How One Highway Destroyed America's Most Powerful Black Neighborhood: Paradise Valley, Detroit

Before Motown, before the ruins, Detroit had a neighborhood unlike any other in America. Paradise Valley and Black Bottom were the heart of Black Detroit — a district where Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Count Basie played the clubs on Hastings Street, where Aretha Franklin's father preached, and where a future mayor of the city grew up. By the 1950s, more Black-owned businesses were listed here than anywhere else in the country. Then the city decided a freeway should run straight through it. Construction of I-375 began in 1959, and by the time it opened in 1964, Hastings Street was gone. Urban renewal displaced around 43,000 Detroiters — the overwhelming majority of them renters who were never compensated for what they lost. This is the story of Paradise Valley: what it was, who built it, and how it was erased. #Detroit #BlackHistory #ParadiseValley