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continued from previous page
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| With the end of the Civil War, African-Americans slowly
began to join the existing community in Ann Arbor. Those who escaped via
the underground railroad still needed to make the trip to Canada, so permanent
settlement was limited to those Blacks who had acquired "free" status.
The End of the Civil War brought this small wave of African-Americans,
who still gathered to worship G-d apart from their white counterparts in
Christ. This was still the accepted means for living together but separately
in Ann Arbor, but unlike the German community who fought assimilation,
Black American men and women fought continued injustice, racial stereotypes,
and age-old segregation: even the celebration of the Emancipation in January
1863 found separate races in separate churches (Stephenson, 160 and Marwil,
28). |
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African-Americans were sometimes able to prosper despite
the rough racial climate in the days after the Emancipation. Individuals
like: John Freeman, who ran a barber shop; Thomas Freeman, his brother,
who was a delegate to the 1843 state convention of Colored Citizens of
Michigan; James Brook, a skilled drayman who had
personal holdings worth $2,500 - a respectable sum indeed - and Henry Clay,
an African-American who worked his way up from Kentucky.
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A former servant, Clay became a self-made man who advertised
his home whitewashing service in the local paper; his popular ads even
poked fun at the white institutions of political elections and higher education.(Marwil,
27). |
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| African-American women were deeply aware of both the
struggles of womanhood and being Black in mid-nineteenth century America.
Yet, in 1898, Katherine Crawford received a medical degree and opened her
practice in Ann Arbor (from McGuigan, A Dangerous Experiment). |
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[The
Underground Railroad]
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| Higher education, in fact, was gained by the Black community
in 1868, when John Davidson of Pontiac and Franklin Hargo of Adrian began
attending classes. Unlike the first female student admitted in 1866 Madelon
Stockwell, a white woman), history notes that the arrival of the two
men caused little stir among the townspeople. The construction of new University
buildings in 1903 under James B. Angell brought African-Americans to the
city relatively quickly. Between 1900 and 1910, the population of Blacks
increased to 3.5% of the already existing population of perhaps over one
hundred permanently-settled members (from McGuigan, A Dangerous Experiment). |
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[Ann
Arbor's German Population and the War]
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