(gentle electronic music) - I was so excited when Henry Lewis Gates decided that he was gonna tell this story, and I knew that Detroit was gonna play a huge role in the telling, so I wanna get to our panelists here, who are also great storytellers and have their own stories to share, how their families got to where they are.

Karen, I'm gonna start with you, you've spent so much time devoted to figuring out these things about yourself and others, tell us a little about your family.

- Well, I'm a native Detroit-er by virtue of my grandparents, Beatrice and Eddie Walton Bachelor, I'm speaking their name, and they were from a really rural area outside of Columbus, Georgia, Grandma used to call it "Goat Rock," I don't know if that was the official name, but they came up here in 1917 to Michigan Central Station, and when they got off the train with my aunt, who was just a toddler at the time, a photographer took their picture, and so, that survives as one of the mementos of our family history, yep, there they are.

(Karen laughing) (people applauding) I didn't realize what a courageous thing this was for them to do until I watched episode one of the documentary.

My grandparents, while I knew they came up, I was able to kinda guess some of the reasons why they came, they talked a little bit, back in those days, they didn't wanna talk about what they left behind, they didn't wanna talk about, you know, the Klan riding every night and the lynchings they saw, they didn't wanna talk about that in detail, so it wasn't until I watched episode one that it filled in the gaps, connected the dots for me on why they were courageous, and strong, and resilient, and getting on that train and coming up here, but then, I learned by...

When I watched episode four of the documentary that I have a third Great Migration ancestor, because my Caribbean grandfather on my mom's side came from Bermuda the same year, 1917, and he went to New York and he married my biracial grandmother, who I would later learn has roots back to the original Great Migration in 1630 of Puritans who came to Massachusetts, but they settled in Harlem where my...

In that Caribbean...

Growing Caribbean community where my mom was then born in 1920, and so, it doesn't matter how far you can go back or what you find, just remember that for all of us, we are... We're the survivors.

Every last one of us in the room, we are the survivors of the good, the bad and the ugly of what our ancestors went through, and I accept all of them, I mean, I have ancestors who were hung for witchcraft, I have ancestors who were enslavers, who fought in the Revolution, I mean, the reality is we all come from the strong ones.

(people applauding) - So Jamon, I said that this is our story, our collective story here as Detroit-ers and people in Southeast Michigan, as the city's official historian, you're the guardian of that story in many ways, the shepherd of that story, talk a little about that role and the protection and preservation of that story.

- Yeah, so Detroit, of course, is a town in the early 1900s, it's not a bustling, humongous city, it's not the hub of the auto industry, but when that starts, when the auto industry begins, when Packard starts their company here in the city of Detroit in 1903, that same year, Henry Ford starts Ford Motor Company in 1903.

By the mid-1900s, all of the auto industry, starting with Henry Ford, but all of the auto industry are building cars on a moving assembly line, and they need thousands of workers, and as the first episode of the documentary showed us, during World War I, there is a decrease in immigrants, in 1910, 74% of Detroit's population are foreign-born, so three-quarters of Detroit are immigrants.

By 1930, only one-third Detroit is foreign-born, because the auto industry needs these workers, World War I, there's a lull in immigrants, and so, what needs to happen is the auto industry needs to look somewhere in America for workers, and Henry Ford starts it out in 1914 when he offers five dollars a day to all workers because he needs these people, many of whom are in the South, to come to the city of Detroit, and many, of course, of these people are African-Americans, they're working in sharecropping and tenant farming, low-skill, low-pay labor, and to have a job paying five dollars a day, which is a living wage, would be, of course, a major come-up for them.

He needs these workers from down south, but Henry Ford don't know no black people down south, so he has to work with black organizations, Second Baptist Church, Ebenezer AME, St. Matthews Episcopal Church, the Detroit branch of the NAACP, the Detroit Urban League, he's working with these black institutions, all of whom have contacts with African-Americans in the South, and that's how he's going to begin recruiting African-Americans to the city of Detroit, and of course, people gonna come from all over the world and people gonna come who are African-American to the city of Detroit from other parts of the country, but these African-Americans will come at such a high rate that between 1910 and 1920, Detroit's black population grows 600%, and so, in no other city, no... None of the other Great Migration cities does the African American population grow to that high percentage, and so, these African-Americans, along with all the people who are coming from other places to the city of Detroit, change the auto industry into a small kind of business, into a major national business and turn Detroit from a town into a major city, and of course, by 1930, it's the fourth-largest city in this country, and it will retain that...

It will retain that title until the 1950s, and so, if you're talking about the city of Detroit's history, and you... Everybody knows that Detroit is the Motor City, which means it's the auto industry, but that history is the Great Migration story, there is no Motor City without the Great Migration, there is no Motor City without that five dollars a day and Henry Ford going to black institutions and getting them to help him recruit African-Americans from Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, and all of these other places, to get people to come here to the city of Detroit, so that is part of what I have to tell when I'm telling the story of the city of Detroit.

(people applauding) - And your personal story.

- And when it comes to my own family, my grandmother, my mother's mother, came right through here.

This is how she arrived here in Michigan Central in 1938.

She moves not far from here, she moves to the neighborhood that we used to call the Old West Side, not far away... Not far from Vicki's Bar-B-Q, my folks and people know where that is, that's where she lives, my grandfather, who's coming from Mobile, Alabama, he comes and he living in Black Bottom, so when he comes in '39, Black Bottom, of course, is going to be destroyed, so he's forced to move to the 12th Dexter Linwood neighborhood, she's gonna move to the 12th Dexter Linwood neighborhood, and that's where they meet, and they live at Byron & Lee Place, which is just a couple of blocks away from where the 1967 rebellion began, and my father's family are living in Black Bottom, they're there until they're forced out in '65, and when they're forced out, they move to an area not far from where my maternal side lives, and my father, as a young man, will meet my mother as a young woman, they'll get married and I come along, so my story, of course, is a Black Bottom story, it's an Old West Side story, it's a 12th Dexter Linwood story, and it's a Great Migration story because all of that helped to bring me here, and so, I'm able to do... Tell these stories because I'm a part of these stories.

(people applauding) - So the Charles H. Wright Museum will celebrate 60 years in 2025... (people applauding) And I think that certainly, Detroit-ers in particular should feel that sense of pride of having created the nation's second-largest now, Smithsonian had to show out and build a bigger one, okay?

The second-largest museum of African-American history in the country, and for Dr. Wright and Margaret Burroughs in... (indistinct) In Chicago, to have founded the African-American Museum Association, the largest association of African-American museums in the country, now, also in a few years, celebrating its 50th anniversary, so the Wright is an iconic institution within the cultural sector, and as Steven is mentioning, our job is to preserve and celebrate the stories of African-Americans, not just in Detroit, but regionally and nationally, and to remind all of us that the African-American story is actually the American story, all of what we have done as a people, civil rights, music, name a topic, is what now, most people describe and most people would attribute to Americans.

If you go anywhere around the world, you know, and you ask someone, go, "So what what do you think of when you think of Americans?"

Think of jazz music, you think of Motown, you think of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, all of these things are grounded in our history, and these are important things for us to know, to be proud of and to share, particularly now.

A lot of times, when people talk about history, they talk about it as if it's something in the past, and indeed, it is important to know that past, but what we need to know about our past, it is starting to show...

The remnants of that are starting to show up in the present moment.

The Great Migration for me, my family, is from...

I had to call my mother and ask her, she is from West Virginia, my father is from North Carolina, right?

They both end up traveling, at different times in their lives, to Ohio, where they lived in a rural area outside of Delaware, Ohio, and then, they would eventually... My mother would go to Chicago, where she would meet my father and the rest is history, we grew up on the south side of Chicago.

- I think, for a lot of people, these stories are kept someplace, but they're not kept someplace that we know, right?

We have to go find them, I mean, my own story, I've had to go back to Natchez, Mississippi many times to kind of unearth the origins of my name, even, and things like that.

I think it's hard sometimes to know where to start.

- Well, if I can just give you a little background on how I started, was 1976, my New Year's resolution, my son had just been born, and I realized how little I knew about our family history that I could then pass on to him.

Now, this was before the Internet, this was before Ancestry.com, it was before all of that technology, you don't need that, so the cardinal rule is you start with yourself and just think about how much history we've all lived through, I mean, I saw the National Guard tanks roll through in 1967, I was in the march with Dr. King in, what, 1963, I mean, there's history in this room that we need to capture, so start with yourself and you work your way back one generation at a time.

One of the best resources for everyone to access, and you can go to the library if you don't have a computer at home, is the census records, so the most recent census that is available for us to look at is 1950, because the census records are classified information for 72 years, which is kind of, like, a lifetime, someone's lifetime, after it's taken, so start with the 1950 census, who of your ancestors were in the 1950 census?

Who of your family are the elders?

Now that I'm an elder, I can say, like, talk to the old people in your family because they have stories, so that's... You know, that's kind of the starting point, and then, I would just say, you never know where this journey will take you.

- I wanna give each of you a chance to talk about, if you want, where we go from here.

We've been talking about the past and the importance of remembering the past, but what does this help us do in the future?

What does that push us toward here in Detroit and in other places?

- I guess it was Wednesday that I had the privilege of going to see Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates speak at the University of Michigan, any of you there?

Angela Davis, who has a reason to know about activism within our community, said that she was very optimistic about what the future would bring for us, and she reminded us that the course of civil rights, of justice, of equity, is not a straight line.

It goes and it wanders back and forth, but in her mind, it always moves forward, right?

So where we may be in one of those periods where it feels like we're looking backwards, we're... You know, we're losing some of what we've gained in previous generations, it's not exactly what's happening in her mind, and so, I encourage all of us, frankly, to, you know, to really drill down on what our history is, what it has meant, teach it to our children, teach it to those who we know need to hear these stories, right?

And keep them alive because this is the book, the map, if you will, that's going to lead us into the future, I think, that we all want and desire, so I was very encouraged by that.

- Anyone else?

- I would just echo what you said about knowing your history, so everyone in this room, what do you know about your own history?

Because your history is American history.

It's not broken down into, like, other categories, it's...

Your history is American history, and so, sharing it with your family, with your friends, we are not going back to a time when we do not know our history, knowing it makes you stand taller and prouder as an American, and I would urge you to make sure that you have that platform available for yourself and those who come after you.

- That's right.

That's right, yep.

(people applauding) - So just as Neil said, that history goes more than one way, we're taught sometimes to accept a narrative that, you know, history, we're down here, but it's always going up, we're always getting better, but history can go more than one way, it can go backwards, you know, we can...

Things can go... As... We're making progress, and then, we going backwards, if you don't believe that you can go backwards, I don't know where you've been in the past few years, all right?

So things can go backwards, but I want you to...

But I want to still hold onto something, when we look at this history, we're standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, who fought these battles in Detroit and this country, and really, the world is better for the people who we... Whose shoulders we're standing on.