The Leadership of Reverend Robert L. Bradby and the Black Community in East Industrial Detroit

Abstract

Richard Thomas’s Life for Us Is What We Make It presents a conceptual framework that explains the dynamics of early twentieth-century Detroit, Michigan and the evolution of its black community. His understanding of what he terms the “community building process” speaks to the totality of historical “efforts of black individuals, institutions, and organizations to survive and progress as a people and to create and sustain a genuine and creative communal presence.” At the core of this process is the drive by the black community to fulfill its vision of freedom and equality. It is a continual massive movement toward freedom, a better quality of freedom than that experienced in the past. Thomas argues that the black Detroit community building process must be seen in “the sum total of the historical efforts of blacks in industrial Detroit to survive and progress.”1 These historical efforts must be addressed in a variety of contexts with emphasis on the relationships between “proletarianization, institutional life, politics, race relations, and particularly ghetto formation.”2