While I was growing up, my parents would take weekend afternoon drives and we would visit relatives. My parents had moved to Flint from Ohio and yet we seemed to have myriads of relatives there, and yet none of then were from Flint either. I was born in Ohio. We moved from Ohio to Michigan when I was three years old. My grandparents on both sides lived in Ohio and had for many years. My mother’s family line, Holsinger and Russell, had lived in Ohio for many generations. My Grandma and Grandpa Adams were born in Dunklin County located in the Missouri “boot heel.” My father was born in that same county. All of his ancestors were born within a hundred mile radius in Southeast Missouri. My Grandma and Grandpa Adams moved from Southeast Missouri to Ohio during WWII. So, with the everyone coming form Missouri and Ohio, I couldn’t figure out how we had so many relatives in Flint. Well, during the 1920s and 1940s, I had relatives leave Southeast Missouri and make their way to Flint. They weren't alone. There was a fairly large migration from there to Flint One source of the immigration movement to Flint stated: “the migration was mainly from the Missouri "Bootheel" and neighboring parts of Arkansas and Tennessee and the people were white. It began during the mid-1920s, declined during the Depression, then picked up during World War II. They worked primarily at Fisher Body and Chevrolet. The area called "Little Missouri," centered on Bristol and Fenton Roads.” Another source stated: “the white ghetto known as ‘Little Missouri’ was located on the southwest side of Flint, Michigan.” My extended family was part of that southern migration. My great-grandfather, Walter “Bert” Kinsey came from the town of Campbell in Southern Missouri to work in the factories of Flint. Bert was a bit a drifter. He moved from job-to-job in Campbell, Missouri. He could have worked clear-cutting the Cyprus forests of Southeast Missouri as his father had done, or he could have joined the legions of sharecroppers in the region. Bert’s eldest son, Oswald called 'Little Tobe," preceded him in his journey to Flint. Tobe secured work in Flint’s Fisher Body factory in the Fall 1925. His father Bert, and Tobe's younger brother, Marvin, came to Flint the following year and worked at Chevrolet plant. Bert ended up returning to Campbell after working two years in Flint. My grandmother, Mildred Kinsey Adams, shared with me the following about her father and his trip to work in Flint: “When I was about 13-14 years old, papa left Campbell [Missouri] and went to Flint [Michigan] to work for the auto factory. He had worked in Flint the previous summer, and then came home. He had a difficult time finding work in Campbell, so he did odd jobs. This time, he was leaving and did not have plans to come back. Mama was fretting that he would leave for good. He prepared his carpentry tools and packed some clothes. I was laying on the floor with a terrible headache. Papa said he had to run and catch the train and that he was going to stay with Tobe, my brother, in Flint, and that everything would be alright. Mama pleaded that he stay, and he said, ‘Hush now – I’m going,” and then he walked out the front screen door. That was the last time I saw him for a couple of years. Mama told me to run next door to use the neighbor’s telephone to call the farm where my sisters, Maudie and Ada, were picking cotton. She wanted them to run to the train tracks so they could wave goodbye to papa. Some years later they told me they got the message just as the train had passed. They didn’t see papa, but they did see groups of men sitting in, and on top of, the boxcars. Mildred continues, When Papa left for Michigan, Mama wondered if he would ever come back. Maudie said Mama suspected that papa had a mistress or many mistresses while he was in Michigan. I’m sure he did. Papa stayed in Flint for a little over two years. While there, he sent money home only twice. Once he sent $30, and another time he sent $20. In the meantime, Mama got jobs cleaning people’s houses and doing laundry. Mama was always full of worries.” Bert’s sisters, Ada Kinsey Beaver and Myrtle Kinsey Tompkins, with her their husbands, Santa Tompkins and Bill Beaver, all moved to Flint. Myrtle and Santa moved to Flint in 1930, and Ada and her husband, Bill Beaver moved there around 1936. Ada worked for the power company headquartered in Flint and retired in 1961. Both Myrtle and Ada lived and worked in Flint the rest of their lives. In 2007, I was perusing through the archives at the University of Michigan and I discovered that Santa was involved in the famous Fisher Body sit-down strike of 1936 and 1937, which gave birth to the United Auto Workers (UAW) Union. The Associated Press carried the following article published on January 9, 1937 on the Flint strike: “Santa Tompkins, who said he was an employee of the Fisher Body plant at Flint, but was not a striker, told police he was hit on the head when he jumped on an automobile from which, an amplifier carried appeals for union support.” Santa's own account of incident appeard in the Flint Journal on Jaunary 9, 1937: We visited Santa a few times during the 1970s. He was in his 90s and living in an older home in the hills just north of downtown Flint near Hurley Hospital. His home was encircled about by flower gardens. Santa’s daughter, Marie, and her husband, Samuel Smith, who went be the name "Fed," lived nearby. Fed worked many years at the Buick plant. He was instrumental in helping my dad get his firtst job in Flint delivering beverages. We would occasionally visit Fed and Marie, and Fed would greet us at the door and look at my brother and me and say, “How’s my little Democrats?” As a child, I had no idea what a Democrat was, or what it meant. In fact, for a long time I thought he would look at us and say “How’s dem rats?” It was some years later before I caught on that he was talking about a political party. All of our distant Missouri relatives were Democrats through and through. So, my Grandma Adams had two aunts and several cousins living in Flint. In earlier years, her father and two brothers had worked in Flint. My Grandpa Adams had two brothers, Harold and Winifred, and a sister, Maxine, who also moved from the Southeast Missouri town of Campbell to Flint, Interestingly, there was a small part of Flint’s south side known as “Little Missouri.” They didn;t settle there, but it does demonstrte the concentration of Missourians in the area. Harold moved to Flint in 1944 and secured a job in one of the General Motors plants. Harold met his wife, Katy, on a bus in 1945. They were on the same bus as she would come home from working at the A.C. Spark Plug Factory. They married in 1946. They had six kids and lived in Flint the rest of their lives. After they were married he secured a job in 1947 with Boutel Trucking, an automobile transport company that had contracts with all GM factories in Flint. He remained with them for 32 years. B.T. Tompkins mentioned in the photo above also worked for Boutel. B.T. began working for them in 1936. He later moved south to Pontiac to work for Ponatiac Motors, anothe GM subsidiary. Winifred moved to Flint in 1945. He served a stint in the army, where he was stationed in Trinidad during World War II. His wife, Gemma, was from Trinidad. Winifred landed a job with Buick in 1950 as machine repairman where he worked for the next 30 years. Harold and Winifred had a sister, Maxine and her husband who also worked in Flint, but they didn't stay. A 1945 Flint City Directory shows Maxine working as a guard at the Flint Fisher Body Plant which manufactured tanks during the war. Flint was attractive during WW II because of the abundant work. Both the Buick and Fisher Body factories operated around the clock to support the war effort. City Directories from 1950 and 55 show them residing in the Kearsley Park are of Flint. My Great-Grandpa Adams’ sister, Mattie, also moved to Flint. She and her husband, John Arthur James, moved to Flint in 1941 to work at one of Flint's factories. My Grandpa also had an uncle, Omer Adams and his wife Corrine, who also lived in Flint in the 1920s and 30s. They later moved south of Flint to Pontiac. Omer worked for years at Pontiac Motors. So, my Grandpa Adams had three siblings and an aunt living in Flint, and an uncle just south in Pontiac. He also had some cousins and numerous nieces and nephews. He also had another aunt, Agnes, and her husband Dewey Skidmore living and working in Detroit. Although, they didn’t live in Flint, they were at every family gathering. As a child, I remember attending extended family gatherings at Uncle Harold’s house. Often, we would go shoot a game of pool in their basement or play baseball in their backyard. The men gathered in the living room, smoking pipes and cigarettes as they talked about Missouri, the union, the factories, their foremen, and about politics. The conversation often condemned Republicans while extolling the virtues of all Democrats. When my grandparents came to visit they would often stay with Harold. It was amusing to watch my grandparents get together with his brothers and their wives. There was a lot of banter, debates, political opinions, and arguments that were often punctuated by laughter. L to R: Winifred, Maxine, Talmadge, Harold, Vernon and Harlin Adams. Winifred and Harold moved to Flint and remained there the rest of their lives. Maxine worked in Flint during WW II. It is possible Talmadge made it to Flint to work, but I just don't know. Talmadge was a drifter much of his life making his way around to stay with relatives for short periods of time. Vernon farmed in Dunklin County his entire life. My grandfather, Harlin farmed most of his years near Springfield, Ohio. For years, I had a hard connecting all of these people to each other, and how they were related to us. Or, for that matter why they were all in Flint when none of them were from the area. It just seemed like we had concourses of distant relatives in the area. It was years later, while doing family history that I could finally connected how I was related to all of them.
4 Comments
In 1963, my family moved from Ohio to the area of Flint, Michigan. In 1965, we bought a 700 square foot, two bedroom, one bath home at 525 West Russell Avenue. It was located in the north part of Flint. There were two homes just west of us. Both of the homes were vacant the entire time we lived there. One was strewn with graffiti, and the home other was boarded up. All of these homes, including my childhood home are now all gone. To the east of us was a two-story house with a well-manicured lawn. It was the best cared for home in the neighborhood. The black family of six who lived there kept primarily to themselves, at least when it came to interacting with neighbors. I can remember every Sunday seeing the adults and teenagers dressed up in their beautiful choir robes as they headed to church. They looked so diginified. All my life, I considered Flint a racially integrated city. Then, some years ago I came across a book, Demolition Means Progress: Flint Michigan and the Fate of the American Metropolis. In the book, author Andrew Highsmith wrote: “When the new southern migrants arrived in Flint, they discovered a rigidly segregated and poorly housed city that afforded black people few residential options. With a residential segregation index that reached 94.4 in 1960, Flint ranked as one of the most racially divided cities in the country—more segregated, in fact, than the cities of Atlanta, New York, Memphis, Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, Little Rock, Los Angeles, Charlotte, Boston, and Birmingham.” When I read this portion of the book, I was sure that Highsmith was wrong. I lived in an integrated neighborhood and attended a mixed race school in Flint, so I was just sure he had to be wrong. Besides, in the book, The Watsons go to Birmingham-1963, a reader for most 5th and 6th graders, the fictitious Watson family lived in Flint and they made a trip to visit family in Birmingham, Alabama. The Watson children seemed a little dismayed by the bigotry and racism in the south. I thought to myself, why should the Watson kids be dismayed, if according to Highsmith, Flint was more racially divided than Birmingham? My parents moved to Flint because jobs were plentiful. It was the birthplace of General Motors and home to Chevrolet, Buick, Fisher Body and AC Spark Plug factories. Just years before, Flint surpassed the 200,000 mark on population, making it the second largest city in Michigan. We were part of a boom city. My dad also had boodles of extended relatives in Flint who came from the Missouri “bootheel” looking for work in the 1920s and 40s. We were surrounded by kin, even if I didn’t know how we were all related. My family was a part of a much larger migration to Flint. Richard Manning wrote in Harpers magazine, “A mass migration from the south brought a volatile mix of hillbillies and black people. Between 1950 and 1960, Flint added about 13,000 white people, many of them Southerners, and the black population doubled. GM helped keep the groups apart by institutionalizing segregation. Real-estate transactions included specific language forbidding sales to African Americans in most neighborhoods. Banks redlined. Schools gerrymandered boundaries as rigidly as Jim Crow.” We lived just east of Dupont Street, and just south of Carpenter Road. A report produced in the late 1950s described this area: “On the city‘s far north side, just south of the Carpenter Road boundary that separated Flint from Mt. Morris and Genesee Townships, surveyors found a low grade peripheral white section, started as a series of cheap subdivisions and inadequately provided with such urban facilities as sewers, sidewalks and paving. Residents of this area are relatively uneducated. The area‘s housing stock contained many temporary, jerry-built homes of flimsy construction.” Yeah, that sounded like our neighborhood, except for "white peripheral section." This report came out in the late 1950s. We moved there in 1965, and it was an integrated neighborhood by the time we moved in. But, that had been fairly recent change, and it was continuing to evolve even as we settled into the neighborhood. I looked at the census records for 1950, 1960, and 1970 to try and understand what happened and why the neighborhood we moved into seemed to be different from the rest of Flint. Here are the demographics I found for our neighborhood (tracts 1 and 2): 1950 census: population - 9,552, less than 1 percent black 1960 census: population -15,529, 33 percent black 1970 census: population -14,891, 60 percent black In the 1960s, the combined effects of racial segregation, discriminatory housing pracfices, black population increases, and neighborhood overcrowding, pushed thousands of blacks out of the poor township adjacent to the Buick factory, to seek out homes in the more integrated sections of the city. In the Northside of Flint, the racial transitions occurred rapidly. I decided to look at the demographics for other Flint tracts just east and west of us. The area west of us was 98 percent white. The area just east of us was 94 percent black. I thought, how could that be? The distance between these areas was not much more than a mile. How could there be that much racial difference from areas located so closely together? I then located a 1970 demography study of Flint that visually represented what I was finding in the census records: Our neighborhood was at the top of the map, and it fell into the 30-79.9 percent range of the black population. There were some other areas of integration, but the areas at the bottom right were sparsely populated townships. Visually, Flint was a segregated city. I came across an article where the author posted his experience of growing up in Flint. He grew up only a mile west of me around the same time, and he shared, “Despite Flint's being home to a significant number of African-Americans, I didn't know a one until I went to college.” My experience was quite to the contrary. The ethnic make-up of our neighborhood (tracts 1 and 2) was substantially different from the areas around us. In a highly segregated city, we lived in the heart of an integrated area. I wondered: Was it possible that there were three Flints – white Flint, black Flint, and this small sliver of land we lived on – integrated Flint? Highsmith further added in his book: "The City of Flint and Flint School system tried hard to keep the city and schools segregated. In the northwest side of Flint, school administrators often turned to temporary structures known as “primary units” to preserve segregation in the face of racial transition and student enrollment increases. Unlike the temporary classrooms operated by many other boards of education in the United States during the postwar era, which often abutted permanent school buildings, Flint’s primary units sat in residential neighborhoods across the city." Highsmith and Erickson authored a journal article entitled, "Segregation as Splitting, Segregation as Joining, Housing and the Many Modes of Jim Crow." They wrote: "As black families from Flint’s overcrowded ghettos moved into white neighborhoods the board of education worked feverishly, if less successfully, to maintain segregation. For the elementary schools, the School Board maintained segregation by assigning African-American students to the primary “units,” thus maintaining an all-white population at the main schools of Gundry and Jefferson. Primary units made it possible to maintain such strict forms of segregation even when traditional school buildings reached their capacity." I attended school in the Gundry Elementary “primary units” during my first grade (picture left), second grade, and third grade years. I didn’t know how I got assigned to the “units” as we called them. Obviously blacks were assigned to the units, but how were whites selected to attend the units? Was it a lottery? Was it the proximity of our homes to neighboring black-occupied homes? I didn’t know, and it was puzzling. There were kids on my street who walked past my house on their way to the main school, while I attended the units. In actuality, Gundry’s main school was only a four minute walk from my house, whereas the units, located two blocks to the south, required an 8 minute walk, more than twice the distance from my home. Even more puzzling were the groups of kids, who were my age, who walked past the units to attend the main school, which was obviously further away for them. Years later, one of my relatives said the units were reserved for blacks and for the “white trash.” He continued, Why else would they have built them in North Flint? Below is a picture of my first, second and third grade units on Home Avenue. These pictures were taken in 2020. Since I had attended school, they have gone from being school units, to falling into disrepair, to abandonment, and now serve as a neighborhood church. I no longer have class pictures of classmates, but in each “unit” I attended, whites were clearly a minority. If Gundry main was reserved for whites, and our neighborhood was sixty percent black, the units had an even larger percentage of black students. Flint Schools were still segregating, but for me, it was integration. And, that was okay. It didn’t really matter to me since I had plenty of friends at school. My friends Jerry, Maurice, and Bobby attended the units. I guess that’s how we all became friends. I didn't know where they all lived because we were spread throughout the neighboring streets. Fortunately, my mother kept all my report cards for every school year. I dug around looking for some sort of indication on how relationships might have been in the Gundry units. I could find only one related comment, listed under “Teacher’s Observations” in the 3rd term of my 1st grade year. It said, “Eddie has many kinds of friends.” I did have fun with my friends, but it was apparent that some other kids were uncomfortable with the mix at school. On the blacktop play area there was a division. A group of black kids played on one end, a very small group of white kids huddled on the other end, and the rest of us were in the middle playing and kicking a ball around the playground. Simply, we were out there to have fun and to play. The strife in Flint wasn’t just racial. There was also a class struggle. The Flint River dissecting the center of the city was a very real barrier. Whites dominated the areas south of the river. I found a quote from the Flint Colorline Project that captured some of my feelings: “When I was a kid, if you were from the North Side you were a nothin‘. If you were on the South Side, you were somethin‘. It was kind of a class struggle between the North Side and the South Side.” Police made frequents trips to our neighborhood. Sometimes, it was for domestic violence, sometimes for a home break-in or vandalism, but more often it involved fights or altercations between neighbors, racial or otherwise. Racial tensions were always there, but they escalated in July 1967. In Detroit, 45 miles to the south racial riots broke out. The rioting carried into Flint. Hundreds of black protesters assembled at the corner of Leith and Saginaw Streets, a couple of miles from our home. The violence spread through Flint‘s North End, where angry protesters vented their accumulating frustrations against police brutality, housing segregation, and racial inequality. During the night, a number of rioters threw stones at cars, smashed windows, looted several commercial establishments, and firebombed at least seventeen stores and homes. The next day, Governor George Romney declared a state of emergency in Flint. The protestors and rioters in Flint were demanding access to better housing in the city. National Guardsmen came to our neighborhood. They didn’t stay long, but we were told to stay indoors until order was restored. The discriminatory housing situation became a referendum. On February 20, 1968, the referendum passed, but just barely. This achievement captured national attention for Flint because it was the first time the residents of a major city in America had approved an open housing referendum. The vote was close. With over 40,000 votes cast, the measure passed by only 30 votes. It was a victory for eliminating discriminatory housing practices, but it also showed the polarization on the issue for residents of the city. I’m sure, given the opportunity, that my mother voted for the referendum. I know my father didn’t vote for it. Less than two months later, Martin Luther King was assassinated. The next day demonstrations occurred at Northwestern High School, a mile from our home, and the school was closed. Riots began at Northern High School. We were sent home from school, and word spread quickly that blacks were targeting and beating whites for retribution. We were told to stay off the streets. The Flint Journal reported 13 assaults in the North end of Flint that day. The following month, George Wallace came to Flint, campaigning as an independent candidate for President. This is the same George Wallace who five years earlier as governor blocked the door of the University of Alabama campus to keep two black students from enrolling. In his gubernatorial inaugural address, he stated, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Not surprisingly, a 1970 study by the American Association of Geographers entitled, “The Spatial Response of Negroes and Whites toward Open Housing: The Flint Referendum,” found, ”that the lower income white residents of Flint reflected similar attitudes in their votes against open housing, and for George Wallace.” According to writer Joe Allen, “Wallace didn’t have to dig too deep to find the soil rich in racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and plain old parochialism. These lower-middle-class and working-class voters yearned for someone like Wallace to express their anger. . . .” Four years later in 1972, Wallace again pulled big crowds with his appearance in Flint. He also won the Democratic primary in Michigan. When we first moved to Flint, my mother enrolled my brother and me into swim lessons. For the next three years, we were spent a lot of time in lessons, practices and competitions. Right there with us was Patty. She began the same time as us, and her abilities pushed us to do better. Patty would eventually go on to set high school swim records. We would swim, and our mothers would sit side-by-side and visit. It became a regular part of our routines. Every once in a while, a rude comment would be directed at us as we would splash around or have fun in the pool. I guess we got used to it. By 1969, we had been swimming together for three years. As we walked out of the pool, we were laughing and nudging each other. Some teenagers, all white, walked by and shouted some racial expletives at us, and then spit at our feet. I’m sure our mothers some yards behind us saw what happened, because they quickly moved us along to the car. It's been hard for me to understand the source of the bigotry and racial division? Was it engrained in the Southern influence that came with people as they moved to Flint? Was it simply a product of the time when discrimninatory practices werre accepted? Segregation in schools was legal until the mid 1950s and ended with Brown v. Board of Education. And yet, the Flint School Board still found a workaround after the Supreme Court decision to create a de-facto segregation in the schools. It was quite evident that we lived in a lower-income neighborhood. Likewise, I suspected the education level was also low. I looked again at the census and found that only 35 percent of the adults in our neighborhood had finished high school, and that the median grade level completed was the 10th grade. But, still there had to be something more. It felt to me as if we lived in a bully culture in Flint. Walking to and from school had its challenges. I got jumped plenty of times after school. Some of them were racially motivated, but most were not. I was able run from some of the confrontations. With most of them, I talked my way out of the difficulty. And, for some situations, my only option was to fight. By the summer of 1969, our house was up for sale. My mother told me many years later, that they chose the home and neighborhood in Flint because it was the best they could do, and it was all they could afford. But, she added, living in Flint wasn’t easy. After four years, my parents decided it was time to look elsewhere for a home. When my parents went house hunting, I was happy to join them in the hosue hunting search. We eventually bought a home in the small town of Holly, located 18 miles south of Flint. It wasn’t long after the passage of the housing referendum, that “white flight” commenced from Flint. White families moved to the suburbs and to the small towns surrounding Flint. I guess we were a part of that statistic. I attended Gundry’s “units’ for three years. I don’t know if the separate school units were ever successful in accomplishing the aims of the Flint School Board. But, the School Board was certainly good at selling the advantages of the idea to the public: According to Highsmith: “Because primary units allowed the board to maintain pupil separation without shifting attendance boundaries, they were also useful tools for upholding the color line. . . Primary units made it possible to maintain such strict forms of segregation even when traditional school buildings reached their capacity.” The school board created 41 separate “units” in North Flint. I’m unaware if the other three elementary schools had wholly segregated units, or if they had some integration like the Gundry units I attended. In some small way, there were a group of us, maybe several hundred in Flint, who had an integrated school experience, while the rest of the city was still holding onto the last gasps of segregation. Left to ourselves, we got along fine at school and on the playground, In fact, better than fine. We were friends. It was when we all left at the end of the school day that bigotry, racism, and cultural norms just seemed to complicate everything. Even though we moved, racial tensions were still around us. In Pontiac, 18 miles to the south, a Federal judge found that Pontiac had "intentionally perpetuated segregation," and he ordered the schools to be integrated by Fall. That order involved the controversial move of "busing" students across town. Six months later, In August of 1970, just days before school began, 10 Pontiac School buses exploded. It was found that dynamite had been affixed to the gas tanks of the buses. In total, 13 buses were damaged. The racial issues and tension permeated the communities and schools around us throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, both Pontiac and Flint still deal with the legacy of actions and decisons made during these years. Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Andrew Highsmith and his scholarship which has enhanced my understanding, and provided context to my childhood growing up in Flint.
I took a return trip to Flint, Michigan on March 20, 2013. This was only the second time I had been in the area since I left in 1980. My parents and brothers moved away in 1981, so there really wasn’t any reason to return. I say return to Flint because I lived there as a child. My dad worked in Flint. My parents shopped in Flint. We attended church in Flint for many years. I delivered the Flint Journal as news carrier, worked in Flint as a teenager, and we hung out in Flint. I have watched the demise of Flint from a distance with a strange fascination as Detroit and Flint worked their way up lists as the most dangerous, most violent, highest illiteracy, most impoverished, and the lowest cost real estate market. I watched with novel curiosity. It has been intriguing and a bit sad. I grew-up in Flint and in Holly, a town located 15 miles away, halfway between Flint and Pontiac. I went to church in Flint and Pontiac. I worked in Flint and Pontiac. We gathered with relatives in Flint. We shopped in Flint. We played in Flint at bowling alleys, movie theaters and video arcades. We listened to radio stations from Flint, and I was paperboy for the Flint Journal. I voraciously read the paper every day as I delivered it. It helped keep me warm during the cold Michigan winters, and I couldn’t wait to get back home at the end of the route to check-out baseball box scores. During my high school years I attended football and basketball games in Flint. On occasion, we cruised the streets in Flint. So, when I had a chance to return to Michigan, I headed to Flint. I listened to the radio as I drove U.S. 23 from Ann Arbor to Flint. The main story was about the death of 24 year-old Matthew Dewayne Williams. He had just become Flint’s 67th homicide victim of 2012. A new record for a place used to setting undesirable records. Williams languished in and out of hospitals for four months after being shot at a BP gas station on Clio Road just south Pierson road. Not only did I know the corner well, I was heading to that area. Williams grew up on Flint's north side and attended Flint Northwestern High School. As a child I swam at Northwester’s pool. The news story on the radio ended with the mayor stating, “Gun violence in Flint is at a historic high.” The BP gas station where Williams was shot is located at the edge of “Merrill Hood.” This is the most dangerous neighborhood, located in America’s most violent city. It is my childhood neighborhood. It’s runs between Pasadena and Sonny Avenues on the north and south, and between Dupont and Clio Streets on the east and west. I grew up a block east of Dupont Street. It now has one of the highest per capita rates of deadly crime in the county. It wasn’t that bad when I was growing up, but I could see it coming. It’s hard to describe the area. But the Flint Journal seemed to capture the essence of the Hood: “It’s a neighborhood where the vacant houses are too numerous to count, many with knee-high grass, shattered windows and busted-in doors. Thirty percent of families live below the poverty level in the Merrill neighborhood. It’s where a pizza deliveryman was shot and killed in a robbery earlier this year. And where children as young as 10 see all the violence as no big deal, because, well, it happens so often they’re immune to it. Here, even the neighborhood church locks its doors during the day when people are inside.” Williams wasn’t the only person shot that day in Flint. One hour earlier in the same neighborhood another man was shot and killed in his car outside a liquor store. In actuality, local police reported there were three shootings in one hour, during one day in Flint. Flint ranked as the most violent city in America in 2013. It had been ranked high for violence for years. Business Insider, noted, “We’ve been ranking America’s most dangerous cities for several years, and there’s one city that keeps making the top of the list — Flint, Michigan.” In 2013, MSNBC named Flint one the top five most miserable cities in America. I left the freeway and drove down Clio Road toward Carpenter Road. The streets had a vague familiarity. It’s been over 40 years since I lived here and the neighborhood had changed. I turned left on Carpenter Road, a main east-west road on the North end, and made my way up to Dupont Street. One block over was my childhood home at 525 West Russell. The home was gone. So were the two homes just west of our house. I wasn’t surprised since both homes were abandoned throughout my childhood. My parents cautioned my brother and me to never go into these homes. We didn’t listen. We wandered over a couple of times. There was graffiti and symbols spray painted on the interior walls, and large holes here and there with insulation poking through. Cigarette butts and bottles were strewn around the floor. In the daytime, the houses were just empty shells. At night they were downright scary. My bedroom window faced west toward the homes and I could look out at night and see lights moving around in them. Now, both homes were gone. In fact, there was no evidence that homes were ever there. In the 1960s Russell Street ended in front of the houses. Now there wasn’t even a street there anymore. I looked across the street and the two home there were gone too. A large vacant lot now lay where they once stood. Many homes were gone, vacant, or burnt out. Every once in awhile there was a driveway leading up to a lot with no home. One block east of my childhood home, I turned south. I saw a two-story home with where the upper story with charred around the windows. One block away to the south was another two-story home of the same architectural design. It too, had been burnt out. It was completely empty with black smoke residue around the windows and doors. The sidewalk running along the right side of the street was pulverized rubble. Weeds were growing through the fine rubble. On the street ahead, I could see spray painted arrows running up the street with concentric circles in the distance. As I got closer, I saw that the manhole cover in the center of the street was missing. The circles identified where it had once been. I later learned that people were stealing manhole covers and were selling them for scrap metal. I turned west and drove down the street behind my childhood home. I was looking for my school. I was struck by some of the homes with their small well-kept yards, freshly painted white fences and brightly painted facades, side-by-side with abandoned structures. The hearty homeowners impressed me by their desire to carve out a bit of civilized society in a place so ridden with blight and crime. I looked ahead and could see the three prefabricated buildings where I attended my first three years of grade school. These “units” were built blocks away from the main school, Gundry elementary. My parents once told me that these neighborhood school units were part of a great social education experiment in the 1960s. I’m not sure if it was true, but it sounded good. My first and second grade classroom buildings were abandoned with flaking paint. My third grade classroom was now a small white community church. I turned back onto Dupont and drove back toward Carpenter Road. I stopped at the location of Germer’s Drug Store. It was the closest store to us, and it was a place my parents shopped when they need a last minute items. As I sat looking at Germers both the experience and the feeling came back to me. It was no longer a drug store. It was now a liquor store with bars on the windows. The parking lot was crumbled and cracked. Time to move on. I drove down the road and stopped at the stoplight at Carpenter Road and Martin Luther King drive. The light was red for my direction and green for cross traffic, only there was no cross traffic. One week earlier at this location a man was shot in a drive-by shooting. He was sitting in his car waiting for the light to change. A car going the opposite way stopped suddenly next to the man. The window rolled down, and a man pulled out a gun, and shot the unsuspecting driver twice. He was hit in the shoulder and in the side. He was rushed to McLaren Hospital. Fortunately, for the driver the shots were not fatal. The light turned green and I continued down Carpenter Road with vacant houses running down both sides of the road. I drove east until I reached Saginaw Street, the main north-south thoroughfare through downtown Flint. I made it downtown just before 5:00 pm. All was quiet. The buildings were still there. Some were boarded up, others were empty, and still others looked the same. I looked around. There were no people. No cars. No movement. There wasn’t anybody walking in or out of any of the buildings. Occasionally, a single car drove by. I had seen this before. It was a movie. Was it Omega Man with Charlton Heston, or was it I am Legend with Will Smith? It really didn’t matter, both movies based on the same book. Those were movies, but here it was in real life. As children, my mother took us boys downtown every summer for sidewalk sales. Some streets were cordoned off between the stores to accommodate shoppers. The streets and sidewalks were choked with a mass of people. My mother held tight to my hand as I held my brothers hand. She would reach in with one arm and grab handful of pants and have us pull them over the pants we wearing. Women jostled each other as they pushed toward the tables of clothing. We would buy some clothes for back-to-school and then my mother took us to lunch at the downtown Kresge’s with its long lunch counter and eating area. The mass of people was overwhelming to me. It was a thriving, vibrant city. It was Flint, the second largest city in the state. It had all the promise to be a great city of the future. Now as I drove the empty streets, I felt alone. I turned and headed toward the Buick freeway. I looked at the dashboard clock as I merged onto the Buick Freeway. 5:12 p.m. As I accelerated onto the freeway, there was nothing to merge into it. There were no cars. It was rush hour in downtown Flint and there were no cars! I tried to balance my cell phone on top on the steering wheel so I could get a picture of rush hour with no cars. I drove a couple of miles. No traffic, no cars. I wondered for a moment if I was on a closed road. I looked in my rearview and I saw a car in the distance behind me. I drove to the LDS Flint Ward Chapel. This was one of my purposes in coming to Flint. I came to talk to local youth about going to college. I was quite a bit early. Fortunately, the building was open and it gave me the chance to talk to local church members before meetings. I met the young men’s president, who was a school teacher by profession. He had been a teacher in Flint but now he taught outside if the city. He had once lived in Flint, just north of downtown. Years earlier, they had bought a lovely home for a great price. He felt, that generally the neighborhood was good, but their home had been broken into three times. Each time valuable property was left untouched. No TV’s, appliances or electronics were ever taken. I was astounded. “What did they take?” I asked. “Food,” he responded, “They stole food.” I thought, “Oh my gosh, these people are hungry.” I briefly spoke to the youth group. I found a couple of them were interested in college. There were others who hadn’t even thought of it. I tried to hurry through my presentation because I knew that leaders wanted to get the youth out of the city before it got dark. I thanked them and drove back to the Freeway. I drove south. I knew about this trip a few weeks in advance. I have second cousins still living in the Flint area. I thought many times of trying to contact them. I should have tried, but I didn’t. A few miles down the road I got off the freeway and drove east toward Dort Highway. I knew this area well. My father and brother had both worked on Dort Highway, although at different times. I worked a mile west of Dort. I looked for the places where we all worked. I couldn’t find them. I looked for the old Eastside Buick dealership where my father worked. I couldn’t find it. Many of the buildings along Dort were empty and indistinguishable. My brother worked in the “Small Mall” near the AC Plant. I thought I saw it, but the potholes in the road were so bad I spent more time watching the road than I did looking for buildings. I was going to turn left on Bristol Road to look for the Flint Pool and Patio store I once managed, but I felt the impression that it was time to make my way back to the Buick Freeway. It was getting dark and I had concerns for the large potholes. I didn’t want to get stranded in this neighborhood in the dark. It was time to leave. I turned south on the freeway and I was alone again. Here was a beautiful four-lane freeway and no one was on it. This freeway was built when I was teenager. It was built for the future. Now here I was in the future and the freeway was empty. It was surreal.
I continued south down the freeway and I saw the Chevy Truck plant straight ahead. It was a familiar and memorable sight, and it was still operating! It actually warmed my heart as I saw something just as it had looked 30 years ago. Even better, there was a factory still operating in Flint. The streets of Flint were vaguely familiar, but the city had changed. The Buick plant was closed. Actually, it was gone. There was now just a big empty space where it had once been. There were trees and shrubs growing through the cracks of the old parking lot. The AC plant was closed. The Fisher Body plant was closed. The other Fisher Body plant was closed. The auto industry had left Flint, the birthplace of General Motors. I continued south on the Buick Freeway until it intersected with I-75 and I took the south interchange. It was now dark. About mile south of Bristol Road the freeway split, I-75 toward Detroit, and U.S. 23 to Ann Arbor. I could see the lights of Flint behind me in my rearview mirror. My family moved from the area of Springfield Ohio to Flint Michigan. Well, the Flint Michigan area. My dad had a job in Flint and we moved to a town just north of Flint called Clio. I was three years old, so I don't remember moving there. We lived upstairs of an old farmhouse, two blocks behind downtown Clio. I have few memories of the place. I do remember walking with my mother to a train station that was converted into a laundromat. It was two blocks from our house and it seemed like we spent a fair amount of time there. I do remember coming back from grocery shopping and my Mom turned on a stove burner while she and my dad unloaded the car. Dave pulled over a chair and climbed up on the stove. I pulled him off before he got to the burner. There was a nice older woman who lived downstairs. Her name was Mrs. Bus and she was our landlady. I recall her watching Dave and I play in the yard. My Mom would take us and walk around downtown. We would walk into a pharmacy which had a soda fountain, candy and warm nuts. She would buy a small package of nuts for us to eat as we walked around town. One image has stuck in mind for years. It was beautiful summer day and we walked downtown to the Pharmacy. aWe bought a bag of nuts we walked through a park. It seemed like the most beautiful place I had ever seen. There was a stream, bridges and large trees. The grass was perfectly manicured. At least this is the way I remembered it all. I revisited the park many years later and it really did match my memory. A picture of the park below. It was September 1965 and I started kindergarten in Clio. We moved the following month to the north part of Flint.
|
Flint MichiganEd Adams Archives
March 2021
Categories |