Before us there was the Ledger Star, and before that there was Cardboard City

INKSTER, Mich. A new newsroom in a city this old owes the ones that came before it an accounting.

Inkster had a paper. For a long stretch it was the paper, and a December 1968 edition called itself the Official Newspaper of Inkster, Michigan, which is the phrase a town uses when its legal notices, its council minutes and its arguments all run in the same place.

This is what the record shows about the Ledger Star and the Inkster it covered. It is also, honestly, an admission of how much of that record is missing, and a request.

The paper

The Library of Congress catalogs three overlapping titles out of Inkster.

A 2007 Michigan Press Association directory still listed the Inkster Ledger-Star as a weekly, publishing Thursdays. A later business listing for Associated Newspapers of Michigan shows it closed.

Here is what we cannot tell you, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The Library of Congress records the start and end dates as unknown. We cannot give you the year the Ledger Star was founded, the year it stopped, who edited it in its best years, or how many people it employed. Those facts exist. They are in bound volumes, in basements, in the memories of people who wrote for it.

If this site is going to claim the Ledger Star's lineage, it should earn it by finding that out.

The city the paper covered

The Inkster of that era was not an accident of geography. It was built in the only place it was allowed to be.

Before 1940, Black workers in Detroit's and Dearborn's factories were shut out of housing almost everywhere nearby by restrictive covenants and redlining. Inkster, on the fringe of suburban development, was one of the few places African Americans could live, and specifically its southwest quadrant, according to the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office.

Inkster Road itself was a color line. The state's survey puts it plainly: Black residents only began moving east of Inkster Road in the late 1950s, past what it calls a long-standing color barrier.

The neighborhoods, by their right names

Cardboard City was LeMoyne Gardens. Those are not two places. The state has it as a temporary housing development built in the early 1940s for low-income Black residents of Inkster; the people who lived there called it Cardboard City, and that is the name that survived. Former residents have held reunions in Inkster Park.

The George Washington Carver Homes went up during the Second World War for Black defense workers who were refused housing at the whites-only complexes nearby. Relatively few of the original buildings remain, though the survey notes the ones still standing retain a high degree of integrity.

Harrison Street was the business district. When the state surveyed Inkster's Black housing, researchers found something they had not gone looking for: a coherent commercial strip on Harrison that the report describes as the nexus of the Black business community in Inkster. They added it to the survey as a fifth district.

Hopkins, Lehigh and Stanford carry houses primarily designed and built by Black architects and developers, among them architect John W. Bingham, president of Hi-Fashion Homes, and contractor Edward M. Burke. In a country where Black families were being refused mortgages on principle, Inkster had Black men drawing the plans and pouring the foundations.

By 1957 the city had an all-Black housing commission.

And Malcolm

The house where Malcolm X lived in Inkster has a National Register of Historic Places nomination. Wayne State University archaeologists have excavated the site with Project We Hope, Dream and Believe.

Say that out loud. One of the most consequential Americans of the twentieth century lived here, and the dig to recover his household is recent enough that people now living in this city watched it happen.

What the state found, and what it did not

Between 2020 and late 2023, the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office, on a National Park Service African American Civil Rights grant, surveyed 598 properties across five areas of Inkster: the Dancy-Ford development, the Carver Defense Homes, LeMoyne Gardens, a 1950s subdivision first known as Watsonia Park No. 2, and the Harrison Street business district.

The report opens with a sentence worth sitting with. Until that survey, it says, the history and development of this area had not yet been thoroughly studied.

A city of 24,000 people, a century of it, and the formal study is three years old.

What we are asking you for

We are not going to invent the heyday. Writing colorful detail we cannot source would be the fastest way to make this newsroom worthless, and the people most likely to catch it are the people who were there.

So instead:

Send it through our tips page, or call the newsroom and leave a message.

We will publish what we can verify, we will say clearly when something is one person's memory rather than an established fact, and we will correct ourselves in public when we get it wrong.

That is the whole job. The Ledger Star did it for this city for decades. We would like to be worth the comparison.

This article will be updated as readers and researchers add to it. Corrections and additions are welcome and will be credited.