"Black Detroit knows love is the strut and hate is the stumble," she says during a phone interview. Although she was born after the Black Bottom era she revives in her novel, she carries its legacy of fostering excellence and facing adversity with her.Īnd she says Detroit in general, and Ziggy Johnson's school, in particular, taught her that joy can be radical.Īlice Randall, author of the 2020 novel 'Black Bottom Saints.' Randall, who's 61, spent a good chunk of her childhood in Detroit. More: Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood resurrected in photo exhibit Free Press file photosīut its heyday was cut short by racist policies of redevelopment. As the Free Press wrote in 2017, "Then, in the early 1950s, in one of the most controversial episodes of mass gentrification in Detroit history, the virtually all-white city government bulldozed Black Bottom in the name of “slum clearance,” eventually to replace it with the Chrysler Freeway and Lafayette Park, an upscale residential community that initially was occupied by mostly white residents." First: The Castle Theater in the Black Bottom section of Detroit, the African-American section of town.
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