Bill McGraw

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

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.

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.

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

Increasingly, policymakers across the political spectrum are coalescing around specific areas to reduce prison populations and successfully integrate inmates back in their communities.

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.

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.

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.

The Detroit Journalism Cooperative survey found significant optimism over racial attitudes in general. But blacks and whites have vastly different experiences -- and opinions -- concerning law enforcement.

Unemployment and poverty drove much of the violence that swept across Detroit in the summer of 1967. Today, those numbers are even worse.

Detroit’s boom and bust auto industry explains a lot about the poverty and jobs challenges the city faces today.

The city’s feared, nearly-all-white police force eventually integrated after the 1967 riot. But crime and mistrust within the city’s African-American community did not fade so easily. Residents say a new chief is helping to ease old animosities

African Americans may now control who’s elected mayor or to city council, but nearly 50 years after racial despair led to deadly insurrection and rioting, a view persists that white political and business interests continue to steer the city’s course

Was it a riot or a rebellion? Or both? Nearly five decades after the last fire was extinguished, the discussion continues over what to call the events in Detroit during July 1967

Sunday, July 23 through Thursday, July 27: What happened, by the numbers.

An Arab-American and Chaldean group sees refugees as the centerpiece of a neighborhood revival. But Detroit’s mayor, and the city’s suburbs, may have other plans.

Mayor Duggan and his new planning director are quietly redrawing boundaries to join stable neighborhoods with blighted areas to transform both

An infusion of post-bankruptcy cash means cutting the grass and making improvements, even as the city is quietly closing other parks.