- [Narrator 1] Coming up on a Destination Detroit-themed episode of One Detroit.

We'll hear from contributor Stephen Henderson about how his family migrated to Detroit from the South.

Plus contributor Nolan Finley reflects on his Kentucky roots and why his family decided to seek opportunities in the north.

Also ahead, we'll examine how the Black church in Detroit assisted African Americans migrating from the South.

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And viewers like you (upbeat music) - [Narrator 1] Just ahead on One Detroit, we're sharing stories from Destination Detroit, our series that explores the rich family histories of the people who moved to the metro Detroit area in search of a better life.

We'll hear from contributor Nolan Finley about why his family left Kentucky to come north.

And we'll look at the role of the Black church in Detroit during the Great Migration.

But first up, the Detroit PBS Destination Detroit Project kicks off our station's year-long celebration of America's 250th birthday in 2026.

It's a collection of interviews and family stories connecting the past, present, and future of southeast Michigan.

We start with American Black Journal host and One Detroit contributor, Stephen Henderson, who tells the story of his family's migration from the South to Detroit.

He sat down with One Detroit senior producer Bill Kubota to reflect on his family history and the impact his grandfather had on the union movement in Detroit.

(bright piano music) - Like many other people here in the city, and especially many African Americans, my family came from the South, on both sides, to Detroit at different times.

My mother's family came in the late 1950s.

My grandfather, her dad, was an auto worker and a union official in Cincinnati.

He had been born in Valdosta, Georgia.

His family moved to Cincinnati when he was a teenager.

He marries my grandmother and they raise their kids there, and he becomes this sort of point of interest for Walter Reuther, who founded the UAW and was running it.

And he needs my grandfather in Detroit to help him connect the union with the growing Black political class, among other things.

I mean, there's this growing Black population in the city in the late 1950s because of this big move from the South.

And Walter Reuther is really interested in that, and so he recruits my grandfather and a guy named Horace Sheffield, whose son is still around, and whose granddaughter is the current president of the city council.

- And that is why we're working today.

(audience cheering) - Horace Sheffield and my grandfather, William Beckham Sr. were great friends and close associates who helped the union through that period.

- Segregation is wrong because it is nothing but a new form of slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity.

- [Stephen] The UAW is really instrumental in getting Martin Luther King here to do the March for Freedom in the summer of 1963, before the March for Freedom in Washington.

He marches down Woodward Avenue and delivers his I Have a Dream speech, the very first public deliverance of that speech at Cobo Hall.

- So because of the legacy of slavery and segregation, many Negroes lost faith in themselves, and many felt that they were inferior.

But then something happened to the Negro.

- [Stephen] The UAW, with my grandfather, and Horace Sheffield, and lots of other people who were involved, that's how that happened.

I don't know all of the details of that story, but I know it was not an easy thing to pull off.

There was a lot of resistance to the idea of King.

He was seen by that point as something of a radical.

Lots of people didn't want this to happen in Detroit.

And the UAW and Walter Reuther in particular stood up and said, no, no, no, we've gotta make this happen.

They do remember, for instance, that they moved to Detroit and they moved to Russell Woods, which is actually a place where, if you just go down the roster of notable African Americans in this community in the last 50 years, a lot of 'em come out of that neighborhood.

Saul Green, who was the US attorney.

Joanne Watson... All kinds of people grew up in that neighborhood.

But when my family moved there in the late 1950s, it was a predominantly, overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood.

And there were covenants that prevented African Americans from buying those houses for a long time.

And so my family was among the first families, African-American families, to be able to live in Russell Woods, and I've heard lots of stories about what that was like.

The neighborhood was starting to change.

At the end of their block there was a synagogue, and across the street from it, a Hebrew school.

By the time I was born in 1970, my memories of that block, that was a public school and a Baptist church.

That's how quickly the neighborhood changed once African Americans started moving in.

My father, whose story is different from my mom's family, he doesn't come until he is in his, I guess, late 20s.

And he comes as an adult to escape, really, the Jim Crow South.

He's born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1933.

And that's a place that is kind of a pivotal place in the antebellum South.

It is an important trading place for not just cotton, but also slaves.

It's also a center of human production of slaves.

After Congress bans the import of Africans in the early 1800s, some cities and some places in the South become breeders of human chattel.

And Natchez is one of the places that was most prolific.

And so my dad's born 50 years, 60 years after the war ends.

In fact, he grows up and goes to serve in the Air Force during the Korean War, and comes home, and is not allowed to vote.

He can't get the GI Bill, which is in place for people coming back from that war as they were for others, because in Natchez the schools that they would've paid for him to go to did not admit African Americans, the neighborhoods where he might have bought a house with a loan through the GI Bill didn't sell property to African Americans.

And so his life was not going to develop, I think, the way he would've wanted it to if he stayed.

So he moves north in the, I think the early 60s, I think it's a little later than my mom's family.

to find that opportunity.

- In Detroit, though.

- In Detroit.

- [Bill] Why Detroit?

Do you know?

- You know, I don't know why he came to Detroit.

He's not an auto worker.

He never, to my knowledge, works in the auto industry.

He becomes a social worker and works at Lafayette Clinic, which was a pretty important mental health institution just east of downtown Detroit.

I don't know why he comes to Detroit.

Maybe he had a friend here, maybe he had just heard about opportunity.

You know, Detroit was seen by African Americans in the South as a place that offered more opportunity than where they were.

Detroit and Chicago are probably the biggest beneficiaries, in fact, of that migration.

But I just don't know that story.

- [Bill] You haven't talked to him about it?

- Well, my dad died when I was 14, so I never had the chance to have that conversation with him.

I go back to Natchez now pretty regularly.

I try to go once a year and try to connect, reconnect the dots, right?

Like, find more about our family, find more about him, but also learn more.

I've learned a lot more about the city itself and its history.

I mean, it's a very different place.

I mean, it's very interesting.

Even in 2024, which is the last time I was there, it is a different part of the world.

- [Bill] How would you say your story is pretty common, uncommon, unique?

How would you summarize what you've done?

- I think this is a very common story is my sense, but it's a commonly unknown story, right?

I think there are tons of people who, if they had the opportunity to go back and look at where they're from, they would find equally surprising, joyful and painful things.

And most of us don't know, I think, past a certain point, what all those things are.

So, yeah, I don't think this is that.

I don't think this is unusual.

I just think I'm getting this special opportunity, I guess, to look more deeply into it.

- [Narrator 1] Let's turn now to One Detroit contributor and Detroit News editorial page editor Nolan Finley.

He also sat down with One Detroit's Bill Kubota to tell his Destination Detroit story about how his family moved to Michigan from a small town in Kentucky in search of better work opportunities.

(bright piano music) - I'm just going through here looking for the ones.

There's my mom and my sister.

And that is on Belle Isle.

- [Bill] We all got a story, right?

Tell me about yours.

- Well, my family was part of the Great Migration from the South.

And it was not just African Americans who came north.

It was white people too, poor farmers and what have you, World War II vets who came up here looking for opportunity.

And my dad was in that latter group.

You know, he went into the Marines in 1944, was in combat.

When the war ended in 1945, he stayed in Japan for two or three years in peacetime duty.

And when he went back to his home in southern Kentucky, you know, he was raised on a tobacco farm there.

And he wanted to stay.

He wanted to stay there.

So he tried his hand as a farmer.

He tried running a little store.

He tried running a sawmill.

He tried any number of things.

And then finally he just decided his opportunity was elsewhere.

And he came up here first, and he and my mom married, and they were back and forth over the first five, six years.

They'd be here a while and there'd be some kind of downturn, he'd lose his job, and he'd go home and work there for a while.

That's my third birthday.

I was born during one of their return stays in Kentucky.

But you know, it took a while for him to take hold here and get settled.

He first lived in Detroit when he was here by himself.

And he drove street cars.

Worked for Chrysler a little while.

I remember him telling a story when he first came up here walking down Woodward Avenue.

And he said every bar along Woodward Avenue had a folding table out front with recruiters from the auto companies just signing people up as they came in and out of the bars.

I mean, it was that kind of a boom time.

Eventually he settled in for his longest stretch, and until he passed away, at a chemical plant in Ferndale.

And he worked there for 25, 30 years.

These are my uncles.

This is in Kentucky, my uncles and aunts.

My parents combined had 15 brothers and sisters, and all but four of them came north to different places.

Most of them went to Indiana.

We came to Detroit just because my mother had a cousin who was here and said, "Oh, there's all kinds of opportunity here."

And so they came up here and settled initially in Detroit, then in Garden City.

Yeah, that's the house in Garden City.

There was a bus line called the Brooks Bus Line, and it would run from Detroit, down 23 in eastern Kentucky, and then it would run from Detroit to Paducah in the west.

And you know, these people from Kentucky go back and forth getting the jobs, coming home on the weekends.

My county, Cumberland County in Southern Kentucky had 17,000 people in it before the war.

After the war, it had 7,000.

That many people left to go mostly north - [Bill] You'd go back and forth, probably still do, and you never really cut ties there.

- Our family didn't.

I mean, they went home, my parents went home every opportunity.

We were sort of schooled in the idea that that was our home and they always dreamed that they would go back.

And of course my mother did for a little while, you know, before she died.

But my dad died, never got the chance.

When my mother had to go to work, the kids, there were three of us then, we stayed down there, lived with my grandparents and aunt and uncle.

And when I was old enough, I went every summer and worked on my uncle's tobacco farm 'cause his sons had been drafted into the Vietnam War, and so I was sent to help.

- [Bill] Maybe there's some people take great offense with what you'd hear with Ypsitucky, Taylortucky.

- Oh yeah everybody's gotta have somebody they look down on, you know?

And it's why I think people from that part of the country, whether it was Kentucky or Tennessee or Arkansas or wherever, West Virginia, they sort of stuck together.

When we came up here, we found a community of other migrants from the South, and mostly from that part of the south.

And they all went to the same church, became our social group.

And it was folks looking from support from other people who understood their story and their journey.

We've been here, branches of my family, since the country started.

I mean, I had ancestors on the Mayflower, but in Kentucky, we'd been in our part of Kentucky for 200 years and I can go now and see and visit the graves of my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents within a 5, 10 mile radius.

You know, we pretty much stayed close to home until, you know, this Great Migration occurred.

And they were all, for the most part, poor farmers, dirt farmers, tobacco farmers, subsistence living.

I mean, they struggled to stay where they were - [Narrator 4] 100 years ago the pioneers pushed west.

But here in these mountains, some of them stayed to farm the fertile land, to live well by ax and gun and plow.

Now the land is no longer- - That's my mother as a teenager.

You know, that's probably in the 40s sometime.

Late 40s.

My grandparents.

My dad's parents and their chickens.

I think for a lot of folks, no matter where they came from, you know, you think you don't forget where your home was.

You don't forget the things that shaped you and the people who shaped you.

And it's easy for us to look at people from other cultures, other countries, what have you, and say, "Why are they still hanging on to those old traditions and those old ways?"

And there's a comfort in that.

And it's a connection.

It's important.

Because for most people, there's that element.

You know, you come from somewhere else, somewhere down the line, and it's important to remember that.

It's not easy leaving a home.

And I often think about the people who came here from other places knowing they never get to go back.

We went back every weekend for a while, and it was a grueling trip.

But many of these people coming over here, they never know if they're gonna see their families again or their homeland again, or the the people they'd love, and they're starting absolutely from scratch.

And I think we should try to think about and understand how hard that would be to put us put ourselves in that position.

- [Narrator 1] Now let's take a look at the Great Migration's impact on the African-American religious community in Detroit.

Some Southerners who came to the North started their own churches, and the Black church became important resource during that time.

American Black Journal host, and One Detroit contributor Stephen Henderson, spoke with Pastor Lawrence Rodgers of Second Baptist Church, and attorney Elliott Hall, the historian for Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, about how the Great Migration transformed the African-American religious landscape in the city.

(bright piano music) - Pastor Rogers, let's start with the story of Second Baptist.

And I think, even as renowned as that story is, as familiar as it is to some folks in this community, I'm not sure everyone really understands how pivotal Second Baptist was in particular during this period of time that African Americans are moving in large numbers from the South to cities like Detroit.

So let's just start with that story.

- This is an important topic, because folks oftentimes know where they are, but they do not know how they got there.

As you are aware of, the Great Migration was a time when African Americans, and other groups as well, but we're looking at it from a particularly African-American perspective, wanted to leave the sharecropping fields, wanted to have a better life.

They were weary of the racial terrorism that they were experiencing in Southern states, and many of them moved to Northern states, industrial cities in hope of finding a new life, finding employment where they could take care of their family and possibly gain entry into the middle class.

And Second Baptist was a pivotal instrument for migrants during the time of the Great Migration.

You know, during that time, the congregation provided spiritual and material support to Southern African Americans moving to Detroit.

When the migrants would come, they literally would be housed in the church.

Programs to help them to go from a agrarian culture to actually working in the plant-like setting, many of which would go through this training.

For your viewers who've read Booker T Washington's "Up from Slavery," he writes about how he does something similar with people who would leave the fields to go to Tuskegee, and how he would have a program to help them to transition from the agrarian life and to the academic life.

Bradley had something similar here.

And he had a connection to Ford, to Henry Ford.

Him and Henry Ford were friends.

And so people would go through this program, literally sleep in the church on the pews, and he would write a letter of reference, and they would immediately get hired at the Ford company.

So Second Baptist became a very important hub for migrants.

And from that, the church grew to thousands of members, of folks who made this church their home, particularly around the support that they received from migrating to Detroit, and also the support that they received in gaining employment at the Ford Company.

- Yeah, yeah, no, it is an incredible story, and it is such an important part of our history here in Detroit.

Elliott Hall, I want to bring you into the conversation here.

One of the things that also happens when you've got this migration of thousands and thousands of people from the South to cities like Detroit, is people need to find a religious home.

And in some cases, they didn't necessarily turn to established churches.

They decided to build their own.

And Tabernacle, where you are a historian, is an example of that.

Tell us a little about that story.

The founding of Tabernacle during this period.

- In 1920 in Cordele, Georgia, 20 families decided that the share cropping life was not a feasible future for any of them.

They all decided as a group to move from Cordele, Georgia, to Detroit.

Now the logistics of that is fabulous because they laid out where they going, who was gonna stay where and where, who's gonna live here.

Some people had relatives, but they all came as a group.

And one of the founders of Tabernacle was Lindsey Sheffield, the great-grandfather of Mary Sheffield, who as you know, is running for mayor this year.

And she's president of the city council.

So I know Mary, I know her father, Horace, I know her grandfather Horace the first, and then of course, Lindsey Sheffield who became, when I was a youngster, the superintendent of the Tabernacles Sunday school.

But the idea, the driving idea that brought these families here was, most of 'em were sharecroppers getting paid maybe once or twice a year when the crops came in, the attraction of getting paid once a week on Friday was compelling.

They all came up and they were able to save money and they all got their own homes.

Now, the interesting thing is that the church was first founded on one row, just down the street from Second Baptist, but rather than join the established Second Baptist church, these 20 families decided to form their own church.

And they started in a storefront on Monroe, now where we now know as Greek Town.

And then after they got it underway they decided to bring the retired pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church from Cornell, Georgia.

Man was retired, but they convinced him to move to Detroit to take over the membership, not the membership, but the pastorship of the Tabernacle Baptist Church.

- Let's cast forward to now, and I guess connect that history to the mission that the church has now.

This idea of the foundational role, I guess, that it has in the African-American community.

I think that's one of the ways that, especially for young people, it becomes easier to understand why it's important to know what that history was.

- I think that what's at the heart of this for today's generation is an advocacy for us being, as the Bible will say, being kind to the stranger.

That word "stranger" in the original language could be translated as of immigrant or migrant, the one that's traveling.

But there's also, I think, advocacy to be available to those who are vulnerable, to those who are marginalized, to those who are seeking a better life for themselves.

- [Narrator 1] For more Destination Detroit stories, head to detroitpbs.org/ destinationdetroit That'll do it for this week's One Detroit.

Thanks for watching.

Head to the One Detroit website for all the stories we're working on.

Follow us on social media and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

- [Narrator 2] From Delta faucets to Behr paint.

Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit PBS.

- [Narrator 3] The DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Through our giving, we are committed to meeting the needs of the communities we serve statewide, to help ensure a bright and thriving future for all.

Learn more at DTEFoundation.com.

- [Narrator 2] Nissan Foundation.

And viewers like you.

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