Screenings

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.

Walk with Wendell Watkins. Consider Detroit’s history through the eyes of a postman with thirty years on the job. Detroit 48202 engages the economic rise of the motor city and the politics of labor organizing, police harassment, race riots, abandonment, bankruptcy, and gentrification. Pam Sporn’s award-winning film is sure to provoke lively class discussions.

Dolores Hayden, Professor Emerita, Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies, Yale University

If you want to understand Detroit in all its turbulence and spirit, you need to go no farther than this film. Pam Sporn’s meticulous archival research and loving, artistic storytelling shed essential light on her hometown’s energies and injustices and on the resistance and renewal that live in the heart of its people. Wendell Watkins is an Everyman whose daily pilgrimage shows how deeply each of us is connected, to the forces of history and to one another.

Dr. Terry Blackhawk, Founder InsideOut Literary Arts Project, author of The Light Between and Escape Artist.

Detroit 48202 is a lively and engaging story about the city’s black community that speaks in the voices of its residents. It is an excellent teaching tool for classes in urban studies and urban policy, and for all the social sciences that address racial inequality, gentrification and displacement.

Tom Angotti, Professor Emeritus, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Detroit 48202 renders a complete and complex portrait of my home town -- the highs and lows of its past, the perils, and promise of its present, and the lives of those who remain both devoted to it and dependent on it. At its center is the remarkable Wendell Watkins, the most charismatic mail carrier I've ever encountered. I loved this film.

Daniel Okrent, Award-winning author and journalist.

A truly brilliant and illuminating film. By the simple act of trailing a mail carrier on his route through the city, Pam Sporn presents a stunning alternative history of Detroit that powerfully illustrates the impact that racist housing policies, capital flight, and neoliberalism have had on Black urban communities.

Robin D.G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair, History, UCLA