DON GONYEA, HOST:
I have spent the better part of my life in Detroit, where I am right now, and I started my career covering the auto industry and culture here. And on America's birthday, the intertwined history of these two threads here have a special resonance. In the 1920s, during the Great Migration, someone's mom or dad or grandparent came up north looking for a better life, and a good paying job in the auto industry in Detroit was a much sought after ticket to make dreams reality.
FELICIA FORD: 'Cause this is where my grandfather started his new life and his freedom.
GONYEA: That's Felicia Ford. She knows this Detroit story because it's her story, too.
FORD: My father and his uncles probably wouldn't have been born without being able to get a job, come to Detroit with the wage, build a family, have a house and be prosperous.
GONYEA: Hundreds of thousands of Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South came to Detroit, arriving at the Michigan Central train station. A great many, like Felicia's grandfather, Roosevelt, were drawn by the promise Henry Ford made to pay workers in his car factories $5 a day.
FORD: He made his way to a millwright, skilled trades. Back then, they didn't have millwright school. You just brawn. You just had the toughness to do a millwright job.
GONYEA: Detroit's assembly lines gave the city its identity worldwide. And as manufacturing grew, so too did the region. Felicia Ford has followed in her grandfather's footsteps. She, too, works at Ford. She designs parts for electric vehicles.
FORD: A millwright would move and build machines that made the cars. I am designing the parts that would be in that factory.
GONYEA: So Roosevelt Ford's legacy continues to unfold. What about the cultural legacy of the auto industry from that era?
So we're in the grand foyer of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Right ahead of us are the Detroit Industry frescoes depicting Detroit's automobile industry as painted by the great Diego Rivera, the great muralist.
Rivera painted these murals in 1932 and 33. Thanks to these massive frescoes, you too are inside that factory, feeling the noise, the heat, the rhythms, the dignity of the work. And the faces - so many faces, each one distinct.
They are each finely drawn, and he has created a multi-ethnic array of workers. That is Rivera's idealized view. You didn't have this kind of racial integration working side by side, almost hand in hand, like he shows them. What he does that I think is so great is that you can make out all of these individual faces. Each of these workers here, as represented by Rivera, would have a story to tell.
The frescoes tell a complex story, beautiful and maybe hopeful for those like me back here today, a story of the future and of struggle and of aspirations not yet fulfilled. In other words, an American story.
One of my very favorite places in the whole world.
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