Two months before his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, King delivered a similar address at Detroit’s Cobo Hall following a “Walk to Freedom” that included Mayor Cavanagh, Walter Reuther, and C.

He presents Motown as emblematic of the energy, creativity and even racial progress that made Detroit hum. Indeed, Marannis emphasizes the rise of Motown, starting with the nationwide tour of its young stars in October of 1962. Other notable Detroit characters in these pages are Barry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, along with Diana (born Diane) Ross and Aretha Franklin, the daughter of charismatic Baptist preacher, C. Marannis, a talented biographer whose subjects include Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and sports legends Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente, brings to life such vivid and disparate personalities as Henry Ford II, grandson and namesake of the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and his sometimes rival and occasional partner, Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers and one of the most powerful labor leaders in the nation. All of this promise was buoyed by a rising economic tide that promised to lift all boats.ĭetroit in the early 1960s (the book chronicles the months from October of 1962 to May of 1964) boasted some of the nation’s most dynamic personalities.

Ford Motor Company was preparing to roll out its newest car, the Mustang, the advent of Motown records was underway, the city boasted an apparently thriving working class, its dynamic young Mayor, Jerome Cavanagh, was a close ally of Kennedy and a supporter of the civil rights movement as it reached its apex. The Detroit that Kennedy saw was at a peak, a city of 1.7 million, and experiencing an astonishing season of creativity and possibility. Kennedy, who won Michigan electoral votes in 1960 with an overwhelming margin in Detroit, visited the city just before the Cuban Missile crisis burst. October of 1962 was a time of great promise for Detroit and the nation as a whole. David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize winner and among the most accomplished writers of non-fiction in the United States, begins his Detroit story a few years before that, in the city in which he was born and lived his first six years. The enduring images of Detroit, Michigan, from the 1960s are those of the major riot that erupted in that epicenter of the industrial Midwest in the summer of 1967.

Once in a great city by david maraniss