Black Detroiters understood all too well the historical significance of struggles between landlords and the landless when Malcolm X linked freedom, self-determination, and independence to land control and ownership during his “Message to the Grassroots” speech at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit. Post–World War II urban redevelopment schemes—spurred locally by the 1947 Detroit Plan, and nationally by the 1949 Housing Act and 1956 Federal Highway Act—had since decimated Detroit’s historic “first ghetto,” Black Bottom; the area’s institutional epicenter, Hastings Street; and Black Detroit’s cultural capital, Paradise Valley. This area—the birthplace of the Nation of Islam, the former center of the largest concentration of Black-owned businesses in the country, the home of the religious and cultural institutions that nurtured the rise of the Motown sound, and the area in which a strong majority of Detroit’s Black population had resided since the Great Migration—laid in ruins, or was being prepared for destruction or gentrification by the time “Detroit Red” came back to Detroit to deliver the keynote address at the Northern Negro Grass Roots Conference in late 1963.

Many Black Detroiters had initially supported urban renewal, believing that slum clearance and urban conservation programs would improve services, living conditions, and neighborhoods by replacing the city’s oldest and most decrepit housing stock with new or refurbished housing. Their faith in the program, however, quickly abated as its implementation cut a broad swath through Black Detroit and destroyed far more low-income housing than it created.