(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.