Destination Detroit

NARRATOR: Detroit's iconic train station, full of history - American history - great migrations and new beginnings.

everyone comes from somewhere.

We invited people to share how Detroit became their family's destination.

PRODUCER: What city do you currently live in?

GLORIA: I live in Detroit.

PAUL: I live in Detroit, Michigan on the east side.

CANDACE: I live in Detroit, Michigan.

JADE: Detroit.

DOMINIC: I currently live in Grosse Ile, Michigan.

STACY: Madison Heights.

MIRA: Ann Arbor.

ALICA: Southfield, Michigan currently, but I am a native Detroiter.

BILL: Shelby Township.

ASPEN: In Detroit.

PRODUCER: Okay cool.

ASPEN: Always in Detroit.

ANNOUNCER: Destination Detroit - stories about people who helped shape southeast Michigan.

This program was made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, And viewers like you.

Thank you.

NARRATOR: For decades, Michigan Central Station greeted new arrivals to Detroit.

It closed nearly forty years ago.

The vacant train station became a symbol of urban decay.

After Ford Motor Company's recent restoration, it's a Detroit destination once again.

CLERTESIA: And it is so beautiful here.

ROMAN: Yeah, I never expected to see this- to happen.

I did manage to come in here when it was abandoned, and it was like so sad.

ANGELA: Just to see it restored to this.

I mean it's magnificent.

SANDY: What's great I travel the country now, you know, they read my title and say, "Oh, Detroit Regional Chamber, tell me about the train station."

NARRATOR: A century ago, Ford Motor Company made this silent film featuring the train station - a place some call the Ellis Island of the midwest.

MAMBA: It's a privilege, it's a privilege for me to be in this situation because I can speak as a Detroiter, I can speak as a Burundian.

I came as a refugee from Burundi.

I've been here since November 2015.

Baobab is a tree, so that tree is the tree of life.

So if you're coming to Baobab Fare you're coming to experience something something new.

NARRATOR: Baobab fare features eastern African cuisine - it's a hit.

Owner Mamba Hamissi - very busy these days.

MAMBA: Yeah.

I'm telling the story now to PBS.

NARRATOR: He's one of the many we spoke to at Michigan Central about how Detroit became their destination.

MAMBA: The only one path I have to follow is to- to be an entrepreneur so I could see how possible opening a business could be.

NARRATOR: Hamissi's working on expansion plans to bring his food to other parts of the city.

DAWNE: I am the granddaughter of an immigrant from Ireland.

In my questioning of my grandparents, "Why did you leave Nova Scotia?"

So they took a boat over from Ireland over to Nova Scotia.

ABDULRAHMAN: So my dad got to Detroit in- I would say in the early- early 90s, late 80s.

Originally he's from Somalia but he was living in Manhattan, New York.

My dad was traveling around, he was a preacher, he's a Muslim, he would go into different masjids, mosque, and just preaching the good word and when he came to Michigan he said, "Wow there's so much Muslim people here, "a lot of different mosques here and the cost of living was like great."

DAWNE: They said there was so much opportunity in Detroit with the automobile industry and my grandfather actually worked for the trains here in Detroit and lived and died in Detroit.

JOSE: I was born in Honduras and in 1997 I moved here so I was nine years old when I moved to Detroit and it was my first time experiencing Detroit but I've been here ever since and I went about eight years ago to Honduras to learn about my culture to bring it back here so three years ago I brought it here with our coffee company.

ABDULRAHMAN: Even though we're Somali our community is filled with Muslim people but they're mostly from Yemen and they're very good people so he saw something he could build within that community.

JOSE: I was actually adopted from Honduras so essentially my mom grew up here in Detroit, so she knew more about it.

So for me it was like kind of learning the culture, learning the language, learning everything, I had no idea.

So the first time that I came here was the first time that I saw snow.

The funny thing was that I was adopted by a Black mom so essentially, I grew up in Black Detroit.

JOHN: The United States has always been a destination place for Filipinos, especially after World War II when the United States assisted in getting the Japanese out of the occupation of the Philippine Islands.

COURTNEY: My dad was born in the Upper Peninsula in Newberry, Michigan in 1940 to a mixed mother, Geraldine Rice, whose family was from the South and moved up to Michigan and my dad's father was from Finland.

JOHN: There was a shortage of nurses and the Philippines happened to have a program that imitated the nursing program of the United States.

The official language in the Philippines was both Filipino and English so it was easier for them to find nurses in the Philippines that could pass the nursing examination.

COURTNEY: My dad and his siblings were so fair they could have passed for white but what's really interesting is that they always had strong connection to their community, the Black community and we are part of what's called The Old Settlers which is a group of eight families that settled in kind of the northern part of Michigan and it was the first grouping that settled there in the Mecosta area.

ABDULRAHMAN: Even though I'm Somalian American I still hold on to my culture, my values, my religion, my language.

I'm growing up and becoming an adult and having my own family, I can pass that down and still hold true to my culture.

JOHN: My mother was recruited by Henry Ford Hospital to basically work her way through nursing in the United States while my father and me and my siblings waited in the Philippines.

JOHANNAH: My grandparents were born in Pforzheim in Germany and my dad was actually born there as well.

And they emigrated to the U.S.

to Detroit in 1954 so I'm first generation American on my dad's side.

JOHN: Unfortunately I had asked my parents to stop speaking Filipino at home so that I could- I could concentrate on English.

I succeeded assimilating to the English language but at the cost of my native tongue.

JOHANNAH: Ever since my grandparents passed away, I've inherited all of their photos, journals, so I've been slowly going through and piecing together their history.

Both my parents were picture-takers.

When they could afford it they bought a camera and I actually have some amazing footage of Detroit.

JUSTINE: When we think about migration patterns and where people go, I always remind people we are nomadic beings, we have always been moving and so we're moving in search of opportunity, we're moving in search of liberation and freedom.

We're moving in search of a pursuit of excellence.

(gulls calling) NARRATOR: How did Detroit become... Detroit?

Around 1700 - this was Le Dtroit - the Straits in French.

MARTIN: It becomes a destination for the French because of its strategic importance.

It is a place where they can build a fort to ensure that they maintain control of the upper lakes.

CHEYENNE: We're often told you know Native American history starts when the French arrived in 1701 but as we all know, native peoples have been here time immemorial.

MARTIN: It had always been a destination for the indigenous folks who were living here.

CHEYENNE: As we refer to it, indigenous people refer to it as Waawiyaatanong or where the river bends.

NARRATOR: The French fought the British - more fighting forced native peoples out while settlers took claim to the land.

CHEYENNE: Jumping forward to present day Detroit we see native peoples coming back to Detroit.

We're not forever gone, we're not forever banished, their descendants are certainly back in the area.

NARRATOR: Who were the first African Americans in Detroit?

Some were owned by this man's family.

KEN: There's been an African American presence certainly in metropolitan Detroit as early as the 1700s.

NARRATOR: Hero of the war of 1812, General Alexander Macomb - his father and uncle were slave owners - like some other prominent families of that time.

KEN: Michigan does have a history of slavery, carried out very differently than the American South, chattel slavery, it was more a system of indentured servitude.

NARRATOR: There was Lisette Denison Forth, born into slavery, freed to prosper, owning nearly 50 acres of land in Pontiac, Michigan.

In the meantime, the Erie Canal opened Detroit to more people out east.

MARTIN: Most of Detroit and Michigan's early Euro-American settlers trace their origins to New England and upstate New York, and it is no coincidence that we have in the Detroit metropolitan area a number of communities whose names can also be found in upstate New York.

Utica, Troy, Farmington, Livonia, Rochester.

All of those communities were named for the points of origin for people who settled there early on.

People often talk about the importance of Yankee Yorker culture in early Michigan.

NARRATOR: One Yankee Yorker sitting pretty?

Hazen Pingree - Detroit Mayor and Michigan Governor in the 1890s hailing from the state of Maine.

As the 1900s arrived, the stage was set, southeast Michigan became a destination for industry.

SANDY: We had access to the natural resources that were needed.

We needed shipping and so we had rail and we had water.

MARTIN: With the discovery of mineral wealth in Michigan's Upper Peninsula you begin to see iron and steel manufacture in Detroit.

It's certainly, one of the first Bessemer steel plants in the United States is built south of Detroit in Wyandotte.

NARRATOR: It led to automobiles.

Henry Ford's and others too.

SANDY: They kind of fed off each other.

This new horseless carriage seems like an interesting idea, and I want to be part of it.

Now eventually you create your own ecosystem.

NARRATOR: Including the people needed to build them.

KURT: And first it was the immigration from Ireland.

We had Italians, Germans, Belgians coming to the east side.

NARRATOR: And African Americans.

KEN: So African Americans began to move to Detroit en masse to in the early 1900s.

In 1900 about 5700 African Americans lived in Detroit.

By 1930 there are about 120,000.

KURT: Detroit we always think about its population loss, and it's lost more population than any other city.

It grew faster than any other city in the country.

I mean it picked up 1.3 million people in a 30-year span between 1900 and 1930.

KEN: It becomes this major city that's growing so fast because of the automotive industry.

And the African American population in Detroit skyrockets.

ANNOUNCER: New travel luxury in every Ford car.

DAVID: Detroit was vast and wide.

Both of my grandfathers felt it was an imperative to get somewhere that was hustle and bustle.

ANNOUNCER: Under the guidance of skilled workmen, comfort and speed and safety are building the motor cars for all Americans.

KAREN: My dad, he was in the Korean war.

He returned home to Ferriday, Louisiana.

CYNTHIA: In Mississippi they were farmers and very rural area very little opportunity.

ROBERT: My father lived in Huntsville, Alabama.

CYNTHIA: Then he heard about Detroit, Michigan and the hiring and came out of the Army and came to Detroit, Michigan in 1949.

CORENE: My uncle was working for Chryslers.

KAREN: He came to Detroit, Michigan and began employment at the Chrysler Corporation.

ANNOUNCER: And it's all wonderful.

Chrysler's new 100- million-dollar look.

ROBERT: So he and his brother came up to Detroit.

He landed at Ford, his brother landed at Chrysler.

MARK: My mother is from Ashland, Kentucky and my father is from Huntington, West Virginia.

They moved to Detroit in 1957 as part of the Great Migration.

LADARLA: My father was from Sweetwater, Alabama and he came here, got a job at General Motors.

KAREN: Now, he tells us he had the most dirtiest and filthiest jobs, but it paid the bills.

MARK: My mom she came up here she eventually got a job at Ford Motor Company at the Glass House in Dearborn.

ROBERT: Detroit in the 50s and the 60s when you really think about it was an expansive period of time particularly for African Americans and so both parents as they connected, their life just really just rose very quickly to the middle class.

CYNTHIA: And it gave my dad as sense of wellbeing, a sense of purpose, and he really felt that he actually made it.

He was a union man too.

That was really, really good for things that came out of that.

NARRATOR: The Great Migration built the Motor City.

But with that came challenges too.

KEN: African Americans can really only live in one section of the city and that's the Lower East Side just east of present-day downtown Detroit in communities we come to know as Black Bottom and Paradise Valley.

CHERYL: Now my dad, when his family when they moved here, they moved into the area which a lot of people know as Black Bottom.

PRODUCER: Tell me a bit about Black Bottom.

ANGELA: Oh, Black Bottom was a great place to live.

It was a community.

KEN: Now those were immigrant- European immigrant communities before African Americans moved to that area.

ANGELA: And we had different nationalities over there and everybody was like family.

KEN: By 1940, Black Bottom really becomes a super-predominantly African American community.

PAUL: My dad early on he would be a paperboy, just do odd jobs to bring in some additional money.

Because he grew up on the Black Bottom.

KEN: That would be today's Ford Field, Comerica Park.

PAUL: My grandma was a domestic.

So like in the movie The Help?

Cuz my grandma had a third-grade education.

So, it was really difficult for her to find meaningful work.

GLORIA: And there was a housing shortage and there also was discrimination, so what they had to do was sleep in shifts.

Whoever worked the night shift would sleep during the day and whoever worked the day would of course sleep at night.

PAUL: It was my dad and my grandma and my great- great grandma for a moment.

Their income was about eighty dollars a month.

That was not a lot, but they managed to survive.

GLORIA: So many Black people were not able to find a decent place to live.

KEN: It's a challenge and it causes a lot of socio and economic friction.

PAUL: So my dad grew up in a rooming house.

So you had eight families in this big house.

And you all had to share a kitchen and a laundry.

GLORIA: They had to move around, they had to live in two or three different places with different relatives.

PAUL: You've got one room for one family, people have to learn how to get along.

GLORIA: Eventually they did find someone that would rent a place to them, but they realized the most important part of the housing and living was to be able to buy your place.

KEN: Because of city neighborhoods, an expanding city at that point, northeast side, northwest side, homeowner associations, block clubs that were largely white weren't very much interested in having African Americans live in their neighborhood.

ANITA: He found this house that was for sale and she went to the family, a husband and wife and they weren't- they told her they were not supposed to sell to Black people.

They liked her and the wife said, "I really want us "to sell to her and her family so that she has a nice place for her daughter."

GLORIA: So they were able to buy a home on land contract but at that time they could only live in a certain part of Detroit.

ANITA: And I remember growing up, I didn't believe that story, like, yeah right, they can't sell to Black people what do you mean?

And my dad showed me the deed.

And it was in the deed to the home.

Yeah.

KEN: Many of them coming- had come from the South, hey we thought this was the- the land of opportunity and we're caught up in the same trip bag we were in in Mississippi and Alabama and South Carolina.

BILL: Being that this is about the Great Migration a lot of people associate that with strictly being only a Black thing.

KEN: I think it's important to point out that a lot of Southern whites moved here too.

Detroit becomes the fourth largest city, the fourth largest city in America by 1940.

BILL: Thousands and thousands of Southern white people that came up along with Jim Crow South Blacks, everyone brought their Southern ways with them.

NOLAN: There was a bus line called the Brooks Bus Line and it would run from Detroit to- down 23 in eastern Kentucky and then it would run from Detroit to Paducah on the west and you know these people from Kentucky go back and forth getting the jobs, coming home on the weekends.

My county, Cumberland County in southern Kentucky, had 17,000 people in it before the war.

After the war it had 7,000.

That many people left to go mostly north you know.

BILL: I'm gonna use the term hillbillies, a lot of people associate that as a derogatory term, I don't.

KURT: We talk about Hazel-tucky sometimes and Taylor-tucky as you had the people coming from Kentucky and Tennessee moving up to Detroit.

BILL: You'd hear about Ypsi-tucky, Taylor-tucky... NOLAN: Oh yeah.

You know, everbody's got to have somebody they look down on right?

You know and so that's why I think people from that part of the country whether it was Kentucky or Tennessee or Arkansas wherever, West Virginia, they sort of stuck together.

When we came up here, we found a community of other migrants from the South, and mostly from that part of the South.

And they all went to the same church, and they became our social group.

It was folks looking for support from other people who understood their story and their journey.

NARRATOR: The legacy of the union autoworker carries on to this day in Detroit.

MAYOR SHEFFIELD: I come from labor, labor is in my blood.

It comes from the history of my family.

NARRATOR: Detroit's new Mayor Mary Sheffield - elected in fall 2025.

MAYOR SHEFFIELD: Detroit we did it!

I know that I would not be here had it not been for legendary civil rights activists and politicians who really paved the way as the first woman in the 324-year history, there were a lot of sacrifices that were made.

None of us can rest and that is why we are marching today!

NARRATOR: Sheffield's Great Migration story?

Her grandfather Horace Sheffield Jr.

came with his family from Georgia in 1918.

MAYOR SHEFFIELD: He landed in Black Bottom, went on to work at the Ford Rouge Plant, was instrumental in getting African Americans into leadership in the UAW and just was an organizer, a mobilizer, and he knew how to unite people.

NARRATOR: Horace Sheffield Jr.

was integral to the civil rights movement - working with Martin Luther King Jr.

on the freedom marches in Detroit and Washington, D.C.

Mary's father, Horace Sheffield III, watched it happen.

MAYOR SHEFFIELD: He really shaped me at a young age, to stand up for justice, to know the importance of service, just fighting for everyday people.

NARRATOR: Detroit's population is growing - more than 12,000 in one year according to the city of Detroit - a recent upswing not seen since the 1950s.

As the city's core develops, community activists worry outlying neighborhoods might be left out.

MAYOR SHEFFIELD: We can continue to build nice skyscrapers and buildings, but if Detroiters don't have access and they're not participating then we're really building a city where our own residents don't have access to the growth of Detroit.

We don't want to grow a city where most of our residents don't benefit.

NARRATOR: In Detroit politics, the name Coleman Young - the city's first Black mayor, often comes up.

But the Sheffield name resounds for many too.

MAYOR SHEFFIELD: My grandfather to this day I mean there's no place I can go throughout this city where people still don't feel and remember his impact which I think speaks volumes to who he was as a person that people still to this day can talk about who he was and what he meant to this city.

NARRATOR: Dearborn.

It sits right on the border of Detroit.

It's home to Ford Motor Company and the first Arab American majority city in the United States.

MAYOR HAMMOUD: My grandfather and my mom's family, they come over here in 1974.

At the time when the Lebanese Civil War was about to start but also for the opportunity at pursuing the American dream.

My mother was about four years old.

She came over here and obviously entered the school system at the time and for my grandfather just a regular laborer, while waiting for a job on the line found a job at a local bakery making fifty dollars a week and it was that that kind of held him over until he found a good paying job on the line.

Dearborn is home to about 110,000 people, the fastest growing city in Michigan according to the last decennial census, it's about twelve percent growth.

Fifty percent of the residents here are foreign born.

After the war in Iraq, you saw a large migration of Iraqi nationals to southeast Michigan, so we have a large Iraqi- American community.

With the civil strife that's persistent in Yemen you see a large Yemeni migration.

And within the Dearborn community in particular amongst the large Arab- American communities the largest I would say is the Lebanese and the Yemeni community, and then you kind of have the Iraqi community and then a scattering of Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian going across the Middle East and North African border.

My father's story is slightly different, he came over here in the early 80s, born and raised in Saudi Arabia although Lebanese.

Ultimately my father for most of my young age was a trucker delivering the seats for the F-150.

The best truck in America.

I have to say that.

I also believe it because I drive one.

(street sounds) SANDY: You look at all the people in Detroit almost all the businesses and restaurants were all Cantonese cuz they all came from Canton, China.

NARRATOR: The history of the Chinese in Detroit starts here - Central United Methodist Church downtown on Woodward.

SANDY: Central Methodist Church had these missionaries that came to Canton, China and invited the Chinese people to come to Detroit and the church would help them get established.

So, in the late 1800s Chinese people started coming.

The city gave them this area by Third and Michigan for their community and by the 1930s or 40s there were like 4,000 people living in Chinatown.

And then in 1960 they decided to build the Bagley Road exit off of the Lodge, so they were saying, "They have to move you for urban development..." NARRATOR: The end for the next Chinatown at Cass and Peterboro: inevitable.

It tried hanging on but by the 80s most of the original residents were gone.

SANDY: We were living in the suburbs doing what all immigrant families wanted for their children.

To get educated, get good jobs, start their own businesses and move to the suburbs.

NARRATOR: In 2023, one of the last historic Detroit Chinatown buildings was demolished.

Asian American groups and community leaders are now planning what might be a Pan-Asian cultural district in the future.

SANDY: You can't make up for what you didn't do before but you can make up for what you're going to do now and that's what we're trying to do is revitalize a neighborhood that's basically been abandoned, honoring our ancestors and the work and the risks that they took, especially these women that were not valued then and come over to this country and raise all of these children that became the Chinese population in Detroit.

ROMAN: Well, I was always one of the few young people that actually wanted to always hear stories because I'm like, "How do you pick up a family "and move during a war?

"How do you live in a camp?

How do you find a new country to go live in?"

JACQUELINE: The reason we left Vietnam in 1975 because of the war.

We left on a boat stranded on sea not sure where we're gonna be.

We landed in Thailand.

And after that we got sponsored from a church in Lansing, Michigan.

VAUGHN: We suffered a terrible, darkest- one of the darkest days in history, actually marked as the very first genocide and that was in 1915 when the Ottoman Empire wanted to exterminate the Armenians.

That's why there are Armenians all over the world.

France, Romania, Greece, America, Canada, everywhere.

My grandparents ended up in Canada.

REP.

XIONG: When my father was seventeen, he married my mother and then he was quickly recruited by the CIA along with the Hmong men and the villagers in Laos.

ROMAN: It started out actually what- what's now western Ukraine, which before World War II was part of Poland and then during the war they started emigrating to stay ahead of the Soviet Army and all that and they worked their way west, they worked their way into Austria where they were in a displaced persons camp.

REP.

XIONG: When the U.S.

pulled out of Laos, anyone that was Hmong was persecuted.

HOA: So my father, he was a South Vietnamese military personnel.

He came to Michigan in 1975.

We stayed in Vietnam.

NY: I was born in Vientiane in Laos.

When I was eight years old our family got sponsored from a refugee camp in Thailand because of the Vietnam war.

HOA: For seven years we lost connection with him, and we always believed that he has lost his life during the war, so in 1982 we actually reunited with him, my mom and eight children.

ROMAN: The family after World War II got split up amongst many different countries.

VAUGHN: The only way my grandmother in Canada was able to survive is when they were coming to the villages, well, my great grandmother and grandfather took my grandmother to the people next door who were Turkish and said, "Take Zaruhi as your baby.

Don't let them take her and kill her."

So this Turkish family held on to my grandmother for about a- close- almost a year and that's the way that she escaped being slaughtered by the Turks.

REP.

XIONG: So my mom was pregnant.

She had three children at that point, they trekked from northern Laos into the southern border and they swam across the Mekong River in the middle of the night and my father was the only one who knew how to swim and so he found a scrap rubber tire, fastened it around my mom's waist and pulled my mom and my three older siblings across the river.

VAUGHN: When my mother and father decided to migrate over here to the United States because my dad was working for Ford Motor in Canada, he had the opportunity to come over to the Ford Rouge plant.

My sisters- older sisters, they were born in Canada.

Myself and my younger sister, we were born here in Detroit.

ROMAN: My mom was born in '41 when Ukraine was under Nazi control, and so her birth certificate says Ukraine, and my aunt, was born in the displaced person camp, she was born in Austria.

REP.

XIONG: I spent my first three years of my life in the refugee camp where a majority of the Hmong refugees had been placed.

Then in 1987 is when our family was accepted into the United States.

ROMAN: Well they're all in Austria in the displaced person camp.

The goal was to find someplace else to go to emigrate to.

My mom and my grandparents, they actually were accepted to Argentina.

So they went to Buenos Aires.

NY: Our sponsor was in a Black community.

We never saw a Black person before.

When our sponsor, which is a husband and wife from a church that went and welcomed us, I didn't know how to react but the first time that he hugged me I knew that it was family.

ROMAN: My grandmother's sister, they did not make the cut for Argentina.

They came to Detroit.

VAUGHN: We started going to church, it was the old Masonic Temple.

And if you go there to this day you'll even see above the columns it says in Armenian "Hay Kedron" which means the Armenian Center.

ROMAN: It was hard to find work and stuff in Buenos Aires, their economy wasn't very strong at that time.

My grandmother's sister said, "Well, come up to Detroit."

So then the family picked up from Argentina and did the move up to Detroit where they lived on the west side.

NY: I think the reason why I'm telling this story is that once I'd grown up it was like this division that we hear about white and Black and so I didn't know what they were talking about in the media about chaotic stuff that's going on versus what I'm living where here's a community that's taking care of us.

VAUGHN: This is the Armenian story.

It doesn't end, okay?

It continues to this day.

We're a hundred some years after the genocide but people are still feeling it and we basically sing the praises of those who have sacrificed for us to be here because if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't be here.

(singing in Armenian) ASPEN: Something that I really didn't know about my dad's side of the family, they were Jews that came out of Rumania, there's a lot of history that wasn't written down, we don't have photographs, it was erased.

NARRATOR: Detroiters here trying to keep their history - Jewish history.

The Zekelman Holocaust Center in suburban Farmington Hills was created to do just that.

KATIE: So before the war, I mean Michigan had a very thriving Jewish community, we always have.

We were very integral, even during the Holocaust trying to send aid and help to those in Europe, and so for many people, they knew that coming to Michigan, they would have help when they came here afterwards.

GAIL: I didn't learn about the Holocaust till much later in life, probably when I was in what we now call middle school because at the time parents didn't think it was a good idea to talk to their kids about the Holocaust, it'd be too traumatic, too upsetting.

NARRATOR: Gail Offen's father Sam was a young man in Krakow when World War II started.

At the Center, descendants of Holocaust survivors talk about keeping their families' stories alive.

And here Irene Miller tells her story.

IRENE: I came to live permanently in Michigan in 1970.

I married in Israel where I just turned 18 to a man from Detroit.

NARRATOR: Then there's Max Markovitz - he came to Detroit seven decades ago.

(Max speaks English) NARRATOR: Max started life near Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia - born in 1929.

(Max speaks English) IRENE: It's a mission for me to let the world know what hate and prejudice did and what hate and prejudice can do again unless we learn from it.

My extended family was close to a hundred members.

Not a single one of them survived.

(Max speaks English) NARRATOR: Irene Miller's family was in Warsaw as Jews were being sent to Nazi death camps.

Some escaped to the Soviet Union, but Miller was taken there by force.

IRENE: Soviet soldiers kicked in the door of the cabin, and they marched us to a train station and they were shoving as many people as they could in each of those boxcars.

When the doors close they delivered us to a labor camp in the Siberian Taiga.

If you were outside, any part of your skin exposed, wouldn't take more than a few minutes it would get frostbitten.

We didn't have clothing for that kind of a climate.

They shipped us thereafter to Uzbekistan.

While in Siberia we were hungry every day.

In Uzbekistan we almost starved to death.

(Max speaks English) NARRATOR: Sam Offen?

He was taken to a Nazi concentration camp near Krakow, then to the Mauthausen- Gusen complex.

Max Markovitz found himself there too.

(Max speaks English) GAIL: It was a rock quarry, and their job was to take rocks, big rocks and break them into smaller rocks but not just standing still.

This quarry has 186 steps and I know this because I've been there and I counted the steps.

And their job was to take big heavy rocks and go run up and down these steps all day long carrying these rocks.

If you didn't run the guards would shoot at you.

(Max speaks English) (crowd cheering) NARRATOR: Markovitz made his way to a Jewish refugee house in Great Britain.

(Max speaks English) NARRATOR: Sam Offen made it to Great Britain too.

GAIL: Before the war my father remembered that his grandmother used to write letters to cousins in Detroit asking for help.

Well after the war they were in London and they thought- they're trying to think of the name, they weren't sure and they sent a letter to- and they put on it, Kirschman, that was the name they remembered, Detroit, Michigan.

KATIE: After the war about a 100,000 Holocaust survivors come to the United States and about 4,000 of them settle here in Michigan.

(Max speaks English) GAIL: The cousins that were in Detroit somehow got the letter, sent them back a letter asking for more details and- and they connected like that.

They said if you come to Detroit you'll have a family, you'll have all the food you want.

NARRATOR: As Sam Offen got older, daughter Gail said speaking about the Holocaust became his life's work.

With his electronics knowhow, Max Markovitz became an entrepreneur in Detroit, working with another Holocaust survivor for a time.

(Max speaks English) KIM: So all my aunts and uncles most of them lived here in Detroit, in southwest Detroit, some though did live in Saginaw, some were in Chicago, but the majority of the family is from Detroit.

My mother's family is from Zacatecas, Mexico.

(street sounds) NARRATOR: Corktown - the original Irish enclave - not far from downtown Detroit.

It's here you'll find Michigan Central.

Lest we forget other people who'd been part of this neighborhood's history - like the Latino families who made this their destination in Detroit.

MARTINA: So we have been here for a very long time.

But yet our history has never been documented in the way that other communities have documented their history.

The African American community proudly has documented their community and that's a huge part of Detroit.

The Arab American community has documented their history.

NARRATOR: This gathering hosted by the VOCES Oral History Project.

Voces?

That's Spanish for voices.

MARTINA: The comprehensive collection of these stories has yet to be done and this committee came together to invite you here tonight because that's what we're gonna do.

(cheering and applause) MARIA: You know, this neighborhood has been revitalized many times over by new families coming in.

There are new transplants you can call them, they come in.

They don't know any of this and I think that they'd be more than interested, everyone across the board to learn about us and our stories.

OZZIE: We have to tell our own story.

That's why I'm really proud of the work that the VOCES committee is interested in doing.

NARRATOR: Filmmaker Len Radjewski Fraga used some audio recordings from the 1970s to help figure out how his family came to Michigan.

Well, the Mexican revolution was going on in 1919.

(Valeriano speaks English) (Man speaks English) (Valeriano speaks English) LEN: Back in Mexico my grandfather was a vaquero, was a basically a ranch hand, cowboy.

(Valeriano speaks English) LEN: I knew of my two uncles that had recorded my grandparents telling their own story sometimes in English sometimes in Spanish.

That changed everything.

ANNOUNCER: This is the story of two remarkable people... NARRATOR: From that came Michoacan to Michigan - a documentary first produced in 1994.

Fraga taught high school video production back then.

LEN: From the very start it's always been a family project.

NARRATOR: The Mexican state of Michoacan lies west of Mexico City.

Now there's an updated version of the film edited by Len's cousin's daughter Julie Brazen.

They're fascinated with the family lore - the Fragas made it to Texas but what really happened when they were busted flat in San Antonio waiting for a train?

DANIEL: As they were walking down the street this Mexican approached them, Mexican American.

(Valeriano speaks English) DANIEL: Dad thought he was saying Michoacan and at that point with as much suffering as they'd been through and disappointment, he was ready to go back.

MARTIN: The people there told him that Michigan you can make a lot of money there, they had been there before.

(Valeriano speaks English) NARRATOR: In Saginaw Fraga's grandfather picked sugar beets, the family barely getting by.

They moved to North Branch in Michigan's thumb for several years and had more children.

LEN: As the- their children got older, they were looking for work and the place to go was Detroit.

NARRATOR: The family - six generations now - Fraga's dive into the Mexican side of his family history has even affected how he says his name.

LEN: Since I've been using more Spanish and visits to Mexico I say frah-ga and most of the family here say fray-ga, the Americanized version and I know sometimes they look at me and they go ahh who does he think he is?

NARRATOR: Fraga's also done some research on the Polish side of his family - still working on the traditional pronunciation of that name.

LEN: Rye-yes-ki I believe.

I've got to do better about the pronunciation.

I went to Poland and found the little town where the name came from.

You know, the American culture now is- I'm half Mexican, my kids are quarter, my grandkids are an eighth, I mean unless you keep those stories and themes alive, they're easily lost.

If my uncles could do it with reel-to-reel recorders all of you should be doing- the power of these things compared to those early cameras but the first thing is, you've got to do it now.

NARRATOR: Now?

An imperative.

When people die, histories can die too.

OZZIE: We were motivated in a way to form this group VOCES because of the work of one of the musicians Cesar Pea, who said I need to make a documentary about all these fantastic musicians that came out of southwest Detroit and Delray, but unfortunately, he passed away.

NARRATOR: Back when, Cesar Pea toured with famed bluesman Albert King.

Pea died in 2022.

Meanwhile Aaron Barndollar and Ozzie Rivera had already been posting interviews on YouTube done years ago like one on musician Frank "Panchito" Lozano who'd been performing since the 1940s.

ZIGGY: This must be you here, Panchito in the background?

PANCHITO: I'm right there.

NARRATOR: Lozano, horn player, band leader and the first Mexican-American principal in Detroit Public Schools died in 2014.

Now cameras gather oral histories again... INTERVIEWEE: He knew everybody... NARRATOR: Including Barndollar's uncle.

HENRY: My grandfather had a farm, and my dad did not like working on the farm.

And he come to Detroit, and he got a job dishwashing.

And he started out as a dishwasher and worked his way up to be the head chef of the Fort Shelby Hotel.

AARON: He was the Mexican Gordon Ramsey.

He never went to culinary school, but he could do anything in the kitchen.

NARRATOR: With the oral histories coming in, Maurizio Dominguez edits an interview with Deacon Raul Feliciano of the Detroit Archdiocese and Catholic activist Beatriz Esquivel Ramos.

BEATRIZ: The people had that church built, the people built that little chapel.

NARRATOR: They're talking about the Our Lady of Guadalupe Church of southwest Detroit that dates back to the early 1920s.

MAURIZIO: Yeah, the first Mexican national parish in the Midwest, so, not just Michigan, just Midwest overall.

BEATRIZ: Those people sent for a priest in Mexico because there were no Spanish speaking priests... MAURIZIO: I think that just speaks to the core of why it's so important to do this project.

You know because stories like this that if there's no documentation available and there's no way for people to- to find out about it then how are they gonna know, right?

NARRATOR: With endeavors like this come limitations.

So many more people to talk to but there's only so much funding and people who have the time to collect these stories.

MAURIZIO: I'm only one guy, I can only record/edit so much so we're officially planning you know, what's it gonna look like to expand- to grow this team, and to bring more people into the- from the community who can help with the archiving, the recording, the interviewing, everything.

OZZIE: We're just scratching the surface.

This Latino community has been here since 1918.

LEN: We hope that what with we're doing with the Mexican-American culture is an impetus for other groups to say, hey, what about me, what about the Polish or the Germans or the ahh the Irish or whatever.

As the deeper you dive into history the more you realize all the groups that have contributed to who we are in Michigan.

Unless you tell your own story not too many people are going to tell it for you.

And that's history, you know the victors tell the story right?

KAREN: And my grandparents came here in 1917 and they settled in Hamtramck.

I have a picture of them that shows them at the Detroit train station on the day that they got there from Georgia and I guess there must have been photographers around and they - oh we'll take your picture and commemorate this-that - so they- for whatever reason and they we're wealthy or anything, they had this picture taken and my aunt Mary standing on the stool looking like shocked at it all but that's how my dad's side of the family got here.

NARRATOR: Karen Batchelor's dad would become a prominent doctor in Detroit - he trained at Wayne University's Medical School during World War II.

KAREN: I became a mom in August of 1975 and it was around that time after my son was born that I realized, wow, I don't know a lot about our family history and within about ten months going to the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit's main library and writing off to a historical society in Erie, Pennsylvania, where my maternal great-grandmother had come from I was able to put together enough facts and found a Revolutionary War patriot.

It was William Hood, he fought in the Battle of Fort Freeland where they came to the rescue of a fort that had been taken over by the British, and that kind of got me started.

This is my great- great grandmother and her family line takes me back to 1630 in this country.

My genealogy mentor took me aside and said I really think you ought to apply to DAR, Daughters of the American Revolution.

Mom talked about how she had been to a concert in D.C.

when she was a student at Howard, it was 1939 and it was when Marian Anderson had to sing on the steps of Lincoln Memorial because she had been denied access to use DAR's Constitution Hall which was a concert venue and still is.

ANNOUNCER: 75,000 mass before Lincoln Memorial to hear Marian Anderson, colored contralto make her Capitol debut at the Great Emancipator shrine.

Refusal of the DAR to let her use their hall fanned a countrywide controversy.

BILL: What was the image for a lot of people with the DAR?

KAREN: Well, certainly in the Black community people were- people did ask me, why would you want to join a group like that who had discriminated against us and here's what I would say was the reason: When I was fourteen, ninth grade, I integrated a school in Detroit and it was on the east side, I had to take a bus an hour and a half each way and my parents wanted me to do this.

And this was part of their way is that- This was the year after the Civil Rights Act, and I was to integrate this school.

There were four of us kids at the school and we weren't in class with one another, none of the Black kids were together, there were no Black teachers.

It was probably one of the loneliest years of my life.

It was the first time I ever got called the N word.

And I remember after a couple weeks getting home from one of those days and I was sobbing, and I asked my parents, "Why are you making me do this?"

And Dad said, and I will never forget this, it has been maybe my mantra through all the years since, but he said, "Because somebody has to."

ANNOUNCER: Tonight we present a landmark in television entertainment.

NARRATOR: 1977 - the year the miniseries Roots premiered on network television.

Suddenly Americans started doing their own genealogy research.

KAREN: In July of 1977 two women at the Ezra Parker chapter of DAR in Royal Oak, Michigan, they were inviting me to apply to them and become a member, they were going to sponsor me.

NARRATOR: Applications to other chapters?

Ignored.

But Karen was in.

It made local headlines.

And the New York Times front page.

REPORTER: So join us for Good Morning America... NARRATOR: Then, national television.

REPORTER: On ABC.

KAREN: There were a lot of news stories.

I did a lot of interviews, that this was the beginning of a lifetime journey for me doing family history.

And then these two pictures are Aunt Clara.

So, the first person I started talking to about the family history and she was the self-appointed family historian whether you wanted to listen to her or not, and I wish I had listened more intently.

I get a lot of satisfaction from going through historic records and finding a clue and seeing what more I can find about a family history.

Remember, I started off not knowing much other than what we talked about at the dinner table.

And now I've been able to go back to 1630 in this country, I have eight Revolutionary War patriots, it's beyond my wildest dreams.

NARRATOR: A half century later, Batchelor's still digging into her family's past.

KAREN: Grandma kept me going on the research and she lived to be 97 and every time we talked she would end the conversation with, "And I saw people hanging from a tree."

And in fact, I was able to document later that there was a lynching in her area in Georgia when she was a young teenager that no Black people would have been at the lynching unless they were the target but she would have seen the aftermath of this.

And she always talked about it but I was able to document later when she'd probably had seen.

Family history is no longer something that you could call a hobby as it was when I first started.

It is a cultural imperative.

The more that we know about ourselves the more we understand how we are an integral part of the fabric of this country.

I mean I'm more American than apple pie.

And I think it's important for our children to understand this because they may not be learning it in school, and it may not be available, as readily available today as it was last week, but the fact is we know more about who we come from now, then we knew in my grandmother's generation and certainly in my parents' generation, so this is a journey.

SHARON: My family came to Detroit via my grandmother, and she came from Natchez, Mississippi in 1919-1920. and she came on a train, I do know that so I kind of get goosebumps thinking hey I'm walking in my grandmother's footsteps literally, you know?

My other grandmother who'd come visit us from New Jersey, she was on one of the last trains that left from here before it closed down, so I have both ends, when somebody came here, and then also one of the last trains that left, going- going east.

NARRATOR: Michigan Central - a Motor City destination again - now, a place for innovators shaping America's transportation future.

For generations, Detroiters' resilience and ingenuity helped transform America.

Our history... part of the nation's evolving story.

ANNOUNCER: Destination Detroit - This program was made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, And viewers like you.

Thank you.

To learn more about this Detroit PBS series, visit Detroit PBS dot org slash Destination Detroit.

You'll find our conversations about Michigan Central and other stories about why people came to Detroit and the lives they built here.

JUSTINE: I actually came to the city with an understanding that this history, the heritage of what mobility and innovation has looked like, I wanted to be there with that.

JARED: My nephews and nieces and future generations it's kind of letting them know, this is where you- we came from, this is the standard, go forth and prosper.

LISA: I had never planned to come back to Detroit again.

I loved it out in Vir- like, Northern Virginia, outside of D.C.

But I've fallen back in love with Detroit.

So, I'm happy to be back.

PRODUCER: Your grandpa he was already working for Ford.

What did your grandmother do?

QUIANA: Waited for him to come home with his check from Ford so she could go shopp- (laughs) so she could go shop.

KAREN: This is a wonderful idea.

I think one day maybe my kids will look back and see this and smile... (laughs) CHRIS: Thank you so much for sharing your story with us... KAREN: You're welcome, it's nice to meet you.

CHRIS: Nice to meet you too!