Famous people who grew up or lived in and around Detroit

Aretha Franklin1952–1967

📍 16200 LaSalle Avenue, Detroit, Michigan, United States

I grew up in this house on LaSalle Avenue with my father, Reverend C.L. Franklin, and it was not a quiet house. My father was one of the most famous preachers in America and people came…

Diana Ross1958–1964

📍 Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects, Detroit, MI 48201, USA

Diana Ross spent her early childhood on Belmont Street in Detroit's North End, and on her fourteenth birthday in 1958 her family moved into the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects, among the…

Eminem1987–1999

📍 Dresden Street, Detroit, MI 48205, USA

Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in October 1972. His father left when he was small, and his mother, Debbie, moved back and forth between Missouri and Detroit…

Henry Ford1863–1876

📍 Corner of Ford Road and Greenfield Road, Dearborn, Michigan 48126, USA

I was born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan in 1863, the eldest of six children of William Ford, an Irish immigrant farmer, and Mary Litogot Ford. The farm gave me a practical education in…

Joe Louis1926–1934

📍 Black Bottom, Detroit, Michigan, USA

I was born Joseph Louis Barrow in May 1914 in a ramshackle cabin on Bell Chapel Road in rural Chambers County, Alabama, the seventh of eight children of sharecroppers who were the children…

John Lee Hooker1943–1955

📍 Hastings Street, Detroit, MI, USA

I was born in Mississippi, in the Delta near Clarksdale, the son of a sharecropper and Baptist preacher who only allowed gospel music in the house. My stepfather, Will Moore, taught me the…

Stevie Wonder1954–1971

📍 Detroit, Michigan, USA

Stevland Morris was born six weeks premature in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1950, and the oxygen he received in an incubator led to his blindness. In 1953 his mother, Lula, moved the family to…