Detroit Michigan Quotes

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living, whose reason for being might be geographical but whose growth is based on industry, jobs. Detroit has its natural attractions: lakes all over the place, an abundance of trees and four distinct seasons for those who like variety in their weather, everything but hurricanes and earth-quakes. But it’s never been the kind of city people visit and fall in love with because of its charm or think, gee, wouldn’t this be a nice place to live.

Professor O’Leary was Professor of Mediaeval Literature at Ann Arbor University in Michigan, just outside Detroit.

Even drunk, I knew any escape plan that involved going to Detroit, Michigan, was a harbinger of doom.

The population began dwindling after silk hats replaced beaver hats in high fashion... collapsing the fur trade, in what would become a familiar pattern for Detroit.

As Hoffa put it, “Nobody can describe the sit-down strikes, the riots, the fights that took place in the state of Michigan, particularly here in Detroit, unless they were a part of it.” And on another occasion he said, “My scalp was laid open sufficiently wide to require stitches no less than six times during the first year I was business agent of Local 299. I was beaten up by cops or strikebreakers at least two dozen times that year.” And

Strangers always ask me if I'm from Michigan. I say, "Why, do I have a Detroit-shaped face, circa 1960?" They all say yes, but I know they are lying, because I look more like Mackinac Island at the turn of the twentieth century.

The bat-and-ball problem, the flowers syllogism, and the Michigan/Detroit problem have something in common. Failing these minitests appears to be, at least to some extent, a matter of insufficient motivation, not trying hard enough.

How many murders occur in the state of Michigan in one year? The question, which was also devised by Shane Frederick, is again a challenge to System 2. The “trick” is whether the respondent will remember that Detroit, a high-crime city, is in Michigan.

Indeed, the average guess by people who were asked about Michigan is lower than the guesses of a similar group who were asked about the murder rate in Detroit. Blame for a failure to think of Detroit can be laid on both System 1 and System 2. Whether the city comes to mind when the state is mentioned depends in part on the automatic function of memory.

Judge Woodward envisioned the new Detroit as an urban Arcadia of interlocking hexagons. Each wheel was to be separate yet united. This dream never quite came to be. Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

The 2018 election also saw victory for Palestinian American and Detroit native Rashida Tlaib. Like Omar, her election should not have come as such a surprise; she was well known and respected in her prior role as a state representative, regarded as someone who would vigorously fight for Detroit. She was a thorn in the side of big businesses that tried to exploit or neglect Detroit neighborhoods and an even bigger thorn in the side of Donald Trump. When Tlaib won her bid for Congress, representing Michigan’s Thirteenth District, she became the first Palestinian American to sit in Congress. She and Omar became the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.

George Romney’s private-sector experience typified the business world of his time. His executive career took place within a single company, American Motors Corporation, where his success rested on the dogged (and prescient) pursuit of more fuel-efficient cars.41 Rooted in a particular locale, the industrial Midwest, AMC was built on a philosophy of civic engagement. Romney dismissed the “rugged individualism” touted by conservatives as “nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.”42 Nor was this dismissal just cheap talk: He once returned a substantial bonus that he regarded as excessive.43 Prosperity was not an individual product, in Romney’s view; it was generated through bargaining and compromises among stakeholders (managers, workers, public officials, and the local community) as well as through individual initiative. When George Romney turned to politics, he carried this understanding with him. Romney exemplified the moderate perspective characteristic of many high-profile Republicans of his day. He stressed the importance of private initiative and decentralized governance, and worried about the power of unions. Yet he also believed that government had a vital role to play in securing prosperity for all. He once famously called UAW head Walter Reuther “the most dangerous man in Detroit,” but then, characteristically, developed a good working relationship with him.44 Elected governor in 1962 after working to update Michigan’s constitution, he broke with conservatives in his own party and worked across party lines to raise the minimum wage, enact an income tax, double state education expenditures during his first five years in office, and introduce more generous programs for the poor and unemployed.45 He signed into law a bill giving teachers collective bargaining rights.46 At a time when conservatives were turning to the antigovernment individualism of Barry Goldwater, Romney called on the GOP to make the insurance of equal opportunity a top priority. As

Rivera’s admiration for Stalin was equaled only by his admiration for Henry Ford. By the 1920s and ‘30s, nearly every industrial country in Europe and Latin America, as well as the Soviet Union, had adopted Ford’s engineering and manufacturing methods: his highly efficient assembly line to increase production and reduce the cost of automobiles, so that the working class could at least afford to own a car; his total control over all the manufacturing and production processes by concentrating them all in one place, from the gathering of raw materials to orchestrating the final assembly; and his integration, training, and absolute control of the workforce. Kahn, the architect of Ford’s factories, subsequently constructed hundreds of factories on the model of the Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, which was the epicenter of Ford’s industrial acumen as well as a world-wide symbol of future technology. Such achievements led Rivera to regard Detroit’s industry as the means of transforming the proletariat to take the reins of economic production.

young professionals seeking cities to live and work in, and a wave of immigrants in inner-city neighborhoods and inner suburbs that eventually produced second-generation college graduates who moved into the center city to live and work. These groups joined the gays and artists who have always chosen to live in urban communities.12 Edward Glaeser points out that not all cities have succeeded in the past generation — and he points to Detroit, Michigan, and Leipzig, Germany, as examples. But most cities have found the power to reinvent themselves, argues Glaeser, because the essence of what makes a city a city is the bringing of people together to innovate. At one level, this means bringing together the most highly trained and talented people, the “elites.” Yet at another level, it means bringing together the most energetic, ambitious, and risk-taking people from among the

Most Michigan residents can get a copy of their birth certificates within weeks by simply placing an order online. But for Detroit native Rudy Owens, attempts to obtain his birth records took decades of legal battles. Why? Because he is an adoptee. Owens is the author of a new book You Don’t Know How Lucky You are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through the American Adoption Experience. (From, Michigan Radio, Stateside, June 11, 2018)

Outlandish subsidies for multimillionaires isn't a phenomenon seen only in Detroit. Michigan gives away 30 cents of every government dollars to private companies. And in other cities, stadiums and ballparks are routinely paid for by governments, all with the hope that they'll help stimulate revitalization, even though economists nearly unanimously agree that spending public funds on private stadiums is one of the least efficient ways for governments to spend money. But the strategy is perhaps particularly troubling in a city where garbage collection, street repair, and streetlights are considered privileges.

Asia and Cedes were cut from a different cloth. They'd seen and done more than most girls their age. They were born and raised in Detroit, Michigan and brought up in the roughest part of the city.

Like most women of her generation, Desiree Ball (known familiarly as “DeDe”) had been raised to become a wife, housekeeper, and mother hen. When DeDe married Henry Ball, it was taken for granted that she—and eventually the family—would accompany him wherever his job took him. As a result, Lucy spent her early years far from Jamestown, first in the copper-mining territory around Anaconda, Montana, and then in Wyandotte, Michigan, a factory town dependent on the automotive industry in nearby Detroit.

In April following I was ordered to Detroit, Michigan, where two years were spent with but few important incidents.

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To see how cavalier progressives can be with taxpayers’ money, consider the case of Leroy Fick. In 2011, the fifty-nine-year-old Fick won a $2 million lottery jackpot. Still, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services ruled he could continue receiving food stamps. The Obama administration agreed. The Detroit News explained the government’s rationale: “If Fick had chosen to accept monthly payments of his jackpot, the winnings would be considered income. But by choosing to accept a lump sum payment, the winnings were considered ‘assets’ and aren’t counted in determining food stamp eligibility.

Florida City?” Coleman dropped a Vicodin. “So that’s what that string of motels is called?” Serge nodded. “Actually a funny story. Used to be called Detroit.” Coleman swigged a pint of Rebel Yell. “Now you’re making fun of me because I’m wrecked.” “Swear to God. You can look it up,” said Serge. “I wouldn’t shit you.” “I know,” said Coleman. “I’m your favorite turd.” “And naming it Detroit wasn’t even an accident, like the other times when two pioneer families set up shop in the sticks and there’s no one else around to stop them, and they’re chugging moonshine by the campfire, ‘What should we call this place?’ ‘Fuck it, I already spent enough effort today running from wild pigs,’ and then you end up with a place called Toad Suck, Arkansas—you can look that up, too. Except modern-day Florida City started as an ambitious land development with hard-sell advertising and giant marketing geniuses behind the project. Then they had the big meeting to concoct a name: ‘I got it! What do people moving to Florida really want? To be in Michigan!

only increased the debt, as governments rightly have borrowed. By March 2012 there were some $43 trillion of government bonds in issue,8 compared with only $11 trillion at the end of 2001. That is only a fraction of Western governments’ true liabilities, once you factor in pensions and health care. The numbers for many cities are even worse: San Bernardino in California and Detroit in Michigan both filed for bankruptcy because of these off-balance sheet obligations. And who will pay for all this? In “old Europe,” for instance, the working-age population peaked in 2012 at 308 million—and is set to decline to 265 million by 2060. These will have to support ever more old people: The old-age dependency ratio (the number of over-sixty-fives as a proportion of the number of

Flint, Michigan. Detroit as seen backwards through a telescope. The callus on the palm of the state shaped like a welder's mitt. A town where 66.5 percent of the working citizenship are in some way, shape or form linked to the shit-encrusted underbelly of a French buggy racer named Chevrolet and a floppy-eared Scotchman named Buick. A town where 23.5 percent of the population pimp everything from Elvis on velvet to horse tranquilizers to Halo Burgers to NRA bumper stickers. A town where the remaining 10 percent sit back and watch it all go by—sellin’ their blood, rollin’ convenience stores, puffin’ no-brand cigarettes while cursin’ their wives and kids and neighbors and the flies sneakin’ through the screens and the piss-warm quarts of Red White & Blue and the Skylark parked out back with the busted tranny.

It is a fact that today steel can be made more cheaply outside America. This is also true of many other products: shoes, shirts, toys, and so on. Cars are different—Detroit’s prosperity plummeted because auto executives made bad decisions and overpaid their workers. Consequently others figured out how to make cars better and more cheaply not only in Korea and Japan, but also in other states like North Carolina. There is unintentional comedy today in watching Michael Moore’s film Roger and Me, in which Moore chases around the head of General Motors to find out why he closed the Flint, Michigan, plant in which Moore’s father used to work. Moore thinks that the plant was closed because greedy bosses like Roger Smith wanted to keep more profits. He fails to mention that unions, like the one his dad belonged to, pressured GM to raise wages so high that GM cars just cost too much. Hardly anyone wanted to buy mediocre cars that were so expensive. Either GM had to keep losing market share, or figure out how to make cars more cheaply. So if Moore wanted to find the greedy fellows who caused the Flint plant to close, he should have started by interviewing his dad.

Many Detroiters, for example, are beginning to see urban agriculture as a real part of the solution; to grow things right where people live, where they work, and definitely need healthier food on the table. Green city gardens are scattered throughout Detroit now, from the schoolyard at Catherine Ferguson Academy for pregnant teens and teen moms, to reclaimed land owned by a local order of Catholic friars (Earthworks), to a seven-acre organic farm in Rouge Park. Together, city gardeners, nonprofit organizations, and the Greening of Detroit resource agency are writing a new local-food story of urban Michigan.

I would think if you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees, that we would someday become communists." -Jane Fonda speech at Michigan State University to raise money for the Black Panthers, Detroit Free Press, 22 November 1969   "My position on the POW issue has been widely misquoted and taken out of context. What I originally said and have continued to say is that the POW's are lying if they assert it was North Vietnamese policy to torture American prisoners." -Jane Fonda, "Who is Being Brainwashed?" An Indochina Peace Campaign Report Santa Monica: Indochina Peace Campaign 1973   "We have no reason to believe that U.S Air Force officers tell the truth. They are professional killers." -Jane Fonda, Washington Star, April 19, 1973

Detroit’s Henry Ford Health System published a peer-reviewed study showing that hydroxychloroquine significantly cut death rates even in mid-to-late COVID cases, and without any heart-related side effects.106 Fauci leapt to the barricades to rescue his vaccine enterprise. On July 30, he testified before Congress that the Michigan results were “flawed.”107

Though many taps are dry in Midtown Detroit, the region does not lack for water. In fact, Nestlé has large water bottling operations in the Great Lakes, drawing on the same natural water systems that feed Detroit. Nestlé paid a $5,000 one-time application fee to begin operations as well as an annual $200 permit fee for the groundwater well it operates in Michigan, but there is no meter running. The company draws water for free now—and sells it to consumers by the bottle. “Why does Nestlé get it for free . . . and make millions while the people in Detroit have been shut off because they can’t afford it?” asked Jim Olson, an environmental lawyer who founded For Love of Water (FLOW), an advocacy group dedicated to protecting the Great Lakes. “Everybody else on the system who is not selling it is subsidizing their profit.

During my first nine years out of college, I served in various positions in the Michigan Department of Corrections including: being one of the first two women to supervise adult men on probation in the city of Detroit; running a halfway house for female offenders; and then becoming the first female deputy warden over programs of rehabilitation in an adult male prison in Michigan.

In the popular imagination, Michigan calls to mind the urban grit of Detroit, but this is misleading: Michigan is Detroit—attached to Idaho. The great mass of the state is rural, agricultural, and a hotbed of right-wing extremism. This has been true for decades, going back to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the success of Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest, in the 1930s.

After the shoplifting incident, the Shinola store gave a copy of its surveillance video to the Detroit police. Five months later, a digital image examiner for the Michigan State Police looked at the grainy, poorly lit surveillance video on her computer and took a screen shot.2 She uploaded it to the facial recognition software the police used: a $5.5 million program supplied by DataWorks Plus, a South Carolina firm founded in 2000 that began selling facial recognition software developed by outside vendors in 2005. The system accepted the photo; scanned the image for shapes, indicating eyes, nose, and mouth; and set markers at the edges of each shape. Then, it measured the distance between the markers and stored that information. Next, it checked the measurements against the State Network of Agency Photos (SNAP) database, which includes mug shots, sex offender registry photographs, driver’s license photos, and state ID photos. To give an idea of the scale, in 2017, this database had 8 million criminal photos and 32 million DMV photos. Almost every Michigan adult was represented in the database.

Dems should be looking toward untapped numbers rather than the Joe Lunchbuckets they assume abandoned ship for Trump in 2016. It wasn’t the white working-class voters who flipped from Obama to Trump that the Democrats really lost. To believe this ignores the fact that there are big cities in all of the controversial states Hillary Clinton lost—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—with large black populations. It ignores the fact that the decrease in black turnout in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee was larger than the margin of Trump’s victory by a factor of ten, meaning that it wasn’t the white working-class voters who abandoned them, it was the black voters who felt they weren’t being acknowledged and so chose to stay home who tipped the vote in those states.

The FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws,” Charles Abrams, the urban studies expert, wrote in 1955, the year my parents arrived in Michigan from Tennessee.

Jimmy may well have read the front-page banner in late August exhorting readers to “Go and Register.” The accompanying article extolled the dual power of the franchise: “When we register and go to the polls in large numbers … we not only perform thereby a duty which is obligatory upon good citizens, but our votes make public officials more obligated to give us the recognition and consideration to which we are entitled.” 109 This paper and others sought to whip up excitement about the recent passage of a civil rights bill championed by Democratic state senator Charles C. Diggs. Declaring with some hyperbole that the bill would be the “New Emancipation,” the black Democratic organization Michigan Federated Democratic Clubs sought to use the bill to both galvanize the community and shore up support for Diggs with the “First Annual Emancipation Picnic and Dance” in his honor on August 1, 1937. Attendees received “a small pocket-size souvenir-copy of Senator Diggs Civil Rights Bill” along with “a statement of what to do if the Bill is violated.” 110 More than a decade later, Jimmy would be among a group of activists associated with the Detroit NAACP and the United Auto Workers (UAW) who mounted an effort to enforce this law by “breaking down” restaurants that discriminated against African Americans. By that time, black Detroiters had made important inroads into the UAW, and a strong coalition emerged between labor and civil rights organizations.

wasn't until 1915 when Detroit, Michigan got the first real stop sign.

Jeremy George Lake Charles Corvette Industry The Detroit metro automotive industry is indeed a significant part of the overall GSP (including vehicle production) of Michigan's economy and serves as an important hub for manufacturing, R & D, incubation, research and manufacturing. Jeremy George Lake Charles Automobile production accounts for more than 60% of total employment in Michigan, far higher than any other state. Michigan is the leading nation in terms of manufacturing jobs and the percentage of total employment in automobile production. In 1929, before the Great Depression, there were 32,028,500 cars in use worldwide, and the US automobile industry produced about 1,200,000 of them. Ford has done a lot to broaden the sales base of cars and create an industry for cars and automotive products. Jeremy George Lake Charles Two years later, GM, Ford, and Chrysler made profits, created jobs, invested and invested in research and development, and in developing new technologies.

Like his rival Brigham Young, Strang took multiple wives, including one who dressed as a man in a black coat and stovepipe hat, called herself Charles Douglas and claimed to be Strang’s “personal assistant.” During his six-year reign Strang survived a naval battle with mainlanders as well as a trip to U.S. District Court in Detroit, where he was accused of counterfeiting, piracy, and interfering with the mail and murder, among other charges. “He talked to that jury and his tongue was like silver. And that jury believed him and said, ‘Not Guilty’ to all charges against him,” Smith recalled. “King James came back to Beaver Island more full of himself than ever, even the U.S. Government couldn’t beat him.” But the man Smith called a “cocky little tyrant” was not all trouble. He had so many followers in his church—up to 12,000 at its peak—that he was able to get elected to the Michigan Assembly in Lansing, where by all accounts he acquitted himself well as a lawmaker. He established a newspaper. He was

Michigan is still home to one of the most extreme human containment systems in the United States. Its prison population has increased by 450 percent since 1973, and the state maintains a higher rate of imprisonment than most countries. African Americans are the largest incarcerated group by far in Michigan, with a total population of 14 percent and a penal population of 49 percent. Latinos and Native Americans are incarcerated in Michigan at rates equal to their population percentage. However, white Michiganders, who make up 77 percent of the general population, are underrepresented in the prison population at 46 percent. Racialized sentencing policies have much to do with these statistics. Historians Heather Ann Thompson and Matthew Lassiter, the founding codirectors of the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan, point to "draconian" state legislation that by the 1990s included the infamous "lifer laws," which exacted life terms for narcotics possessions of over 650 grams and extinguished the opportunity for parole. As men and women were thrown behind bars for nonviolent offenses in the 1980s through the early 2000s, Detroit neighborhoods were gutted, children were orphaned, and voter rolls were depleted.

More than half of Detroit’s children now attend charters—second in the nation only to New Orleans (and possibly Flint, Michigan)—and 80 percent of these are for-profit.

Given the devoutly Catholic household in which the family was raised, it is not especially surprising that two of Philip’s daughters became nuns: Mary, who entered St. Mary’s convent in Monroe and took the name Sister Christina, and Martha, later known as Sister Clementine.5 More unusual was the path followed by Philip’s daughter Frances. After finishing high school in two years, this brilliant young woman went on to the Detroit College of Law—this when only 5 percent of all American youths went to college.6 After graduating, she became a practicing attorney—one of only two hundred female lawyers in the entire country at the time—and, later, a founding member of the Women Lawyers Association of Michigan.7

I spent the two and one-half months between my meeting with the Art Commission and the beginning of my actual mural work in soaking up impressions of the productive activities of the city. I studied industrial scenes by night as well as by day, making literally thousands of sketches of towering blast furnaces, serpentine conveyor belts, impressive scientific laboratories, busy assembling rooms; also of precision instruments, some of them massive yet delicate; and of the men who worked them all. I walked for miles through the immense workshops of the Ford, Chrysler, Edison, Michigan Alkali, and Parke-Davis plants. I was afire with enthusiasm. My childhood passion for mechanical toys had been transmuted to a delight in machinery for its own sake and for its meaning to man -- his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty. That is why now I placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend. I felt that in the society of the future as already, to some extent, that of the present, man-and-machine would be as important as air, water, and the light of the sun. This was the "philosophy," the state of mind in which I undertook my Detroit frescoes.

In the popular imagination, Michigan calls to mind the urban grit of Detroit, but this is misleading: Michigan is Detroit—attached to Idaho. The great mass of the state is rural, agricultural, and a hotbed of right-wing extremism.