“Sugar Island is a small island in the Detroit River between Grosse Ile and Boblo Island. Sugar Island is part of Grosse Ile Township, Wayne County, Michigan, USA, and lies about 0.5 miles (0.80 km) west of the border with Canada. Currently the island is uninhabited and was recently converted to wildlife refuge by the US Fish and Wildlife service (see below). The majority of the island is wooded and it is known for its white sandy beaches and easy access by boat.” From Wikepedia
In my maternal grandparents yard there was a metal pipe swing frame that my grandfather had attached to the apple tree. There was a big swing three or more people could sit in and there was a baby swing for one little person with a bar to hold them in, you can see it below to the right. And there were a pair of rings that my cousin Barbara was expert with. I don’t remember ever doing a flip or anything else.
In this photograph my Aunt Mary V. is helping her youngest daughter, my cousin Marilyn learn how to use the rings. Marilyn was the youngest of the five cousins by 6 years. She was often regulated to “go-ie wo-ie” during games.
For other posts featuring Poppy and Nanny’s yard –
The following article on accountability was written by the late Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, formerly the Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr., the founder of the Shrines of the Black Madonna of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church, for his weekly column, “Message to the Black Nation.” It was published in the Oct. 14, 1967, issue of “The Michigan Chronicle,” Detroit’s oldest black newspaper.
His column began informally with two articles that he wrote in the wake of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, which were published in the Aug. 12 and Aug. 19, 1967, issues. The first was headlined “The Message’/We Must Control Our Community” and the second was headlined “Transfer Power To End Violence.” The following week, on Aug. 26, his column formally began under the “Message to the Black Nation” title, but the “Black” was omitted in the Oct. 14 column, apparently due to a typographical error. It ran for the next two years, with only occasional breaks, such as when he vacationed in Mexico in December 1967. It was usually published on p. A-12, but sometimes on p. A-16.
In the beginning of this column, he refers to the Citywide Citizens Action Committee (CCAC), which was a broadly-based coalition of black organizations and individuals that was formed at a public meeting held in the 13th-floor auditorium of the former Detroit City-County Building, now the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, on Aug. 9, 1967. CCAC was disbanded the following year. — Paul Lee.
Explains Principle Of Accountability
By REV. ALBERT B. CLEAGE, JR.
Black people in the city of Detroit have a new kind of unity born out of the July [1967] rebellion. Our new unity is the unity born of conflict and confrontation. It is a unity that was made possible by our realization that in a moment of crisis the total white community came together in opposition to us in our struggle for freedom, justice and self-determination.
This is the first time in the city of Detroit that we have had this kind of unity and out of this unity has come a new kind of organization, the Citywide Citizens Action Committee (CCAC).
Historically black organizations have not been born out of conflict or the will to self-determination but rather out of a fruitless seeking after integration. Our old organizations expressed our conviction that it was possible for us to integrate into the white man’s society and that some day there would come a great getting-up morning on which black and white would walk hand in hand in love for one another.
That was the basic dream which brought all of our black organizations into existence. That was essentially the message of the black Christian church. Now we realize that it was this dream which thwarted and frustrated all our efforts to secure freedom and justice.
Today’s unity was born out of the realization that our survival means a continual conflict and confrontation which can only be restored through the transfer of power and self-determination for the black community.
What Self-Determination Means
Self-determination means black control of the black community. This is the purpose which has brought us together. Self-determination means control of the police department in our community. It means controls in our community. It means that we must control everything that touches the black community.
Self-determination is not something vague and abstract. It means that we must control all of the stores on all the streets in our community. It means control of the housing in our community. It means that we cannot tolerate one huge white real estate concern operating 60 percent of the apartment houses in our community.
As the days pass and we begin the complicated task of translating these objectives into concrete programs, there is going to be a lot of double-talk and confusion. Very few black people will publicly deny that they support self-determination even though many will refuse to do the things necessary to achieve it.
That is why we must have one citywide organization interpreting day in and day out the simple facts involved in black control of the black community. CCAC must help people understand what is involved.
We do NOT mean that we are going to turn the black community over to the self-seeking black capitalists. There would be no great improvement for us if individualistic black businessmen controlled the business in our community for their personal benefit. We are not exchanging one kind of economic slavery for another.
We are far beyond the days when we would proudly point to Brother So-and-So who had gotten rich from exploiting us and was driving around in a Cadillac. If a black businessman is going to operate in our community, he must contribute to it and be accountable to it.
This is the first principle of black control of the black community: the principle of accountability. Everyone who is going to do anything in the black community must be accountable to the black community.
This will be something entirely new for us. No black leader has ever considered himself accountable to the black community before — in politics, in business, in labor, in the church, or in education. So-called black leaders have considered themselves accountable only to the white man.
We were supposed to be happy and content because they were successful and could dress up and live in big houses and walk around acting like white men. Today, if a black man is exploiting the black community, he must be dealt with. We have no room for selfish individualists in politics, in business, in labor, in the church or in the professions.
That Slavery Softness Has Got to Go
We must be willing to accept the implications of this position. We have certain so-called leaders who disappear or have nothing to say when a crucial issue faces the black community. We must have one answer for this disappearing act. When election times come around, these so-called leaders must be put out to pasture.
This is more difficult than you imagine. When election time comes, a lot of us will hesitate. People will argue that it is better to have a weak black man in office than to risk no black man in office.
They will say that he is still some help just because he is black. This is not true. If a black politician does not recognize his accountability to the black community, then he is worse than nothing. It would be better to have someone in office whom we can recognize as an enemy than to have an enemy in office who appears to be our friend.
Legislators, judges, councilmen, congressmen, every black man who holds a political office must take orders from us. The moment he begins to think his job is bigger than we are, there is nothing for us to do but take him out.
We intend to demand that everybody who works in the black community recognize his accountability to us. When he strays from the straight and narrow path, we are going to talk to him. We will take a group of brothers and we will sit down and talk over his weaknesses and shortcomings.
We are going to do just what it says in the Bible. “If a brother strays, go sit down and talk to him. If he won’t listen to reason, take some more brothers to talk to him. If he still won’t listen, then treat him like a Gentile.”
In the Bible the Gentile is the white man. That means that if he will not accept his accountability to the black community, we have no alternative but to treat him like a white man — and put him out of the [Black] Nation. That is the Bible.
A lot of you are not really ready for this. You have still got a lot of that soft slavery weakness in you. This is because you don’t take seriously the simple fact that we are fighting for survival. If a brother is betraying the Nation, he must be put out of the Nation.
We are holding everybody accountable because we are getting ready for confrontation. We can’t afford any halfway people messing us up. We are preparing for all kinds of conflict.
Don’t think we had a bad summer and everything is going to be pleasant from now on. Get yourselves ready. That old slave psychology, that softness, has got to go. We must know that if we are going to move, it is going to be by confrontation.
_______________________________
For more about the Black Star Co-op, click.
For more about the CCAC and my father in the year following the 1967 Detroit riot, follow the links below.
Prophet of possibility Pt. 1 – The Michigan Citizen by Paul Lee.
Profit of possibility Pt 2 – also from the Michigan Citizen by Paul Lee.
In 1965 the idea of the Black Star Co-op was born at Central United Church of Christ. In 1968, the year after the Detroit riot, a grocery store was opened a block from the church. Due to a variety of reasons – inexperience of management and staff, costs of keeping enough stock, high prices – the store did not last long. Later the church operated a long running food co-op. Several people would go down to Eastern Market early Saturday morning and buy produce which was shared by everybody who paid $5 that week. There was no overhead and no paid staff. Later the church had a farm in Belleville, Michigan and the food for the co-op came off of that farm. Below is a short photographic story of the Black Star Market.
To read more about the church and the street it stand on, click on these links: “L” is for Linwood (About the street of Linwood), “H” is for Linwood and Hogarth (About the church).
This article is from my Grandmother, Fannie Turner Graham’s scrap book. It was printed in the Detroit Tribune on November 24, 1945. Victoria’s parents, James and Margaret McCall, were the owners and operators of the Tribune. My grandmother wrote the date and my mother wrote the identifying information.
The postcard on the left shows the Book-Cadillac Hotel, where the interview took place, in the 1940.
Part of the article is missing. I think my grandmother trimmed one side and part 2 was on the other side. I combined her pink article with a scan from online.
You can read more about the Tribune and the McCalls in this post “James Edward McCall, Poet and Publisher“.
Week 46. Politics. What are your childhood memories of politics? Were your parents active in politics? What political events and elections do you remember from your youth?
My first memory of politics is the 1952 presidential campaign. My parents supported Adlai Stevenson and I remember waking up the day after the election and asking who won. I was quite disappointed when I found it was not Stevenson.
For more about my family and politics, click on these – 1965 Cleage for Congress and Elections Past.
The staff at Annis Furs in Downtown Detroit. Taken in the 1920’s. My great grandmother, Jennie Virginia Allen Turner is in the second row, far left. Her daughter Alice is next to her. Skip the next woman and her daughter Daisy is there, 4th from the left. The three of them got jobs at Annis Furs soon after moving to Detroit from Montgomery, Alabama in 1922. I remember a little teddy bear Daisy made for my younger cousin Marilyn Elkins out of scraps of real fur. To read more about my Great Grandmother Turner, click Jennie Virginia Allen Turner.
Above is a photograph from the Burton collection at the Detroit Public Library. The Annis Fur Company is in the corner building. Although this was taken in 1917 I think the area looked pretty much the same 7 years later. To see a photograph of the Woodward Ave in 1910 click at Shorpy. You can see Annis Fur Post and Grinell Bros Pianos on the left, looking down the crowded street, past the Eureka Vacuum sign.
For more photos of crowds of women and other fascinating subjects, click Sepia Saturday.
Yesterday I was working like mad to complete an entry for the “Carnival of Genealogy – Our Ancestors Places of Worship”, by the midnight deadline when I came across two interesting pieces of new information.
First, even though I thought I had done this before with no success, I asked my cousins to ask their mothers what church they had attended as children in Detroit. The answer came back – St. John’s Presbyterian Church. At first I thought there was some confusion because I knew that my father had been pastor of St. John’s Congregational Church in Springfield, Mass. and St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Detroit but St. Johns Presbyterian? I didn’t remember ever hearing of it before. So, I googled it and found that not only was there a St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Detroit but that my Cleage grandparents were among founders and that it was founded in 1919, the same year my Graham grandfather was participating in the founding of Plymouth Congregational Church, also in Detroit, also on the East side. I looked for more information on St. Johns. I searched for even one photograph of the old church. I came up with very little. I looked through the family photos for something that looked like it was taken at a church but also found nothing aside from a few where the family is on their way to church. I did find the information below.
Detroit and the Great Migration 1916-1929, by Elizabeth Anne Martin Religion and the Migrant
“We, the believers in Christ members, are very proud of our rich heritage. We rejoice always; give praise and thanksgiving to our Lord for His abundant blessings of the faithful shoulders we stand on. We accept our charge of ensuring an African-American Presbyterian witness for our Lord in the city of Detroit, Michigan and beyond to the glory of God! St. John’s Presbyterian Church was among the new congregations formed because of the migration. In the winter of 1917 Reverend J.W. Lee, “field secretary for church extension among colored people in the North,” came to Detroit hoping to establish a Presbyterian church. He was disturbed by the fact that many migrants of the Presbyterian faith had turned to other denominations because there were no Presbyterian churches in Detroit. In April 1919 Lee organized thirty-nine believers into a new congregation. He served as pastor until 1921, when he recruited a southern preacher front Alabama to take his place. By 1925 the Sunday services at St. John’s were so popular that some people arrived as much as three hours early in order to secure seats. Hundreds of persons had to be turned away at both Sunday and weekday services.” One clarification, there were Presbyterian churches in Detroit but they were white.
Something the churches my grandparents helped fond have in common is that they were both urban renewed and torn down to make way for, in the case of Plymouth, a parking structure and I’m not sure what for St. Johns but neither of the historic church buildings are standing today, although both churches are still going strong in their new buildings.
Next I decided to google the church my grandfather, Albert Cleage attended when he was growing up in Athens Tennessee. I found that he was too young to have helped start First United Presbyterian Church, it was founded in 1890 and he was born in 1883. However, his step-father, my great grandmother Celia Rice Cleage Sherman’s second husband, Rodger Sherman, is listed as the architect of the church on Wikepidia. Amazed? Yes, I was. Mr. Sherman and Celia Cleage weren’t married until 1897, First United Presbyterian church had been standing for 5 years by then. The church is still standing and still looking good today.
From the Website “J. Lawrence Cook – An Autobiography”
“After a short time at Fisk, just how long I do not know, my father (note: J.L. Cook) entered Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee. [5] He worked to pay his expenses, and was also aided by donations from individuals back in his home town of Athens. In 1888 he received his bachelor’s degree from Knoxville College and entered Allegheny Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry. [6] On 9 April 1890 he was licensed as a minister by the Allegheny Presbytery, and with this credential returned to Athens to establish a United Presbyterian mission. Fresh out of seminary, he began holding services in an old dance hall. [7]”
Other posts about church founding in my family.
From Montgomery to Detroit, A Congregational Church – COG Our Ancestors Places of Worship
Witherspoon United Presbyterian Church 1909, Indianapolis Indiana
