Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  A year later, on March 12, 1859, Brown returned again, this time with twelve or fourteen slaves he had liberated from Missouri. Many of the same men who had met with him at the previous meeting were on hand, but this gathering was distinguished by the presence of Frederick Douglass, who was in Detroit to deliver a lecture at City Hall.14

  From the very inception of the slave revolt and Brown’s plan to storm the arsenal, Douglass began to step back, cautioning his friend that he was headed for “a trap of steel” from which escape would be impossible.15 Brown’s loyal followers in Detroit were less forthcoming in their critique of his plan, and they extended their prayers and best wishes to him as he stood by the dockside watching the slaves he had emancipated board ships for Canada.

  Brown’s raiders were vanquished, the small contingent easily overcome after the initial success of their surprise attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Brown was captured and hanged, but his audacious act served as a catalyst to a nation that had to be stained with blood, Brown had said, in order to bring about the end of slavery.

  “On April 12, 1861, a Detroit telegraph operator received the news that Fort Sumter had been fired upon.” About a month later the First Michigan Infantry was on its way to Washington, DC. It was the first Western regiment to reach the capital and was soon the first Northern force to advance to South Carolina.16

  It would be two years before black Detroiters could present arms and become agents of their own liberation. When they had an opportunity, after the Union Army had defeated the Confederates at Antietam, and once President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and realized he could not win the war without his “sable soldiers,” black Detroiters were ready to fight, ready to heed Douglass’s clarion call—“Men of Color, to Arms!”

  Men who had served without fear in ferrying fugitives to Canada were prepared for the rigors of war. They knew the danger of engagement, and their mettle had been annealed in their encounters with bounty hunters. Detroit is often overlooked as an important terminus of the Underground Railroad, but this legacy is part and parcel of the city’s great history, a legacy that in its beginning was forged by such stalwarts as Lambert, DeBaptiste, Webb, Willoughby, and Banks.

  These gallant warriors for freedom and justice put their indelible stamp on the quest for self-determination, a hallmark of courage and sacrifice.

  4

  FAULKNER AND FLAMES

  Humanity wept, she lamented the sight,

  The groans, blood and tears of that terrible night;

  Yet, oh, may the town of Detroit never see

  Such a day as the sixth of March, sixty-three.

  —B. CLARK

  Before black Detroiters could be fully engaged in the Civil War, there were some civic issues to overcome. For years the city teetered on the brink of racial turmoil fueled by the competition for jobs, the Enrollment Act of Conscription (the draft law), draft exemptions, and the issue of slavery. It took only a spark of misinformation to ignite the racial hostility, that tinderbox of bad feelings festering in Detroit’s ethnic neighborhoods, particularly among the poor Irish and German working class.

  By 1850, there were more than three thousand Irish Americans in Detroit, twice as many as the black population and representing a little over 15 percent of the residents of the city. In the 1880s, the number of Germans overtook that of the Irish and African Americans. With the advent of the Civil War and the Conscription Act, young German and Irish men were the majority of those drafted. Many of them complained about having to leave their jobs to fight whites for the benefit of blacks. They were even more incensed when black workers were hired to take their places. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation seemed to confirm their fears that the war was no longer to preserve the Union but to end slavery. On January 6, 1863, a celebration was held at Second Baptist Church to mark the proclamation, and exactly a century later President Lyndon B. Johnson dedicated a commemorative plaque memorializing the event.

  These were some of the simmering issues that finally erupted when a black man was accused of raping a white girl. It was a chilly February day in 1863 when Mary Brown, a nine-year-old white girl, on her way to the post office encountered Ellen Hoover, a black girl she knew. Somehow they were enticed into a tavern owned by Thomas Faulkner and, once inside, lured to a back room where he raped Brown and possibly Hoover. “By late February,” wrote Tobin T. Buhk in his book True Crime in the Civil War, “the alleged crime was front-page news in the city’s two primary newspapers. Faulkner’s racial identity was indefinite, though the Free Press and its rival the Advertiser and Tribune, jumped to conclusions and labeled him a ‘negro.’”1

  An examination of Mary Brown was ordered by a judge and conducted behind closed doors. Both the child’s mother and the family doctor corroborated her story that the newspapers said was too fiendish to report. Meanwhile, Faulkner’s lawyer bided his time, saving his defense for the trial. He had revealed that Hoover would be his star witness.2

  Perhaps intimidated by Faulkner, Hoover’s version of the event differed from Brown’s. Later, with further coaxing and threatening her with jail time, she changed her story and said Faulkner had taken them both in the back room and closed the door.

  Once more the newspapers aroused the public with inflammatory stories, lamenting the fact that if Faulkner was found guilty he could not be hanged since the death penalty had been abolished.

  Unfortunately, the opening day of Faulkner’s trial came almost simultaneously with the government’s announcement of the new conscription law. Irish and German residents, already disturbed by a law that allowed those with $300 to avoid the draft, found the trial a perfect place to vent their discontent.

  The trial lasted only two days. Faulkner was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. This judgment was not enough for a mob that gathered outside the courthouse. As Faulkner was being escorted from the courthouse to the jail, the angry mob surrounded him, refusing to obey the commands of the provost soldiers guarding their prisoner. When they became unruly and began chanting “Kill the nigger,” one of the guards fired several shots into the crowd. One man was killed and two were wounded, but this only enraged the mob. “If we got to be killed for niggers, then we will kill every nigger in town,” someone in the mob screamed.3

  There was no way to contain the fury, because there was no police force in Detroit at that time. No black person in the area was safe as the mob assembled and rushed downtown. There was no mercy for the first two black men they encountered and were relentlessly beaten to the ground. It’s a miracle that Richard Evans, seventy-nine, survived the savage attack. He and his aged wife were together when the rioters fired on his home and battered down his door. One of them drew a pistol and shot Evans in the face, tearing the flesh to the bone. The old man fell to the floor and exclaimed, “You are now satisfied—you have done your deed, and shot me!” They left him there on the floor, thinking he was dead. Then they plundered the house, taking more than a thousand dollars from members of the distressed family.4

  Another attack was on young Joshua Boyd, a mechanic who was hit in the head with an axe. After knocking him unconscious, the attackers dragged him from one location to another, repeatedly beating him with clubs and metal pipes. Boyd lingered in a comatose state for thirty hours before his mangled body expired.5

  The mob knew better than to attack M. Dale, who stood in his doorway with a shotgun daring them to approach his house. One of his friends stood by, armed with an axe, and when the thugs saw their weapons, they quickly withdrew. Each time they neared his house, Dale lowered his gun and they retreated.6

  By early March, on the fourth day of violence, more guns had arrived in the hands of federal troops, who were finally able to subdue the discord, but the city had been terribly damaged, leaving race relations in tatters.

  In the wake of the turmoil, it was later learned that Faulkner wasn’t black but of mixed Indian and Hispanic ancestry. Moreover, he wasn’t guilty of raping
the girls. They later confessed that they had lied, and after serving a few years in prison, Faulkner was released. The city had lost thirty-five buildings in the rioting, an untold number injured, and two people had been killed. No one was ever arrested, tried, or convicted for their deaths.7

  During this period, the Confederate Army was wreaking havoc across the South and threatening to advance beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. It was time to put aside racial differences and to answer Frederick Douglass’s call for unity. “There is no time to delay,” he declared in a broadside from his home in Rochester on March 21, 1863. “The tide is at its flood that leads on to fortune. From East to West, from North to South, the sky is written all over ‘Now or never.’ Liberty won by white men would lose half its luster. ‘Who would be free themselves must strike a blow. Better even die free, than to live slaves.’”

  White soldiers from Michigan and Detroit had already tasted battle in the South as members of the First Michigan Infantry. Now was the time for black enlistees to test their mettle. In July, with the lingering aftereffects of the riot still an open sore on the city, Governor Austin Blair was authorized by the War Department to raise a regiment of black men to fight for the North. Many of the 1,500 African Americans living in Wayne County had already joined regiments, though they were still viewed as second-class citizens and denied the vote.8 In October the black leaders in Detroit and around the state, including Sojourner Truth, held a meeting at Second Baptist Church, and hundreds of potential soldiers were in the audience, ready and able to become part of the newly formed First Michigan Colored Regiment. Of the 1,500 or so volunteers, one thousand of them had been born in slave states.9 The colored troops from Michigan comprised one of nearly 150 such regiments in the Union Army. Their barracks were located on the city’s lower east side. “The barracks were poorly constructed and during the following winter the men suffered from the cold, lack of good equipment, and sickness from which several died. Negro troops at that time were paid only $7 a month while the white troops received $10. In January 1864, the pay for all troops was changed to the same pay as the white troops received.”10 This action was similar to one taken by the black soldiers of Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth Regiments of Massachusetts, who stacked their rifles in a protest that ultimately brought about the change in pay. There was some resentment about the settlement, which to some seemed to suggest that black soldiers were concerned only about equal pay; on the contrary, one soldier wrote, they were protesting the principle of unequal treatment.11

  By the winter of 1864, nearly 900 black men had enlisted in the regiment that was called Corps d’Afrique by the Detroit Free Press, and they were mustered into military service as the 102nd United States Colored Infantry. They left Detroit in March and saw battle almost immediately in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In South Carolina, the troops, including two of Sojourner Truth’s sons, were consistently brave under fire. On November 30, 1864, a detachment of the regiment consisting of 12 officers and 300 men left Beaufort and joined General Foster’s column at Boyd’s Landing, where they were engaged by Confederate forces. They distinguished themselves most gallantly in battle in the face of a vastly superior army; however, they lost 65 troops with many wounded during the three engagements. During its nineteen months in the field, the regiment lost 10 percent of its troops—about 140 soldiers and 3 officers, none of whom was black.12 The historic Elmwood Cemetery on the city’s east side is the final resting place for many of the casualties of the war. They had served nobly in the great war, whose victory and celebration was muted on April 14 with the assassination of President Lincoln. A river of tears flowed from Detroit’s black community, and the soldiers in the field were no less mournful and distraught by the loss of the president.

  At the war’s conclusion, with the Union triumphant, the regiment mustered out and arrived in Detroit on October 17, 1865, to be paid and disbanded. Its soldiers had fought the good fight, and although they had removed their uniforms, many of them prepared for their next battle for dignity and human rights.

  5

  EARLY YEARS OF THE BLACK CHURCH

  The social, political, and economic bedrock for black Detroiters was the church. It was in the sanctuary, the “loving arms” of the church that they sought refuge from the ravages of the day. Here they could find succor and salvation from the slights of poverty, the insults, and the racism that were so much a part of their daily travails. Two desires are significant to the emergence of the black church in Detroit—the need for spiritual nourishment and for a place to worship free of the white churches’ discrimination.

  On July 7, 1837, Madison Lightfoot, who was among the community leaders in the Blackburn affair, along with Cornelius Mitchell and William Scott, no longer willing to tolerate segregated seating at First Baptist Church, rose from the pews and walked out. Almost a year before in Detroit, Lightfoot and his wife—along with such enlightened communicants as Robert Allen, William Brown, Mr. and Mrs. George French (of Blackburn affair fame), Benjamin Read, the Rev. William C. Monroe, Samuel Robinson, and Richard Evans (who had been shot in the face during the riot in 1833)—had petitioned the state legislature to organize the Society of Second Baptist Church.1

  Seven years after the riot, Detroit, like other northern enclaves, was experiencing a substantial growth in population as more and more blacks fled slavery. The census of 1840 listed two hundred African Americans in the city, and 15 percent of them belonged to Second Baptist Church.2

  At the group’s first meeting, in the home of one of the petitioners, the Rev. William C. Monroe was elected pastor, Lightfoot was chosen as the clerk, and French was elected deacon. By the time they held their third meeting, the state legislature had approved their request, and they decided to begin thinking about building a church. In the meantime, they used a building located on Fort Street, between Beaubien and Saint Antoine streets.3

  The church leaders focused on outreach programs at Second Baptist, particularly an education curriculum for the children and an antislavery committee. By 1842, the day school was open for classes. William Lambert, Robert Banks, Lightfoot, and Benjamin Willoughby, a businessman of impeccable integrity, founded the Colored Vigilant Committee.

  The next two to three years were productive for Second Baptist, especially for such tireless activists as Lightfoot, Lambert, Banks, and Monroe. One or more of them participated in practically every major state convention pertaining to abolition, temperance, or significant church affairs. Within a two-year period, the Rev. Monroe performed more than twenty marriages and officiated at funerals and baptisms. In 1846, he and Lambert left Second Baptist to establish Saint Matthew’s Protestant Episcopal Mission. They moved farther downtown on Saint Antoine and Congress streets, leaving William Newman to lead the Second Baptist flock.4

  The church continued to prosper under the Rev. Samuel H. Davis, who continued many of the programs launched by his predecessors. At the top of his agenda was the antislavery mission, which was complemented by several community programs in social services, education, and cultural activities. In addition, the church joined the Baptist Association for Colored People and later became affiliated with the Canadian Anti-Slavery Baptist Association and the Michigan Baptist Association.5 These alliances were designed to broaden the church’s reach beyond provincial groups and solidify its relations with Canadian activists. Moreover, the connection to Canadian Baptists also gave them ties to white ministers and churches of the same faith, something that was inconceivable in Detroit.

  In 1854, a fire of undisclosed origin burned Second Baptist to the ground. Church services moved to an old schoolhouse that needed major repairs. It took three years before a new church was built, with the Rev. William Troy as the church’s fifth pastor.6

  With Monroe and Lambert at the helm, the newly formed Saint Matthew’s congregation quickly surpassed Second Baptist and the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, becoming the most influential black church in Detroit.7 This influence, however, was short-live
d, and with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Saint Matthew’s lost most of its congregation, the majority seeking refuge in Canada. Not until the 1880s would Saint Matthew’s regain its former prestige.

  The Bethel Church was established in 1841, having begun under the leadership of the Rev. Edward Heart two years earlier as the Colored Methodist Church. From its inception and throughout the century, Bethel AME had the largest black congregation in the city.8 Bethel, whose congregation had been meeting at various locations, including the city’s Common Council office, was able to construct its first church at a cost of $2,000, and was officially dedicated on September 19, 1847.

  The churches often competed to host major abolitionists. In 1858, the presence of radical abolitionist the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet guaranteed a standing-room-only audience at Second Baptist.

  Garnet, with his usual oratorical brilliance, regaled the crowd with a story about an incident in which a man, John Broady, had enticed two brothers into the hands of slave catchers. Broady convinced the brothers, John and James Williams, both escaped slaves, to return to Kentucky with him to liberate other members of their family. The brothers were trapped, and for the betrayal Broady pocketed $300 in gold. When a group of black men in Cincinnati heard about the incident, they pursued Broady, captured him, tried him in their “kangaroo court,” and save for the intervention of Garnet, would have killed him. Instead, he was punished with three hundred blows with a paddle for his reprehensible act. Broady went to the police with his complaint and pressed charges against his assailants; they fled from town. In addition, he promised to tell everything he knew about the Underground Railroad.