What the Eyes Don’t See

Mona looks back on her first visit to Flint when she was a child. She and her family took a trip to the now-defunct amusement park AutoWorld. By the 1980s, when Mona and her family visited the park, Flint had already fallen on hard times—the city was no longer the shining beacon of industry and progress it had been a few decades before. Though AutoWorld was designed to focus its patrons’ attentions on the bright future of Flint, its historical exhibits obscured the city’s dark past.

In the early-to-mid 1900s, Flint and GM were synonymous. As auto factories opened throughout the region, immigrants and women who were entering the workforce around the time of World War II flocked to Flint to seek work. And between 1915 and 1960, a huge influx of more than 6 million Black Americans, seeking refuge from racist Jim Crow laws in the South, came north for employment. But Black workers were shunted into the lowest-paying, lowest-skilled jobs. Housing in Flint was segregated, and real estate agents enforced the cruelly restrictive racial covenants that dictated who could live where in Flint.

In 1936, Flint made history as the site of the Flint Sit-Down Strike, during which auto workers demanded better conditions and higher wages. The strike stretched on into 1937—and despite violent attempts to disband the strikes, they actually grew. Soon, workers and the auto companies reached an agreement called the Grand Bargain. Now compensated fairly and able to enjoy benefits, a thriving new middle class emerged, and the things that happened in Flint rippled throughout workplaces all over America.

The late 1930s were a progressive time for Flint as workers’ rights expanded—but racist violence swept the city, and tensions remained. As the century sped onward and schools and neighborhoods were desegregated, Flint became an emblem of “white flight”: as Black Americans moved into new neighborhoods from which they’d previously been barred, white families moved out en masse. Real estate agents scammed Black residents into terrible mortgage structures. As Flint’s Black population rose, a referendum to bind the suburbs of Detroit together failed to pass. Flint was on its own.

Plants closed, AutoWorld failed, and many people left seeking better jobs and climates, so Flint fell increasingly into disrepair. While the national poverty rate was, at the time Mona was writing the book, about 16 percent, almost 60 percent of children in Flint lived below the poverty line. Fewer than 100,000 people live in Flint. It’s a complicated city whose challenges are nonetheless underscored by a history of tenacity, a desire for justice, and plenty of “grit and resilience.”

When former Gateway businessman Rick Snyder was elected governor in 2010, he campaigned as a moderate who would run the state like a well-oiled machine. But the reactionary Tea Party faction of the Republican party pushed Snyder farther right, and Snyder passed laws that would allow him to appoint emergency managers and essentially take over financially insecure municipalities with ease. The austerity that the EMs were directed to put in place led to measures like the water switch in Flint. The rotating EMs in Flint cared little for how to make the city actually function and thrive—their only directive was to cut costs no matter what.