Black Bottom

01 / The story of this place

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Named for its dark, fertile soil by early French settlers long before the neighborhood took on its later identity, Black Bottom grew through the early twentieth century into one of the largest African American communities in the Midwest, home to more than a hundred thousand residents at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s. Restrictive covenants elsewhere in Detroit pushed Black families, including singer Della Reese's, who was born here in 1931, into Black Bottom and neighboring Paradise Valley, where Black-owned businesses, churches and nightlife thrived despite poverty and segregation. Beginning in the 1950s, the city's urban renewal program demolished Black Bottom to build the Chrysler Freeway (I-375) and the Lafayette Park housing development, displacing tens of thousands of residents, a disproportionate share of Detroit's Black population, with little compensation. Today Lafayette Park's mid-century towers, designed in part by Mies van der Rohe, occupy much of the former neighborhood, and a 2022 federal grant is funding plans to reconnect the area once I-375 is removed.

1. One of the largest African American neighborhoods in the Midwest by the 1930s–1940s
2. Singer Della Reese was born here in 1931
3. Demolished from the 1950s onward for the I-375 freeway and Lafayette Park
4. Lafayette Park now covers much of the former neighborhood