Over the past five years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting emergency management.1 In this essay, we explore how community groups in Detroit and Flint have advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, offering an account of activism that has directly confronted neoliberalism across the state. We analyze how solidarity has been forged through community organizing, interventions into mainstream media portrayals of the water crises, and the articulation of counternarratives that center the experiences, needs, and collective power of those most directly affected. While our rootedness in Detroit leads us to focus primarily on the experiences of activists based there rather than in Flint, we insist throughout that the experiences, resistance, and aspirations of these communities are best understood as interconnected and mutually empowering. Resisting Emergency Management in MichiganDetroit has provided water to the City of Flint since 1967, the year of the Detroit Rebellion. Within a few years Detroiters had elected Coleman A. Young, one of the first and strongest African American mayors in the United States. Young's election reverberated across the country. Many whites living in the Southeast Michigan region perceived emerging African American political power as a threat and, over the next several decades, abandoned cities for suburbs (Sugrue 2005). During the 1970s, nearly 250,000 jobs left Detroit and the city lost onefifth of its population. Over the next decade, black unemployment had risen to 34 percent and the Metro Detroit region had the largest income differential between city and suburbs of any major metropolitan area in the country. Oakland and Macomb Counties welcomed whites fleeing from Detroit while Genesee County welcomed scores more from Flint. Suburban, white residents were concerned that their water supply had been left in the hands of a majority
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