By Peter Blackmer
Editor’s note: This is the third post in our annual Digital Summer School for 2025, where we highlight projects in the digital humanities. You can read other posts in the series here.
In early 2013, Michigan governor Rick Snyder declared a financial emergency in Detroit, which gave him the power under a controversial new state law to effectively suspend democracy and appoint an emergency manager with autocratic power over the largest majority-Black city in the United States. Within a matter of months, emergency manager Kevyn Orr, a self-described “benevolent dictator,” sold off city assets, initiated widespread residential water shutoffs, attacked collective bargaining agreements and retiree pensions, and declared bankruptcy on behalf of the city. The story surrounding the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history has largely been shaped by racist narratives that blame Black Detroiters for an economic crisis fueled by systemic racism and celebrate Detroit’s subsequent “comeback” driven by wealthy white developers at the expense of working-class Black residents.
The Voices from the Grassroots Oral History Project was conceived in 2018—five years after bankruptcy was imposed on the city of Detroit—and launched in 2023 to document, preserve, and amplify the voices of grassroots organizers in Detroit during this pivotal chapter in the city’s history. Through interviews with longtime activists and organizers, this project explores how Detroiters have been organizing their communities to challenge systemic racism and build movements for racial equity and self-determination.
We spoke with Peter Blackmer, the producer and lead interviewer of Voices from the Grassroots and an Associate Professor of Africology and African American Studies at Eastern Michigan University. He is also the lead researcher of Rise Up North, a national digital humanities project to preserve and present the histories and lessons of grassroots Black freedom struggles in the urban north. Working alongside an expansive team from the university and community, he developed the VFG project as a research fellow with the Detroit Equity Action Lab (DEAL), an initiative of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University Law School. The project was supported by funding from the Kellogg Foundation and Ford Foundation.
Voices from the Grassroots (VFG) emerged as a response to Detroit’s governance dating back to 2013. What happened in 2013? How does VTG challenge popular narratives regarding the city and its residents?
The imposition of an emergency manager over the city of Detroit in 2013 didn’t come out of nowhere—it was the culmination of a crisis decades in the making caused by systemic racism. From redlining and “urban renewal” in the 1940s-60s, to the escalation of white flight and organized abandonment in the 1970s-2000s, to the Great Recession in the early aughts, the economic, political, and social power of Detroit has been under attack on the regional, state, and federal levels. As Detroit became a majority-Black city and Black communities gained political power in the early 1970s—as was the case in many other US cities—white Republicans focused on consolidating their power at the state and county levels to isolate the city and stifle Detroit’s economic vitality and political power. The prevailing sentiment of the era is best reflected through Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson’s infamous 2014 declaration that “What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.” In the decade preceding emergency management alone, state lawmakers withheld over $732 million in state revenue sharing funds from Detroit, while forcing through various iterations of laws that empowered the state to take over cities deemed to be in financial crisis. So, when Republican Governor Rick Snyder imposed emergency management on Detroit in 2013, it was a power move to capitalize on a manufactured crisis.
Despite these well documented histories, the narratives that have dominated popular discourse around emergency management and the subsequent bankruptcy have primarily blamed Black Detroiters for the conditions caused by systemic racism. Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr blamed “dumb, lazy, happy, and rich” Detroiters for the supposed financial crisis and painted a picture of a population that was incapable of self-governance and in need of saving. This has been accompanied by white savior narratives celebrating white leadership, like Mayor Mike Duggan and developer Dan Gilbert, for leading Detroit’s “comeback.” Perpetuated through countless outlets and media over the years, these racist narratives have served to rationalize and justify the dispossession, displacement, and disempowerment of the city’s majority-Black population for the benefit of wealthy white developers and corporate interests.
We embarked on the VFG project with a recognition that the role of racist narratives is to normalize and reinforce racist systems, and that challenging and disrupting these narratives is part of a broader process of dismantling the systems that produce them. Racist narratives are able to persist, in part, through the erasure, marginalization, and criminalization of counternarratives, particularly the voices of activists and organizers fighting to create a different world. We set out to document, preserve, and amplify those voices through oral history to challenge this erasure and combat dominant narratives and systems they uphold. In addition to challenging systemic racism, these stories must be told to prevent the whitewashing of Detroit’s history and to preserve important lessons for future generations of organizers.
The project utilizes a number of approaches common to the digital humanities, such as interactive timelines that contain digital images, embedded videos, oral histories, and more. How did you decide on this multimedia approach?
The multimedia approach we used in developing the website was driven by our intentions and objectives for the project. One of our guiding intentions was to make the histories and personal narratives within the project accessible, engaging, and educational for popular audiences. When I was in grad school in the W.E.B. Du Bois Dept. of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst, I was trained by scholar-activists like John Bracey and Bill Strickland, who taught me that my job as an academic was to make scholarship for the people, not the academy. So that was a foundational intention that I brought to this project and use to guide my broader scholarly work.
Our DEAL team spent countless hours in planning meetings thinking through our theory of change, clarifying our objectives for the project, and developing strategies for fulfilling them. We had lofty visions and ambitions for how the process and outcomes of this project would contribute to ongoing struggles for racial equity in the city. Ultimately the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 uprisings drew our energy elsewhere and limited some of our aspirations for impact strategies, but we were able to achieve one of our overarching objectives of creating an accessible resource for Detroiters that connects ongoing struggles and their histories through an analysis of the crises in water, land, and education as products of systemic racism.
The forms of media we used in the website were determined by three main commitments: a) centering and amplifying the voices of grassroots organizers and activists in shaping these histories and analyses; b) creating multiple access points for engaging with these narratives to reach broad audiences; c) building an archive that could be useful to organizations, journalists, educators, etc. in challenging racist narratives and systems in the city.
As the bedrock of the project, we wanted the oral history interviews to really shine and be able to serve multiple purposes. Because so many people consume and seek information from visual media today, we worked with fantastic videographers to create high-quality recordings that would draw viewers in and do justice to the gravity of the oral histories. We also wanted the videos to stand the test of time and be adaptable for future projects, like documentaries and social media shorts. Each profile also includes photo portraits of the narrator because we wanted to honor and celebrate Detroit’s freedom fighters with the kind of images that could be used in exhibits and other venues.
But we also recognized that not everyone was going to watch a two-hour interview in its entirety, so we included transcripts and written profiles of each activist to accompany the oral history interview. We worked with broad array of local journalists, activists, students, and community members to write these and I think the breadth of perspectives of the writers and meanings they derived from the oral histories really shines across the collection.
Lastly, we created the digital timelines for each issue area to offer visitors some historic context to frame the issues and locate the oral histories within. We recognized that most visitors weren’t going to engage with every oral history on the site as we had, so we wanted to offer an accessible historical narrative that wove together many of the threads that emerged for us during the interviews. We particularly chose the Knight Lab TimelineJS tool because it is user friendly (both for the creator and viewer) and can be easily embedded on other sites. The timelines were meant to be tools that could be used by journalists, organizers, and educators for supporting popular education and challenging dominant narratives.
For others hoping to embark on similar projects, what obstacles or challenges did you encounter in implementing this approach?
We wanted this to be an oral history project that involved our narrators and communities as collaborators, which required a lot of intentionality in planning and carrying it out. When doing community-driven work from within a university, it’s important to understand the university’s reputation and relationships within surrounding communities. Despite DEAL’s deep connections with the community, it’s location within a university created some tensions. In addition to their historical complicity in gentrification and displacement, universities and academics have long approached research in local communities—specifically Black communities—in extractive and colonial ways. Some of our narrators were hesitant to participate because of past experiences with the university, so we needed to be mindful of those experiences and be intentional about repairing relationships through intentional relationship-building. One way we addressed this was through working with narrators to craft release forms and use agreements that protected their ownership and agency over their stories and how they could be used. If anyone wants to use an interview for purposes beyond the scope of fair use, they need to get the permission of the narrator to do so. We also kept narrators up to date on our progress at every step of the project, including hosting gatherings to solicit input and feedback, to ensure that the project was being shaped by the people who contributed their stories to it. We also paid each narrator an honorarium as a sign of respect for their labor and contributions to the project, which I’m glad has started to have a ripple effect in more institutions compensating people for their intellectual and emotional labor.
Early in the process of conducting oral histories, we also came to realize that we needed to incorporate a trauma-informed approach to the project. The impacts of austerity and neoliberalism in Detroit have been devastating and recalling memories from this period can be painful for those with lived experiences of loss, displacement, and trauma. After our first day of oral histories, we asked DEAL’s fellowship manager, Rhiannon Chester-Bey—who is also a healing arts practitioner—to sit in on the interviews and support narrators as they needed it. This was an important step in helping narrators feel safe and comfortable in sharing their stories and shaped our approach to care throughout the rest of the project.
On a more basic level, the amount of work that goes into creating so many different media for inclusion on the site is also daunting. While I started this project as a research fellow and was able to dedicate most of my time to it, transitioning to a faculty position made completing the project much more challenging. For the written profiles that accompany the oral history interviews, I worked with undergraduate students in my classes at EMU to learn how to write profile articles for popular audiences while also researching the histories surrounding the interviews to be able to contextualize them. This was a lot of additional work to take on with a 4-4 course load, but it was a transformative experience for some of my students which ultimately made it worth it.
In working on and producing this project, was your understanding of the city’s history, confirmed, challenged, or some combination of both? Was there anything in particular revealed to you through the project about the city’s history that you found indicative of the whole?
Taken as a whole, I think the interviews affirm and expand on many of the impressions and experiences people have of what was happening during the era of emergency management and offer the kinds of counternarratives that expose the intentional misrepresentations of dominant narratives that color this chapter in Detroit’s history. At the same time, the collection also reveals the richness, vitality, and continuity of traditions of community organizing and resistance in Detroit. Many of the narrators were either directly involved in or influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and brought those experiences into their organizing work against the austerity politics and neoliberalism that characterized the era of emergency management. Getting a deeper understanding of how deeply rooted Detroit organizers are in various organizing traditions and eras—whether labor, Black liberation, anti-war, etc.—really illuminated for me the intergenerational nature of organizing in the city. I think this kind of recognition is also critical for challenging dominant narratives that have sought to separate and isolate recent organizers from the city’s celebrated organizing history.
Two moments from the project in particular really stand out in my memory for illustrating the impacts of these oral histories on people involved in the project. After each interview, we usually had discussions among the team and often the narrators to debrief about what we heard. During one of these conversations following an interview with We the People of Detroit co-founder Debra Taylor, one member of our video crew said something to the effect of, “Man, I always thought I was crazy for thinking that these things were happening with the water department and city government, but now it all makes sense.” This stood out to me as an example of the transformative power of these kinds of stories to affirm the political thought of community members.
One of my students at EMU who worked on the project was in elementary school in Detroit during the era of emergency management and told me early on about her experience of having her school closed by an emergency manager and speaking out against him at a community meeting. Her experience in researching and writing a profile on the late Rev. Dr. JoAnn Watson wasn’t just an academic exercise for her—it was an opportunity to connect with a legendary activist that she felt a sense of kinship with. The semester she worked on this was in the depth of the pandemic, so we never actually met in person until she approached me at an event a couple years ago and explained how significant that experience remained for her. So, I think that through engaging with these oral histories, people can not only connect with their own experiences on deeper levels, but also find what Dr. Vincent Harding described as “signposts” to guide their growth as activists.
Voices from the Grassroots traces the city history back to its early settlement in the 18th century. What does this broader historical aperture demonstrate or reveal about the city and its residents?
We decided to approach the era of emergency management through a wide historical lens to challenge ahistorical dominant narratives and tell a different story about what’s been happening in Detroit and how we got here. The most pervasive racist narratives about the causes and consequences of emergency management and the imposed bankruptcy in Detroit have been shaped by a shallow view of history that both obscures the deep, systemic roots of the economic crisis in Detroit and marginalizes traditions of resistance.
For example, the timeline of Detroit’s water crisis stretches all the way back to the 1830s and forward to the 2020s to explore the centrality of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to regional development and trace the long history of contestations over control of the water infrastructure. This long historical memory is critical for challenging racist narratives that thousands of Detroiters were getting their water shutoff during emergency management because they chose to spend their money on sneakers or televisions instead of paying their water bills. When we understand the longer history, we see the systemic reasons that Detroit’s water bills are among the highest in the nation and the decades-long motive behind the water shutoffs, which was to wrest control of the infrastructure from the city or privatize DWSD for corporate benefit.
At the same time, this wider historical lens also helps to understand the continuity and tradition of grassroots organizing in the city. We see throughout these timelines the various eras of organizing around water, land, and education that current organizers are building upon and drawing strength from. This is critical work for resisting narratives that seek to isolate activists from their communities and traditions.
Have you been able to get feedback about who is using the site and how? Did or does this align with how you thought about or envisioned the site’s public application?
Truthfully, I haven’t had the capacity to really track engagement with the site in intentional ways. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from academics and educators about how they’ve used the site in their classrooms and as a model for digital humanities projects.
I also recently had a couple of conversations with folks who were interested in using the site in some really interesting ways. One was an academic who was planning a community design exhibition and wanted to show clips from the oral histories in a workshop focused on imagining new futures. This was really exciting to me because we ended every interview with a question about the narrator’s vision for Detroit’s future in hopes of both documenting the political visions of grassroots activists and inspiring viewers to cultivate their own dreams and visions of a liberated Detroit. So to hear that the site was being used in that kind of way was really fulfilling.
I also heard from an artist who came across the site while looking for a reference photo of an organizer for a mural in Southwest Detroit. One of our early intentions for the project was to work with local artists to create public art that illustrated and amplified the stories and activists featured on the site to connect with different audiences in different ways. We didn’t have the capacity to see this through, but I’m hopeful that more artists will find the site and draw inspiration from it to create mass art that popularizes and uplifts these histories and traditions of struggle.
What do you see as the site’s future?
The site was designed to be modular and collaborative to allow for continued expansion. In the coming years, I’d like to build out additional sections covering recent struggles around policing/mass incarceration and environmental racism in Detroit. These are critical issues that are touched upon in other parts of the site but really warrant their own spotlight for how significant they’ve been within the organizing landscape in the city over the past few decades.
As more people learn about the site, I also hope that folks will start conducting their own oral history interviews and contributing to the archive. In the Resources section, there is an instructional guide for conducting and submitting oral histories for inclusion on the site. There are countless organizers and activists we weren’t able to interview for the project, so we’re hoping to continue documenting and amplifying more of these vital oral histories with the help of our communities.
Digital humanities are in their young adulthood at this point; where do you see the field going and how does your project fit into this larger history?
I’ve loved seeing various digital humanities projects over the years that have contributed to expanding popular discourse around the legacies of systemic racism (like Segregation by Design), preserving community histories (like Black Bottom Archives), and amplifying traditions of resistance to support organizing in the present (like the SNCC Legacy Project). I hope to see the field continue to grow in its commitments to co-creating community-driven projects with local activists and community members to address pressing issues and support liberation struggles. There’s still much to be done with VFG in this regard to fulfill our original objectives for the work, but I hope we can continue to grow in that kind of direction.
Peter Blackmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africology and African American Studies at Eastern Michigan University and alumni of the W.E.B. Du Bois Dept. of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. His work explores the local dynamics and global connections of grassroots Black freedom struggles and urban politics in the 20th and 21st Century United States. He is a former research fellow with the Detroit Equity Action Lab, an initiative of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University Law School, and lead researcher of Rise Up North. His first book, Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long Hot Summers, comes out this fall with the University of Virginia Press.
