Cass Technical High School
On Our Radar $
Why it’s on our radar
Detroit’s selective public high school has turned out a ridiculous amount of talent. Diana Ross went here. So did Lily Tomlin, jazz bassist Ron Carter, trumpeter Donald Byrd and Alice Coltrane, and so did Jack White, who started at 14 and later told NPR it felt like suddenly going to Harvard.
The music program is the stuff of legend. Jack learned drums and trombone here and, because the class required it, a scale on the marimba.
The building he walked into was the 1922 original, designed by Malcomson & Higginbotham with Albert Kahn’s firm. The school moved into its current building, just north of the old one, in 2005, and the original came down in 2011. What you see on Second Avenue today is the newer Cass Tech, still one of the city’s flagship schools.
Stop 4 on our Jack White’s Detroit: From Ferdinand Street to Third Man.
