Bill McGraw has written about metro Detroit’s history for decades, but few stories have stirred as much controversy as an article about Henry Ford’s public campaign to stir anti-Semitism
Bill McGraw
Bill McGraw, a veteran Detroit Free Press writer, was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in April, 2014. A native Detroiter, McGraw co-founded the online website, Deadline Detroit, in 2012. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Toronto Globe and Mail, National Geographic, Newsweek, the London-based History Workshop Journal, the Fifth Estate and Orbit. McGraw spent 37 years as a freelance contributor, city-desk reporter, sportswriter, Canada correspondent, deputy metro editor and columnist at the Free Press. He created two best-selling books on Detroit subjects, “The Quotations of Mayor Coleman A. Young” and “The Detroit Almanac,” which he co-edited with Peter Gavrilovich. In 2007, McGraw drove all of the city’s 2,100 streets for the award-winning “Driving Detroit” series.
Posted inMichigan Government
Henry Ford and the Jews, the story Dearborn didn’t want told
When a city-financed journal explored a darker side of the auto titan, Dearborn’s mayor banned its distribution and fired the writer. Public officials fail the public when they stifle serious journalism. It’s media’s role to step up.
Posted inUrban Affairs
He started the Detroit riot. His son wrestles with the carnage.
Bill Scott threw the first bottle at police, an act that encouraged violent uprisings by black Detroiters in 1967. His son grew up thinking his race didn’t matter. Until one night, suddenly, it did.
Posted inUrban Affairs
He started the Detroit riot. His son wrestles with the carnage: Part 2
Bill Scott from a promotional poster for his book, “Hurt, Baby, Hurt.” The father The origins of the Scott family’s story is a familiar one in Detroit. William Walter Scott II, the owner of the blind pig and Bill Scott’s father, was born in Georgia and came to Detroit as child, just as the “Great […]
Posted inUrban Affairs
He started the Detroit riot. His son wrestles with the carnage: Part 3
Bill Scott with his sister Wilma and an unidentified friend (courtesy photo) Ann Arbor Bill Scott never did move back to Detroit. For the Ann Arbor of that era was a cauldron of activism, music, drugs and experimental ways of living and thinking, with John Sinclair and the White Panthers, SDS, feminist scholars, the Black […]
Posted inUrban Affairs
The War on Crime, not crime itself, fueled Detroit’s post-1967 decline
In this Q-and-A, historian and National Book Award finalist Heather Ann Thompson argues that draconian police tactics in black Detroit neighborhoods had as much to do with the city’s decimation as white flight and lost jobs
Posted inUrban Affairs
Three prison reform ideas drawing bipartisan support
Increasingly, policymakers across the political spectrum are coalescing around specific areas to reduce prison populations and successfully integrate inmates back in their communities.
Posted inUrban Affairs
Hatch contest leans toward white winners in majority black Detroit
The $50,000 Hatch Detroit competition has helped startups launch creative businesses in the thriving central city. But winning entries for entrepreneurs of color in Detroit’s neighborhoods have proven more elusive.
Posted inUrban Affairs
The Detroit Historical Museum wants your story from the summer of ‘67
The museum is collecting oral histories from Detroit and suburban residents who lived through the chaos and pain of the disturbances that took place in Detroit that summer as its 50th anniversary nears.
Posted inUrban Affairs
DJC Poll: Black and white optimism on Detroit-area race relations
Yet the Detroit Journalism Cooperative survey on racial attitudes also shows that bias infiltrates the daily lives of blacks in the region a way that many whites can’t imagine.
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