Black leadership nationally is stratified along class lines and economic issues

It's obviously unclear whether this Detroit can again be joined to the desolate, exhausted Detroit of so many of its neighborhoods. There are all sorts of reasons longtime Detroiters are suspicious of government planning: the network of freeways that permanently scarred the city in the 1950s and '60s (and simultaneously sucked the life out of it) were another era's idea of urban redevelopment, as were the spirit-deadening public-housing projects that replaced paved-over neighborhoods. In the spring, a prominent local minister declared that the mayor's shrinkage plan amounted to "ethnic cleansing" — an odd (and offensive) charge to throw at an effort proposed by an African-American mayor, his largely African-American planning officials and the African-American consultant who is the project's point person. At one of the community forums where planner Toni Griffin and her city colleagues attempted to explain the planning process, members of a group calling itself By Any Means Necessary vowed to oppose not a specific plan, or a specific sort of plan, but whatever plan emerged. (Read "Detroit Tries to Get on a Road to Renewal.")
Some city officials, citing Griffin's out-of-town provenance — rarely a positive attribute in Detroit — wish to diminish her influence. ("If they marginalize her," says the Kresge Foundation's Rapson with a stern finality, "they're on their own.") And it's reasonable to question whether Bing, the former basketball player and steel-company executive who ran for mayor as a nonpolitician, has the political skills to do what's necessary. Will he, for instance, be able to tell individuals and community groups who have labored hard to save their neighborhoods that their efforts have failed and the city is walking away from them? Early on, Bing said he was interested in only a single full term, which would presumably free him to act without fear of reprisal at the ballot box. Now some of the philanthropic foundations, understandably desiring continuity, want him to stick around. Paradoxically, this might require him to pay greater heed to political power brokers disinclined to support something that comes from any agency not under their direct control.
But the essential challenge for everyone involved in the effort to reinvent this storied and suffering city, says Bing aide Marja Winters, is, "How do you get people to think optimistically again?" The likely answer might be found in one of her office's promotional handouts. It's a statement attributed to Heaster Wheeler, a former city firefighter who is now executive director of the Detroit branch of the NAACP.
"The best way to predict the future," Wheeler says, "is to create it."