I submit that Detroit slipped collectively into the social mindset of the lumpen proletarian in the 1970s when the murder figures sometimes topped 700 per year. I was living on Delaware and Second in the '70s when the city slipped into its present state of anti-small business ownership and anti-intellectual live-for-today mindset.
Apropos of this comment: when I was a girl on the lower East Side, the president of the Detroit School Board lived across the street -Mrs. Canty. She left most nights for meetings, driving her own little Ford sedan.
When I first started to work downtown, many years later, how surprised I was to see that a customer of mine was a UAW clerical employee and an elected school board member and who had a driver and car at her disposal, paid for by the DPS. Detroit and the expectations of leaders had changed a lot in the intervening years. The School Board got to be a patronage body and the members pretty much got to be eating pretty good at the public trough.
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