“Lord, please don’t let ’em take my smile.” Actor Lou Beatty Jr. steps into Detroit is Different with a life that reads like a Detroit map and a history syllabus—North End porches, Oakland Avenue storefronts, and the labor that rebuilt churches and neighborhoods after white flight. He traces his family’s Great Migration from Union, South Carolina—“the automobile industry… afforded these people… a way to make the dollar”—to a Detroit where Black artisans raised steel, laid brick, and even helped build C.L. Franklin’s church: “We hung the steel girders, created altars.” Lou remembers a city alive with sound—“I used to see Smokey walking down the street”—and a worldview sharpened at St. Emma Military Academy and in radio ad sales where he learned, “In business, you want all the money coming…..