Kid Rock opening Detroit’s new arena makes a mockery of the city’s history

Kid Rock opened Little Caesar’s Arena on Sept. 12, 2017. It was the first of six shows he was contracted to perform at the new home of the Detroit Pistons and Red Wings. He was also allowed to build his “Made in Detroit” restaurant on the northeast side of the stadium, facing out towards Woodward Avenue, a road known as Detroit’s main street.

The agreement with Kid Rock was criticized by many Detroiters, but especially the Detroit chapter of the National Action Network (NAN). He had played previous shows with a massive Confederate flag behind him and has been a vocal critic of Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality. Having Kid Rock open a stadium that is supposed to be dedicated to the people of a city that’s more than 80 percent black seemed like an insult. Before his first show could start, protesters led by the NAN took to the street against him.

The protesters held up signs against Kid Rock and Donald Trump and chanted, “This is what democracy looks like.” Kid Rock dismissed the anger of the people beforehand on a blog post on his website, calling it “jealousy” which was “merely a reflection of disgust for your own failures and lack of positive ideas for our city.”

Many spectators came out to watch and take pictures. Some concert-goers waiting to cross the street from where I stood — across from the stadium — tried to antagonize the protesters. One police officer came over to calm them down before things escalated. A black man who I was standing next to looked at me and said, “If that was us, we would have been arrested.”

On the other side of Woodward, in front of the stadium itself, counter-protesters stood, in attendance in support of Trump and Kid Rock. The two sides engaged and yelled at each other. All the while, one counter-protester, wearing sunglasses, stood proudly and held out the Confederate flag.

Police separated the two factions quickly. A few moments later, a horde of the Highwaymen motorcycle group rode down my side of the street and revved their engines to drown out the protesters.

Afterwards, former mayoral candidate William Noakes summed up the event: “Kid Rock is an insult, but this isn’t about Kid Rock.”

Detroit’s history is the history of black people’s struggle for freedom in this country. The city was codenamed “Midnight” on the Underground Railroad. Fugitive slaves found shelter in the city before crossing over to Canada, to freedom. The Second Baptist Church, the oldest African-American church in the Midwest, hosted more than 5,000 fugitives. Legendary Detroiters George DeBaptiste and his friend William Lambert helped more than 30,000 of those runaways go from Detroit to Canada while another legend, Seymour Finney, hid the runaways and got their catchers drunk.

Campus Martius, a park a few minutes walk away from where the man stood holding the Confederate flag, was where the First Michigan Regiment received their colors before leaving for the Civil War. A few minutes away, in what is now Bunche Elementary School, is a plaque commemorating the 1st Michigan Colored Infantry, which was composed of 845 black men, including escaped slaves.

Detroit is black excellence. It’s Motown. It’s a city that has influenced almost every single music genre. It’s where the Nation of Islam was founded. Detroit is the Broadside Press, and where the Revolutionary Union Movement was borne. It is the city of Coleman Young, Berry Gordy Jr., Joe Louis, Ralph Bunche, Sugar Ray Robinson, Smokey Robinson, Elijah McCoy, Charles McGee, J Dilla, Rosa Parks, and too many others to name.

Symbols of white supremacy in the middle of a city like this isn’t just stupid, it’s antagonistic.

Yet, Detroit also has a history of honoring powerful men who knew better but still punished the black citizens of the city.

Woodward Avenue is named after Augustus B. Woodward, the man who devised the original plan of Detroit after the fire of 1805, then became the first chief judge of the Supreme Court of Michigan. He once ruled, in Denison v. Tucker, that four slave children in Detroit were the property of a British settler under the Jay Treaty with Great Britain. Then, in contradiction, he wrote in his opinion: “The Existence at this day of an absolute & unqualified Slavery of the human Species in the United States of America is universally and justly considered their greatest and deepest reproach.”

Woodward owned slaves until he left the Michigan Territory in 1824.

The Cobo Center, Detroit’s meeting and convention space, is named after Albert Cobo, a former Detroit mayor who advocated for racist housing policies and destroyed two great black neighborhoods in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley.

From where I stood at Woodward and Adelaide, Martin Luther King Jr. — accompanied by then-Detroit mayor, Jerome Cavanaugh, Rev. C. L. Franklin (father of hometown legend and goddess Aretha Franklin), United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, Rev. Albert Cleage, and more than 125,000 people — walked to where Woodward meets Jefferson Ave., and turned right. The Walk to Freedom of 1963 was the nation’s largest civil rights demonstration in history at that time — a trial run for the March on Washington — and it stopped at Cobo.

In Cobo Hall, MLK Jr. gave a longer version of his “I Have A Dream” speech. He spoke about the greatness of the Emancipation Proclamation and then said, “But one hundred years later, the Negro in the United States of America still isn’t free.”

Noakes was right, the protest and anger was about much more than Kid Rock. It’s about a city that’s now divided into two.

One part of that division is District Detroit and the downtown core where the Little Caesars Arena is. The QLine — Detroit’s new streetcar system — only services the 3.3-mile radius of that area, where the rich have created their own suburb inside the city and housing prices are rising so fast that only transplants can actually afford to live there.

Then there’s everywhere else in the city, where the poor natives live among abandoned buildings and 40 percent of people are impoverished.

The problem isn’t Kid Rock; it’s the question of what it means to love a city. A city is not just land and opportunity, but also people and history. To love it is to love everything about it. That love also cannot be static. You can’t just say you love something and have it be so. As Ursula K. Le Guin says, “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

In his blog post where he lashed out at the potential protests, Kid Rock ended it by writing “P.P.P.P.P.S. I LOVE BLACK PEOPLE!!” During that first show, he gave a speech where he repeated that claim. Those who asked him to do those shows also proclaimed that they were remodeling the midtown/downtown area, and building the Little Caesers Arena, because they love the city.

Yet, in 2014, Christopher Ilitch, CEO of Ilitch Holdings, Inc., explained to the Detroit News exactly how his family built the arena (aside from the $344 million he got from the city to do so).

Illitch said that his family had spent 15 years and $50 million buying up over 70 properties in that midtown area. Then they let those buildings and lots deteriorate to keep the prices of the surrounding properties down.

“It’s been painful to not be able to develop some of that property because every time we made a move, the price for other property would shoot way up. But we had to wait and that hurt.”

Purposely letting a part of the city rot and adding to the blight of the area to secure your vision of a new Detroit is great business. I’m just not sure that means you love the city or its people.

Empowering an artist whose come up was through black culture but now flies the symbol of black oppression, and giving him six shows and a restaurant right where one of the United States’ greatest civil rights demonstrations took place, that can’t be love. It’s insensitive to the point of being comical. It’s even worse than when Dan Gilbert’s company created a banner that read “See Detroit Like We Do” that depicted no black people.

You can’t love the city of Detroit without loving black people, and you can’t love black people without being compassionate to their pains, both current and historic. The reason that Kid Rock’s performance at the crown jewel of the new Detroit is important is that he’s a symbol, and not a very good one. What the people who marched were protesting is the message that the supposed “rebirth” of Detroit has been sending them all along: That after decades of struggle, they are not welcome in their own city.