Black Bottom was a predominantly Black enclave in Detroit, Michigan demolished for redevelopment in the early 1960s. It was located on Detroit's Near East Side and was bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, Vernor Highway, and the Grand Trunk railroad tracks. Its main commercial strips were on Hastings and St. Antoine streets. An adjacent north-bordering neighborhood was known as Paradise Valley. The two were not, however, considered to be the ...
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Black Bottom was a predominantly Black enclave in Detroit, Michigan demolished for redevelopment in the early 1960s. It was located on Detroit's Near East Side and was bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, Vernor Highway, and the Grand Trunk railroad tracks. Its main commercial strips were on Hastings and St. Antoine streets. An adjacent north-bordering neighborhood was known as Paradise Valley. The two were not, however, considered to be the same neighborhood. It was named Black Bottom not because it was all-black, but because of the darkness of the soil, and had been named even before blacks arrived in the neighborhood.
Hastings Street, which ran north-south through Black Bottom, had been a center of Eastern European Jewish settlement before World War I, but by the 1950s, migration transformed the strip into one of the city's major African-American communities of black-owned business, social institutions and night clubs. It became nationally famous for its music scene: major...
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