DETROIT — On a rainy, cloud-muted evening, a group of Black men dressed all in black, some with handguns holstered to their hips and pamphlets in their hands, marched down one of the main strips of the west side of Detroit to a steady stream of handshakes and hugs.
“People know that we really put in work. They see us out here in the community,” the group’s leader, Zeek Williams, said between honks from passing cars and renditions of Detroit’s ubiquitous colloquial greeting, “Whatup Doe!”
“We gotta be out here,” Williams said. “We gotta be the ones to be out here to step with our people, make sure that we are, you know, putting on for the culture, as we like to say.”
Williams is the founder of New Era Detroit, a community-based organization that connects residents in some of the city’s most disinvested neighborhoods with badly needed resources. The needs include public safety, housing support and youth and political education programs, and the group does everything from armed patrols of crime hot spots to hosting massive community cleanup efforts and block parties that double as resource fairs. It’s always looking to secure grants and public funds to redistribute to neighborhoods in the most need.
Williams describes New Era Detroit’s role as filling the often-massive gap between the people and the politicians in his city. It’s not an explicitly political group. But it is a window into a key group of voters whom both parties are eyeing — and perhaps misunderstanding — ahead of the 2024 election: Black men.
Public opinion polls find that larger numbers of Black men are up for grabs now than in past elections. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are both making appeals to them. But there’s also a persistent sense among Williams and others in his orbit, in a battleground-state big city, that no one in the political world is really…
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