Detroit Civil Rights Project
Michigan State Historic Preservation Office rolls out Detroit Civil Rights Bike Tour
SHPO has launched an interactive Civil Rights Bike Tour around the city of Detroit to highlight many historically significant sites that describe the civil rights movement in Michigan’s largest city. Encompassing 20 different stops in total, the tour is nearly 17 miles in length but can be easily broken into shorter segments.
Explore TourDetroit Civil Rights Project
The places associated with the struggle for African American civil rights in the city of Detroit represent a particularly fragile class of resource. Many important buildings and sites have been lost as a result of urban renewal and aggressive blight removal programs and demolition related right-sizing that addresses population loss, economic hardship, and years of neglect. As the resource pool is diminished, the cultural legacy and story that the remaining places portray rise in importance.
The Michigan State Historic Preservation Office in conjunction with the City of Detroit Historic Designation Advisory Board announce a project to document Detroit’s 20th Century Civil Rights History and the historic sites associated with it. The project is funded through an African American Civil Rights program grant by the National Park Service (NPS). Research topics are based on four themes identified by NPS:
For more information on these themes see the NPS 2008 report Civil Rights in America: A Framework for Identifying Significant Sites .
Quinn Evans Architects of Ann Arbor and Detroit have been contracted to undertake the field work for this project. They will research Detroit’s Civil Rights history and identify the people, places, trends, and time periods associated with it; identify and conduct a survey of existing sites; and prepare National Register of Historic Places nominations for five undesignated sites. Development of a public bike tour of the sites is complete and you can explore the tour by smartphone, tablet or computer. You may see representatives of Quinn Evans Architects in your neighborhood taking photographs and surveying properties for the project.
For more information on the Detroit 20th Century Civil Rights Sites Project contact:
Amy L. Arnold, Civil Rights Project Manager
State Historic Preservation Office
arnolda@michigan.gov or 517-335-2729
Ruth E. Mills, Historian/Architectural Historian
Quinn Evans Architects
rmills@quinnevans.com or 734-926-0433
For information on the National Register of Historic Places visit https://www.nps.gov/nr
This project is partially funded by the African American Civil Rights program of the Historic Preservation Fund, National Park Service, U. S. Department of the Interior, through the Michigan State Housing Development Authority. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Interior or the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, nor does the mention of trade names or commercial products herein constitute endorsement or recommendation by the Department of the Interior or the Michigan State Housing Development Authority.
