Stephen Henderson

Detroit Free Press

Detroit is about us now.

What we do, as Detroiters.

How tightly we seize our own destiny, cultivate our own investment and ingenuity, and how strongly we dedicate ourselves to careful, determined progress.

The 50th anniversary of the 1967 uprising is a clarion reminder of many things in this community, but it is an admonition of those axioms, above all.

And for me, the remembrance coincides with the blossoming of my own, very small effort to make a forgotten corner of Detroit better.

The Tuxedo Project, an endeavor to reimagine my abandoned, stripped west-side childhood home as a writers’ residence and literary center, had its first, tentative opening just a day before the 50th anniversary of the uprising.

In a little less than two years, the project has gone from concept to reality, and it will formally open its doors this fall.

The idea is to leverage the literary arts as a means of rebirth. First, with the house where my family lived when I was born in 1970, on west Tuxedo near Livernois. Then, with the more than 20 other houses on the block that are in some form of distress. And then, with the neighborhood that surrounds that block, including old St. Cecelia’s parish.

Where it started:Through the doors of 7124 Tuxedo

Reclaiming home:Saving father's house brings new hope

More:Take a tour of 7124 Tuxedo

One house, one block, one neighborhood at a time.

It’s the change that’s within my grasp, the rallying point from which I can help move the city in a positive direction.

The destruction around my old house is not a direct result of what happened in 1967, but there’s no question that year, and all it meant to Detroit, was a turning point for this neighborhood and others.

Fifty years later, it’s clearer than ever to me that reversing the trend depends as much on discrete, localized action, as anything else.

Henderson: Understanding 1967 unrest can move Detroit forward

Mike Thompson:Detroit 1967: What progress have we made?

Detroit 1967: 50 years later

Detroit's fits and starts

Sadness is the dynamic I’ve noticed, most, about the memories of July 1967 in Detroit.

It’s not the anger that boiled over into massive conflagration. It’s not the resentment of those who felt the uprising “ruined” a city they once loved.

It’s a heartache — one that crosses race and class and geographic boundaries — over the fact that it had come to this. Police brutalizing citizens, and those citizens pushing back. Then the masses pouring into the streets to protest — sometimes violently — the greater contexts of oppression and inequality, the city’s long history of holding down African Americans, in particular, as the city thrived.

By 1967, the city’s vaunted economic surge from the explosion of industry had begun to subside, population was sliding and racial tensions had been building for decades.

But for so many, that one hot week in July serves as a marker between before and after, and it shapes a melancholy about the Detroit that emerged — bruised, different, more divided, less certain about its place in the world.

More:Riot or rebellion? The debate on what to call Detroit '67

Detroit Today:How words affect perceptions of history

My life began just three years later, in 1970, in the house on west Tuxedo that sits just two blocks from the Detroit Police Department’s 10th Precinct, where those who were rousted and detained from the blind pig at 12th and Clairmount were booked and jailed.

For most of my life, the city’s most riveting narrative has been around a bounce back, a rebirth from the ashes of 1967, maybe one that echoes the resurrection after the fire of 1803, when the city motto about rising from the ashes, resurget cineribus, was coined.

I remember a field trip in first grade to the top of Cobo Hall, where we looked east to the construction of the Renaissance Center. A guide told us all about the building, and the tremendous partnership between Henry Ford II and Mayor Coleman Young that had birthed it. She explained what the word “renaissance” meant, and said this symbol, on our riverfront, would be a catalyst for the city’s rebirth. She mentioned what happened in 1967. It was the first time I ever heard about the uprising.

Later, as a young adult, I watched as the 1993 mayoral campaign became a referendum on Detroit’s past and future. Dennis Archer’s election that year was heralded as an end to the tensions and cleaves that had left the city without support or investment. We were finally going to move, together, past the divisions that had led to 1967.

And today, of course, I watch as an entirely different Detroit emerges in downtown and Midtown — one rich with private investment and teeming with new population and energy.

Any one of those milestones could be judged a success or failure, on its own terms. But taken together, they represent a collective series of fits and starts, of confounding, often desperate attempts to put 1967 behind us by grand gesture, or bold expression.

They are all “hope-for” solutions to the problems that have grown strong, sinewy roots throughout Detroit’s 139 square miles.

What we’ve forgotten in all that is the people who live here, the neighborhoods they live in, and the great chasm of need and isolation that has opened up around them.

Small start, big outcome

The Tuxedo Project is my attempt to think of it a different way. Rather than waiting for something “big” to turn the city around, why not focus on something small, and personal? Why not turn back to the place where I have the strongest historic connection, to try to make change?

I’m certainly not alone in thinking that way, or acting on it. The city is wide and deep with small-scale, neighborhood-based projects that are aimed at building from the ground floor, where Detroiters live and breathe.

But for me, The Tuxedo Project has been a refreshing reminder — about the power of singular action to build into collective will, and the strong momentum that can build around investment in Detroit’s most valuable assets, its people.

From the start, the focus has been on the folks who live in the neighborhood around my old house. I turned to the idea of literary arts because words and ideas were what propelled me to better, bigger places.

I haven’t been alone, either. Marygrove College was a partner from the beginning, agreeing to host the resident writer as a member of its English Department faculty.

Rose Gorman, program director at the New York Writers Coalition in Brooklyn, N.Y., will fill the role in the fall. She’ll move to Detroit, into the house, help build the literary center and draw connections between the college and the neighborhood.

We’ve gotten financial support from the philanthropic community and more than 100 individuals. And my high school classmates from University of Detroit Jesuit formed a nonprofit around the idea. Their investment, time and energy has pushed the project to higher ambitions than just the house. By late fall, we hope to begin demolition and renovation of several other houses on the street. We are working on training, employment and housing solutions for those who need it.

The neighbors on the block have also embraced the project, and are looking forward to its formal kickoff in a few weeks. As one of them said to me recently: We don’t need to wait for something big to happen in the city and matter on the block. We can make something big on the block, if we work together.

There’s nothing about 1967, or the 50 years since, that can defeat that kind of resolve.

Stephen Henderson is editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at shenderson600@freepress.com.

At noon today, C-SPAN3's American History TV will broadcast live from the Free Press' newsroom for a national show that looks back on the unrest of 1967. The show will feature the Free Press' Stephen Henderson, historian and author Heather Ann Thompson, former Detroit Police Chief Isaiah (Ike) McKinnon and former Detroit Free Press and Detroit News journalist Tim Kiska. The program will re-air at 6 and 10 p.m. today.