This is a misconception, used as an excuse time after time after time.
This is not conjecture on my part, nor is it what I heard. I lived there and witnessed it.
They are not wealthy people. If you knew anything about Hamtramck, the place I spoke about,
you would know that it is a lower working class town.
The wealthy Indians, Banglas, and Arabs don't live there, nor do they work there. The wealthy among them
have their own communities.
I have heard the same excuse for many years.
As I said before, 400 plus years is ample time to at least have one's community together, and it just ain't happening.
Every place I have lived, there is an immigrant community that thrives at the expense of the black community.
In Detroit, it is Arabs, specifically, Chaldeans.
In Baltimore, it is Koreans.
In Costa Rica, it is the Chinese.
In Chicago, it is the Italians, and increasingly, Mexicans.
The ugly fact is, African Americans simply do not have their shit together collectively.
Again, I do not say this with glee.
I stand by my previous comment 100 percent.
I don't think you know our history in Detroit. Every thriving black community was burned down or bull dosed. You can stand by your previous comment but that's exactly the problem with us. So what happened to those Polish immigrates that owned everything in Hamtramck? What happened to the German's that were in Hamtramck before them? What you're seeing is just history repeating itself. Those Indians will not prosper just like those before them didn't. Where are these wealth communities of Arabs and Indians you speak of? Dearborn is not wealthy. Sterling Heights is not wealthy. Please fill me in because I've been here 50 years and have no idea what or where you're talking about,
Detroit's Paradise Valley was full of nightclubs, bars and theaters frequented by Jazz & Blues musicians known locally and around the world. From the 1920s until the 1950s, Hastings Street was a hub for Black musicians to perform, rivaling other places like Harlem and the Southside of Chicago. Jazz greats like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Duke Ellington were regular guests in Paradise Valley's nightclubs; playing in venues like Jake's, the Paradise Theater, the Tropicana, Club Harlem, the Flame Show Bar, Sportee's Lounge & the Horseshoe Bar.
Though known nationally as a place for Black music and entertainment, Paradise Valley was also a concentrated area of Black entrepreneurship. with dozens of the clubs, speakeasies and theaters owned by Black Detroiters.
When I-375 freeway was built, this area was essentially decimated to make room for the "urban renewal" efforts of the city. Few theaters, clubs, and restaurants remain from this era. One of the last vestiges of Paradise Valley, the Horseshoe Bar at 606 Adams St, came down recently with the construction of Ford Field.
Black Bottom was a predominantly Black neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan demolished for redevelopment in the late 1950s to early 1960s and replaced with the Lafayette Park residential district and a freeway. It was located on Detroit's near east side, bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, the Detroit River, and the Grand Trunk railroad tracks.
Though by the 1950s, migration transformed Hastings and St. Antoine Streets into the city's major African-American community of black-owned businesses, social institutions and night clubs, nationally famous for its music scene in Paradise Valley. Hastings Street is also where Aretha Franklin's father, the Reverend C. L. Franklin, first opened his New Bethel Baptist Church. Businesses included ten restaurants, eight grocers, 17 physicians, and six drugstores, Barthwell Drugs being one of the well-known enterprises.
Although condemnation of property began in 1946, the National Housing Act of 1949, then later the 1956 National Highway Act, gave the city the funds to begin an urban renewal project in earnest, replacing Black Bottom and Paradise Valley with the Chrysler Freeway and Lafayette Park, a mixed-income development designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The east side neighborhood was gone by 1954 though Paradise Valley survived a few years more. Relocation assistance was minimal and many former Black Bottom and Paradise Valley residents were
given 30 days notice to vacate. A number of the residents relocated to large public housing projects such as the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects Homes and Jeffries Homes.
Black Bottom was a predominantly Black neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan demolished for redevelopment in the late 1950s to early 1960s and replaced with the Lafayette Park residential district and a freeway. It was located on Detroit's near east side, bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, the...
detroithistorical.org
Detroit Riots of 1967
In the sweltering summer of 1967, Detroit’s predominantly African American neighborhood of Virginia Park was a simmering cauldron of racial tension. About 60,000 low-income residents were crammed into the neighborhood’s 460 acres, living mostly in small, sub-divided apartments.
The Uprising of 1967 is also known as the Detroit Rebellion of 1967 and the 12th Street Riot. It began following a police raid on an unlicensed bar, known locally as a “blind pig.” Over the course of five days, the Detroit police and fire departments, the Michigan State Police, the Michigan National Guard, and the US Army were involved in quelling what became the largest civil disturbance of twentieth century America. The crisis resulted in forty-three deaths, hundreds of injuries, almost seventeen hundred fires, and over seven thousand arrests.
Deindustrialization within the city limits took many jobs to outlying communities, even as a number of auto companies went out of business. The east side of Detroit alone lost over 70,000 jobs in the decade following World War II. Construction of the city’s freeways, newer housing, and the prospect of further integration—due to the demolition of the city’s two main black neighborhoods, Black Bottom and Paradise Valley—caused many whites to depart for the suburbs. From 1950 to 1960, Detroit lost almost 20 percent of its population.
RACE RIOT OF 1943
Detroit’s 200,000 black residents were marginalized into small, subdivided apartments that often housed multiple families. They were crammed into 60 square blocks on the city’s east side, an area known as Black Bottom.
Because there was simply no space left to expand upon already existing African American neighborhoods, the city attempted to construct a black housing project in what was otherwise a white neighborhood, though near the predominantly black neighborhood of Conant Gardens. In 1942, a mob of more than one thousand whites, some of whom were armed, lit a cross on fire and angrily picketed the arrival of their African American neighbors.
Black workers faced virulent racism on the job as well. In June of 1943, white workers halted production to protest the promotion of their African American co-workers. Other factories faced habitual slowdowns by bigoted whites who refused to work alongside African Americans. Humiliation and resentment on each side spilled over into all facets of Detroiter’s wartime struggle and by the early 1940s, racially motivated street fights were common. The Ku Klux Klan was active in the region and riots had already broken out in Harlem and Beaumont, Texas.
Like the successive rebellion that would erupt 24 years later, the Detroit Race Riot of 1943 was deeply rooted in racism, poor living conditions and unequal access to goods and services. The apparent industrial prosperity that made Detroit the “Arsenal of Democracy” masked a deeper social unrest...
detroithistorical.org
there are plenty of dirt poor so-called whites. The difference is that they have more generational wealth to pass down and they get more favorable lending and more government benefits. To act like there are not millions of poor white trash is delusional.
