What Makes Detroit Black Culture? 

Ro Spit

Detroit is made up of so many different fabrics and defined by people who inspire and create. There is culture and there is Black culture. From our art which inspires, to our fashion which eliminates, and to our music which transits globally, it all comes from our city. 

“There is no Detroit without Black culture,” said Jessica Care Moore, a renowned poet and screenwriter. “Black culture is what shapes the city, it’s what makes the city interesting.” 

Moore reflects on being a “post-riot baby,” growing up in the city from 1973 until 1994, following the city’s heightened racial reckoning of the 1960’s. 

“All my shaping growing up in that time period, being Black wasn’t something you talked about, it was just something that was.”  

She recounts a “revolutionary” era of the late Mayor Coleman A. Young days when there were “Black teachers, Black city councilmembers, Black leadership.” 

It was a time she looks back on and recalls the mayoral administration implementing the requirement of residency for police officers and firefighters, a push to have public servants who represented the community they were serving. 

“Black culture should really be a part of American studies,” Moore says. “Growing up here was a very rich and cultured experience. From Detroit techno which changed the music world.” 

Moore recounts being embedded in the sounds of Black music in Detroit, from techno to house and hip-hop and poetry. “I am honored to have always been around young entrepreneurial spirits and Black institution builders, and we didn’t know anything else because nothing in Detroit was just given to us.”  

Moore says growing up in Detroit she and her peers had to build things, followed by creating institutions around their craft so they could have something later. 

“That is what inspired me, more than just becoming a poet, but an institution builder. That is definitely Blackness and a part of being a Detroiter is that we actually have to build things around our legacy and our art.”  

In 1995, Moore left Detroit for New York and saw a better opportunity to excel in her poetry from more spaces which welcomed her art. 

“In Detroit, I just had to figure it out and make a space. And that’s the difference with being a Detroit artist, it makes us different culturally in how we get down with our approach. I think you can hear it in the urgency of my work.” 

Another artist who exemplifies the importance of creating something that contributes to art and legacy as well as to Black culture in the community is Ro Spit, rapper and entrepreneur — Roland ‘Ro Spit’ Coit, owner of Burn Rubber Boutique and Two18. 

“Everything starts with us,” he says. Ro Spit looks to house and techno music which started here, yet when it caught popularity in global settings, its origin was soon forgotten. “I just love our culture always starts with us and even when it doesn’t, if we pull from something, we make it our own.” 

Black culture in Detroit has a grind mentality, a hard working hustle and can-do spirit which translates into almost any industry, especially for entrepreneurs and artists like Ro Spit who believes this kind of work ethic “comes from the streets.” 

“I think one of the dopest things is knowing a lot of business owners from clothing brands, to store owners, to bar owners, there is a hustling spirit here, it’s a get out and get it by any means necessary.” 

“If we go out and get it and if it’s not given to us, then we create it and make our own.” 

Making something of his own is another artist to breeds what Black Culture sounds like. 

“There is so much flavor around us,” says Curtis Roach, an artist who gained popularity for his viral TikTok video, “Bored in the House.” 

“It’s so natural to find some inspiration for all types of Detroit kids that grew up out the mud and then grew into story tellers. I think most Detroiters have something to say, a story to tell.”