"Racism is historically entrenched in Owosso. Minister and civil rights activist Malcolm X in his autobiography referred to Owosso as “White City,” describing it as a place where Black Americans and marginalized groups were threatened with racist violence if they were there after dark.
And in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was heavily active there — they rented office space in a building in Owosso’s downtown area"
It was not just in the 1920s. Up until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Owosso had a law on the books that African Americans could not be on the streets after dark.
My best friend my senior year in high school, Juan (John) Hinajosa, had me have my first taste of Mexican food prepared in his uncle's restaurant in Owosso called the Taco House. Juan (he preferred John) went on to a career as a deputy with the Saginaw County sheriff's department. Our hometown had been a Native American meeting ground for Ojibway and Ottawa tribes. My hometown's name was based on the Anishinaabemowin and meant "place of the Big Rock". The glaciers thousands of years earlier had deposited huge house size boulders which became the sacred meeting place of the tribes.
Since before World War II, my rural hometown in Saginaw County just north of Owosso, had an annual festival called Showboat. There was an actual Showboat which traveled maybe a quarter or half mile down the Shiawassee River before it docked in front of an amphitheater of about 5,000 seats. Some nationally famous entertainers (comedians, singers, magicians, etc.) would perform there as well as local Michigan professional and amateur talent.
The Showboat was based on the Mississippi river boat minstrel shows. So, there was a Showboat captain and endmen. The endmen performed in the 50s and into the middle 60s in blackface.
In the mid-1960s, the NAACP of Saginaw City objected to the blackface performances and they were ended. My neighbor, the Showboat captain and a former endman himself, was livid.
After the 1967 riots in Detroit, there was fear among some that the rioters would visit our rural area which is about an hour and a half drive north of Detroit, perhaps 90 miles from the city.
In 1968, I remember some local folks being almost gleeful when Dr King was assassinated
Now for some good about Michigan.
Slavery in Michigan was banished in the constitution of 1835. Slavery had been present in the state (Detroit and other areas including some parts of SW Michigan) before then.
Cass County was a prominent location of abolitionists and the underground railroad primarily due to the presence of the Friends, i.e., the Quakers. To this day, there is an Underground Railroad Society in Cass and historical markers and a home that can be toured in the summer months as a former location on the underground railroad.
Battle Creek, about an hour and a half east of us, was the home and burial place of Sojourner Truth who was born a slave, escaped north, and helped with the underground railroad. There is a monument to Sojourner, a 12 feet high monument:
https://www.
Of course, Rosa Parks later in life moved to Detroit.
And finally, while Henry Ford was an notorious antisemite, his legacy has done some good. Dearborn, the home of Ford Motor Company, now hosts the Jackson Home where Martin Luther King planned the march from Selma to Montgomery with his colleagues:
https://www.thehenryford.org/visit/greenfield-village/jackson-home/
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