This epicenter of Dayton reflects the ethnic and economic diversity of the city with its restaurants and nightclubs, such as Ned Peppers, near where the lone gunman, who was carrying a .223-caliber gun with a high-capacity magazine, opened fire. He has been identified as Connor Betts, 24, though his motive is still unknown. But less than 24 hours after a shooting in El Paso in which the suspect may have posted online an anti-immigration manifesto, the Dayton killings are even more chilling. My hometown, long a destination for people seeking a better life, has seen a steady influx of immigrants in recent years .

Dayton has also had the recent distinction of being among the worst-hit American cities in the opioid crisis, yet it has bounced back with a series of successful initiatives. It got some national attention recently when businesses and residents united against a march by the Ku Klux Klan in May. And a nearly flat population decline after years of a serious population exodus has given the city a sense of pride.

It’s that kind of hope I remember from the Dayton of my youth, when it was a postwar boomtown with factories that not only hummed but virtually rattled. The city flourished mostly on the power of National Cash Register, which built nearly every rock-solid steel cash register on Earth starting in the 1880s.

Dayton has always been known as a city of invention and individualism. The Wright Brothers are from here — Daytonians say they only went to North Carolina to test their airplanes because that state had better wind — and the bicycle shop where they began their love of machinery and movement is re-created at the Wright Brothers National Museum in Carillon Park. I’ve always thought the city’s most resilient example of survival is the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, one of the oldest black dance companies in America, established in 1968 by a young black woman who was secretly taught dance by two white sisters in then-segregated Dayton.

The city of my youth, Dayton in its prime, was built on the hopes of the tens of thousands of people who fled Appalachia after World War II for the unionized factories of National Cash Register, General Motors, Frigidaire and Chrysler. My parents were among them, and I think of them as almost refugees from the hills of Kentucky, who moved to Dayton in the 1950s from the sprawling homesteads of tobacco country for bigger lives in smaller houses. The coal mines and tobacco farms of Kentucky could never promise what Dayton could.