9226 Kercheval: The Storefront that Did Not Burn, With a New Preface (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)

By: Nancy Milio

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Synopsis: "They make you feel like you're somebody..." The testimony of one black woman in Detroit's Lower Southeast Side ghetto, explaining what the storefront at 9226 Kercheval Street means to her. The storefront houses the Mom and Tots Neighborhood Center—a remarkable experiment in community health care, founded by a diminutive registered nurse named Nancy Milio and run by and for the people of the ghetto. This is the area that was literally burned down during the Detroit Riot of 1967. Not a proper location for a maternity and daycare center, according to many white professionals."These people ought to go away from their neighborhood so they can see how other people live... if we make it too easy for them, they'll never..."During the Riot, buildings on both sides of the Mom and Tots Center were fired and gutted. The Center was untouched. Why it was untouched is one of the implicit themes of 9226 Kercheval; as is the theme of struggle—struggle in the birth and development of a truly relevant health-care center, and struggle to define "health" in its broadest possible terms."Health is... opening, unfolding, from diffuseness towards coherence, simplicity toward complexity... toward wholeness."9226 Kercheval is both a documentary of how a new institution grew and a personal account of how a "social activist" was herself changed. It is the story—beautifully conceived and written—of the strengths of the so-called people of poverty. There is no other book like it.