Module 14: An Ethnic History of Albion: 19th and 20th Centuries
Reading: McGuire, "Dialogues with the Dead"
The town of Albion was founded in 1836 by Anglo settlers from New England traveling through the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes to arrive in Detroit. Ethnic mixing in Albion began in the 1860s as immigrants arrived from Germany, settling farms in the Albion area, opening businesses, and working at Gale Manufacturing making farm implements. A number of African Americans also settled in Albion in the 1860s, escaped slaves before the Civil War and immigrants from the South afterward. Before the Civil War, they worked as day laborers, farm laborers, barbers, and domestic servants. Albion was a station on the underground railway before the Civil War, but the KKK was active in Albion after the war, and few blacks actually settled in Albion prior to the twentieth century.
More diversity was added as Albion Malleable Iron Company, maker of steel parts for boilers, engines, motors, trucks and tractors, sent labor agents/recruiters to different parts of the country to find factory workers. In 1907, 40 Russians, unable to speak English, arrived from the slums of Manhattan and the Bronx. They worked at Malleable in unskilled jobs. To ease tensions among White Russians, Ukrainians, and Galicians, they asked that a Russian Orthodox Church be built, and a fundraiser in town raised $5,000 to build the church. In 1916, 64 African American men were recruited from Pensacola, Florida. The labor agents encountered hostility in the South, because southern landowners and businessmen didn't want to lose this abundant source of cheap labor.
The wives and children of these men arrived in 1917, and the city of Albion, which did not have any racially segregated institutions at this point, had to invent racial segregation. The city government arranged for segregated classes for African American children, first in existing school buildings, then, when Dalrymple school was finished, the African American children moved into the renovated West Ward school, which is described as having been dark, damp, small, and cheerless, with limited supplies and equipment. When African American men first arrived in Albion, they were invited to worship at First Baptist Church and First Methodist Church, but Malleable decided to build a separate Community Church in 1916, then Bethel Baptist in 1918. In the 1930s, African American veterans of WWI (who had served in segregated units) formed their own American Legion Post and purchased a section of lots in the cemetery, which explains why African American burials concentrated in the southern half of Sections 120 and 129, even though the cemetery has never been formally segregated. A similar clustering of Russian burials can be found in the northern half of Sections 120 and 129 for similar reasons: the plots were purchased together by members of the Russian Orthodox Church. So although it was never formally segregated, Riverside Cemetery does spatially reflect the segregated institutions in Albion society.
It’s an interesting story about how Albion schools became integrated. In 1953, African American parents refused to send their children to West Ward school. Led by the NAACP (the Albion chapter was founded in 1918), the boycott lasted 46 days, with parents threatened with arrest for contributing to the truancy of their children. But they finally prevailed, and the Albion Board of Education agreed to close West Ward school and send African American children to the white schools (but the African American teachers from West Ward were not allowed to teach in the formerly white schools until some years later). This was a year prior to Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education that made school segregation illegal in the United States.
During World War II, three Albionians were selected for the elite Tuskegee airmen unit, the first African American pilots to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. Also during WWII, a labor shortage caused labor recruiters to go out again to find workers for Albion’s foundries. This time, the agents brought in Mexican American workers from Texas. About 10 percent of Albion’s population today is Mexican American.
What was the point of building separate institutions (e.g., churches, housing, schools) for different groups of workers? It has been suggested that factory owners like to do this to prevent workers from forming a united group that would demand higher wages, safer working conditions, and/or better pollution control, i.e., demands that would reduce corporate profits. Some (white) workers are given advantages not enjoyed by other (black) workers, so they will not join together to make demands upon factory owners.
Class Exercise: For the rest of the class, students divide into pairs and develop theories or hypotheses about differences or lack of differences they will see in the graves of African American people and Russian Orthodox people at Riverside Cemetery. Then they spend a couple of hours in the cemetery on Saturday gathering data to see if their expectations are correct. Hypotheses from last year included:
(1) Because of wage discrimination, African Americans would have shorter life spans, on the average, than Russian Orthodox people.
(2) Because of discrimination, the tombstones of African Americans would be smaller, on the average, than the tombstones of Russian Orthodox people.
(3) There would be differences in the types of decorations on the two groups of tombstones, serving as markers of ethnic group membership.
(4) Because of discrimination, African American spouses would depend on each other more than Russian Orthodox spouses, and would more often be buried under a single joint tombstone.
(5) Because of discrimination, African American families would maintain stronger family ties than Russian Orthodox families and would more often be buried in adjacent plots.
I give students instructions for what to do on Saturday. They should work in pairs. Working from the maps I give them, they will locate the graves of the 10 African Americans and 10 Russian Orthodox individuals. At each grave, one student will read the short biography of the individual, while the other student records the data they will need to test their hypothesis. They can return biographies to me as they finish. They should bring their data to class on Wednesday and be ready to describe their hypotheses and their results.