313 Legends

Detroit native Brittany Rhodes is an educator who created a subscription box and programming service called Black Girl MATHgic to help Black girls build greater confidence with math, reduce their anxiety in the classroom, and progress in STEM fields.

The groundwork for her mission was laid early.

Her mother was also an educator, and Brittany went on to attend Spelman College, where she acquired a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics before later completing her MBA at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

There, she got involved in the community by tutoring younger students in mathematics, realizing that a lack of foundational skills would lead to anxiety and have a negative effect on their academics.

A man best known for redefining postwar American cars, Virgil Exner didn’t just design cars – he made them move before they even left the curb.

From his earliest years, Exner grew up fascinated by motion – planes, trains, and automobiles; he loved it all.

He studied art in Chicago and started his career in advertising, where his talent for drawing machinery quickly led him into industrial design. From there, he signed on with General Motors in the 1930s, a member as of Harley Earl’s design studio, gaining valuable experience working on early concept cars.

That said, it was only when he joined forces with Raymond Loewy’s team at Studebaker that Exner truly began to shine, helping create the first postwar car in 1947 – a one-of-a-kind, low-slung shape that was a teaser of the revolution soon to come.

The businessman, who is best known for turning a single pizza shop into a billion-dollar empire and later giving it all away to pursue a path of education, faith, and conservative Catholic values, Tom Monaghan’s story sounds like the stuff of movies.
Picture it: an orphan raised by nuns, who later joined the Marine Corps, served his country, then came home and bought a struggling pizza joint with a borrowed $900 at the young age of 23, which he would later flip into one of the largest pizza chains in the world: Domino’s.

A Detroit native who turned a blog into a multimillion-dollar business, Mia Ray is the founder of Glam-Aholic Lifestyle, a beloved lifestyle brand that has redefined what affordable luxury looks like for Black women all across America.

Her story is one of vision, hustle, and relentless drive…proof that dreams written in a notebook can unfurl into an empire.

Mary Barra was raised in a Detroit family that knew cars.

Her father worked as a Pontiac die maker for nearly four decades, by the time Mary was a teenager, she was following in his footsteps, working for GM at a Pontiac plant to pay her way through college.

Little did anyone know, this engineering student would one day lead General Motors as its first female CEO and the first woman in history to run a major auto manufacturer.

That said, her story goes well beyond breaking glass ceilings.

She’s just one small piece of a larger puzzle that’s reshaping Detroit’s most famous industry for a new century.

Known as “The Captain” in racing circles since he first started driving in the 1960s (earning Driver of the Year” from Sports Illustrated in 1961 ), it’s a title Roger earned through decades of strategic brilliance and an unwavering attention to detail that never went away — not even when he retired in 1965 at the height of his driving career to focus on business.

He then went on to become just as prolific as a corporate mover and shaker, launching a successful Chevrolet dealership in Philadelphia before setting his sights on the Detroit area and its growing auto industry.

From there, Roger became something of a force to be reckoned with, one whose empire spans everything from transportation to retail to logistics to civic leadership.

If Henry Ford was the cold-blooded engineer of Detroit’s motor revolution, then William Crapo Durant was its wild-eyed carnival barker – a showman, a gambler, and a man who built and lost empires with the same blinding stare.

The car was not invented by him. 

He barely enjoyed driving. 

And yet, Durant saw something more in the auto industry – a future filled with gears, glass, and unstoppable ambition.

With that in mind, he was creating more than just a car company when he started General Motors in 1908.

He was imagining capitalism in motion.

Before the Chrysler name became a badge on millions of American cars, it belonged to a man with grease under his nails, railroad grit in his bones, and a vision too big for anyone else’s garage.

Walter Percy Chrysler did not set out to be a titan. 

He was a locomotive mechanic, a lifelong tinkerer, and a hands-on problem solver with no patience for wasting time. 

For what he lacked in polish, he made up for in audacity and torque — qualities that would eventually help him build one of Detroit’s Big Three automakers from the ground up.

He was not born into wealth. 

He did not inherit an empire. 

He simply ran circles around the men who had. 

Peter Karmanos Jr. did not inherit a legacy – he wrote his own in bold code – one backed by ice shavings and quiet generosity.

Raised by Greek immigrants who owned a small Detroit diner, Karmanos learned early on that anything worth having required hard work and determination – a lesson he took and expanded into an entire empire.

In 1973, long before Detroiters were whispering of “comebacks” or “innovation corridors,” Karmanos founded Compuware.

Not in Silicon Valley, but in the Midwest, a place most known for its bankruptcy and blight. 

He went on to rip the city apart and construct a tech fortress from the inside out – not for acclaim, but for possibility.

No one can ever say that Detroit lacks legends. 

That said, John Zachary DeLorean was more than a motor canon figure – he was the wild card, the suit-clad rebel engineer, the man who turned muscle cars into cultural revolutions and corporate boardrooms into rebellion arenas.

He wore wide lapels and shouted louder ideas, existing somewhere between mechanical brilliance and Hollywood flash.

He was a rock star turned messiah turned corporate heretic, and for a time, he seemed utterly untouchable.

Until he wasn’t.

As with his gull-winged car, John’s story ends with the thought that maybe he was just too unique to survive.

Some billionaires purchase islands.

Dan Gilbert bought downtown Detroit.

Or at least, that’s how it felt in the 2010s, when buildings that had been dark for decades got a second life – brick by brick, floor by floor – under the blinding floodlight of Gilbert’s unstoppable ambition.

Where others saw rust, debt, and decay, Gilbert saw a real estate sandbox.

A puzzle to solve. 

A dare. 

And like any man looking to prove something – maybe to the world, maybe to himself – he poured billions into the city that built him – turning dilapidated buildings into tech hubs, coffee shops, casinos, and coworking spaces.

Some called it revitalization. 

Some called it gentrification.

But no one could deny the influence.