Lessons from Detroit: Learning Curves & Street Smarts

This post is part of my Personal Journey series. You may recognize some of my crossroads as your own. They may make you smile or touch your heart, but at their core, they're about setting goals and committing to the work necessary to make them happen. 

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This first post focuses on the role of education in my early life, or its apparent lack. That's before I was an adult with more of a say in the matter. Later essays will focus on my efforts to finish college, including many shifts in focus and fields of study. Like many of you, my early experiences are inseparable from the schools I attended and the larger communities to which I belonged. As a result, my story is as much about growing up in Detroit as it is about the influence of any one classroom.

Education for me starts in a Catholic grade school and ends with a PhD at age 51. A late bloomer, to be sure. The gap in between is packed with drama and the relentless pursuit of time, funds and the motivation to keep going. No doubt any nuns left alive from Guardian Angels in Detroit would be shocked I made it that far, as they were pretty sure I was destined for prison or hell before I reached adulthood.

Aside from religious indoctrination and the relentless focus on discipline, my elementary school's small class sizes were an obvious advantage. If the nun teaching the class was well-versed in the subject, and enjoyed teaching children, this too worked well. My English classes were top-notch.

However, if the nun lacked the proper training in a particular subject, lessons could be tedious and my attention seriously stunted. The obsession with memorization for some nuns also bordered on obsession. Often it was counterproductive to learning. One of my nuns insisted we students memorize dates and figures from our history textbook, demanding we recite them back on command. I vividly recall getting the following test question wrong: how many people died on the Lusitania? The answer, which I had to look up even now, was 1,197.

What possible benefit is there to having a 7th grader know this, aside from a future appearance on Jeopardy? A better question may have been why the ship was targeted? Or what effect it had on events leading up to WWI? It's why years later as a college professor, I resisted writing any exam questions that asked students to memorize numbers (and dates). Some wounds never heal!

High school mis-adventures

By the time I finished the 9th grade at St. David's High School, also in Detroit, I was booted out of the parochial system. Let's just say my dismissal was a combination of factors, which only a spirited 13-year-old girl noted for her sass and defense of anyone being bullied could pull off. 

It seemed a harmless prank to add vodka to orange juice containers meant for a school field trip. That was clearly misguided. After confessing, I did some sort of penance I don't recall. Strike one.

Then I wrote a paper for my world history class on the Spanish Inquisition. At my own tortuous interrogation, the nuns asked why I didn’t focus on a more uplifting example from Church history. Any self-defense involving historical records was clearly beside the point. In their view, my attitude was the real problem. Strike two. 

The final blow came when I was asked to "out" a gay student who'd been at my house for a slumber party and rumored to have tried to kiss another girl. The nuns reminded me that Catechism dictates that "homosexual persons are called to chastity. " Honestly, I can’t recall any specifics beyond being told bad stuff was going to happen to her and me. Her because she was probably a lesbian and me because I refused to help "save her soul." That was that. Three strikes and I was out. (My expression in my student ID says it all!)

Changing habits and lasting influences

To be fair, there were nuns I encountered, who by the late 1960s, like the rest of society, were updating more than their habits. During my last year or so of grade school, the nuns returned with exposed legs and modified veils that left some of them fussing with their bangs like the rest of us. More shocking to us, they no longer wore those stiff, white "coifs" that framed their faces and blocked their peripheral vision. For some nuns, their attitudes also shifted with the times, enough for one of ours to leave to marry a local priest.

My social studies nun, in particular, had a profound influence on me. She was a passionate advocate of social justice, encouraging us to go beyond praying to taking action to help others in need. While she was increasingly reprimanded by superiors for her growing militancy, she courageously held onto her faith while challenging the status quo. (I'll address my eclectic spiritual influences in a future blog, including how this nun taught me to commit to my values and live my beliefs.)

A testament to her influence, some of my classmates at St. David's wrote the following in my yearbook on our last day together:

• "Stay the way you are. Never let anyone force you to do what you don't want to."

• "To one of the bravest girls I know ... give those teachers at your new school the kind of hassle [they] deserve and that you're excellent at."

• "I will never forget you. You have a way of getting your point across without harsh feelings. Remain as you are."

  
  

Detroit and me: struggling together

My parents were understandably upset about my expulsion. Mostly because I now had to attend a Detroit public high school, which, by 1971, was in crisis much like the city itself. White flight was in full force and racial tensions at their worst.

My father was a police officer and such city employees were required to live within the city limits. He'd been a sergeant during the 1967 riots. I clearly remember the wails of sirens outside our home, and the view inside of shotguns stacked in the corner of the living room. In the wake of 1968's assassinations of MLK and RFK, student unrest had started trickling down to American high schools. To further strain matters, 1970 saw the start of attempts to use busing to desegregate the whiter schools on the city's fringes.  

Given the era's social unrest and my proven ability to buck authority, my father and I were on a collision course. Our kitchen table resembled many others back then. I thought of my father as Archie Bunker with a badge. He saw me as a female version of Archie’s son-in-law, the pinko with no appreciation for the established order.

At the same time, I also remember the black officers who worked for him being invited home to play cards. Or to attend parties, as did members of the Blue Pigs. They were an interracial group of musicians who were also cops, co-opting the disparaging term and making it their own.

One other black officer, who later became a high-ranking official in the department (and talking to me, then a reporter, on background), explained my enigmatic father this way: “Your dad wouldn't have been happy if I showed up to date you, but he saw blue first then if you were black or white. He treated me with respect and I really appreciated that at the time." 

After I uncovered how try-out cards were being coded by race to limit black girls from joining my school's cheerleading squad, my father was the one to urge me to take action. I knew he was no freedom fighter, but I also learned how much he hated cheaters, especially those who wanted to retain power by rigging the system. He had bitter memories of growing up a chauffeur’s son in nearby Grosse Pointe, with its roots in old money and social standing. He knew well the measures used to keep “the help” in their place. It wouldn't be the last time I'd struggle to make sense of my father's contradictions.

We’re moving on up ... to the east side 

My high school, on the city's east side, embodied much of Detroit's escalating torment. It served as a prime example of a white-dominated school being targeted for greater integration. The year before I arrived, roughly 1,000 white students, largely from my school, had marched to another high school about three miles away to confront black students. Many of them were angry over a possible busing exchange between the two schools. The police responded by arresting more than a dozen black students, actually beating them in front of local news cameras. They left the white students who had started the melee largely unscathed.

There was no mistaking the undercurrent of hostility that I felt walking into that school the following September.

Our classrooms became sites of tense stand-offs between students, and some incidents of open aggression between students and teachers. There was a breakdown of trust, the creep of neglect, and the feeling of being exploited by politicians of all stripes. I witnessed stabbings and drug overdoses, but I don't remember them being linked to racial infighting. That's not to say those didn't happen. With neighborhoods emptying out, the city was simply growing more dangerous for everyone concerned.  

Some of us made friends with anyone who shared our interests, especially if they liked the same music. This was Motown, after all, and home to Alice Cooper, Grand Funk Railroad and MC5. Even dating across the color line was an act of defiance to prove the adults wrong about our ability to get along. It was a political act that many of us took seriously, sometimes suffering the related consequences.

The Vietnam War remained an ugly shadow that darkened our lives. Our male friends, black and white, feared being drafted after turning 18. Like many young people of the era, the war tore us apart, as we were torn between protesting our government’s aggression and supporting those already in harm’s way.

My brother left for Vietnam in early 1969 and worrying about him haunted my family. At school, those of us who protested thought we were fighting a more just war than what was happening in Southeast Asia. Sadly, our passion and naiveté also further wounded soldiers returning home, including my brother. His feelings of isolation and rebuke from his own generation afflicted him far more than any physical injuries.

I remember one protest that seemed to truly capture the madness of the moment. Somehow students had vandalized a city bus in front of the school. It may have even been set on fire. All I remember is being horrified by the spectacle, wondering: what good is this doing? 

By the fall of 1973, after spending part of my summer glued to the Watergate hearings, things at my school got a whole lot worse. Teachers system-wide went on strike for six weeks, and we didn't finish school until mid-July of 1974. Those of us who were seniors were never able to recover what we had lost that year. Many memory-making events that most teenagers expect to cherish the rest of their lives were lost to us forever. 

I graduated with pretty lousy grades, maybe a C average overall. That wasn’t hard to pull off since I probably skipped class more than I went my senior year. I remember getting D's in a few classes. I didn’t care. The teachers and administrators didn’t seem to care much either. What my parents were up to while all this was going on is a story for another day. By then my father had risen to the rank of commander, with his private torment keeping apace. It also further isolated us from each other.

Detroit: my troubled but enduring hometown 

By the mid 1970s, even aspiring, middle class blacks had started heading for the suburbs north of 8 Mile. The road marked the city’s northern border and later made famous by Eminem, who chronicled his experiences as a white kid growing up in an increasingly black city.

Eminem also reflected what Ralph Ellison taught us in his 1970 essay about American society: it had already absorbed its “soul” from black culture, leaving the “expression of American diversity within unity, of blackness with whiteness.” America was already as much black as it was white, despite the howls of protest that urged resistance or aimed to preserve racial purity (such sentiments emanating from all sides). 

For whites who had fled, their racial identity no longer seemed a concern for them. Their whiteness and its larger privilege restored to hiding in plain sight. For the rest of us left in the city, race was something we consciously navigated on a daily basis.

Some kids I knew, white and black, felt increasingly trapped, wanting to flee to be with their own kind. Others like me leaned into race, wanting all the more to explore the edges of its frayed borders. It would take years for me to realize how much these experiences formed my politics, influenced my attitudes about social justice, and girded my ability to embrace difference. 

At the time, though, to watch Detroit decline further was painful. It had always been a one-industry town, even when it was the 4th largest in the nation in 1950 (now it's the 26th). We never developed subways or reliable mass transit, as it countered our city's standing as the automotive capital of the world. Once that was threatened by stiff competition from Japan and elsewhere, Detroit’s downward spiral continued unabated.

The city ultimately survived bankruptcy in 2014. Moreover, it stopped drawing the world’s media to come photograph the rundown buildings that symbolized “ruins porn.” They also lost interest in capturing the burning spectacle of the Halloween season's “devil’s night,” when abandoned houses were set ablaze just for the hell of it. By 2024, even the city’s NFL team, the Detroit Lions, had clawed their way back to respectability. 

Make no mistake, Detroit is still struggling, like so many other big cities in America. But for those of us who grew up there, black and white, we're familiar with its scars, they've left their marks on us too. We also take pride in its role as the perennial urban underdog. We stand ready to defend its troubled history and celebrate its enduring grit.

The "fist" sculpture of the heavyweight champion boxer and hometown hero, Joe Louis, sits at 5 Woodward Avenue. It seems to warn those who might disparage the city to do so at their own risk. It's in-your-face symbolism is not lost on most visitors.

What did I learn about learning? 

While the above makes clear is how my city and my early education are so inextricably intertwined, yours may be similar for different reasons. Plenty of students I've met over the years, after hearing my stories, shared how much their circumstances dictated their outlook on education. I came to appreciate that isolated rural schools are often just as ill-equipped to prepare kids for their futures.

On the other hand, those who learned to love learning early in life grasp what a gift that is.

I suspect for many of us, our first experiences with education set us on a course that we wish to fix or extend now that we're adults. It's one of life's first major crossroads.

After my graduation from high school, alongside my nearly 800 classmates, I realized soon enough how ill-equipped I was for the job market. It was a hard lesson. It would require every skill and modicum of talent I could tap inside me to reverse course. I had to play catch up with those who had gone to private institutions or well-funded suburban schools, or simply put in the effort while they were in school as kids.

When I did catch up, even to surpass my cohort group, I also wished I could talk back one more time to those nuns from my childhood. The ones who wanted me to sit still more than to learn. I wanted to tell them how much faith it took to get educated. Not necessarily their kind, but faith in myself that I discovered ever so slowly along my life’s journey.

Contact me if you want help rethinking your current level of education. Or if something I wrote resonated with you. I'm here to listen and to help you map your path forward.

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