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Learn more about the Community Foundation at cfgf.org by the Saint John Street Historical Committee honoring the legacy of the resilient Saint John.

Neighborhood residents working together to keep the memory of Saint John alive.

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.com The St John community.

What it meant to me was that it was it was home.

And it was a self-sufficient neighborhood where everybody knew everybody else you could.

The neighbors were all friendly.

We ate together, we cried together, We did everything together.

It was a mixed area and it was we were all kind of poor, but we shared a lot of things.

St John had his very good points, you know.

You know, it was self-contained.

It was neighborly.

To be able to explore, to have the kind of people that was around us that that is what made it amazing.

St John Street was like, my Wakanda.

Our treasure was and our camaraderie.

We respected each other.

We loved each other.

It was just a melting pot of love.

It's what I remember.

♪ The first people to come here were the Anishinaabe people.

These are the Native American tribes who came here from the East Coast.

You know, according to their belief system, they came here as part of a prophecy that they would move to the west and stop where the food grows on water.

And this refers to wild rice that was growing in the Flint River and the waterways of Michigan.

So they came here at some point before European contact.

We don't know exactly when they came here because of a river crossing or a Grand Traverse, as it's called, an easy place to cross the Flint River.

And they settled here.

And their presence here was what first first attracted Euro Americans to the Flint area.

They came here to trade with the natives.

And, you know, Michigan during that time period was a nexus of the fur trade because of the Great Lakes, because of the internal rivers, because in a time before you have the highway system, the waterways are the way that people are getting around and moving heavy things, just like interstates.

And so, you know, that was kind of the story of how people started to come here.

1807 I believe it was the Treaty of Detroit cedes about half of Genesee County to the United States.

And as part of the terms of this treaty, it allows Euro-Americans and Americans to settle in this area, also provides some other stipulations such as, you know, we're going to provide tools to the tribes and various things.

It doesn't outright say that they're supposed to leave as part of the terms of this, but it's kind of the end game with this because a lot of the people who are engaging in this kind of behavior, they think that as more Europeans start to come here, it's going to push the first people out.

I was born in Flint, born and raised here, and I have learned over the years that things that I was taught.

Were not correct.

I thought, you know, about Jacob Smith then totally erased the Anishinaabe community that were here that was here first.

So, Jacob Smith, you know, a lot of people have considered him to be the founder of what is now modern day Flint.

He was a fur trader originally from Quebec.

I believe.

He came here to Michigan and specifically settled in the Flint area because of the Grand Traverse, where, you know, the Anishinaabe people were living to engage in the fur trade with them.

He had children with some of the Anishinaabe people, and he actually benefited directly from a lot of these treaties because as part of the treaties he was specifically given and his children were specifically given plots of land in what is now downtown Flint in the Grand Traverse neighborhood, but also in what would become the Saint John neighborhood.

♪ After the the Lumber industry died out, another industry began, which was to construction of of carriages, horse drawn carriages.

One of them was the Durant- Dort carriage company founded by William C. Durrant and J. Dallas Dort both of whom eventually developed their own automotive companies.

In fact, that William Durant, he bought the Buick Motor Company and built up a complex of factories on Hamilton Avenue.

And that's how Buick City over the decades developed.

So if we're if we're thinking about Flint in the turn of the century, it's still a relatively small town in 1900.

And it really doesn't take off.

Really, really.

We don't see a ton of growth until 1910.

And the difference is between 1900 an 1910 as we build our first auto factory here.

So the Buick factory gets built and we start rolling the first Buicks off the line in 1905.

And we get a huge influx in migrants coming into the city and they're kind of there for a while.

It's kind of the elites and the industrial elites and city planners and civic leaders are worried about what this migrant -- what these migrants look like and kind of worried about what these migrants might you know, what might mean to the growth of the city.

The birth of General Motors had a huge impact on the city of Flint because all of a sudden you have this very large auto manufacturer with all kinds of high paying factory jobs, and there's suddenly a really huge thing attracting people to this area.

And so you start picking up this very common thread in Flint history, and that is that people came here, whether it's someone's grandparents, their great grandparents, they come here from the south, places like Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and they're attracted here because of these high paying factory jobs.

So my granddad had written in a paper that Henry Ford was paying $5 a day for workers.

They recruited just a 1919 year in 1919.

So he was recruiting in the South.

My granddad put four boys from them for families that he had in his crew, and he pulled them, took them to the railroad station, put them on a train, and it was a back, it was a cattle car with straw on it.

So Mr. Hopperias I told him he had to get his cotton out the field.

My granddad said no these boys going north and he took them to the next town.

Put that 41 Colt on his hip and took him to the next town and sent him to Detroit.

Well, when they got to Detroit, Henry Ford had to spend time that day and it was a state track truck with a sign on it.

If you want a job, pay him $5 a day.

Get on the truck.

So all the boys, they jumped up on the truck.

And at that time there wasn't but one they called it Dixie Highway.

But there wasn't but one way to Flint So once they cross Eight Mile Road was all wooden, desolated.

And so when they got to Flint, it was dark.

It wasn't...

It was nighttime.

And the truck took them over the on E Street viaduct and told them to get off here and just wait there till the morning.

And that's how my dad.

Ended up here.

My family started the migration probably somewhere around 19... probably around 1920.

They migrated from Macon, Georgia, to Michigan City, Indiana, and that was where many people came during that that that kind of migration.

But when they got there, they heard that there were jobs, more jobs in Flint.

My family, I do not have the exact date that my family migrated to the St John Street community, but it had been in the twenties when the factories were opening and so they left their farm in Arkansas and moved here to Flint, Michigan, to work in the factory.

The origins of St John's really kind of are somewhere in the 19 teens.

And again, it's one of these kind of neighborhoods that start up as impromptu neighborhoods.

Most of the neighborhoods that pop up around the factories in what we would say, like the industrial area, have no are are springing up ahead of urban infrastructure.

In the late thirties, every city over a population of 40,000 was redlined, which is to say the City, the... HOLC The Home Owners Loan Corporation came in and created maps for each of these cities that we now know as redlining maps.

Flint's was created and finished in 1937.

Redlining was explicitly racist.

That underwriting manual explicitly sought to prevent what they said was the infiltration of inharmonious racial groups.

And what they meant by that was prevent black people from living in a particular neighborhood.

We only had two of the two really two spots in Flint, the south side, that was around Liberty Street, where black folks stayed and the St John Industrial area.

♪ We went to War World War Two, and while we was in war, General Motors got a contract making tanks, jeeps.

Okay?

Now black folks lived in that area over there.

So my aunt's backyard was right up against the Buick fence, a Bekaert Rampid, so we could see those tanks coming off.

And they had a proving ground two blocks down the road.

By the time you get to post-World War two Right?

So we're still having these conversations in Flint after World War Two about what is what's an orderly city, what's a progressive city?

You know, what's a stable city look like?

This is where you really start to see things in flux in terms of new forms of migration.

And it's really not until World War Two that we start to see large numbers, significant numbers of African-Americans moved to Flint.

My parents came from along with me came from Dyersburg, Tennessee, in Dyersburg.

my dad was a clothes presser He worked at the laundry in Dyersburg and in... by accident one day, he came off of lunch, and there was a guy sitting in the parking lot, called him over to the car and ask him, you know, he says, I'm from Michigan and I'm opening the cleaner's in Michigan and I'm looking for a presser, a good clothes presser.

And my dad told him, you just found one and Dad was was in a -- he was really in a hurry to get away from there because he was only making $5 a week and I was his only child at the time.

So he told me he would go, He's the guy.

I told him he would be leaving next week.

He could drive back with him.

So he came home, told Mom what had happened.

She okayed it.

He hopped in the car with Mr. Noland, was his name.

At that time, Kankakee was a main industrial, was a paint factory, and those jobs shut down.

And my dad and some of his buddies, the Woods family and various families, heard about the industrial, the building of cars in Flint, Michigan.

And Buick was hiring and left and right.

Chevrolet was hiring left and right.

And so my dad came to Flint for a better job.

I remember, you know, talking with my grandfather, you know, which was the first to arrive here from Oxford, Mississippi.

You know, him and his cousin came here.

He told me he sold his cow to be able to finance a trip to get here, to get a a good job in a manufacturing.

He worked for A.C.

Spark plugs at the time, and then he sent for my grandmother, my mother, which was the first born of five.

So it was around 1949, I believe, that the migration occurred and the family started here in the city of Flint.

We migrated from from Arkansas to Pine Bluff, Arkansas area Rise and Faith, Arkansas, to Flint, Michigan.

My mother and I understand at three when I was three years old that we rode the Greyhound bus on the rear of the Greyhound bus from Arkansas to Flint, Michigan.

Originally, I'm from Mississippi.

I come out of Charleston.

Mississippi.

In 1951, My dad came to Flint in 1950.

He worked and got a job and came back and got us.

In 1951 February.

Flint was the third most segregated city in the country back in the 1950s.

As a matter of fact, Ebony magazine might have been CPO magazine did an article regarding Flint being the most segregated city in the north.

At the time.

African Americans could only live in two neighborhoods, and it was the Floral Park area on the south side of Flint and the St John Street area.

And at that time Saint John was defined as both the Saint John's Street side and the industrial street side of the Buick factory separated the two.

So those were the only places where African-Americans could retire.

When I attended Roosevelt, I was a stepping stone.

This is my first time experiencing segregation.

We went on a field trip and I never will forget.

This white guy says to one of us, The people, you know, the teachers or whatever, you're not going to let these niggers on my property.

And that was my first experience.

The government from the National government the state and the city, and FHA, VA, all complicit in segregation Remember, when we when we think about kind of the postwar era, 1945 to 1960, that part where we have an exponential growth in African-American population in Flint, when African-Americans are showing up to Flint, the rules for residential segregation had been written 20 years prior to that.

All right.

So they're showing up to a system where we're already determining where folks like that can live.

And it is in areas that are predetermined, not areas like Civic Park, not areas like Mott Park, certainly not areas like Westwood Hills.

So and also not outside the city in the growing suburbs like Davison and, you know, Flushing and even south of us in Grand Blanc and in Burton.

♪ It was a wonderful, wonderful neighborhood because I was sheltered.

My dad had eight boys and when all -- when they turned seven years old, he put a peanut bag in a basket.

It was a basket and your job was to come home, get that basket -- that... And I really, I really, really credit that to my entrepreneurship, number one and for my knowledge of the different people in the Saint John area.

I met so, so many people, so many people and my fondest memory is the people took me in like I was their child.

It was just like a bird.

When all the eggs was done and you got the birds.

It's just like they took me under their wings and they kind of like helped me with everything that I needed.

The people next door had a grapevine in my and they would give my mother grapes and she would make jelly and they would share that and whatever they had.

And they were clean.

They were always working, cleaning.

Just when we had a dirt road, they would spray water out to keep the dust down.

We had milk man who came and delivered milk and left it on the porch.

And all coal people that came and dump coal into your basement.

What I remember about Saint John, I can close my eyes.

I remember the love of the diversity.

The village.

The best days of my life.

It was a melting pot.

It was, as I said before, self contained.

I mean, you didn't have to go downtown to shop.

I mean, everything that you needed, it was right there in the area.

We very seldom locked our doors if we went on vacation or went out of town, I don't think we ever locked our door.

The neighbors always watched out for us.

Saint John Street was the urban center of black culture in Flint, Michigan.

It had the clubs, it had our stores, and it had a proliferating economy over there that could sustain people.

And there were many black businesses there.

Oh, Stewart Street was what is called the bus turnaround, where they used to have a trolley bus that would come there and turn around and then it would take you all the way downtown.

You catch the bus and that's how you got downtown.

There was a store on the corner of Stewart Street and Carol Lee called Kaplan's grocery store.

♪ Across the street from Katherine's grocery store was another store called Datch Brothers.

Got a lot of candy and stuff from Datch brothers and stuff.

But we as schoolchildren we always stop Datch Brothers, get a BB Bats and the Lemon drops and and... Holloways, suckers and bubble gum.

Sol's market, Ale's market, the Balkan Bakery.

That was one of my favorite places.

We had a theater.

The Comforee theater.

There were restaurants Friley's, Coney Island.

We also had the chicken.

I didn't frequent this place, but there was a place called a Chicken Shack.

They had real good chicken that sometimes my mother would get it from there.

The street was Saint John was a long street, and it was a busy street.

We had businesses where you can go buy live chickens, hamburger, restaurants, beauty shops, pool rooms, shoeshine parlors, bars funeral homes, churches, nightclubs.

We had our own skating rink on Nevada and Saint John.

You see in the Saint John Street area, all the streets were pretty much named after states.

We stayed on Burma Street and then on Rhode Island, right next to Vermont.

My wife's uncle had a wallpaper and paint shop.

We had a black grocery store.

Aldis Grocery had a black grocery store.

We also had Old man Holly had a grocery store on the corner of Massachusetts and Saint John.

And then down further right off Easy Street was the Jarret Ice House.

It's a black owned ice house.

My dad was in He was...

He was a constant entrepreneur He had the he bought the fish market and poultry market along Saint John street.

He opened up a nut house.

They call it Jarret's nut house.

What was special was the name though it was comedic to say I work at the nut house.

Jarret's Nut House.

He also had penny machines with the glass on the top.

He put a penny in it and you turn it everywhere you went.

It was one of them machines, the St John Street Community Center.

That was the centerpoint of that community.

Yeah, I think it was built in...

I can't remember the year.

And in the early fifties, but all the children migrated there and the adults as well.

They had adult education classes there.

Basketball, city league basketball, which I was a part of roller skating, which was a big thing at that time.

Arts and crafts for parents and it was just a place where everybody could congregate.

We would go there for ice cream socials and musical programs, go there to skate.

You can do art, you can learn how to sew.

So we you know that I enjoyed all that.

You can go down to the center, you know, you could play ball, you could learn how to march.

You could you know, they had what they called the marching groups.

That's where we went for recreation for one of our late leaders.

She would teach us how to be polite and how to... good manners and Mrs. Broadway, was her name.

When I first came to Dakota Street, I when I looked at that house and when I went in, there was the most beautiful house.

And I felt so loved and accepted.

And what I did notice about living in Dakota Street, I was listening to all the sounds around me, and most of the sounds was coming from the factory.

And you can hear the I guess is the big press or something.

The machines go boom, boom, and you can feel it in the house.

And before daybreak you would hear people walking to the factory.

There was a lot of smokestacks and there was a lot of stuff that came out of those stacks that when they did have cars, a lot of times it would put dents.

And the cars, you know, it was just kind of a smog area in a lot of cases from the Buick.

You know, there were days when my mom and many of the women wouldn't even put their clothes out on certain days because of the soot.

You know how that would blanket our community like a big fog and so on.

So several days we didn't even put our clothes out, you know, once we washed them because the soot was so bad.

All that smoke and that soot and that sand would settle in the black community.

And if you didn't have a garage for your car, all that stuff was sitting in the finish of your car, but nobody cared you'd breathe in that.

nobody cared about that because they didn't have to live over there.

One of the things GM did too, and General Motors did too, they had a place called a foundry that called Buick Seventy.

That's where they put all the blacks in.

And they they they took and they worked the foundry.

They got to the point where that was so detrimental to the black people's health that they told if you worked and foundry you could retire in 25 years and get insurance called black lung.

You know and then I had several friends of our family that worked at the foundry.

You know, that was the most arduous work that many of our ancestors were engaged in.

And uh, some of the cousins that I knew, you know, you see them getting off work and how they loved it was just appalling.

I knew I never wanted to work there.

You know, the conditions that they were subjected to.

My mom used to always say, they killing us because we could smell it.

You know, we got the windows up in the house.

I said Ma listen, what's that smell.

She said, yeah, they killing us, baby.

baby girl.

They killing us.

That's what she said.

For years DuPont, Buick, Chevrolet, AC.

The foundry used the Flint River as its industrial waste system.

The industrial waste that were dumped in that river, the mercury, the leads, all of those things stay in that river for over 100, 200 years.

And then the city of Flint had the nerve to give those people the water that had that industrial waste in it.

It happens all the time, whether it was it split, whether it's Saint John, whether it's North Street or whatever.

What happened in Flint happens all over America.

These guys from the South, they came up there working on a plant.

I remember a story this one guy told me.

He said he had hired in at Buick and there were four white guys ahead of him.

And I said, they had all signed the necessary papers.

They were going to the plant where they were going to work, the four white were guys went one way, and he -- they took him and they said, No, you go this way.

He went to the foundry and they went to the better paying job.

And he he said, I'm from the South, but I'm not away from this yet, it still follows me wherever I go.

He said the money was good, but sometimes things hurt more than money.

The master plan is a plan that covers the entire geography of the city.

It's a plan that is comprehensive in scope in the sense that it covers all the important issues in a city, and it always has a land use component to it.

And it's also the plan that is the long range plan.

So it's typically a plan for 20 years from today.

So the City of Flint master plan of 1960, that was when it was adopted, it was drafted by Ladislas Segoe and Associates, you know, and it's really aimed at continuing this momentum and this growth that was happening in the 1950s and is part of it.

They identify two neighborhoods for a complete redevelopment.

One of those is the Floral Park neighborhood in South Central Flint.

One of those is the Saint John neighborhood, closer to the north end.

And what they identify for these two areas is redevelopment as interstate and as parts of what would become the Buick City complex.

You know, initially, black leaders in these communities are supportive of a little bit of redevelopment with some reservation.

But as things started to progress, it became clear that this was not about just simply improving the area.

It was about completely redeveloping and demolishing the area.

How did I hear about urban renewal is when someone came to the house.

I don't know whether it was a family member or a neighbor.

They came and they were they were talking with my grandparents.

I didn't know the rest of the conversation, but it seemed to be quiet.

And after that person left, it was even more quiet because I remember my grandfather, he was just sitting there and and my grandmother, they didn't talk.

They were just sitting.

And and I remember one day my grandmother saying, well, I don't know where we're going to go because I have paid for this house and I can't start over.

I heard that there was going to bulldoze neighborhood Urban renew it is what they did.

They brought the highway through part of it.

So they had to get rid of the neighborhood because we were just in the way.

They came through with urban renewal.

And it wasn't an about no highway.

It could come up the highway they came through with urban renewal first, I'm assuming to make a path for the highway.

I started to realize that when I got out of the Air Force, as I continued in college and I began to see this tradition happen all over America, it is our neighborhoods that they tear up.

The worst of neighborhoods, and they sell you the thing that they're going to improve their neighborhood.

What they're doing is buying cheap property.

Call it urban renewal.

I call it urban removal.

I don't believe the urban renewal program was a success.

It might be a success if you look at what things it did do.

And but for me to call it a success, the question was what should it have done?

And relative to that, it was definitely a failure.

I think it had offered the city their renewal program and Flint offered this the city administrators at the time, a way to project to the community that they were trying to do something about the problems, but they really had no clue as to the relationship between those promises and what actually had to get done.

And that and that's where It just failed to give people what they needed.

It wasn't just a matter of individuals making decisions based on their own biases, but the decision to bulldoze a neighborhood and replace it with an efficient mechanism to get people out of the city from their work had a real consequence for us, and it was a bad choice.

When I heard that they were going to bulldoze the neighborhood, I didn't really hear about the bulldozing.

I just- it came to my attention from my father when he said that we would have to be moving shortly, and I didn't understand why.

I didn't understand any of that at the time.

But it was kind of devastating in a way.

When you grow up someplace and you get used to their place, you don't want to leave it.

It was I had gotten to the point where I gotten close to being an adult, and I learned that I was supposed to be poor when I wasn't.

You know, I was told by the establishment that I was living in the ghetto, which I didn't consider a ghetto.

I considered a village.

We were growing up there.

We were happy.

My parents worked.

It happened over a period of years until finally, you know, there was nothing left with the I-475 construction.

And then with the industrial park out at Saint John Street Industrial Park that came along after all the residents had been relocated.

I can't remember the year, but I remember that they came through and was telling everybody not to pick up, do anything with their property, not to fix up or do anything.

But it was ten years after they came through telling them that that they came through and then, did the highway thing.

But they didn't get very much money for their property because it wasn't kept up.

And that was the reason they told them not to, because they kept telling them they were going to come through with this highway and they were going to buy up the property.

And it was ten years after that that they finally came through and the property was it wasn't valuable at the time.

What happened is when you went on, when this expressway and urban renewal came in, it decimated the Saint John and part of the industrial side of Oak Park, was just destroyed and all those people had to be replaced.

But see what you have to consider is this They were not building any homes for black people.

So a lot of time with black families like when we came here, we had to double up and triple up and maybe fourth and fifth up with someone else and rent.

This happened throughout America.

If you look at what what the lie that was told it was going to bring these jobs, it's going to be an industrial center, was going to be all this magnificent stuff was going to happen.

None of that panned out at all, you know.

So, yeah, they sold them a bill- they sold them a lot.

A lot of it was based on fear, the unknown.

I think a lot of it played into their decision to sell.

And I know a lot of people have told you about the good times, but we have to also talk about the economic part of that whole commute of those communities, because within those communities we had a whole economic system going on that was disrupted when the highway came through, when the urban renewal came through, that disrupted the economics that were going on in those neighborhoods where we had our own grocery stores, where we had our own pharmacies, where we had a movie theater, we had laundromats, we had those things in our neighborhood.

Oh, I thought it was it was disastrous.

It was just terrible that they went through there and pushed all they mostly all that did, At one point there mostly it was mostly black people that was left there.

So- and it was disastrous for us and I didn't know...

Right now, I can't even think how I felt that we had to move because then we felt that we were leaving all our family and nobody was going to be there.

It was just going to be a road in a minute.

How did I hear about the house on Dakota Street being torn down was my aunt gave me a call, My aunt gave me a call.

She told me they took the house down and that was one of the few houses that was left.

And I think it was two people that were left.

And she was she was one of them.

She told me that they took the house down.

Yeah.

Inside... you know... they you know, they taught me well how to move on.

But we knew this was going to happen.

And I'm not the only one that was crying about it because, you know, everybody was comfortable where we were comfortable where we were end of Dakota street, 1112 Dakota Street.

I was the end of 1112 Dakota Street.

Well, I think there's a direct connection between the story of Saint John and the story of the Anishinaabe people, because in this story you have two groups of people who are being systematically pushed off of their land for gain and for greed in the 19th century.

This comes in the form of formal treaties where this land is is ceded to the United States.

People are systematically pushed off because, you know, there's there's something to gain from that.

You know, the connection that I see in 20th century Flint is yet again you have people who are being systematically pushed off their land, except it's not by a treaty, it's by a master plan, by the city of Flint, in which these areas of the city are are identified for redevelopment.

And you know, what's interesting about this is in the master plan, you're hearing about how these these structures are all supposedly dilapidated.

But what's interesting is that doesn't really play out in the historical record.

The city is sending a photographer around, taking pictures of every single building in the city, whether it's a business, a house, including in the Saint John neighborhood and in the floral Park neighborhood, which is the other neighborhood that was demolished in the name of urban renewal.

And, you know, you're looking at the actual photos of these houses which are in the collection of the Sloan Museum.

And, you know, this this story that these structures are all dilapidated and substandard.

It doesn't really play out.

These are just normal houses that I would be perfectly happy, comfortable living in.

So, you know, it seems to be a fabricated justification for what they were doing in the 1970s and eighties.

I think.

I mean, what was lost was the camaraderie that I mentioned earlier.

The village, the caring, the togetherness and the closeness that the community had with each other.

That was lost.

The families were scattered throughout the area.

I believe it hurt our community.

And when you look at the word community, C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y Unity.

That busted it up.

We have no unification to date like we had in the days of geographic area.

If you look across the track they shared, neighbors shared with one another.

Neighbors lift each other up, striving for better living conditions.

They worked in general Motors, they worked in Buick, they worked in the foundry.

They strive for better working condition.

They strive for better living and and we were so close together that when somebody hit the numbers in the community, we knew everybody was going to share.

I think the community, the togetherness that we had, you know, even as blacks and whites in the community, they destroyed that trust that we had between us at that time.

When I moved over on York York street, there was a neighbor behind me and I went to shake her hand and say, you know, I was new in the neighborhood.

And she said, Well, I'll be moving out.

I'm moving out.

She was a white lady and she wasn't she didn't want to even get to know me.

She said, I'll be moving out, moving out.

So that's the way it was, you know, And I think in a way it was about money and power, because when they came through, we had to buy older homes on the other side of Industrial Street, you know, further west.

And then they came through and would tell those people the blacks are moving in and they were building housing out in the suburbs.

So they got money from us going to the older homes and they get money from the people moving into the suburbs.

So it was a it was a money profitable thing for the realtors.

This fledgling group of people did take away their voice.

Their voice was gone.

They went to neighborhoods.

They didn't know anyone.

So they're there.

And then the one person said their soul was gone.

So the unity that they had and that soul, they had to continue on even in a fight.

They were by themselves where they before they were unified.

I think one thing that they were trying to diffuse African-Americans political power, you know, because like I said, it was a burgeoning community population wise.

So I think I think one of the reasons was to diffuse that that enclave of political power and sort of like what happened with Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I think there were some of plans in place, you know, to deprive African-Americans of any economic sustainability.

Truth and history collide because for a lot of years, you know, the truth was covered up regarding the Saint John neighborhood.

You have this, you know, very traditional narrative of why the Saint John neighborhood was demolished, and that is that it was, you know, this dilapidated slum, of course, that we know looking at resources we have in the historical record, that that was not at all true.

And, you know, it's important to tell that truth, because the truth has power.

And in this case, it's the right thing to do to tell this story and to tell the truth.

One way to destroy a people is you take away their ability to have -- to control their finances, to control their destiny, to control where they live, where they work, where they worship, where, where they do anything.

When you're controlling that, then you have you are destroying that people and they really thought that they would destroy that neighborhood camaraderie that the St John Street People neighborhood had.

But for some reason it survived.

When you eliminate anything, you have to put something in its place.

There'll be a void.

Anything that's that you have that you take away is a void.

It's like when you throw a pebble in the water, you see the ripples go out small at first, but it gets bigger and bigger as time goes on and it goes to the bank, to the shore.

Pretty soon the pond is still again because the water is very sensitive.

And when you throw that in there, you create a void and it can't be calm again until that void is filled The consequences of what has happened to the St John area as when they dropped a bomb on the expressway.

When they dropped the pebble of the urban renewal, people will feel the affects beyond.

This is an you know, and now we're trying to get back to some stability and it won't be right until that void is filled.

It can't be right up to the void to filled.

okay.

Should the St John Street community be memorialized.

That's a good question because me being I am president of the St John Street Historical Committee.

Our purpose and our dedication is in trying to memorialize the St John community and that's why that committee exists.

The historical committee are... That's a phenomenal group of people.

I was, I was gifted the opportunity to come and talk to them about the project that we were doing and sitting with them, experiencing the past and the love that they have for the community that they grew up in made me want to join the committee.

I was sitting there and one one man, well, he was a new member and he said he found his pride and he started crying.

And when he said that and started crying, the emotion in the room of how they embraced him, I said Oh, I've got to join this committee.

So it's outside of my professional role.

I'm personally involved with the committee because I want to make sure that it continues.

I want to make sure that the aspirations that they have for the Memorial Park and just making sure that everyone in the world knows that St John Street is yet still alive.

Like I said, you you, you forgot me.

You you act like I didn't exist.

They didn't talk about how the bulls run up and down street from the packing house.

They didn't talk about the cars, and I'm gonna start crying now.

So we got to talk about it no more.

Because you feel it.

You You feel your childhood.

You feel where you were.

And they just erase it like you were never there That's wrong and it shouldn't happen.

This is why I said I know what he feeling And I can understand what he is saying, but and I get teary so I get emotional and stuff, especially when I talk about it.

You act like, we just got extinct we're not extinct animals.

We're real people.

A lot of the kids, the young kids that are coming up now do not know anything about the St John Street area.

We have a reunion every year, but young kids, they don't they have no idea of what Saint John was like that it was self sufficient for for the community.

These kids... it's like when you say St John they want to know what is it?

Where is that?

What is it?

Our goal was in the beginning we were thinking small.

We were thinking of a plaque, like I said, to commemorate the St John's St Community Center and to also put a sign, adopt a sign and adopt a certain part of 475 as the St John.

You are now entering the Saint John's St community.

Well, what happened was that the City of Flint announced that they had sold the Saint John's Street Community Center to a marijuana processing company and they referred to the in that when they announced that when they made that announcement they referred to it as the old police training center.

Well that's it.

That really kicked us off.

Okay.

Because that building was built as the Saint John's Street Community Center.

They sold the Saint John's Street Center and it lit a fire up under us because we were under the impression that that building could not be sold.

We're fighting for our memorial we will not be pushed to the side.

We will not be forgotten.

So give us something to to compensate for what you have now.

And maybe I won't be around when it's finished, but I would like to see it started.

So we said, okay, we're not we're not just going for the plaque and a sign on a highway, we're going to meet with the mayor.

Our engagement came by happenstance.

You know, they didn't seek me out, nor did I seek them out.

We happened to be in the same space at the same time when they had one of their reunions and it provided an opportunity for us to have a dialog.

And I walked up to him and I told him who I was and I told him how we felt about the sale.

He said, Well, why don't you why don't we set up a meeting?

Let's talk about it.

Well, I prepared my pitch and everything, and we met with the mayor as a committee, and I told him how we felt about it.

He said, Well, I think we can work something out.

We can.

We can.

We can do something.

I said, but I don't, we no longer want to plaque or sign on the highway.

We want a memorial park.

And a symbol of ours 70 years young now or plus.

And and it provided me to have an opportunity to have a dialog.

They talk, I listen and they talk about their willingness.

And when we have a partnership, a marriage that has to be perfected, they had a willingness and the memory and a knowledge to be able to says, How can we restore some of our old neighborhood?

I was able to listen to the historical committee, take what they said and then try to put some efforts to be able to help them.

They help us resurrect some parts of their community.

I was brought in by the mayor, by Mayor Neeley, to work with the historical committee to develop the plan for the memorial.

And that's how we got rolling with to develop.

And then he made available to us his planning and development department, who they've been working with us, and they've been a big help and do that in planning and developing this park.

And that's where we are now.

We're in phase two now, and now we're reaching out to the community for donations and endowments and so forth.

Kids that we do have our our site where we're going to have our park.

We've chosen some people to memorialize them from that area that have done so much for the area when they when we were over there.

So the memorial going to be built and the last remaining original park from the Saint John neighborhood, it was called West Boulevard Park.

It has been renamed the St John Street Neighborhood Memorial Park, which was a huge win this year for the historical committee.

And this memorial park is going to have pavilions and it's going to have kiosks to learn more about places and people who lived and were important to the neighborhood.

And it's going to be a place where people can gather and learn and and kind of feel the spirit of the neighborhood that was lost.

I mean, I hope there is an honest conversation here in in our community about the value that that neighborhood had, that that corridor had.

And maybe there is a way to to bring something like that back to life again.

We've certainly done it with buildings.

Maybe we can do it with a community.

I think what what we have to do as a people, as African-Americans in this community, you know, is that we have to take lessons from St John's Street.

We have to take lessons politically and we have to take lessons economically.

It can be replicated, You know, if we did it once, we can do it again.

If we don't tell the stories of our past, you know, it gives us less direction of where we should be going in the future.

We can't revisit that level of the past, but definitely it's important not to forget and not to forget the segregation that caused us to be a one relegated area inside of a city or the businesses that that started in those areas.

It's important for us to pass on the information to our generation so it won't be forgotten just because it's old and time is... it doesn't sanitize, you know, to the point where we should forget it.

People should care about the destruction of the St John neighborhood because this was a grave injustice inflicted upon tens of thousands of people.

You know, I think of this in in very personal terms, because, you know, we're all related.

We're all in a community together and a grave wrong was done against a huge segment of the population in this community.

And we can never truly heal and come together if we don't come to terms with that.

And, you know, we can't really come to terms with it unless people know about the story.

And there are a lot of people in the area who simply don't.

I just just want us to leave something for our children and their children and their children to know what we went through and how our life was over there, carefree and peaceful.

And there was such a thing.

Yeah, African-American has been resilient throughout their existence in this country.

We've always found a way, and we will find a way again, as we have with with the erasure of the St John Street community and the industrial Avenue community, we continued to advance.

We didn't let it wipe us out.

It wiped out our community and and a lot of things.

But we survived.

No matter where we go or what we do, we are still in our hearts, St John.

♪ I mean there is no better neighborhood that anybody would want to live in.

♪ (In unison) Keep St. John alive!

♪ This program is brought to you in part by the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, committed to connecting generosity to local needs with the goal of creating a vibrant and equitable Flint and Genesee County.

Learn more about the Community Foundation at cfgf.org by the Saint John Street Historical Committee honoring the legacy of the resilient Saint John neighborhood residents working together to keep the memory of Saint John alive.

Find out more at Saint John Street Historical Committee dot com by the Flint Youth Film Festival, a national platform celebrating young talent, empowering emerging storytellers to make an impact and strengthen the community through the power of film.

Discover More at Flint Youth Film Festival dot com and by Veteran Narratives No Stories Left Behind, inspiring communities to forge a closer connection with veterans.

Find out more at veteran narratives dot com