Don’t Know the beauty of our Black City till You Leave: Aaron Foley on Being Raised on Detroit Culture

“You don’t know that you live in a Black city until you leave.” Aaron Foley pulls up to Detroit Is Different with that truth and four generations of Detroit in his pocket—from Conant Gardens to the North End—unpacking how Legacy Black culture was built through homes, institutions, and the Black press. He paints his great-aunt Joyce’s house as “JoAnn Fabrics full of patterns and clothes,” a creative HQ where couture fashion shows happened in the living room, and laughs at family lore: “I kicked that man out of my dressing room,” his grandmother’s story after mistaking Lou Rawls for an intruder. From Pershing to Northern, Four Tops doo-wop to Smokey “out in these streets,” Foley shows how Detroit genius was neighborhood-deep. Then he brings it to the Michigan Chronicle, where he grew up watching the paper “come to life,” learning why “papers like The Chronicle…were very important in documenting our stories.” Now back at the Chronicle himself, he’s focused on “what kind of stories…you can only read this in The Chronicle,” writing pieces meant to “stand the test of time” and seed the next wave of Black journalists. This episode is a love letter to our past—and a blueprint for our future.