What the numbers mean

Nobody knows when Detroit will bottom out, though the census figures last week indicate things are even worse than we thought. Nobody knows how bleak things will get, in terms of poverty or population flight or urban devastation.

Nor do we know what the worst-case scenario will look like when it arrives. Will Detroit eventually be run by a state-appointed emergency financial manager? Will the city be broken up into smaller pieces? Will areas be abandoned, fenced off, left to coyotes, raccoons and the occasional dying vagrant?

Or will something, somehow, revitalize the city, perk it up, make it grow again, possibly in ways we haven't yet imagined? Everyone is hoping for that. Many are counting on seeing it.

Whether we ever will is another question. Detroit is still in decline, and Gov. Rick Snyder's financial reforms seem likely, even if they are wildly successful at luring new jobs in the long run, to be positively devastating to Detroit in the near future.

Ending the state's Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor threatens to plunge thousands of Detroiters into poverty. Ending credits for "brownfield redevelopment" may mean, a developer told me, that whatever development is going on in the city will just stop, making the economy worse.

But if we don't know where the devastation will stop, we can name the date when Detroit reached its modern-day zenith, when it was at the peak of its wealth, population and power:

July 28, 1951. That was the day the city kicked out the jams and celebrated its 250th birthday with a historic five-hour parade that had hundreds of thousands lining the sidewalks.

President Harry Truman started things off that brilliant Saturday afternoon with a speech. That was a bigger deal than it sounds today. Presidents didn't travel nearly as much back then. Yet Detroit was seen as worth it; we were the fifth largest city in the nation, and economically even more important.

This big, brawling, muscular city had sprung up between 1900 and 1930, replacing what had been a small town. Detroit put the world on wheels, and then served as the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II, arming the world to defeat fascism, sending trucks and tanks to all the Allied armies.

Detroit was still rich and still growing, after a temporary slowdown during the Great Depression. In 1951, the U.S. Census Bureau reported finding 1,849,568 Detroiters the year before. City fathers were sure they'd soon hit 2 million.

Nobody had heard of a Japanese car. We were killing Chinese in Korea, not buying cars from the Koreans and borrowing money from the Chinese.

Nobody imagined a black majority in Detroit. Negroes, as they were called, were barely a sixth of the population, and mostly rigorously segregated into a couple areas. Some white liberals muttered about that, but nobody else cared very much, except that they wanted to avoid a repeat of the vicious race riot that had occurred eight years before.

> Email Jack Lessenberry