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Merin Babu

Professor Herron

Honors 1000

October 11, 2017

Who are we?

During the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Irish migrated to America

due to the Great famine, my uncle being one of the lucky. My wife, Rose and I came to America

a few years after the Great Famine hit our homeland, Ireland. Although we were only children

when the famine hit, the conditions were not getting better so we decided to find a better home to

raise a family. We were a part of the laboring class and jobless, so it was our priority to get work

once we reached America. Once we came over by ship and reached the Chesapeake Bay, my

uncle greeted us and brought us to a city called Detroit where he happened to live for many

years. In Detroit my uncle provided me with a job to sell vegetables using his food truck, which

he named Smith Bros. However, we were faced with a problem of racial segregation in Detroit

due to division in race among men in 1920 (Wood). My name is James Smith and this is my

story.

On a typical work day, I wore a suit, trousers, a bow tie, and a hat. Living in Detroit was

very different from Ireland; the main issue was becoming fluent in speaking English especially

since it caused problems in my work when talking to customers. Customers were unable to

understand me with my heavy accent but speaking to them daily helped me become more fluent
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in speaking English. Besides that issue, Detroit was overall a beautiful city constructed with

many buildings, one of them that my wife and I visited was the Veterans Memorial Building

made in 1950 (Cameron). The smooth, white edifice stood in stark contrast with the

surrounding brick buildings (Cameron). I was told that this Modernist architecture was the first

complete building of the new Detroit Civic Center (Cameron).

Detroit was a very busy city, and many people used the transit system to get to work and

go home each day. So, I learned that it was best to bring the food truck in the early morning and

leave very late because it was better to stay until everyone came for work and went home. I

brought my food truck to midtown by using our horse because we were not able to afford the

upcoming cars. I noticed that the emergence of automobile manufacturing after 1900 changed the

citys industrial character nearly overnight. Detroits population increased six-fold and that

helped the Smith Bros. business escalate and expand our business.

As time passed, I noticed that there was racial discrimination. When I went to the nearby

Catholic church, the African-Americans usually sat in the back. The liberals used zoning,

housing laws, and education to deepen segregation, which they believed would promote racial

peace (Wolcott). However, this was untrue because this segregation in the future causes African

Americans to want to uncover the gap between unequal urban life (Wolcott). Although, my

wife and I were terrified that this beautiful city would become destroyed.

By saving up some money from work, I decided to donate it to nearby areas that was

needed to build up buildings and gardens in Detroit. Even though we only lived here for a couple

of years, I became attached to the city. It was not a place that I was willing to let go to ruin. It
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was going to be the home for my children and I did not want them to see this fast-emerging city

be ruined through racial riots or rebellions. I did everything on my side to disregard the racial

segregation by treating everyone that came to the food truck with equal respect.

However, for this treatment I was looked down upon my white friends and other people

in the business. Although slavery was abolished in 1865, there was still racial tension in Detroit.

Many African-Americans were given a job at the Ford Motor Company to give them an equality

for jobs, but there was still racial tension brewing between the whites and the African-Americans

that lived in Detroit. My wife, told me that what I was doing was the right thing and that I should

not stop selling vegetable to the African-Americans because other people treating me poorly.

The racism continued to bother me, I did not understand why people looked at the skin

color of a man to determine how they should be treated. Since I noticed that this was wrong, I

began giving local speeches through my church on how racism was abolished and that we should

not judge someone based on their skin color. Even though I was not able to change everyones

opinions on them, I was glad that I was able to make a difference and change some peoples

viewpoints. This made me believe that I had a purpose in life, and it changed me into becoming a

better person and making other people better as well.

Overall, moving to Detroit was a life changing decision because I knew that if I

continued to live in Ireland, I would not have witnessed many of things I have seen in Detroit. I

would not have been able to run my own business and be a witness to the beautiful emerging city

of Detroit. The most important thing that changed me from coming to Detroit was being able to
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change others lives on spreading the word that everyone needed to be treated equally and that

racial segregation was not the correct choice.


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Work cited

Wood, Gregory. The Paralysis of the Labor Movement: Men, Masculinity, and Unions in

1920s Detroit. Michigan Historical Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2004, pp. 5991.

Cameron, Robert. The Creation of the Detroit Civic Center. Michigan History Magazine, vol.

95, no. 5, Oct. 2011.

Wolcott, Victoria W. Karen R. Miller. Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in

Interwar Detroit. The American Historical Review, vol. 121, no. 2, 1 Apr. 2016, pp.

585586.

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