» NYT Magazine: G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class

This week's cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine covers a lot of territory - everything from the downward socioeconomic trends of urban Detroit to the more lingering concerns of still-employed middle class African-Americans in the Detroit suburbs. But the main focus of the story is that of Marvin Powell, who's faith is a big part of how he's dealing with the uncertainty of working at General Motors these days.

Powell's positive outlook is largely a product of the life he leads outside the plant at the Greater Grace Temple, one of Detroit's largest, best-known churches. Among its claims to fame is that in the fall of 2005, more than 4,000 people, including former President Clinton, Aretha Franklin and an Illinois senator named Barack Obama, packed its pews for the funeral for the transplanted Detroiter Rosa Parks. (Parks came to Detroit in 1957, not long after famously refusing to vacate her bus seat, joining her brother, an auto-assembly-line worker who migrated North years earlier.)

...

Powell delivers the same message in his Bible class at the plant. Recently he has returned repeatedly to Isaiah 6:1, in which Isaiah recounts how the death of King Uzziah inspired him to join the prophetic ministry: "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple." Powell tells his co-workers that G.M. is just like King Uzziah, an earthly entity whom people put their trust in but who ultimately failed them. "In the year King Uzziah died I saw the Lord -- my focus shifted to the Lord," Powell says. "In the year G.M. became a bankrupt company, my focus shifted to the Lord."

The church hasn't been a stranger to NY Times reporters, thanks to their attention-getting service with SUVs on the pulpit and prayers for a recovery in the local economy. The more defined focus on Powell and his extended family in this more recent story adds some interesting context.