Because They Could

Working in close collaboration with community organizers, Because They Could exposes devastating austerity measures imposed on majority-black communities in Michigan by a state-appointed Emergency Manager. The film opens with the story of the abrupt shuttering of Detroit’s only public school for disabled children. Passionate community resistance to this school’s closure is the first of several stories followed in neighborhoods across the city, where local citizens develop myriad ways to resist a vicious cycle of home foreclosures, school closures, water shutoffs and displacement. In the midst of this struggle, a civil rights lawyer and a coalition of residents file a constitutional lawsuit to protest these multi-pronged attacks on their community, all of which are aided and abetted by voter suppression.