- Coming up, we've got a great episode of "American Black Journal" for you.

Our "Black Church in Detroit" series is gonna look at the role of the church during the Great Migration.

We're gonna talk about the Southerners who started their own churches when they arrived in the north.

Plus, we'll examine how the church assisted the millions of African Americans who migrated out of the South, many of whom came right here to Detroit.

Don't go anywhere, "American Black Journal" starts right now.

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(upbeat music) - Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson.

Tonight, PBS launches a four-part documentary series that's titled "Great Migrations: A People on the Move."

Tells the story of African-American movement over the 20th and 21st centuries and its impact on American culture and society.

The series is hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. And you can see it on four consecutive Tuesday nights at 9:00 right here on Detroit PBS.

Let's take a look at a preview.

(bright music) - My grandmother and her siblings were all cotton pickers.

They hated that life.

They picked up everything they knew and left to the North.

- My grandmother migrated to Philadelphia from Eastman, Georgia.

- My mother's family migrated to Los Angeles in 1924.

- My grandfather, he jumped on a moving train and headed to Kentucky.

- I think migration is freedom to Black America.

- That decision to migrate was everything.

It broadened Black life and what that life could look like.

To create a whole new life in these new places is what made the next generation possible.

(upbeat music) - The African-American Great Migration was in fact one of the most significant demographic transformations in United States history.

- The music that we associate with America.

The food ways we associate with America.

- [Sbaker] Doc, I got something for you.

- Oh man, it looks like it's out of magazines.

- The North always had this connotation of the promised land.

It took on new meaning with the migration.

- I have seen this photograph a thousand times.

In every book or essay about the Great Migration, you see this photograph.

- There was a very tragic story as to why they moved.

(bright music) - If there's a Black American dream, I think it's to have the freedom to dream, freedom to imagine oneself and a future for oneself that involves both African-Americans and immigrants.

- Why is it important for people to understand that Black people came through here too?

- It's like affirmation saying, "This is our dream too."

You don't see that.

You don't hear about it.

- We are still fighting for visibility around Black immigrants in the US.

- When did you become aware of the phenomenon of the reverse Great Migration?

- You could feel it.

If you lived in Atlanta, you saw our population growing year over year, decade over decade, and you realized something was happening.

- Movement is a really concrete way of measuring your freedom.

Realizing that I can make a choice to pick up and start up all over again elsewhere.

If that's not the most transformative decision that you can make, I don't know what is.

(upbeat music) - So today, we're taking a look at the Great Migration's impact on the Black church as part of our "Black Church in Detroit" series, which is produced in partnership with the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and with the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History.

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

I 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 here in Detroit.

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 and the role that Robert Bradby, who was the pastor back then for a lot of that time period, the role he played, and the role that that church played in grounding African-Americans in this community.

- Well, again, I want to thank you so much for inviting me on this program, this program that is so important to the culture, that's so important to telling the story of our history.

I just wanna thank you so much for your work and this invitation.

And 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.

During that time, the congregation provided spiritual and material support to Southern African-Americans' movement to Detroit.

As you mentioned, Reverend Robert Bradby, whose leadership was similar to like a Booker T. Washington type of figure.

And in fact, in the book, the book is titled "Race, Religion, and the Pulpit: Reverend Bradby and the Making of Urban Detroit," Scholar Julia Marie Robinson notates how Bradby was one of the first people to join Booker T. Washington's trade association in Detroit.

And this was his commitment to Washingtonial ideals of racial uplift through economic self-reliance.

And it was a broader vision that he had for transforming Detroit's Black community through work, education, and religious guidance, which puts him similar to a Washingtonian type of thinking.

But when the migrants would come, they literally would be housed in the church with programs to help them to go from an agrarian culture to actually working in the plant-like setting, many of which would go through this training, which for your viewers who've read Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery," he writes about how he disciplined 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, yea, no, it's an incredible story, and it is such an important part of our history here in Detroit.

Elliott Hall, I wanna 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.

- Well first of all, I've got to mention the Second Baptist Church.

My dad came to Detroit in 1918 and was aware of the role that Second Baptist played in getting employment at Ford.

There were three churches in Detroit that Henry Ford relied on to refer Black workers, Second Baptist, Big Bethel, or what we now call Bethel AME Church, and St. Joseph and St. Matthew Episcopal Church out on Woodward Avenue.

If Black folks were members, Black men were members of those churches and got a reference letter from those three pastors, the main one being Second Baptist Church, they got a job.

And they got, of course, at that time, most Black men got jobs in the foundry and the furnace room.

My dad worked in the foundry and the furnace room.

He started working in 1918 at the foundry in Highland Park.

He stayed at Highland Park for 10 years, and then they built the whole rouge complex in 1928.

So the whole factory employment moved from Highland Park to Dearborn, and that vast plant where they built tires, glass, steel, everything, the whole complex of cars and building of cars was done in that one complex.

And then of course, the interesting thing that was funny, and especially at Second Baptist, if you worked at Ford, you would put your badge on the lapel of your suit, so the women in the church know that negro had a job, and became a very attractive man at the church.

And that was years ago.

And as I indicated, my dad started there in 1918, and he was off during the Depression about three or four years.

But he retired in 1957.

Now with Tabernacle, most interesting story, in 1920 in Cordele, Georgia, 20 families decided that the sharecropping 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 who was gonna stay 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 Lindsay 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, Lindsay Shefield who became, when I was a youngster, the superintendent of the Tabernacle Sunday School.

But the idea, the driving idea that brought these families here was most of them 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.

And 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 Monroe 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 the storefront on Monroe, 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 Cordele, Georgia.

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

But the interesting thing about all of this is that everybody, we had some solid Baptist churches back then.

And when I was born in around 10, 12, 15 years old, we only had two of the founders left from 1920.

The other interesting thing was after Pastor Morris, our first pastor died, we had a pastor by the name of Pittman, Reverend Pittman.

By the way, Reverend Pittman and Reverend Bradby were very good friends.

And they both are buried at the same cemetery, Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit.

And that was one of the requests of our pastor when he was killed in an automobile accident back in 1947.

And then we had a big split.

We had a huge church that was being built on the corner of Milford and Beechwood in West Side of the city of Detroit.

The cost of building that church was like $27,000.

And it caused a great dispute.

And it split the congregation in 1927, so many of the members of the church went to and formed New Light Baptist Church, which is still in existence over there on Arden Park Boulevard.

But the church developed, we had several pastors come through after Morris, Pittman.

And then we had one of the most erudite pastors, get this, in 1947, Dr. Jesse Jai McNeil comes to the Tabernacle Baptist Church.

He has a PhD in education, a master's in theology, but he's from Texas.

He went to Bishop College in Texas.

The white colleges would not accept him for a master's or a PhD.

So these white segregationists paid for Dr. McNeil's master's and PhD from Columbia University in New York City, a revered Ivy League school.

So give me my degree from Columbia, rather, university of Texas.

I would rather have the (indistinct) And when he took over his pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church, the man was just erudite, speaking the king's English, and stressing awareness of what was going on in the community and stressing education.

A lot of us from those early days were inspired by his understanding and appreciation for education and inspired us to go to college.

Damon Keith, who became a very renowned judge here in town who passed away.

Aubrey McCutchen, who became the General Council for Detroit Board of Education.

And then we would have a Lyceum series on Sunday afternoon at 4:00 where we would have the governor, the mayor, City Council members, and folks that were known and contributed to the community would come in and we'd have our Lyceum series at 4:00 every Sunday during the pastor of Dr. Jesse Jai McNeil.

- Yeah, yeah.

Pastor Rodgers, one of the things that I think is really important is connecting the things from our past to the present so that people can understand better how important they are.

At Second Baptist, the role that played in the migration was not the first time that it played such a pivotal role in the history of African-Americans.

Of course, it was an important stop on the Underground Railroad as well.

That's long before the migration.

But then 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.

- Oh, I really do appreciate that, and I agree.

And I wanted to just give a quick footnote because it is true that many of the Black folks hired to work in the foundry.

And that was probably one of the most unpleasant places to work.

And a lot of folks who worked in that environment oftentimes had these sort of health outcomes like a coal miner had early deaths because of the things that they were breathing in and the sort of conditions that they were having to work under.

And also, I wanted to say that when Reverend Banks came after Bradby had passed away, he continued the tradition of supporting migrants, even going down to the train station to meet them, to offer them warmth and a warm place to be.

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

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

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

And I think this is very important, especially, Dr. Henderson, as we consider there's some benefits to the internet age.

There's benefits to the social media age, but another thing that it does that is not a benefit is that it drops us into a more individualistic society where there is not as much concern for the collective we as there has been in the past.

So I think that the testament for us is that when we find ourselves with some sort of privilege, whether it's through education or some privilege, whether it's economic privilege or some sort of privilege, like we don't gain this privilege just to have it for our own comfort.

We gain this privilege to help others, particularly from which we have come.

And all of us, particularly with Black folks, have come from somewhere.

And I believe we have a responsibility to those who are still on their way, who are still migrating through life, whether it's geographically or economically or academically, intellectually, we have a responsibility to them.

That's why at Second Baptist, and we've had a lot of different programs that I'm proud of, like our STEM program where young children from the community come in, they don't pay anything.

They get to meet an engineer and they do things like build robots together, have robot battles, and they all get to leave with the little mechanical robot that they built to show to their friends and family.

Or having a chemistry day where we have a chemist come in and show to young people some basic chemistry experiments, financial literacy for youth and for adults where we brought in young business owners who had Etsy shops and all sorts of lip gloss business, et cetera, and talk.

I think the young lady was about 10 years old and she's discussing how she set up this business, how she runs it, and how they can do it too.

This is the spirit of the migration.

People gathered their resources and they supported one another as each had need.

And I think that's a valuable lesson to learn today, to remember, I should say, as we are facing in the national politics, a strengthening oligarchy where the individualism is becoming hyperactive.

The lack of concern for those who are marginalized is growing, the cutting of social programs, the rolling back of safety nets.

Well I believe that the church, churches like Second Baptist, churches like Tabernacle, other churches who have stood up to this call historically, we must do it again.

Because now is the time for that spirit of self-determination and self-reliant and community of support to show us face for this age.

- Yeah, the irony really of the time is pretty rich.

I mean, as you point out, we've got this political backlash going on to the idea of migration, of immigration, at the same time that here in the city of Detroit, we're reopening the Michigan Central Station, which is such a pivotal point for that migration, not just for African-Americans, of course, but for people from all over who came to Detroit and came through that place.

That's where Robert Bradby was meeting people to try to connect them with work and home here in Detroit.

And it really does, I think, put a powerful onus on the religious community, the Black religious community to stand up and say, "This is a welcoming place, and we will continue to be that whether or not the federal government wants us to or not."

- Amen.

I agree.

- Okay, it was great to have both of you here to tell the stories of Second Baptist and Tabernacle and how they played that pivotal role in the Great Migration.

Thanks to both of you for being here on "American Black Journal."

- Stephen, thank you so much.

- That is gonna do it for us this week.

You can find out more about our guests at americanblackjournal.org and you can connect with us anytime on social media.

Take care, and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] 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.

- [Announcer] DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

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] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you, thank you.

(bright music)