The city’s public schools, which have shrunk to about 90,000 students from more than 160,000 nine years ago, are also undergoing big changes. Robert C. Bobb, the emergency financial manager, has closed schools, laid off employees and begun investigating numerous thefts, the system’s real estate deals and questions about whether scores of people receiving paychecks are really on the payroll.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/us/26detroit.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The Sixties was also the moment when Detroit began to experience its reversal of fortune. The city was hit particularly hard by the social turbulence of this revolutionary era, most notably a rising militancy among local community organizers angered by what they perceived to be the slow pace of civil-rights reforms[8]—although Detroit had a large and prosperous black middle class, higher-than-normal wages for unskilled black workers because of the auto industry, and two black U.S. congressmen. Moreover, Detroit had acquired millions in federal funds through President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and invested them almost exclusively in the inner city, where poverty and social problems were concentrated. The Washington Post claimed that Detroit’s inner-city schools were undergoing “the country’s leading and most forceful reforms in education.”[9] Housing conditions were not viewed as worse than those of other Northern cities. In 1965, the American Institute of Architects gave Detroit an award for urban redevelopment.[10]
Nonetheless, Rev. Albert Cleague and other Detroit-area activists openly called for black separatism and self-determination on the premise that whites would never voluntarily choose to share political power with blacks.[11] At a July 1967 Black Power rally in Detroit, the radical H. Rap Brown gave voice to the city’s growing unrest when he warned “Motown” that if it did not make sufficient reforms, “we are going to burn you down.”[12]
This inflammatory racial discontent grew at a time when the Democratic Party, claiming to be sensitive to the problems of minorities, was completing a takeover of city government. In 1961, the reins of political power in the city fell permanently into Democrats’ hands. In the 53 years that have passed since then, Detroit has not had a single Republican mayor. Indeed, it has elected only one Republican to its City Council since 1970.[13] As it was becoming a failed city, it was also becoming a political monoculture.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Cities_Program