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Merin Babu
Professor Herron
Honors 1000
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
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
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
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.
Interwar Detroit. The American Historical Review, vol. 121, no. 2, 1 Apr. 2016, pp.
585586.