Sankofa Community Research (SCR) is a year-long community-led project to study the multi-generational impact of displacement on Detroit’s Black Bottom community, focusing on the perspectives of Black Bottom survivors and Black Detroiters. Bringing together oral histories, census records, business records, historic maps, and other sources, we will examine how displacement impacted people, businesses, cultural centers, environment, public space, and infrastructure and produce a community report that presents evidence of impact and proposes reparative actions. 

Throughout the course of the project we will facilitate community dialogue with Black Detroiters to discuss impact and produce collective proposals for reparations. With the community report, we aim to support ongoing reparations organizing in Detroit by providing evidence of the many ways that displacement impacted Black Detroiters, and by presenting pathways toward repair that are grounded in the lived experience of Black Bottom survivors. With this project we will further illuminate the history of Black Bottom, intervene in present-day political organizing in order to collectively shape the more equitable future that Black Detroiters deserve, and provide a model for collaborative community-led public scholarship that works to transform the material conditions of the community being engaged.