By Desiree Cooper

I was recently forwarded an email titled: “Detroit: Interesting Pictures.”

I thought, “Here we go again.” Another email of Detroit looking like the day after the Apocalypse-20 foot trees growing out of the windows of abandoned buildings. The crumbling Michigan Central train station, once a monument to 1920s architecture, now a playground for urban spelunkers. Graffiti-marred walls in neighborhoods, kids playing among broken glass and discarded tires.

That’s the kind of treatment I’ve come to expect as a Detroiter. Honestly, when I moved to the city 25 years ago, I was full of those stereotypes myself. And I did find a fair share of abandonment, poverty and urban malaise when I arrived. But I was also astounded by the opulence of the city’s grand skyscrapers, the grand neighborhoods and of the firmly-entrenched black middle class with its dogged commitment to making the city better.

No one remembers that Detroit was the town called “Midnight” at the end of the Underground Railroad. African Americans have been living free, going to school and running businesses here since the 1800s. There are African American families in Detroit with college-educated relatives going back several generations. Long before the rise of the auto companies, Detroit was a land of opportunity for blacks.

Even through these troubled times, opportunity abounds. My next door neighbor is Ed Welburn, vice president of design for GM–globally. Former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer, who was also the first African American on Michigan’s Supreme Court, lived down the street for years. Countless other black professionals thrive in historic neighborhoods within the city limits.

I was shocked.

Someone had taken the time to go around the city and photograph all of the homes-some now abandoned, but most still manicured family homes-where famous Detroiters once lived. There are the former homes of Gladys Knight, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson, as well as the places where Malcolm X and Henry Ford once lived.

The vision brought tears to my eyes. Detroit, now the Rust Belt poster child for urban decay, has long been the crucible for invention, creativity, political leadership and African-American self-determination. In these tough economic times, it’s not easy to hold on to the greatness that was once Detroit.

One person who had looked at the pictures online emailed back: “What, no historic markers?”

It was a valid observation. Detroit’s place in American history seems to be passing unnoticed, with few markers or commemorations to remind the country-or even its own residents-of its contributions to our current way of life.

Case in point: one of the emailed photos is of Bob-Lo Island, an island in the Detroit River between Detroit and its Canadian sister-city, Windsor. Since the 1900s Detroiters rode the Bob-Lo ferry to the island where they frolicked at an amusement park. It was like an international Coney Island.

But for years, the owners of the Bob-Lo boat only allowed whites on board, making the summer fun mere legend for the African Americans stuck on shore. That is, until Sarrah Elizabeth Ray Haskell, an African-American business school student who was celebrating her graduation with her white colleagues, decided to board the boat in 1945. She was thrown off, and she sued for discrimination.

Her case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the discriminatory practice was struck down in 1948. Scholars say that Haskell’s case pointed the way to how the high court would later rule in the seminal, 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, striking down the notion of “separate but equal.”

There is no marker in front of Haskell’s house, where she lived as a community organizer for decades. There is, however, a marker in front of the Orsel McGhee house on the west side of Detroit. That’s where a black couple challenged the covenants that restricted the sale of property to whites only. The McGhees fought to live in their bungalow, resulting in another 1948 landmark Supreme Court case striking down restrictive covenants nationally. The case was argued by Thurgood Marshall.

Maybe now, more than ever, it’s time for Detroiters to educate themselves as well as the nation about who we are and what we have contributed to this great country. Who knows? Maybe a concerted effort to preserve and mark the birthplaces of great Detroiters will spawn a healthy tourist industry. People will finally come to Detroit not to gawk at its decimation, but to revel in its history.

For a look at more famous homes in Detroit, read “Homes in Detroit: Where They Lived in the Motor City,” by T. Burton.

Desiree Cooper is a contributing author to the anthology Other People’s Skin: Four Novellas. A former columnist with the Detroit Free Press and co-host of public radio’s Weekend America, she is now a freelance writer, BBC correspondent and novelist.