- [Narrator] Coming up on a Destination Detroit edition of "One Detroit:" It's all about the people who came to the city and helped shape its rich history.

We'll hear from contributors Stephen Henderson and Nolan Finley about how their families migrated to Detroit from the South.

Plus, we'll examine the role of Black women in the church and community during the Great Migration, and we'll give you some ideas on what you can do this weekend in metro Detroit.

It's all coming up next on "One Detroit."

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(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Just ahead on "One Detroit," we're highlighting our initiative called Destination Detroit, a collection of personal and historical stories about the people who move to the area.

We'll hear from contributor Nolan Finley about why his family left Kentucky for Detroit.

Plus, two pastors talk about the important role women played in the Black church in Detroit during the Great Migration.

And if you're looking for something to do this weekend, we'll have a list of activities.

But first up, as part of our Destination Detroit project, American Black Journal host and "One Detroit" contributor Stephen Henderson 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.

(upbeat 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 are 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.

(audience cheering) - [Stephen] The UAW was 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.

- 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."

(crowd shouting) - [Crowd] Now, now!

- I 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, Joann Watson, all the 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 twenties.

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

He's born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1933.

And you know, 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 channel.

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

And so my dad's born, you know, 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, I think, the early sixties.

I think it's a little later than my mom's family to find that opportunity.

- [Bill] In Detroit?

- [Stephen] 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, or are you- - 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] Now 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 unusual.

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

- [Narrator] Turning now to "One Detroit" contributor Nolan Finley, who is editorial page editor at "The Detroit News."

He also sat down with senior producer Bill Kubota to talk about his family's move from a small town in Kentucky to Michigan in search of work opportunities.

(upbeat 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?

- Right.

- [Bill] 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, you know, 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 you know, there'd be some kind of downturn.

He'd lose his job, he'd go home, and, you know, 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 boon time.

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

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 that house in Garden City.

There was a bus line called the Brooks Bus Line, and it would run from Detroit to 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 to 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.

You know?

- [Bill] You'd go back and forth, probably still do.

And you'd 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, you know?

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, you know, I was sent to help.

(laughs) - [Bill] Maybe it's something you take great offense with when you'd hear of Ypsitucky, Taylor Tucky.

- Oh yeah.

You know, everybody's gotta have somebody they look down on, right, you know?

And so 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, you know, 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, you know, and I can go now and see and visit the graves of my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents within a five, 10 mile radius.

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

So, 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] A hundred 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 safe.

- That's my mother as a teenager.

You know, that's probably in the forties sometime, late forties.

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 know, 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 you know, there's a comfort in that.

And it's a connection.

It's important, 'cause for most people, there's that element, you know, you come from somewhere else, somewhere down the line.

And, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, the people they 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 ourselves in that position.

- [Narrator] American Black Journal's "Black Church in Detroit" series examined the role of women in the church and community during the Great Migration.

They organized church groups and provided support for families moving to Detroit from the South.

Host Stephen Henderson spoke with two women pastors about the influence of Black women in the church during this pivotal period.

(upbeat music) - What was the role that women played during this time, and why was it so critical and special, kind of standing out from the role that women played in the church at different times in our history?

- Well, I'll tell my family's story.

I remember my, the story goes, my grandfather was picking cotton, and someone came from the steel industry, and said, "I'll pay you $5 a day."

He dropped the bag and left.

- He said, "I'm going now," right?

(Stephen laughs) - He came right up North, and he sent later, after he started making money, sent later for his wife and his family.

My grandmother, however, the story is about how she built our church in Ohio.

- [Stephen] Wow.

- I'm from Ohio.

She built the church, she did teas, she set up social programs.

She did a lot of things that helped people maneuver.

So as I'm learning and talking with people, I remember my mother-in-law's story about when she came up from Alabama, and she was going to meet her husband who was working up here, and she gets off the train, but she's got open-toed shoes on, and she steps in the snow.

- [Stephen] Oh, wow.

- The translation of the South and the activities and the way people were living, coming North, they had to do some adjusting.

So they did social things, they did feeding programs.

They were, and church was really the hub where everyone could go, where everyone met.

I remember even recently, someone said to me, (laughs) a lady said, "I haven't said this in a long time to anybody."

And I said, "What?"

She said, "Your slip is hanging."

They made sure social things were happening.

(Stephen laughs) They made sure you're adjusted not just in the social world and how to, you know, maneuver.

But they were also dealing with the economics of families.

They dealt with the political institutions.

They actually were the backbone of the church.

And even today, you know, the church still survives because somebody's grandmother or great-grandmother- - [Stephen] Sure.

- Sat in and came up and then said, "Oh no, this is what we must do."

- Yeah.

- They taught Sunday school, you know, whatever the need was.

And when they saw families struggling, they would step in and make sure the family was adjusting.

- Yeah.

- Because the adjustment, just in the weather, the adjustment was huge.

- Well, night and day, right?

- Yeah.

- You know, I also think about the story you were telling about, I think, your grandfather coming up.

He leaves his family behind, because he's gotta go and take work.

- Right.

- Up North.

He's gonna bring them up later.

But that means that your grandmother is left to manage everything in the community that they left behind.

- Right.

- And that's an important and critical role as well.

- Right, but you still had your nucleus, your family.

- [Stephen] People were still there, right?

- The cousins, the uncles.

You know, I think he was the first one to come up to actually explore the territory.

Then after that, others came.

- This was a time of building in cities like Detroit too.

Building churches, building institutions, and the role that women play in that is really critical, Reverend Barnes.

- My story is very similar to Dr. Simon's story, where both my, it started with my grandfather who came first, and then my father came and sent from my mother.

And so one of the very first things that my mother did when she got here was look for a church.

- Oh.

- That was so important to her.

One of the very first things that she did, she looked for a church, and she found a church.

And my mother remained in that church until, you know, she was eulogized in that church.

- Wow.

- The church that she came to and joined when she came to Detroit was the church that she stayed in.

- Which church was that?

- It was True Faith Baptist Church.

They are no longer organized, but that was the church that my mother was laid to rest in.

And it was important for her, because that was her foundation.

That's what she knew, and there was so much that she did in that church.

Just like Dr. Simon said, there were many programs that she helped with.

She was an usher on the usher board.

But they did things to fundraise there.

They did things like cake walks.

I don't know if you familiar with that, pie.

They called them cake walks and pie struts.

(Stephen and Constance laugh) They did those type of things.

And then the very funny thing, which as a child growing up, I thought it was just so funny.

But they had a Mississippi Club.

My mother was from Mississippi, and she discovered that there were so many other people there from Mississippi.

And it was made up of all women.

And there must have been about 20 women that were a part of the Mississippi Club.

And they would meet.

They would go from house to house monthly.

And one day I asked her, "Mom, what do you do in this Mississippi Club?"

She said, "We talk about Mississippi."

- We talk about Mississippi.

Right?

- We talk about Mississippi.

(Constance laughs) We talk about the good times.

We talk about the way things were.

- Yeah.

- And so, yes, it was building.

It was not just building of the church, but building communities, building friendships and fellowships.

It was important for them to be a part of the church, but to also help build a church, and to build communities within the church.

- [Narrator] Let's turn now to some of the events and activities taking place in metro Detroit this weekend and beyond.

Here are Peter Whorf and Haley Taylor from 90.9 WRCJ with today's "One Detroit" weekend.

- Hey there, it's that time of the week where we get to share with you some arts and culture events happening in and around Detroit.

Peter, what do you have for us?

- April is Jazz Appreciation Month.

So I'm starting off with Detroit Jazz icon, Dr.

Professor Leonard King's performances, happening now through the 12th at Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe, one of the premier jazz venues in southeast Michigan.

- [Haley] Starting Friday, April 11th, Wayne State University presents Emelia at Hillberry Gateway's the Studio.

It tells the story of a feminist and poet who challenged the patriarchal norms of the Renaissance era.

The show runs through April 19th.

- [Peter] Looking for a way to add a touch of spring to your home?

Look no further than the Michigan Makers Second Annual Spring Market at the Suburban Collection Show Place on Saturday, April 12th.

The market will be brimming with talented Michigan artisans, crafters, and other small businesses.

- [Haley] Also, Saturday, April 12th, the renowned folk artist Ani DiFranco will perform at Royal Oak Music Theater.

DiFranco's music is a mix of folk, rock, and punk, with a strong emphasis on social justice and political activism.

- [Peter] And yet another iconic musician, Detroit's own Jack White, graces the stage at the Masonic Temple, April 12th and 13th.

- And of course, there's so much more to do.

So stay tuned for a few more of our top picks.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] 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.

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Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

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

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Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan-focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Learn more at DTEfoundation.com.

- [Announcer] Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you.

(upbeat music) (cheerful piano music)