Stephen A. Jones
May 1, 2009

It isn’t easy living in Detroit.

Lately, it feels like I’m under constant assault. There is, of course, the survival struggle of the auto industry that sets the stage with existential angst. And beyond that, we have the tragedy of the collapsing public schools and the absurdist theater of city government (though dysfunctional politics are certainly not confined within the city limits).

One evening as I’m driving home, National Public Radio informs me that Detroit has become the cinematic symbol for all that is wrong with urban America. The next morning, I hear that Forbes magazine has declared Detroit the most dangerous city in the nation.

Imagine, then, my surprise (glee might be a better word) to hear Jerry Herron speak at a recent scholarly luncheon and declare that Detroit had saved his life. For nearly a half hour, Herron said nicer things about Detroit than anyone I’ve heard since Emily Gail in the early 1980s.

But his comments were not mere hometown boosterism. Herron, who is dean of the Irvin D. Reid Honors College at Wayne State University, came to his affection for the city through nearly three decades of academic study and residence in the city. As an English professor at WSU, he has written extensively about the city’s cultural history. Detroit saved his life, he says, by giving him the subject around which to build his scholarly career, and he is grateful.

When Herron moved to Detroit in 1982, like many newcomers he found the city “improbable, fascinating and a little bit frightening.”

“You see the city and begin to ask, what happened? … Something went wrong here,” he says. “What I’ve come to think instead is maybe Detroit is the greatest American success story.”

Detroit was enormously successful in creating wealth, “rivers of wealth that flowed out into that great green world of suburbia,” Herron says. In Detroit is clearly visible the history of 20th century America — the urbanization that made cities the nation’s dominant way of life from 1920 to 1950, followed by the exurbanization through which the suburbs eclipsed the core cities by 1970. That process was at the heart of American aspirations and American prosperity for the last century and a half.

It is a process, Herron says, that has made Detroit “the American poster for how we have chosen to live, with consequences that are good and consequences that are not so good…

“I think first you have to credit the stunning success of the city of Detroit,” Herron says. “Then you can ask, what happened along the way? … Everything we have to be proud of in our country is right here. Everything we have to do in our country is right here. This is a great unfinished experiment in human industry and application. It is unfair to tell only half the story.”

Herron is so passionate about Detroit that when the opportunity presented itself to lead WSU’s honors college, he designed a program aimed at helping students experience the fascination and inspiration that he has found in the city. Whereas many honors programs organize themselves around Great Books, WSU’s program takes the city itself as its master text.

“We try to teach our students how to read the city of Detroit like a Great Book,” Herron says.

The honors program is built on four pillars: community, research, service and career. Students take courses on what it means to be a citizen of the city, design their own research projects, and find community groups whose efforts they can assist and serve in the process.

For example, one group of five students linked up with an archeological dig in the Corktown neighborhood. Their efforts not only helped the students learn the archeological skills required for their academic programs, they helped the community build a deeper understanding of its own history.

“It enriches their learning experience but it also contributes something to the community,” Herron says. “We go into the world and do things.”

And where better to do them than in Detroit?

“If you want to make a difference in this world,” he says, “go to where the problems are. You don’t solve problems by avoiding them or living where they apparently don’t exist.”

It doesn’t matter — in fact, it is probably better — if the projects are small. Small projects are manageable by a handful of people working together. Small tasks help people move beyond the paralysis that can come from confronting vast problems. Small tasks make action — and progress — possible.

In a time when our lives in this city seem to be characterized largely by decay and collapse, it is heartening to hear a voice like Herron’s. His is a perspective that comes not from donning rose-tinted glasses, but from long study of Detroit’s gritty realities and a faith in the power of possibility.

He sees that possibility in the willingness and hopefulness of the young people he works with each day, and it makes him hopeful, too.

“Come to Detroit,” Herron says. “This is where we will invent the future.”

Inventing the future won’t be easy. Living in Detroit isn’t easy.

But it can be rewarding.

Stephen A. Jones is a Detroit resident and assistant professor of History at Central Michigan University. He is co-editor with Eric Freedman of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).