Benton Harbor, Michigan

Benton Harbor sits on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan where the Saint Joseph River meets the lake, making it a natural harbor that attracted early settlement. The community was laid out in eighteen sixty, became a city in eighteen ninety-one, and grew as a trading and fruit-shipping port, taking advantage of Michigan's orchard country just inland. For most of the twentieth century it was an industrial city with a strong Black community that migrated from the South during the Great Migration.

By the late twentieth century it had experienced severe deindustrialization and population loss, becoming one of the most economically distressed small cities in the Midwest. It sits across the Saint Joseph River from the more prosperous city of Saint Joseph, a geographic proximity that has long underscored the region's economic and racial divides.