Detroit Reading List, Videos, and Links

Detroit Reading List, Videos, and Links

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Critical Moment is a collectively-run, newsprint magazine working to provide a forum for education, debate, and dialogue around the political issues affecting communities in the Southeast Michigan area.

Michigan Independent Media Center

Books

Babson, Steve with Ron Alpern, Dave Elsila, & John Revitte. 1986. Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town. Wayne State University.

Boggs, James. 1963. The American Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Boggs, Grace Lee. 1998. Living for Change: An Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Boyle, Kevin. 2004. Arc of Justice, A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. New York: Henry Holt & Company.

Davis, Mike. 2003. Dead Cities and Other Tales. New York: The New Press.

Dillard, Angela D. 2007. Faith in the City, Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit. University of Michigan Press.

Fuller, John G. 1976. We Almost Lost Detroit. NY: Ballantine Books.

Georgakas, Dan & Marvin Surkin. 1998. Detroit I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution, Updated. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Georgakas, Dan. 2006. My Detroit, Growing Up Greek and American in Motor City. NY: Pella Publishing Commpany.

Geschwender, James A. 1977. Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Grandin, G. 2009. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Haussaun, Rosina J. 2003. Arab Americans in Michigan. University of Michigan Press.

Hershey, John. 1968. The Algiers Motel Incident. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U Press.

Katzman, David M. 1975. Before the Ghetto, Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century. University of Illinois, paperback.

Keemer, Ed, M.D. 1980. Confessions of a Pro-Life Abortionist. Detroit: Vinco Press.

Leggett, John C. 1968. Class, Race, and Labor: Working-Class Consciousness in Detroit. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lichtenstein, Nelson. 1995. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, Water Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. Basic Books.

Mast, Robert. 1994. Detroit Lives. Philadelphia: Temple U Press.

Meier, August & Rudwick, Elliott. 1979. Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oestreicher, Richard Jules. Solidarity and Fragmentation, Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Shakur, Yusef. 2010. The Window 2 My Soul: My Transformation From a Zone 8 Thug to a Father and Freedom Fighter. 4th Edition. Detroit: Urban Guerilla Publishing

Sugrue, Thomas J. 1996. The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Thompson, H.A. 2001. Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U Press.

Widick, B.J. 1972. Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, Inc.

Wolcott, Victoria W. 2001. Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

Novels

Harriette Arnow. 1954. The Dollmaker, Avon Books, paperback. World War II historical novel revealing working-class life and the racial divide, particularly focusing on white and Black Southerners coming north. (Jane Fonda played the central role in a TV movie.)

Marge Piercy. 1987. Gone to Soldier, Fawcett Crest Books, paperback. Set in Detroit, this is a story of women’s changing roles during World War II.

Jeffrey Eugenides. 2002. Middlesex. New York: Picador Books. An epic saga of gender identity, beginning in a small village on the slopes of Mount Olympus in Asia Minor in the 1920s, to Prohibition-era Detroit and the Motor City of the 1950s and 1960s. “A love letter to a city that could probably use a few more.” - Jeff Turrentine, Los Angeles Times

Videos

Finally Got the News (1970/2003) A Film by Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner produced in Association with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Icarus Films: [www.icarusfilms.com]

Poletown Lives (1983) (52 minutes, available in DVD, VHS and 16mm from Information Factory, 352 Courville, Detroit, MI 48224 (313.885.4685). The film follows a community group as it resists forced relocation and demolition of homes, churches, and businesses for a new GM auto plant Check (Poletown).

Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power (2005) California Newsreel: [www.newsreel.org/] (Detroit & Robert Williams)

Water Warriors (2006) Media that Matters: [1] A film by Liz Miller about the struggle against water privatization in Highland Park, MI.

With Babies and Banners: This film is about the GM Flint sitdown strike, told from the women’s viewpoint. This successful 43-day strike led to the first GM-UAW contract.

Hi Tech Soul: A Film on the history of Detroit Techno

Living with Pride, Ruth Ellis at 100: A film about queer Detroiter Ruth Ellis.

Locusts [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5rins_invincible-finale-locusts-music-doc_music]

Links of Interest:

Indigenous History of Michigan [2]

Wayne State University Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies [3]