Excellent article in Free Press on Detroit’s history we should all know, but were not taught. Detroiters will immediately recognize the cities and street names.

 Excellent article in Free Press on Detroit’s history we should all know, but were not taught.  Detroiters will immediately recognize the cities and street names.

Detroit's Underground Railroad flourished in a city of slaves and slaveholders (by Jamon Jordan in the Detroit Free Press)

Twenty years ago this month, the Gateway to Freedom Underground Railroad Monument was unveiled on the Detroit Riverfront. A sister sculpture, the Tower of Freedom, made its debut the same day on the river's opposite bank in Windsor, Ontarrio. 

Both monuments were created by Ed Dwight, a celebrated sculptor who was also the first African American trained to be a NASA astronaut.

Gateway to Freedom features a trove of information illuminating Detroit's important role in the abolitionist movement. It lists the names of important freedom fighters and Underground Railroad conductors” like William Lambert and Laura Smith Haviland, as well as some of the “stations,” including Seymour Finney’s barn in Capital Park and Second Baptist Church in what is now Greektown. George DeBaptiste, one of the principal agents of the Underground Railroad in Detroit, is depicted on the monument in a suit, pointing across the river to Canada, where thousands of fugitive slaves found freedom.

Visitors who have admired Dwight's work were horrified earlier this year when his monument was badly damaged by unidentified vandals. It's unclear who's responsible for restoring the monument. Because no arrests have been made, it's impossible to know if the Gateway to Freedom was targeted specifically for memorializing Michigan's role in the African American struggle for freedom. 

If so, it would not be the first attack on that history.

In 2016, a marker identifying the Larned Street homesite of abolitionist William Lambert was stolen. 

A few months later, two additional historical markers — the first at the home where abolitionist William Webb hosted a meeting between celebrated orator Frederick Douglass and anti-slavery activist John Brown, and a second marking the home of Isaac and Sarah Cozens, where Temple Beth El, the city's first Jewish synagogue, was founded — were seriously damaged. The Webb and Cozens markers were restored the following year, but the one commemorating Lambert's contribution has yet to be replaced.

Despite these setbacks, historians have done a good job telling the story of Detroit's Underground Railroad, and I’ve been a part of that effort.

Acknowledging the more complicated truth about slavery in Detroit — its deep roots and abiding legacy — has been harder.

Detroit had slavery, although there is no monument or plaque in our city that even touches on the subject.

It is discussed in the Frontiers to Factories gallery at the Detroit Historical Museum, and in Tiya Miles’ book, "Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits." And I first read about it in a column retired Free Press columnist Bill McGraw wrote in 2001, the same year that the Gateway to Freedom monument was unveiled as part of the Detroit 300 commemoration.

But this is woefully inadequate. And for the most part, Detroiters grow up without hearing a word about their city's history of slavery.

In a city that, according to last year’s census, is 77% African American, there are over 20 streets named in Detroit after slaveowners. And if you want to know how people in the South defend the myriad towns, schools, streets and monuments that honor Confederate soldiers, slaveowners or white supremacists, just mention to a group of Cass Technical High School alumni the possibility that their alma mater should be renamed. The responses will sound surprisingly similar.

That is, in part, a legacy of the lies we've been told, and continue to tell ourselves.

One of these lies is that Jim Crow was in the South, and segregation was not a major issue in the North, especially in cities like Detroit.

In the Oscar-winning film, “The Green Book,” which is supposed to be based on a true story, Tony “The Lip” Vallelonga chauffeured Don Shirley, an acclaimed African American musician, on a concert tour throughout the United States. The film’s title is taken from the Negro Motorist Green Book, which was published from 1936 to 1966 to help African American travelers find lodging, meals and recreation open to Black patrons.

In the movie, Tony only uses the Green Book when the tour goes to the South. But Shirley would’ve needed it in New York, in Indiana, and in Michigan as well — and even in Detroit.

The history schools don’t teach

Dr. Ossian Sweet

How is it that Detroit high school students learn about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Birmingham Campaign of 1963, and the lunch counter sit-ins that took place across the Deep South in the 1960s, but not learn about the 1925 Ossian Sweet murder trial that transfixed Black and white Detroiters alike?

Or that a six-foot-tall, half-mile-long segregation wall was built in Detroit in 1941?

Why were Detroit students taught that slavery was a horrible practice that flourished in states like Virginia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, but not that it was present in all 13 of our country's original colonies, including New York, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts?

And that both before and after it became a state, Michigan, too, had slavery?

After the Civil War, northerners presented themselves as the good guys, and their late president, Abraham Lincoln, as the “Great Emancipator.” The bad guys? Those were the vanquished Rebels of the South — the slaveowners and slave traders who had betrayed American democracy. When the civil rights movement convulsed the nation a century later, northern states reprised the same narrative.

Both Jim Crow and slavery were national phenomena, not practices limited to the South.

And Detroit had slavery.

A long, troubled history

You may have been told that Michigan, as part of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, was a "free state," meaning slavery was outlawed here. You may have even been taught that Michigan was a haven of freedom for Black people, and that Detroit was a center of  abolitionist activism.

But you should also have learned that France had been involved in the Atlantic slave trade since the 1540s, and that French colonists would practice chattel slavery in Detroit when they arrived in the 1700s.

In October 1736, a burial ledger at Ste. Anne de Detroit, then inside a fort established by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, recorded the internment of an “unknown negresse,” a woman identified only as the property of the Campau family.

It is the earliest record of a Black person in Detroit.

The Campaus were among the most prominent slave-owning families among a group that included Louis Caesaire Dagneau dit Ville Sieur deQuindre, Noel St. Aubin, Jean Rivard, Antoine Beaubien, Louis Beaufait, Jean Chapoton, Alexander Chene, Francois Livernois and Jean Francois Hamtramck, all of whose names are memorialized in the Detroit of 2021.

By the 1760s, when the British took over Detroit, British slaveowners such as John Askin, George McDougall and George Meldrum continued the practice of enslaving Africans and Native Americans here. Two British Detroiters, William and Alexander Macomb, were the Michigan territory's largest slaveowners.

By the time Detroit became part of Northwest Territory in 1796, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had ostensibly outlawed slavery in Michigan. But the Jay Treaty of 1794 permitted British and French slaveholders who had settled here before that year to retain their human property.

But in 1807, a court decision made it clear how slavery would proceed in Michigan.

In the first years of the 19th century, Peter and Hannah Denison, originally enslaved by William Macomb, were sold to William and Catherine Tucker. In 1807, after their new owners freed the Denisons but not their four children — Elizabeth, Scipio, James and Peter Jr. — the family ended up in the courtroom of Augustus Woodward, Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory.

Woodward ruled that anyone born after 1796 could not be held in slavery. But enslaved people who had been born in the years between the Northwest Ordinance and the signing of the Jay Treaty could be held in bondage until their 25th birthdays

This meant the youngest Denison, Peter Jr., could eventually be freed. But under Woodward's ruling, the boys three older siblings could not. Peter and Hannah won their family's freedom only when they escaped across the Detroit River to Canada.

William Macomb owned about 40 slaves in his lifetime, and at his death, still claimed title to 26 people. His brother, Alexander Macomb, moved to New York, where he became that state's third-largest slaveowner. Macomb County is named for Alexander's son, a major general in the continental army.

Joseph Campau, a slaveowner and descendant of one of the earliest French families in Detroit, married Adelaide DeQuindre, who came from an equally prominent French slave-holding family in Detroit. Joseph’s sister, Cecile, married Thomas Williams from New York. They had one son, John Williams. To distinguish himself from the many other John Williamses, Cecile's son added an R to his name. In 2021, we know him as just  John R.

Joseph Campau and his nephew, John R. Williams were not only slaveowners but also massive landowners. Joseph Campau owned a major ribbon farm along with other large plots of land in Detroit, and by the early 1800s, was the first millionaire in the state. John R owned the land which is now Boston-Edison, and became Detroit's first elected mayor. He and his uncle used their wealth to promote discriminatory laws and anti-Black politicians.

In 1817, when he was the treasurer of the Zion Lodge of the Detroit Freemasons, Joseph Campau donated $250 to help establish what would become the University of Michigan. Although the school’s founders, Augustus Woodward, Father Gabriel Richard, and Rev. John Monteith, were not slaveowners, many of its donors and early trustees were.

Campau and John R also founded the Democratic Free Press and Michigan Intelligencer, which flourished in its first century as a notoriously racist paper known for its resolutely segregationist stance. You know it today as the Detroit Free Press.

Part of our legacy

What this history describes is a city whose most enduring institutions, from its city government to its school system to its early businesses and law enforcement agencies, are connected to slavery and slaveowners.

Lewis Cass, who became rich by selling his vast land holdings, was not a British or French national exempted from the law that prohibited slavery in Michigan. But his social and political prominence — he served as territorial governor, as President Andrew Jackson's secretary of war, and as Michigan's third U.S. Senator — allowed him to ignore that prohibition.

Who did Cass enslave? A Black woman named "Sally."

Why did he break the law to enslave a Black woman? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

In 1818, while governor of the Michigan Territory, Cass negotiated the sale of "Sally" to David Macomb, the son of William Macomb and cousin of Major General Alexander Macomb Jr.

Maj. Gen. Macomb cosigned for the purchase, which cost Macomb $300, about $6,500 in today’s dollars.

General Alexander Macomb eventually became the commanding general of the U.S. Army and would fight in the Second Seminole War, which sprang from Jackson's campaign to expel the Seminole tribe from Florida. Much of the land the United States seized from the so-called Five Civilized Tribes — Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw and Seminole — was distributed to plantation owners, who used it to grow the cotton harvested by enslaved Africans.

Detroit was home to brave freedom fighters who made the Underground Railroad run. And we should celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Gateway to Freedom Monument, and all that it means for Detroit.

But Detroit had slavery, too.

And we need to acknowledge that other October milestone, the anniversary of the burial of that “unknown negresse” on the grounds of Ste. Anne’s, who was owned by the Campau family. That is also part of our city's legacy, and its significance cannot be discounted, either.

(Jamon Jordan, a Detroit historian, is the founder of the Black Scroll Network History & Tours. He teachers a class on Detroit history at the University of Michigan.)

My thoughts:

How sick, insane, evil, selfish, hateful and demonic is it to feel that a people believed that it was okay and had a right to brutally kidnap a race of people, bring them to another country, enslave, sell and own them like property or animals, abuse, beat, rape and lynch, use them to have free labor, create wealth and have sexual pleasure, then later have monuments, buildings, streets, cities and states names after them? 

And for some, don’t even think of asking, suggesting and wondering why we can’t or won’t move on because that was the past, when the names are still on the buildings, street signs and other places.