Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, cleared for urban renewal

Black Bottom, on Detroit's lower east side, was where the city's Black population had been confined by racial covenants and realtors for decades - overcrowded, under-maintained by absentee landlords, and dense with the institutions that density makes possible. Paradise Valley, immediately north, was its commercial and entertainment district: several hundred Black-owned businesses, hotels, theatres and the clubs where Detroit's music was made.

In 1946 the city announced the Detroit Plan, and the Gratiot Redevelopment Project began clearing the area in 1949-50 under federal urban renewal powers. The bulldozed land sat empty for years before it was rebuilt as Lafayette Park, a Mies van der Rohe development aimed at middle-class residents. The Chrysler Freeway - Interstate 375 - was then driven through what remained of Paradise Valley in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Thousands of families were displaced with little relocation assistance, into a housing market still closed to them, which pushed overcrowding into neighbourhoods like Twelfth Street - where the 1967 rebellion began. Almost nothing of either neighbourhood survives above ground. Michigan is now dismantling the I-375 trench, sixty years after it was cut.