Book Review: Edward McClelland’s Midnight in Vehicle City, General Motors, Flint, and the Strike that Created the Middle Class
By Harold C. Ford “You are a scoundrel and a skunk…You’ll go to hell when you die if you do things like that.” –Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor, to Alfred Sloan, CEO, General Motors, Jan. 1937 “You can’t talk to me like that…I’ve got seventy million and I made it all myself!” —General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan’s response to Frances Perkins, U. S. Secretary of Labor, Jan. 1937 Edward McClelland’s Midnight in Vehicle City,...
Book Review: A five-day odyssey of “Motown Man” explores familiar themes, settings in Flint author Bob Campbell’s first novel
By Harold Ford “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line.” –from Address to the Nations of the World, W. E. B. DuBois, July 1900 “As much as we all try to think we have all reached the promised land, the reality is there’s still alot of separation.” –Bob Campbell, Motown Man author, Dec. 11, 2020 Flint author Bob Campbell’s first book, Motown Man, was virtually launched Dec. 11 via Zoom and...
Review: Caste is “the bones,” race “the skin” in America’s body of discontents
By Robert Thomas Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson offers a deep, scholarly dive into the foundations of human hierarchical organization. “A caste system,” she defines “is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would...
Review: “Begin Again” blends James Baldwin’s urgent lessons and a call to face “the American Lie”
By Robert R. Thomas BEGIN AGAIN by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a clear example of a historical genre I call living history, i.e., history being written in real time by living historians. Glaude is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton, where he is also the chair of the Center for African American Studies and the chair of the Department of African American Studies. Glaude’s...
Review: Latest Flint book, “Poisoned Water” belongs in classrooms, libraries all over America
By Harold C. Ford “Flint was an example of the nation at its worst but also its best.” — Candy J. Cooper, Poisoned Water I’ve just added a fourth book to my personal collection of publications about Flint’s water crisis: Poisoned Water: How the Citizens of Flint, Michigan, Fought for Their Lives and Warned the Nation, written by Candy J. Cooper, with Marc Aronson, released May 19 by Bloomsbury Publishing. Cooper is...
Review: Need some pandemic reading? These two books offer pertinent context on the plague we’re in
By Harold C. Ford Two recent reads provide some historical context for the current coronavirus pandemic: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1999, W. W. Norton & Company) traces the long history of human pandemics to the domestication of animals. How to Hide an Empire, A Short History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr (2019, The Bodley Head) details the racial inequities of health care and research by...
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