About Director

A comprehensive history book of Detroit comes to life in Detroit 48202: Conversations Along a Postal Route. Compelling personal interviews provide Sporn the pathway to the city’s history, all of which unravels in stunning, rarely seen archival footage.

Herb Boyd, Author of Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination

DETROIT 48202 provides a rare inside-out perspective on the social, political and economic history of a city that embodies the effects of boom-and-bust capitalism and structural racism, as well as the ongoing resilience of a spirited, steadfast and embattled African American community. As the inspirational figure at the film's center, and with humor, generosity and hard-won wisdom, Wendell Watkins offers an intimate, inviting glimpse of a world too often reduced to fatalistic headlines and lurid sound bites.

Ann Hornaday, Film Critic

Detroit 48202 is searing—a powerful reckoning with what it looks like when capital abandons a major American city, and… its white residents also flee when challenged to make it truly equal and just. It is also, however, a stunningly beautiful reminder that corporate greed and ugly racism have utterly failed to destroy this same city.

Heather Ann Thompson, University of Michigan Professor of History. Author of Pulitzer Prize winning Blood in the Water: the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and it’s Legacy, and Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City.