Category Archives: Social Studies

Detroit, America’s Most Epic Urban Failure

[Above image: “Detroit Industry” – Detroit Institute of Arts ( Diego Rivera ) – View 1, from DetroitDerek’s Flickr photostream.]

Over the past decade or so, I’ve visited Detroit many times, so as I read Mark Binelli’s profile of this dying city in the most recent Rolling Stone (#1073) there was a lot of resonance with my Motown experiences.

The article, of course, focuses on the auto industry, the government bailouts and Binelli uses a visit to the Detroit Auto Show to explore the decline of the industry and the city. But the most compelling part of the article describes a tour of the deindustrial wastelands of downtown Detroit that Binelli takes with Detroitblogger John to see abandoned factories, houses, and office buildings; grassy fields, which used to be crowded working and middle class residential neighborhoods and are now homes to coyotes and other wild life.

Check out photos at DetroitBlog.org or KenTakesPictures “Detroit” Flickr photoset or Derek Farr’s “Detroit Ruins” Flickr photoset to get an idea of what Detroit looks like these days. (KenTakesPictures describes the areas around the old GM factories as resembling scenes from 28 Days Later and Mogadishu)

You can also explore disappeared Detroit here and here.

Binelli vaguely hints at but doesn’t explore Detroit’s spirit of resistance, which is too bad because the history of the city is in many ways a history of resistance. There’s no doubt that Detroit is ground zero of the urban crisis in the US, but it is also home to many people who have and continue to work against racism, labor exploitation, and other inequalities.

Detroit’s also the birthplace of The Rouge Forum, which drew inspiration for it’s name from Detroit’s River Rouge and the River Rouge auto factory, which at one time was the largest factory in the world.

“The Rouge is both nature and work. The Rouge has never quit; it moves with the resilience of the necessity for labor to rise out of nature itself. The river and the plant followed the path of industrial life throughout the world. The technological advances created at the Rouge, in some ways, led to better lives. In other ways, technology was used to forge the privilege of the few, at the expense of most–and the ecosystems, which brought it to life, The Rouge is a good place to consider a conversation, education, and social action.”

Join us at the Rouge Forum annual conference this May, we’ll be meeting at Eastern Michigan University in Yspilanti, close enough for a quick trip to Detroit.

[Rich Gibson has a good collection links that explore the urban, and particularly the educational, crises in Detroit at his web site.]

A message from Staughton Lynd

I encourage you to get your library to purchase the new memoir by Staughton and Alice Lynd. EWR

Friends,
Greetings. Alice and I have written a joint autobiography entitled Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together. We need your help in getting the book into the hands of the young people for whom it is most intended.

The book begins with a lovely Foreword by our longtime colleague, Tom Hayden. Then come chapters, some written by us both, some by one of us, some by the other. The chapters are grouped in the following sections:

Beginnings (our families, Staughton as a “premature New Leftist” and Alice on “Music and Dance and Discovering Childhood,” how we met and fell in love);

Community (our three years in the Macedonia Cooperative Community in the hills of Georgia);

The Sixties (among other matters, Mississippi Freedom Summer, a trip to Hanoi, Alice’s work in draft counseling and how it planted in our minds the idea of the “two experts” — the professionally trained person and the counselee, client or fellow struggler — who work together);

Accompaniment (how we found our way beyond the Sixties by doing oral history and then law together, with chapters on Nicaragua and Palestine);

The Worst of the Worst (representing and learning from prisoners);

Afterwords (a poem, retrospectives, Alice’s wishes for our daughter Martha’s marriage).

We had some difficulty finding a publisher. At length we signed a contract with Lexington Books. Lexington has produced an attractive hardback edition. On the front cover there is a photograph of the two of us on the day we married (looking very young) and on the back cover a picture taken at our 50th wedding anniversary.

The problem is that this hardback edition is intended for academic libraries and costs $70. Perhaps in part because of the current recession, we have been told that a paperback edition will be forthcoming only if orders from libraries are substantial.

This is where you can help. It could make all the difference in getting this book into the hands of those who will carry on from all of us if you could:

* Ask whatever libraries you are connected with — law libraries, college or university libraries, public libraries — to acquire Stepping Stones. The address of Lexington Books is:

Lexington Books
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite 200
Lanham MD 20706, www.lexingtonbooks.com.

There is a customer service number if desired: 800-462-6420.

* If you are told that the library would purchase a paperback edition but cannot afford an expensive hardback copy at this time, we hope you will write to Lexington Books and tell them that.

Let’s look at the bright side. If your library orders a copy, you can read the durned book for free. And if enough libraries order copies it will hopefully trigger paperback production, and together we can pass on to our successors what one Zapatista has called the hope of creating “another everything.”

With thanks, love, and comradeship,

Staughton Lynd for S&A

Student Protests Sweep Italy

While Americans waste their time discussing what position they’ll be in as they continued to get screwed by the bank bailouts and/or tweaking the reactionary education reform mess of No Child Left Behind students in Italy are saying “NO” to the Berlusconi government’s plan to impose business models on public services such as schools and universities that will see the disappearance of nearly 100,000 teaching positions in the next three years:

This “euthanasia of the universities”, as Gaetano Azzariti, professor of constitutional law at Rome university, calls it, was a political decision, sacrificing teaching and research to sectors of the economy. It means that for a university to hire a new lecturer now, two others have to leave its payroll. And it means more private sector funding in universities and higher tuition fees, leading to increased levels of debt for the poorest students. And on August 28, education minister Mariastella Gelmini presented another executive order, setting out budget cuts and plans to return to single teachers in primary schools (each class is normally taught by several different teachers), meaning a shorter school day for children (and reducing parents’ ability to go out to work). Other measures aimed to revive old practices, such as marks for behavior up to secondary level.

Since the start of the school year in September 2008, a national movement of parents, teachers and students resisting the neoliberal reforms of the Berlusconi government formed under the banner of “Non rubateci il futuro” (Don’t steal our future) and have spawned huge demonstrations and university occupations and general strikes.

“What’s developing is the self-organization of university students and casual workers,” explained Aliocha, a literature student at La Sapienza university who is also a casual in a bank. “Some people combine being casual workers and students or researchers, others are just casual workers. Together with the rank and file unions, we started the October 17 strike, and organized it in workplaces where job insecurity is an everyday reality.”

See Serge Quadruppani’s article at CounterPunch.