Mainstream media has created a very specific narrative about the city of Detroit.
It’s a struggling city that is synonymous with white flight, but it has been on the brink of resurgence as a new wave of startups have started to boost the local economy and incentive programs attract white citizens back to the city’s downtown and midtown neighborhoods.
To those who call Detroit home, however, that narrative is missing something extremely important — the many Black-owned businesses that line the streets of the bustling city and even managed to stay afloat when the city navigated the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
With more than 80 percent of the city’s population being Black, it’s no surprise that it has a hearty population of Black-owned businesses, but it’s all too often that these businesses are forced to close their doors for good.
With so much of the media’s attention honing in on the new startups presented by the influx of white residents returning to the city due to new government incentives, Black businesses have struggled to match that kind of free publicity with their own marketing efforts.
That is until one Detroit resident’s brilliant idea helped highlight the resilient community that had long been overlooked and unappreciated.
“I just said to myself, ‘I don’t want to hear another story about the renaissance of Detroit and not have it include my people,’ ” Carole Watson, the creator of Us Too Detroit, told Al Jazeera. “God has created enough for everybody. So why do we have to work so hard for exposure?”
Her solution was an innovative new bus tour that would take excited residents all around the city, even to its less-popular outskirts, to show them the vast collection of Black-owned businesses that call Detroit home.
The unique shopping experience serves as a reminder for the tour bus patrons that these business owners, while largely ignored on a national scale, are just as much a part of Detroit’s economic resurgence as the new wave of downtown startups that have garnered so much attention.
Of course, those startups are helping the economy as well and Watson’s tours have no intention of deeming one business as being more valuable than the other, but rather she hopes to give Black-owned businesses exposure so they can mirror the success of the new, predominantly white, startups that are just now laying roots in the city.
“We’d see a new business in Detroit and we’d be excited about them, but we’d go back a few months later and they’d closed,” Debra McIntosh Rhodes, one of the 10 founding members of the tour, told Al Jazeera. “So we stopped complaining and started doing something.”
Us Too Detroit
The ladies took to social media to spread the word and it wasn’t long before they were being flooded with emails from Detroit residents who wanted to go on the tour as well as Black-owned businesses that wanted to be a part of it.
Suddenly, residents were becoming aware of the many businesses they passed by every day or journeying to new parts of the city where they discovered a new café or boutique that piqued their interest, all thanks to Us Too Detroit.
“People had no idea these places existed,” said Stephanie Dickey, the owner of Stef-n-Ty, a clothing boutique on Detroit’s East Side, Al Jazeera reports. “Even the people who lived right in the midst of them.”
The Black-business tours started to grow so rapidly that the women behind the project believe they will need a second bus for the next outing.
They have consistently sold out of their $20 tickets as word of the tour continues to spread.
In addition to providing more customers to Black-owned businesses, Us Too Detroit will hopefully serve as a message to the local officials — their Black residents should be valued just as much as their white counterparts.
The city’s new programs that were supposedly geared toward bringing the city back to its previous glory have favored white residents rather than helping the entire community at large.
“[The city] will subsidize everything possible and do everything possible to get one white person into our downtown core,” The president of the Skillman Foundation, Tonya Allen, told Al Jazeera. “How much do [they] pay for one white person that [they] would never pay to keep four black people?”
As the company continues to grow, Watson hopes to create a directory of all the Black-owned businesses in the city and even have a more diverse pool of residents signing up to be a part of the tours.
