Donald Levin

Savage City Donald Levin

Detroit. 1932. The fates of four people converge during a violent week of labor unrest in the bleakest year of the Great Depression.




Detective Clarence Brown is one of a handful of Black officers in the Detroit Police Department, navigating a thicket of lies and racism to find the killer of a young Black man. Ben Rubin wants to move from petty crime into the ranks of Detroit's notorious Purple Gang. Elizabeth Waters is a fiercely independent Communist sympathizer who has turned her back on her privileged Grosse Pointe upbringing to join the workers' fight for a piece of the American dream. Roscoe Grissom is an unemployed auto worker enlisted by the fearsome Black Legion to sow terror as a night-riding emissary of hate.




Against the backdrop of the bloody Ford Hunger March, events hurl these four into the center of a political storm that will change them forever. Savage City spellbindingly captures a key inflection point in the creation of modern American life.