All Along Down That Road

It is the mid-seventies in Detroit, Michigan, a time of change. Vietnam has finally ground to its melodramatic end and the 60’s, exhausted and defeated, have fizzled out as well. The body politic still reels from Watergate and Nixon’s subsequent resignation. Race relations are everywhere problematic, nowhere more so than in Detroit.

The city is also dealing with the auto industry being forced, for the first time, to comply with federal pollution and safety standards, an imposition many insi...