Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City

4. From Old World to Old South and Old Testament

C h a p t e r 4 From Old World to Old South and Old Testament We have come, over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. —“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900 and set to music by John Rosamond Johnson in 1905 Although written out of the experience of blacks, the sentiments expressed in “Lift Every Voice and Sing” equally apply to generations of other ethnic groups who came to Detroit seeking a better life. Despite common motivations, peopling this region tapped three distinct geographic sources. Immigration into Greater Detroit shifted from a predominantly “Old World,” European stock, to an “Old South,” black stock, and an “Old Testament” stock from the biblical lands of the Middle East. Only recently have substantial sources of immigration begun to diversify. Out with the Old, in with the New The first recorded visit of a European to this region occurred in 1669, when French trapper-explorer Adrien Joliet disembarked from his canoe. It would From Old World to Old South and Old Testament 93 be another thirty-two years before Cadillac’s forces built the first permanent French fortified settlement. The first generations of settlers continued to be overwhelmingly French until the British and American takeovers in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, one of the most constructive immigrants in the nineteenth century was a French American: Father Gabriel Richard. After completing Roman Catholic seminary in France and emigrating to the U.S. in 1792 to do missionary work with the “natives,” Father Richard came to Detroit in 1804 as assistant pastor of the region’s oldest Catholic parish, St. Anne’s. He quickly established a school for Natives and developed what we would now call progressive “community outreach programs.” These so successfully reduced long-festering tensions that dated to Cadillac’s time between Natives and European immigrants that powerful Shawnee chief Tecumseh refused to fight with the British in the War of 1812 so long as they imprisoned Father Richard in the occupied city. Among Father Richard’s other notable educational achievements, he imported the first printing press to Detroit to publish several periodicals, and in 1817 founded the Catholepistemiad of Michigania, which would become the University of Michigan. He also served as pastor to Catholic and Protestant parishes in Detroit simultaneously in 1807, in a notable display of ecumenical tolerance. It is deeply regrettable that Father Richard ’s doctrine of education and religion as vehicles for unity among groups fell on infertile ground that would soon become the impermeable rock of sectarian and racist fragmentation on which Detroit was built. Though French and English settlers would continue to flow into Detroit (often by way of Canada), the first substantial nineteenth-century immigration from the Old World originated in Ireland and Germany. By 1830, a substantial Irish neighborhood had taken shape in an area along the river just west of downtown—Corktown (the name persists today). The neighborhood expanded rapidly after 1846 as the potato blight-induced famine in Ireland accelerated immigration. Nearly four in five of these later-arriving Irish were common laborers, twice the share of the earlier cohort. They found plenty of work in the city’s sawmills, foundries, and rolling mills and as draymen for the omnipresent horse-drawn wagons, carriages, and coaches. Germans started a sizable immigration into Detroit in 1825, focusing on the east side of downtown, north of Jefferson along Gratiot Avenue. By 1850, this neighborhood was commonly known as Germantown. Although this flow of Germans included farmers and unskilled laborers, as a group they 94 Chapter 4 comprised much higher shares of skilled craftsmen and professional workers. While split by Catholic and Protestant loyalties, embodied in the respective St. Joseph and St. Luke parishes, the Germans shared a clannish sense of über superiority that transcended mere religion. * * * It was a day on the Detroit waterfront at the foot of Woodward Avenue like so many others in 1851. Sailing vessels silently slipped past, destined for their docks just downstream, laden with lumber or iron ore. Plodding ferries shuttled passengers and railroad cars across the river to Windsor. The overnight steamship from Buffalo had just disembarked its passengers where Cadillac had landed a century and...