Karolyn Smardz Frost - A Fluid Frontier

GREAT LAKES BOOKS

Editor

Charles K. Hyde, Wayne State University

Advisory Editors

Jeffrey Abt, Wayne State University

Fredric C. Bohm, Michigan State University

Sandra Sageser Clark, Michigan Historical Center

Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Clements Library

De Witt Dykes, Oakland University

Joe Grimm, Michigan State University

Richard H. Harms, Calvin College

Laurie Harris, Pleasant Ridge, Michigan

Thomas Klug, Marygrove College

Susan Higman Larsen, Detroit Institute of Arts

Philip P. Mason, Prescott, Arizona and Eagle Harbor, Michigan

Dennis Moore, Consulate General of Canada

Erik C. Nordberg, Michigan Humanities Council

Deborah Smith Pollard, University of MichiganDearborn

Michael O. Smith, Wayne State University

Joseph M. Turrini, Wayne State University

Arthur M. Woodford, Harsens Island, Michigan

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

A
FLUID
FRONTIER

SLAVERY, RESISTANCE,
AND THE
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
IN THE
DETROIT RIVER BORDERLAND

Edited by KAROLYN SMARDZ FROST and VETA SMITH TUCKER
With a foreword by DAVID W. BLIGHT

2016 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

20 19 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015946924

ISBN 978-0-8143-3959-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-3960-2 (ebook)

Published with support from the Arthur L. Johnson Fund for African American Studies.

Designed and typeset by Bryce Schimanski
Composed in Adobe Caslon Pro

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Sir Isaac Newton

We dedicate A Fluid Frontier to two giants, one American the other Canadian. Their insights on the Detroit River region influenced our thinking and motivated us to finish this project. To the late Dr. Norman McRae Jr. (19252010), historian, author, and educator, whose scholarship and dedication to truth continue to have a profound influence on both academic and popular perceptions of African American history in Detroit, Michigan, and to Dr. Daniel G. Hill, historian, sociologist, civil rights activist, and Chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, whose research in the study of the African Canadian past will inspire scholars and students alike for generations to come.

CONTENTS

by David W. Blight

KAROLYN SMARDZ FROST AND VETA SMITH TUCKER

VETA SMITH TUCKER

KAROLYN SMARDZ FROST

BRYAN PRINCE

IRENE MOORE DAVIS

BARBARA HUGHES SMITH

ADRIENNE SHADD

AFUA COOPER

ROY FINKENBINE

MARGARET WASHINGTON

KIMBERLY SIMMONS AND LARRY MCCLELLAN

DEBIAN MARTY

CAROL E. MULL

LOUIS A. DECARO JR.

KAROLYN SMARDZ FROST AND VETA SMITH TUCKER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their unconditional love and support while we labored to complete A Fluid Frontier, we are grateful to Norm Frost, and all our family members and close friends; for their diligent research and excellent writing, we thank the twelve authors whose chapters give this volume life; and for her insightful editorial review, we thank Dr. Alisea McLeod. For kind and competent assistance from every librarian and archivist we consulted throughout the Midwest and Canada, we thank all of you.

For their remarkable generosity in sharing with us the findings of their ongoing research in African Canadian history, we thank Hilary Dawson, Natasha Henry, and Guylaine Petrin. For taking stunning photographs exclusively for this volume, we thank Elizabeth Clark of Detroit; and for their assiduous editorial support and encouragement, we thank the editor-in chief of Wayne State University Press, Kathryn Wildfong, and her dedicated staff.

Finally, to those who supported us with and without our knowledge, whose names may not be listed here, it is also because of you that we were able to complete this book.

FOREWORD

I grew up in Flint, Michigan, an easy drive northwest of Detroit, in the 1950s and 1960s. I was fortunate to be taught by two excellent high school history teachers, one in Western Civilization and the other in U. S. History. But I never learned anything about this epic, harrowing, and inspiring story of the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River region. I am grateful for two degrees in history from Michigan State University, where in the late 1960s I took the first course ever offered there in black history, taught by the late Leslie Rout. To say the least, I came to love history. I taught American history in the Flint Public Schools for seven years in the 1970s, and have practiced the craft as a scholar now for more than three decades. Countless times I traveled to the Motor City for all manner of eventssports, culture, road races on Belle Isle in the middle of the Detroit River.

But I never learned about the many thousands gone who had by so many paths over long journeys crossed over from the docks of Detroit to the shores of Windsor or Amherstburg. No one or no thing in particular is to blame for my lack of knowledge in these formative years. Great shifts and revolutions in historical knowledge take time and events to force them to the fore. But what a remarkable history and cultural memory was there in my youth hiding in plain sight. And that rich, profound historya living historyis brought to life in this collection of essays about the people, the communities, the personalities, the places, and the institutions forged from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War. The Detroit River borderland was for decades a teeming, thriving landscape and waterscape by which thousands of African Americans became African Canadians or both. That story is now poignantly memorialized in monuments on both sides of the river.

In a recent important book, Eric Foner has shown how the Metropolitan Corridor, the region connecting the Vigilance Committees of Philadelphia and New York City, and funneling fugitives slaves particularly out of Maryland and Delaware to New York and beyond, operated with great energy, both open and covert, in the 1850s.and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland the story of how the Detroit RiverCanadian border region was every bit as large and important as a place and a system through which African American former slaves found degrees of freedom. This books research and scope, the poignant new stories it tells, and especially its international, borderlands approach ought to advance any effort to achieve a World Heritage designation for the Detroit River region. The Underground Railroad along this international border functioned both overtly and covertly as well as outside or in resistance to the law. Its leaders, like Henry and Mary Bibb and so many others, were full-throated revolutionaries; the people they assisted have millions of descendants today of all human colors and backgrounds in Canada, the United States, and other countries.

I witnessed the beauty and character of that diaspora several years ago as a very fortunate invited speaker at a conference on the Underground Railroad in Canada on the eve of the annual Buxton Homecoming, an event that those of us in the United States have to see to believe. Each year on Labour Day weekend, for four days, descendants and extended families from far-flung places come to the small town of Buxton, Ontario, a mere hours drive east of Detroit. They camp out all over the agricultural landscape and commune with their own illusive but suddenly real past at the North Buxton Community Church and graveyard, as well as at the extraordinary Buxton National Historic Site and Museum. They come to learn about and celebrate the original fugitive slaves who settled in that community and built its great farming traditions. They also conduct spirited family baseball and softball tournaments. But I can attest that, as a historian of this subject, I have had few experiences as moving and special as the hayride and food fest hosted and led by Bryan and Shannon Prince. Bryan is himself a distinguished historian, direct descendant of Buxton founders, and a successful local farmer. The annual Buxton Homecoming, the ninetieth annual of which was held in 2013 and drew more than three thousand people, is a living legacy of the difficult but inspiring story represented by this book.