We were headed out to plot out some local
walks for my new First Year Experience class, called "Finding Your Way," about the literature and practice of walking, but we got sidetracked as usual. We were in the car, driving north along the
Flint River up Industrial past Leith to Stewart, and we turned left and crossed
the bridge which once was the best view of the Buick Plant. Today it is a brownfield that is reverting to
nature. We drove through the historic
black and ethnic neighborhoods near the plant.
There is really nothing much there now … you have to use your
imagination. And that to me has always
been the really wonderful thing about living and walking in Flint. If you live in a fully operational city, you
are inside some kind of big human artifact—a machine or an assembly line. Everyone is slotted into a neighborhood, an
occupation, a route that they take more or less every day. Even their leisure is scripted according to
institutions and systems in which they have little to no say in their
scheduling. The factory workers in Flint
were among the highest paid blue-collar workers, but can you put a price tag on
liberty? No wonder they fantasized about
three acres in Burton or a cottage up north.
Things are altogether different if you live in a has-been city, a
burnt-out city, a postindustrial rust-belt city like Flint. The centers of such cities around what used
to be factories are now ground zeros.
Pits of devastation. “You know,
this area was white as late as the late sixties,” says Paul, as we intersect
with North Saginaw. “What happened? What caused this? I don’t think we can blame it all on the
factories closing.” We are near the
Burston Field House, and that gym is where the Clarissa Shields trained for and
won the Olympic medal in boxing. Paul
remembers a story he was told by the son of an old dulcimer player. There was a street—Gillespie Ave.—where
Germans from Russian lived. They immigrated
to pick sugar beets in the Michigan Thumb, but the work probably got too hard and the
factories were too tempting. They can
from the towns to what was, in the early 20th century, a booming
metropolis. “Let see if there’s a
church.” We drive to the top of a
hill. The grasses get longer and are
golden and wavy in the evening light. A
trumpet vine with its orange flowers is climbing all over the remains of a
house, and I imagine invisible spirits or animal musicians blowing away on
those floral horns. At the top of the
hill, there is a church--old and somewhat gothic.
The door is
open. Inside, devastation reigns. There is a mesmerizing word set on fire
scrawled in spray paint across the sanctuary:
Entropy. It’s frighteningly
accurate. Entropy is a science word,
from physics, I think, about the degree of randomness or disorder in a system. When I look it up later, the word explains
Flint: “lack of order or predictability;
gradual decline into disorder.” I hear a
car door slam, and I get a little scared.
I quickly duck out of the ruined church without taking a photo of the
only remaining and unexceptional window of colored glass. Outside, Paul has noticed the signboard. It was last used as a Masjid—a mosque. That’s interesting.
Our curiosity has been piqued, and Paul suggests that
we check out the City Directories in the Flint Public Library. These books contain lists of businesses and
residents by street—every street in the City of Flint, published nearly every year since 1870. Starting with 1942, we look up Gillespie
Avenue. "What was the cross street?" asks
Paul. "Buick." Sure enough, there was “First Reformed
Church” which is clearly a Protestant Church, German, and the Pastor is listed
as Rev. Albert Weinbrauk, which is a German name. Oddly, we don't find many obviously German family names listed as residents on the street. In order to figure out when the church was
built, hence when the "community" was established, we have to go back in time, and check
earlier books. It was there in
1923. It was there in 1921. But it wasn’t there in 1916. Eventually, we figure out that it was built
around 1920. Then we move forward in
time to see if we can find out when the church became a mosque. The 1972 Directory lists the building as
“Muhammad’s Mosque of Islam #53.” So after it ended life as a church, the building became a Nation of Islam mosque, referred to as a "temple."
The Nation of Islam (NOI) was a black Muslim movement that grew out of Black Nationalism. The movement was founded in 1934 in Detroit by Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole in 1897 in Sandersville, Georgia). Poole, who moved his family, parents and siblings, north to Michigan, was among the hundreds of thousands of black families forming the First Great Migration leaving the economically troubled and oppressive South in search of safety and employment. Poole claimed that before the age of twenty, he'd seen three black men lynched by whites. He settled the family in Hamtramck and struggled throughout the 1920s and 1930s to find and keep work. Inspired by Wallace Fard Muhammad, who claimed to the the Mahdi (Muslim messiah) and who preached black independence from white culture, Elijah Muhammad took over leadership of the fledgling Islamic movement when Fard mysteriously disappeared, clinching for his followers his identity as Allah. Group infighting eventually led Elijah Muhammad to leave Mosque #1 in Detroit for Chicago, and he moved around the northern midwest, growing the movement. Much of its appeal was to black men, who tended to stay away from church because it didn't address their needs. The NOI had its own program for economic development: Elijah Muhammad purchased land and businesses to provide housing and employment for young, black males in NOI-owned bakeries, barber shops, coffee shops, grocery stores, laundromats, night-clubs, retail stores, or as drivers in its fleet of tractor-trailers. By 1959 there were 50 temples in 22 states. The temple on Gillespie Ave. is listed as #53, so it may have been one of the last ones established before Elijah Muhammad died in 1975. By the year 2000, however, the building is listed in the Directory as “Flint Masjid." The NOI was disbanded in 1976. Some readers may recollect the famous clash between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, who made the haj (one of the five pillars of Islam), became a mainstream Muslim, broke with the NOI (which was blamed, by some, for his assassination). Over time, the movement decayed from within, and an orthodox Islamic organization was formed, that came to be known as the American Society of Muslims.
Paul and I close the books, knowing that we've only begun to dig into the rich history suggested by these few but important facts. We locate Gillespie Street on the huge street map of Flint that hangs over the library tables. As we leave the library, we chat about the way such major movements of people, religion, economics, and community can be glimpsed through tracking the simple history of a single building. “And remember," I say, "the current ‘Muslim House’ is just down the street on Saginaw." “Right,” says Paul, “There’s a whole institutional history in this.”
Piecing together that history from the remains, from stories heard, from bits of facts culled from books is work, and it is creative. It teaches us to dig in, understand, be inspired by past times, and let those times inform what we make. There may be no more first, second, or third shift, but there is plenty of work for those of us who stay in Flint. The city may be dead and the smart people fled to suburbs, but those who stay inhabit a ruin. And there is something sacred about ruins … you are walking through layers of time, the deep psyche of the city, and the collective unconscious of the people who came here, worked, played dulcimers, prayed to God or Allah, and either died here or moved on. It’s our job to wake up and discover the lives here, and use the wisdom that is laying all around us in the artifacts and echos to make new communities at spots where the river is fordable or the view is nice or where the decay has allowed a whole field of prairie grass to grow. There is something mesmerizing about entropy, but we mustn’t just photograph the ruins or the graffiti. It is the human task to work against entropy and to make order where there is only fire, ash, rotting wood, and soggy mattresses decaying in the street.
The Nation of Islam (NOI) was a black Muslim movement that grew out of Black Nationalism. The movement was founded in 1934 in Detroit by Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole in 1897 in Sandersville, Georgia). Poole, who moved his family, parents and siblings, north to Michigan, was among the hundreds of thousands of black families forming the First Great Migration leaving the economically troubled and oppressive South in search of safety and employment. Poole claimed that before the age of twenty, he'd seen three black men lynched by whites. He settled the family in Hamtramck and struggled throughout the 1920s and 1930s to find and keep work. Inspired by Wallace Fard Muhammad, who claimed to the the Mahdi (Muslim messiah) and who preached black independence from white culture, Elijah Muhammad took over leadership of the fledgling Islamic movement when Fard mysteriously disappeared, clinching for his followers his identity as Allah. Group infighting eventually led Elijah Muhammad to leave Mosque #1 in Detroit for Chicago, and he moved around the northern midwest, growing the movement. Much of its appeal was to black men, who tended to stay away from church because it didn't address their needs. The NOI had its own program for economic development: Elijah Muhammad purchased land and businesses to provide housing and employment for young, black males in NOI-owned bakeries, barber shops, coffee shops, grocery stores, laundromats, night-clubs, retail stores, or as drivers in its fleet of tractor-trailers. By 1959 there were 50 temples in 22 states. The temple on Gillespie Ave. is listed as #53, so it may have been one of the last ones established before Elijah Muhammad died in 1975. By the year 2000, however, the building is listed in the Directory as “Flint Masjid." The NOI was disbanded in 1976. Some readers may recollect the famous clash between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, who made the haj (one of the five pillars of Islam), became a mainstream Muslim, broke with the NOI (which was blamed, by some, for his assassination). Over time, the movement decayed from within, and an orthodox Islamic organization was formed, that came to be known as the American Society of Muslims.
Paul and I close the books, knowing that we've only begun to dig into the rich history suggested by these few but important facts. We locate Gillespie Street on the huge street map of Flint that hangs over the library tables. As we leave the library, we chat about the way such major movements of people, religion, economics, and community can be glimpsed through tracking the simple history of a single building. “And remember," I say, "the current ‘Muslim House’ is just down the street on Saginaw." “Right,” says Paul, “There’s a whole institutional history in this.”
Piecing together that history from the remains, from stories heard, from bits of facts culled from books is work, and it is creative. It teaches us to dig in, understand, be inspired by past times, and let those times inform what we make. There may be no more first, second, or third shift, but there is plenty of work for those of us who stay in Flint. The city may be dead and the smart people fled to suburbs, but those who stay inhabit a ruin. And there is something sacred about ruins … you are walking through layers of time, the deep psyche of the city, and the collective unconscious of the people who came here, worked, played dulcimers, prayed to God or Allah, and either died here or moved on. It’s our job to wake up and discover the lives here, and use the wisdom that is laying all around us in the artifacts and echos to make new communities at spots where the river is fordable or the view is nice or where the decay has allowed a whole field of prairie grass to grow. There is something mesmerizing about entropy, but we mustn’t just photograph the ruins or the graffiti. It is the human task to work against entropy and to make order where there is only fire, ash, rotting wood, and soggy mattresses decaying in the street.
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