Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis by Andrew R. Highsmith (review)

Andrew Highsmith’s book Demolition Means Progress begins by retelling the story of a November day in 1954 when General Motors celebrated, along with the rest of the Flint community, the fifty millionth car the company had built. There was a parade, cheers and whistles, and droves of people celebrating the day that Highsmith quickly points out, “was a festival of both truth and fiction.”

This sets the tone for the rest of the book, in which Highsmith, with great depth and detail, turns several of Flint’s myths—economical, educational, social, and so on—directly on their heads. It is a common lament in Flint that its golden age, a time in which gm employed approximately eighty thousand people and its school systems were the envy of the country, is not coming back, but Highsmith’s book serves as an accurate and sobering reminder that Flint’s golden age wasn’t the utopia that passing decades have allowed it to become in memory, and that all of Flint’s accomplishments worth celebrating came at a steep price.

The book begins appropriately by showing how intrinsically linked are the city’s growth and the growth of gm, and how the automotive giant’s well-being was directly tied to the wellbeing of the people of Flint. Highsmith goes on to look at Flint’s school system, once the envy of the country as it sought not just to educate children but to make schools community centers where adults could further their own education and skills. Highsmith continues through Flint’s history, looking at its attempts (led by gm) to annex itself into a “mega city,” suburban growth, and the city’s—alongside gm’s—decline.

Demolition Means Progress reads in some ways like the tale of a disastrous marriage between one city and one company, but the thread that really ties this book together is race. Highsmith points out in each chapter at how beneath the glossy veneer of Flint’s greatest accomplishments was severely institutionalized racism and segregation. In the chapter “Jim Crow, gm Crow,” Highsmith shows how the city’s greatest employer sought to keep blacks and whites separate, with black people having the least desirable and most dangerous jobs. “During the 1940s and 1950s, tens of thousands African Americans moved to Flint and other urban centers in search of good jobs, better housing and schools, and first-class citizenship,” Highsmith writes. “Yet when these migrants arrived in the Vehicle City, they quickly discovered that gm and other local employers were committed to maintaining the color line.”

Throughout, Highsmith looks at Flint’s issues at both the macro and micro level, offering not only a glimpse at the policies of gm and municipalities that led to racial tensions, but also more intimate portraits of the people whose lives were directly affected. A telling moment Highsmith writes about is the conclusion of the 1936–37 sit-down strike that formed the United Auto workers, and how it was a black man, Roscoe Van Zandt, who carried the American flag as workers marched out of the factory, victorious. He includes an accompanying and powerful picture of Van Zandt holding the flag. It’s the kind of photo that could go on to inspire stories of the day equality took hold in gm’s factories. “In spite of its symbolic power and potential, however,” Highsmith explains, “the story of Van Zandt and his uaw comrades conceals much more than it reveals about the experiences of bland workers in Flint and elsewhere.” In 1956, two decades later, Highsmith details the instance of one how one white supervisor was fired for using racial slurs toward one of his employees, but only after that employee’s complaints went ignored for so long that he, in his own words, “beat him severely.”

While it’s true that Flint’s school system was dedicated to its model of community...