Updated August 13, 2026 at 2:12 PM EDT
Sometimes, one family’s story helps tell a bigger story of a place.
Marsha Battle Philpot is part of one of those families. She is a Detroiter with many titles: cultural historian, former labor activist, author, poet, music preservationist, and opera performer. She also goes by Marsha Music.
Philpot has spent many of her 72 years telling her version of Detroit’s story, about its industrial boom, its hollowing out and racial clashes, and now, its recovery.
It’s a complex story, full of musical connections, because Philpot’s father, Joe Von Battle, was a record producer.
Like many Black men, he moved north to Detroit in the days of Jim Crow, seeking better work opportunities and a better life.
“My father was a part of this migration that came here to the North from the South,” Philpot said. “He was born and raised in Macon, Georgia.”
Eventually, he got a job at a Chrysler factory during World War II. At that time, Detroit was the country’s fourth largest city, behind New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. And those years were peak Detroit, Philpot said.
“Work was extremely plentiful because it’s wartime production,” she said. “So it was common for people that were up here, these Blacks who had come here to work one job for eight hours or 10 even, and then walk across the street to the factory across the street and work in the next job for another eight or 10 hours.”
After the war, her father was laid off. Auto plants were putting in more machines to replace people, and most Black workers had low seniority.
So Joe Battle opened a storefront: Joe’s Record Shop.
“He was very, very successful, and he began to have relationships with other record companies and all kinds of stuff,” she said. “But he wanted to record, and he had recorded John Lee Hooker, who was a blues guy. That was his buddy, and he walked up and down the street playing his guitar because that’s what people did in those days. You know, in that time period, people were very very musical.”
And he recorded a famous Detroit Baptist minister.
“Once he began recording the Rev. C. L. Franklin, he would play these records out of the loudspeaker and church would break out on Hastings St., and people would be shouting and screaming and going through the whole church things right on the street,” Philpot said. “They’d have to call the police, you know, to break up the crowds.
“At one point, you know, Rev. Franklin has this daughter, and she can sing like a grown woman.”
The daughter was Aretha Franklin. And Joe Battle recorded her too, Philpot said.
“She’s so extraordinary in a city of extraordinary singers. Detroit is no joke,” she said. “He recorded Aretha Franklin’s very first records, gospel records, before she made the transition into secular music.”
By the time Philpott was born in 1954, Detroit was struggling, hemorrhaging people and companies, including Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. They left Detroit and went to the suburbs.
“You know, we commonly say white people abandoned Detroit. But I don’t think that people, individual homeowners, families, I don’t believe they abandon cities. But industry abandoned the city. Industry abandoned the city,” Philpot said. “Corporate entities abandoned Detroit, and then compelled people to follow. And a lot of that was done by developers, real estate interests that fomented this, pushing all white Detroiters out of the city by fomenting a lot of racial hatred, fear.”
The suburbs became overwhelmingly white, the city mostly Black. And that’s when many Black neighborhoods were demolished. In 1959, the construction of Interstate 375 began in the city. Joe’s Record Shop was displaced.
“They got the word that there was going to be a freeway built and that freeway was going to replace everything on Hastings St., including all of the businesses,” Philpot said. “And it’s a freeway now.”
Her dad moved his store to another part of town, 12th Street.
“But it’s never the same. It’s not the same,” Philpott said. “The community is not the same. The music that they want to listen to is not the same. It’s not the old-time sound. You know, there’s a different kind of new music. And even his own kids don’t want to listen to his music. You know, I don’t want to hear Lightnin’ Hopkins. I don’t want to hear John Lee Hooker. I want to hear Stevie Wonder. I want to hear The Temptations. >>
And by 1964, Philpot wanted to hear The Beatles.
“People maybe think that Black people didn’t like The Beatles. They think they were so separate from popular culture. But I mean, that’s what we listened to. You know, we just loved the Beatles,” Philpot said.
Even her father loved The Beatles, “because they, unlike any of the mainstream or white musical artists here that began to play Black music in Europe,” she said. “They always acknowledged where the music came from. The Beatles would make sure that they would always say, ‘This is an old blues record by so-and-so.’ You know, it’s hard to describe how revolutionary that was, how stunning that was for a white person to admit that that’s where their music came from.”
And The Beatles performed in Detroit in 1964 and the summer of 1966. A year later, violence broke out in the city. The summer of 1967 brought a defining moment in Detroit: a deadly clash between police and Black residents. Forty-three people were killed, mostly Black, mostly at the hands of law enforcement.
Today, many describe that violence as the Detroit Riots, but Philpott calls it a rebellion.
“In 1967, you had the women’s movement, you had the Black Power movement, the Civil Rights Movement, you had the anti-Vietnam War movement, and you had veterans coming back into the city,” she said. “You had the flooding of these cities with heroin. This was a time of extreme volatility, of social upheaval going on. And you also add intense police brutality.”
The inciting moment was a police raid on an illegal drinking club, on July 23, 1967. Tensions boiled over, leading to five days of clashes and looting. Joe’s Record Shop was in the middle of it all.
“After things had calmed down, my father allowed my brothers and my cousin and my uncle to go over there. Like man’s job, kind of. You know, ‘let’s go see what’s going on.’ Philpot said.”That’s when he learned that his store had been looted and that it was pretty messed up.”
In that summer of 1967, several American cities saw social unrest. In the aftermath, a presidential commission examined the events and linked them to segregation.
The commission said America “is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white: Separate and unequal.”
For the next five decades, Detroit continued to hollow out, losing two-thirds of its people. Then, the turnaround began in 2013. The city declared bankruptcy and wrote off much of its debt, luring investors, developers, and people back to the city.
“Of the narratives that have developed about Detroit since it became a Black city is that it’s a city of ruins,” she said, “and there is an entire sort of what they call ruined porn industry that cranks out visual narratives and images of that, rather than this remarkable phenomenon of these Black people who came from the South, made a way here and have held on to and really maintained some of the most spectacular neighborhoods in the United States.
“But, you know, now that we are having development come back to the city, now all of a sudden we can talk about all those wonderful aspects of the city of Detroit.”
That “comeback” story includes the workers who went there in the first place, including Black working class Americans who went North to build something, and, as Philpot tells the story, never actually left.
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Julia Corcoran produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Corcoran also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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