David Maraniss
David Maraniss
David Maranissis an American journalist and author, currently serving as an associate-editor for The Washington Post...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
ask evoke name people today
People evoke his name today and ask what would Lombardi have done with Terrell Owens.
babies baby boomers culture maybe
To that extent, he will live on, at least for baby boomers and maybe longer. He's part of the culture now.
cities dancing littles
My favorites are Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, but those are a little off in terms of getting Detroit right on the head. But of course, you know, "Dancing In The Streets." You can't forget the Motor City. And we can't forget the Motor City.
spring shadow stories
It seemed that I could tell the whole story pretty powerfully in those 18 months between October of '62 and the spring of '64 when they were all at their peak. And yet you could see some of the shadows of Detroit's demise coming.
detroit vulnerable possibility
It was a time of uncommon possibility and freedom, when Detroit created wondrous and lasting things. But life can be luminescent when it is most vulnerable.
cities dying balance
There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.
country rights cities
Well, here you had a city that was selling more cars than ever before, that had this wondrous music being created, that was so vital to the labor and civil rights of this country, and yet it was dying and didn't see it, except for some sociologist at Wayne State University who predicted that Detroit was losing population by a half-million by the end of that '60s decade, and that that trend would continue taking away its tax base.
cuban-missile-crisis october speak
Originally, John Kennedy was going to come speak, and then Lyndon Johnson. Because it was October of '62, neither made it because of the Cuban missile crisis.
years selling-more car
And all of the big shots of the car industry are there, strutting their stuff. And that year, they're feeling especially good because cars were selling more than ever before.
cities detroit factories
Well, there were several things. One was that the industry itself built in Detroit was abandoning the city - taking factories elsewhere, the corporate headquarters elsewhere.
cocky japan car
And then the industry itself was so cocky about what they were doing that they weren't seeing what was coming on the horizon with Japan and Germany and other places that were building smaller cars.
country fall squares
And that John F. Kennedy uttered the first variation of "ask not what your country can do for you" in Detroit on Labor Day in 1960. So Detroit was really central to Democratic politics United States. Every Democratic candidate would start their fall campaigns in Cadillac Square.
dream kings rights
It was so crucial to the Civil Rights Movement that on June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King came to town, walked down Woodward Avenue with more than 100,000 people and delivered the first major public iteration of his "I Have A Dream" speech, two months before he did it in Washington.
dream country kings
Detroit was an exaggeration of what was going on across the country. You could see the divisions, even within the Civil Rights Movement of that period. At the same time that Martin Luther King was talking about his dream, Malcolm X gave his most famous address in Detroit during that same period, "The Message To The Grass Roots," dismissing the notion of integration.