Black Culture Matters in Detroit

By Andre Ash

Detroit is made up of so many different fabrics and defined by people who inspire and create. There is culture and there is Black culture. From our art which inspires, to our fashion which eliminates, and to our music which transits globally, it all comes from our city.

“There is no Detroit without Black culture,” said Jessica Care Moore, a renowned poet and screenwriter. “Black culture is what shapes the city, it’s what makes the city interesting.”

Moore reflects on being a “post-riot baby,” growing up in the city from 1973 until 1994, following the city’s heightened racial reckoning of the 1960’s.

“All my shaping growing up in that time period, being Black wasn’t something you talked about, it was just something that was.”

She recounts a “revolutionary” era of the late Mayor Coleman A. Young days when there were “Black teachers, Black city councilmembers, Black leadership.”

It was a time she looks back on and recalls the mayoral administration implementing the requirement of residency for police officers and firefighters, a push to have public servants who represented the community they were serving.

“Black culture should really be a part of American studies,” Moore says. “Growing up here was a very rich and cultured experience. From Detroit techno which changed the music world.”

Moore recounts being embedded in the sounds of Black music in Detroit, from techno to house and hip-hop and poetry. “I am honored to have always been around young entrepreneurial spirits and Black institution builders, and we didn’t know anything else because nothing in Detroit was just given to us.”

Moore says growing up in Detroit she and her peers had to build things, followed by creating institutions around their craft so they could have something later.

“That is what inspired me, more than just becoming a poet, but an institution builder. That is definitely Blackness and a part of being a Detroiter is that we actually have to build things around our legacy and

See BLACK CULTURE Page B-2