42.3301° N, 83.0462° W

DETROIT

Most Famous People Born in Detroit, United States

Notable people

3,099

Peak decade

1950s

Median birth year

1949

Most distinctive

Basket 4.6×

Motown, and everything Motown taught the rest of American music. Detroit's distinctive shelves run to basketball, baseball, hockey, and a music industry — singers, producers, novelists — that reads like the statistical fingerprint of a postwar Black working-class city that built a national sound and kept rebuilding one. Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Jack White, and Eminem all grew up inside a few miles of each other.