." Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the president of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for 2018–2019.
Conant Gardens is a historically Black neighborhood in northeast Detroit, Michigan. The neighborhood was once the most exclusive Black neighborhood in that city, and residents of Conant Gardens comprised the most highly educated Black enclave in Detroit.
Robert Sean Wilentz is an American historian who serves as the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. His primary research interests include U.S. social and political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written numerous award-winning books and articles including, most notably, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Thomas Byrne Edsall is an American journalist and academic. He is best known for his weekly opinion column for The New York Times, Previously, he worked as a reporter for The Providence Journal and for The Baltimore Sun, and as a correspondent for The New Republic. In addition, he spent 25 years covering national politics for the Washington Post. He held the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Chair at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism until 2014.
Ira I. Katznelson is an American political scientist and historian, noted for his research on the liberal state, inequality, social knowledge, and institutions, primarily focused on the United States. His work has been characterized as an "interrogation of political liberalism in the United States and Europe—asking for definition of its many forms, their origins, their strengths and weaknesses, and what kinds there can be".
Louis C. Miriani was an American politician who served as the mayor of Detroit, Michigan, from 1957 to 1962. To date, he remains the most recent Republican to serve as Detroit's mayor.
Alondra Nelson is an American academic, policy advisor, non-profit administrator, and writer. She is the Harold F. Linder chair and professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent research center in Princeton, New Jersey. From 2021 to 2023, Nelson was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where she performed the duties of the director from February to October 2022. She was the first African American and first woman of color to lead OSTP. Prior to her role in the Biden Administration, she served for four years as president and CEO of the Social Science Research Council, an independent, nonpartisan international nonprofit organization. Nelson was previously professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science, as well as director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She began her academic career on the faculty of Yale University.
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit is the first book by historian and Detroit native Thomas J. Sugrue in which he examines the role race, housing, job discrimination, and capital flight played in the decline of Detroit. Sugrue argues that the decline of Detroit began long before the 1967 race riot. Sugrue argues that institutionalized and often legalized racism resulted in sharply limited opportunities for African Americans in Detroit for most of the 20th century. He also argues that the process of deindustrialization, the flight of investment and jobs from the city, began in the 1950s as employers moved to suburban areas and small towns and also introduced new labor-saving technologies. The book has won multiple awards including a Bancroft Prize in 1998.
A large number of books and articles have been written on the subject of suburbs and suburban living as a regional, national or worldwide phenomenon. This is a selected bibliography of scholarly and analytical works, listed by subject region and focus.
Black Detroiters are black or African American residents of Detroit. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black or African Americans living in Detroit accounted for 79.1% of the total population, or approximately 532,425 people as of 2017 estimates. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, of all U.S. cities with 100,000 or more people, Detroit had the second-highest percentage of Black people.
Kevin Michael Kruse is an American historian and a professor of history at Princeton University. His research interests include the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America, with a particular focus on the making of modern conservatism. Outside of academia, Kruse has attracted substantial attention and following for his Twitter threads where he provides historical context for and applies historical research to current political events.
Heather Ann Thompson is an American historian, author, activist, professor, and speaker from Detroit, Michigan. Thompson won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2016 Bancroft Prize, and other awards for her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
John L. Jackson Jr. is an American anthropologist, filmmaker, author, and university administrator. He is currently the provost and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Jackson earned his B.A. from Howard University and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University. He served as a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows before joining the Cultural Anthropology faculty at Duke University.
