Our bus, taking I-75, arrived in Detroit about 1 p.m., a good four hours after
the daily commuters from Oakland County and other surrounding suburbs.
A local paper greeted us with a front page story about a gunman storming
a daycare center. Two individuals were seriously injured and a three-year-old
child was killed. Welcome home!
I was a bit sad that my town was still living up to its image of
being the murder capital of the nation. Less than 50 years ago, Detroit
was considered one of the best cities in the country for blacks to
live; the new promised land for those seeking refuge from southern
bigotry, Jim Crow laws, and lynching. My parents were among that great
migration from the South. The Charles Wright Museum, the venue for
the next day's event, was less than a half-mile from the apartment
where they had lived.
In those days, I-75 was part of Hasting Street, a main thoroughfare
of a black community that had its own shops, hotels, and nightclubs.
Former world heavyweight champion Joe Lewis had trained in a gym just
a stone’s throw from where our bus parked.
It seemed fitting that my mother was among the few hundred people
who came out the next day to enjoy the program and tell her story.
She had been a little hesitant at first: “What will I talk about?
I don’t have a special story.”
“Just tell them what it was like moving from Florida to Detroit,” I
urged.
“Oh! You mean how I learned to live with freedom.”
Inside the Charles Wright Museum, we both sat “swelled up” with
pride as one speaker after another reminded us why Detroit is more
than the sum total of a newspaper headline.
SandraTene Ramsey, director of Detroit’s Senior Citizens Department,
delivered a beautiful impromptu speech as Harriet Tubman, reminding
us all that Detroit was the end-station for the Underground Railroad.
The rounded tenor tones of Jorel Quinn, a soloist with the Renaissance
High School choir, suggested that some of our young people do have
their “eyes on the prize.” “I just wanted to give
thanks to the people who came before us.”
Driving back through downtown with my mother, I could see a new Detroit
rising from the ashes of decades of neglect. Motown is morphing into
Tech Town and Hockey Town. Sing your song, little brother!
