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federally funded black public housing development in the country.
    Three years later, it opened with 703 units caved between two-storey rowhouses and one three-storey apartment building. In the early ’50s, its success bred construction of six fourteen-story towers for 1,300 families, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 9
    THREE GIRLS FROM THE PROJECTS
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    which were bundled into a subdivision named for the abolitionist slave and author Frederick Douglass; the resulting Brewster and Douglass Homes, now a huge piece of property, had some high-minded guidelines: Its dwellings were earmarked for “working poor,” the euphemism given to the broods of mainly black auto-plant and other workers making at least $90 a week. Brewster-Douglass was not confused with Arcadia, but it more than suited the Motor-Town analog of the Harlem Renaissance.
    And it stayed something of an oasis into the ’50s, even when the wrecking ball came to the neighborhood to clear the way for the new Chrysler Freeway and other interstate arteries that erased the roguish charms of the neighborhood. Many of these had been jazz clubs—
    the “black and tans,” drawing the new leisure-class blacks and music-minded whites from the northern sectors where whites, mainly Jewish and Eastern European immigrants, retreated when the mass movement of blacks from the South changed the face of Detroit seemingly over -
    night. A saunter down Hastings Street or a wind down the side streets around the projects could net you a night with homegrown musicians like John Lee Hooker, Big Maceo Merriweather, Bobo Jenkins, Baby Boy Warren, Calvin Frazier, Boogie Woogie Red, Detroit Piano Fats, and dozens of others. Within the Brewster-Douglass borders, on St.
    Antoine, was the Rosebud club. By the end of the ’50s it, along with all too many others, was a mere echo entombed under the asphalt on-ramp of the Freeway.
    It was this Detroit, the storied Detroit of John Lee Hooker, that begat Berry Gordy’s Motown empire, and the Detroit that Gordy mined not only for talent but also for public relations gold. In the mid-
    ’60s, when Gordy walked the narrow line between his black roots and his crossover ambitions, the Supremes presented the perfect vessel to pump both sides. This was still a couple of years before Gordy punched his ticket to the West Coast and all he left Detroit was alone; for now, the roots thing was still in the Motown playbook. So, as the Supremes swept into the top niche of American music, their own roots—
    Brewster-Douglass—became a useful metaphor. One day in 1965, a Detroit magazine photographer snapped them on their home turf, where they still lived with their families, at least until the homes Gordy had helped them purchase on upscale Buena Vista Avenue could close.
    The pictures taken showed them off as the perfect ambassadorettes of Gordy’s copyrighted “Sound of Young America,” and though he in no way wished for anyone to expand that blurb to its natural state—the
    “Sound of Young Black America”—the subconscious pull of the ghetto 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 10
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    THE SUPREMES
    backdrop for the Supremes couldn’t have hurt Gordy’s coveting of hip whites as well as his base black audience. There they were, then, in très chic mode—Ross in a very continental black-and-white suit with a mink collar, Wilson in a leopard-print dress and matching chapeau, Ballard in a suede skirt and jacket, all under fashionable, high-sheen wigs—merrily tripping down a sidewalk on a cold winter day. Behind them, the high-rise tenements loomed; to the left, the row houses squatted. In one photo, Ballard extends her right arm, her gloved hand holding a purse, in a high-sign to unseen neighbors. Just to the rear, a mother and her young son stare into the camera, looking bewildered.
    All this was intended to strike a homey, poor-girls-make-good theme. And, looking back thirty years later, Wilson would