For Black History Month insight, two major Saginaw sources are available at Hoyt Library.
- “Black Presence in Saginaw, Michigan: 1855-1900,” by Dr. Roosevelt S. Ruffin.
- “Voices in Transition: African American Migration to Saginaw, Michigan: 1920-1960,” by Dr. Willie E. McKether.
Both authors are graduates of Saginaw High School.
Ruffin, who passed away in 1992, was a Michigan State University product who served as principal of the former North Middle School. He also was an advocate for health care and assorted worthy causes, and he volunteered as a local historian. He devoted hundreds of volunteer hours to his review of Saginaw’s late 19th century, which begins with the Goodridge Brothers photographers and extends into African Americans in the lumberjack era, including William G. Atwood.
McKether is chancellor at Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University, following his tenure as the University of Toledo’s vice-president for diversity and inclusion. His five-year project is more ambitious, with more than 500 pages and with audio tapes of nearly 100 interviews, because it comprises his doctoral thesis for his PhD from Wayne State University.
Both works, published by Ruffin in 1978 and by McKether in 2006, are preserved in Hoyt’s third-floor confines for history and genealogy studies. Advance calls are requested for viewing, (989) 755-9827.
Ruffin covers a late 19th century era in which the black population held steady near only about 300. The presence was so low, in the range of 1 percent, that whites as a group did not feel overly challenged, and the handful of black families established homes on both sides of the river.
McKether picks up the story during the economic boom of the 1920s, when General Motors began recruiting labor from the southern states for work in Saginaw’s expanding foundries. Recruits arrive in trainloads on Potter Street, and now resistance grows among major segments of the white populus. The first step toward racist repression is housing, and the first red line is the railroad yard, keeping blacks squeezed north of the tracks..
A petition to the City Council states, “We, the undersigned citizens and taxpayers of Saginaw, do hereby petition your honorable body for a hearing in protest against certain objectionable acts committed by some of the Negroes and Mexican people who have recently come into our city (and) whose acts are menacing the welfare of our community.”
McKether’s assembled quotes, from Saginawians who mostly have passed away since then, address the gamuts of race relations, employment, housing, education and social life.
I really didn’t know I was different than anyone else. It wasn’t until third or fourth grade that a blonde little girl called me (a racial slur). I had not heard the word before, but it was just the way she said it that made me feel there was something wrong with being black.”
Florence Goines, student
We always knew there was a certain line, like across Potter Street, where the white people lived. It wasn’t until after World War II that we could move and buy houses across the railroad tracks, on streets like Astor and Carlisle and Carroll.
Martha Hardy, pioneering real estate agent
When Duke Ellington and his band came to Saginaw, they couldn’t stay at the Bancroft Hotel. They couldn’t even go down to the restaurant, and so they stayed in black folks’ homes.
Charles Bowman, WWII Tuskegee Airmen combat veteran
I came back to Saginaw with three battle stars, on a segregated train car with farm animals, and back at home we decided that we were going to go to every white (tavern) establishment to Saginaw. And we would sit there until they called the police to have us arrested, and go to jail as our way of trying to break these barriers.
Jessie Daily, WWII veteran and volunteer with First Ward Center and the African Cultural Festival
Primarily my father (Ernest Thompson Sr.) loaded iron, poured iron. The black workers had the dirtiest, noisiest jobs in the whole Grey Iron Foundry. I saw my dad doing those jobs and I felt tears, because that wasn’t the way a human being was supposed to have to live.
Willie Thompson, longtime Delta College educator and Saginaw school board member
Pastor Roosevelt Austin, Zion Missionary Baptist Church, offered a summary: “Religion has been the salvation for black folks, not just in terms of spiritually saving our souls. We have learned to be tolerant and to accept the things we cannot change, but to become very involved in changing those things that we can.”
Saginaw’s legendary clergyman risked his then-young life organizing Louisiana voter registrations in 1951, four years prior to the Montgomery bus boycott. Once in Saginaw, he joined Mayor Henry Marsh during the 1960s on a newly integrated City Council. He added a pledge: “We’re going to go down fighting and make things better for all people. Religion tells us that we all are people of God.”
McKether said, “By looking back at historical times and events, maybe we can find some clues to deal with today’s issues.”
He added, “Hopefully, the work from Dr. Ruffin and from myself will inspire young people to do these kinds of interviews with their grandparents, their parents, their other relatives, so that we may continue to build this sort of a collective history. We need to begin asking questions. We need to start writing more of this stuff down.”
