This is what I was trying to post in a very long and not quite concise set of posts on the LDS Church growth blog earlier today. I wish I had remembered I had this blog to post it at, and stopped trying to post through comment section.
There is an awful lot of information one has to process and understand to realize why in 2009 when President Lantz, the father of the LDS Church's reinasance in Detroit, proclaimed that 8 Mile was no longer a boundary, we had reached Zion.
Of coruse we know that all is not well in Zion and the Devil seeks to cheat away our souls. The social and spirtual unity across the wide divide, that is 8 lanes of traffic plus the grassy median, may not yet have reached the level of the physical unit within the ward boundaries.
Also a key to this being a move towards Zion was having both Roseville and Warren Wards. These wards being merged together is sad, and maybe at some level a result of people not catching the vision of the Lord's anointed for this area at this time, even Michael James Lantz. However it should be born in mind that the reason this vision was not caught and who didn't catch it is a complex question. One that I have no easy answers to.
The Lord's vision for our becoming as him involves a difficult road. We stumble, and we often think we have fallen and fallen off the journey. The net goal is as many of his children coming back to him as possible, and having one ward instead of two may actually move us closer to that goal.
Also, to be fair, one key factor that worked against the survival of the Warren Ward was that Michigan was loosing people during the time in question.
However to understand why a oneness across 8 Mile was such a big thing, we need to go back very far.
How far back is a good question. John Brown's meeting in Detroit to try to built support for his raid on Harper's Ferry failing might be a good place to start. From those events in the late 1850s were sown the seeds that would lead to the anti-Mormon crusade of the 1880s and still not done by 1905 being only mitigatable by making Mormons clearly white.
This in turn lead to a policy of priesthood ordination that no one alive in 1925 understood why it existed, since the only person who fully understood why it was in place had died in 1918. How much Jesus letting Joseph F. Smith fully putting in place what had been since about 1850 a general policy against ordaining those of African descent to the priesthood with no real teeth, Elijah Able was serving as a missionary in the 1870s, and even Jesus letting the policy come into place back in about 1850 was a result of the Lord letting us learn from our mistakes, how much was the fact that even a mistake like an unchanged pronoun in the current edition of the Doctrine and Coventnants when it was modernized to you from thee in the shift to more modern English after the original recording of the language can be used by the Lord to teach us a deeper truth, and how much this was the result of the Lord not yelling at any of us, and letting us persist in our wrong actions when we are not ready to hear his voice is hard to say.
The fact of the matter is that while it is hard to square Anthony Obina waiting over 10 years to be baptized in the region of Aba, Nigeria, and J. W. Billy Johnson and others in Ghana waiting just as long with an all loving Lord, especially since the reason for this delay was largely due to policies that treated people differently on race, it is also easy to see that they methods used to build the LDS Church in Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and other surrounding countries have lead to more people there being active faithful members of the Church and receving the blessings of the temple, than have the methods used in Chile.
Yet while the LDS Church has been able to overcome the issue in Africa, the overcoming is still in progress in the United States. True, it is in progress, but it has not occured yet in full.
However it had not occured yet at all when we start up our story again in the 1960s.
Goerge Romney may not have marched in the same march as Martin Luther King ever, but he did march against housing segregation. Romney was on the cutting edge of any politician regardless of party in doing this. The fact that he was a Mormon, former stake president, doing such was not a big deal when he set off down Kercheval in 1965.
True, this was 2 years after Martin Luther King had marched hand in hand with the mayor of Detroit down Woodward and on over to speak to a capacity crowd in the Cobo Center. the civil rights act had passed, but the fair housing act was still 3 years away, and governors marching in any sort of political protest march were a rare sight indeed.
It would be 2 years until Detroit burned in a rage inspired riot sparked over shutting down an after hours drinking establishment but with the tinder of mobs trying to drive out a mixed race couple from their house in Warren and a white mob beating to death a black man at River Rouge Park. True, unlike in Alabama, the prosecutor was trying to bring members of the white mob to justice, but just as in Alabama the jury in the end would not convict, although the later happened after Detroit had its false facade as the model of racial harmony destroyed in a conflagration and instead set on the course of being for at least the next 50 years the by word of the violent American city.
The riot in turn lead to the reactionary administration of Roman Griggs, built on the false premise that tough policing alone could cut down on crime. This sadly gave rise in turn to Coleman Young, a man with communist ideas who saw himself as a decolonizer and would throughly endorse the message plasted on a building just east of Van Dyke on Forest "1967 as Detroit's 1776".
Coleman Young promised that Detroit police would leave people alone. They did just that, and a murder rate that was 360 in 1968 had risen to over 800 by 1985, even though the city had lost many people.
Young had also portrayed his run for mayor as a referendum on wheather the city was a white city or a black city. He then proclaimed "all the criminals should hit 8 Mile", or maybe all the white people should. If it was criminals, it included at least white cops and maybe all cops. It is not clear that Young viewed black police officers who were willing to work for a city with a white mayor as any better than Quizlings.
Of course Young is rarely seen as a true post-colonial leader. His city was still in the US, despite the extreme rhetoric from the Shrine of the Black Madonna and a few other post-Christian racialized groups in the city. The top business leaders in Detroit, remained white people, and the rate at which they lived outside the city remained essentially unchanged from what it had been since the mid-1950s.
Young's getting the city income tax applied to those who worked in the city did drive more job flight. Crime and more crime drove more flight beyond 8 Mile and the other borders. The fear of crime spilling across drove racial profiling by suburban police departments, at higher rates by eight mile than anywhere else.
The rising crime rate caused more accidents, which in turn drove up insurance rates, which meant that black drivers could less afford insurance, which meant many drove without, which meant that getting stopped in racial profiling sweeps was all the more bad because it was impossible to afford insurance, especially if the fairly good job you had as a restuarant manager for a fastfood place ended when the resturant closed when the neighboring Detroit Medical Center administrative offices relocated out of the city to Troy so the employees there would no owe city income tax.
Even at this, Detroit was not as bad as it seemed in 1980. There was still some hope of survival. The Jews had left, as in Boston, but some of the Catholics had stayed. One place the Catholics had stayed was Poletown. However it should be kept in mind that Young was a communist in the Soviet style, at heard he was a supporter of the power of the government and centralization and hated the small time player.
So Poletown with its vibrant jobs, mostly linked to small business was anathema to Coleman Young. On the other hand the big three, as huge companies that gave easy rise to huge unions, were exactly what he wanted. So Young used the power of eminent domain to seize the northern half of Poletown, demolish it, and turn it over to GM to build a factory. Those who saw this as a clear taking of private property for private use opposed it up to the Michigan Supreme Court, but were defeated.
Thus the only neighborhood in Detroit that was moving along with about equal black and white populations without significant change was destroyed.
Eminent domain had also moved the LDS Church out of Detroit. The Detroit Chapel, built in 1936, was leveled to make way for I-96, a wopping 12 lanes of traffic (6 each way) at that point.
Yet with Coleman Young attacking Mo Udall, the Mormon Democrat seeking the Presidential nomination in 1976, as from a Church "that won't even let you in the back door", there was little force on either side keeping Mormons in Detroit.
By the start of June 1978 there may have been 4 black members in the Bloomfield Hills Stake. This might be overestimating the number. Two were the Edwards. Brother Edwards would drive the stake bus on temple trips to the Washington DC Temple even though in those days he was not able to enter the Lord's house. He would later be bishop of the Detroit Ward.
In June of 1978 President Kimball received the revelation that the long promised day had come and all of God's children could enter the temple without regard to race, and all worthy men could receive the priesthood without a racial restriction.
In Brazil this immediately produced results. Marcus Martins who was engaged to be married in a week, had to weigh serving a mission instead. He choose to serve a mission, even though his first plan had been to marry on May 20th. In Jamaica the Church could now send someone to ordain Brother Nugent so he could start giving the sacrament to his family, and soon missionaries followed. In Ghana and Nigeria Ted Cannon and Merrill Bateman showed up in August to meet with those who had been meeting in the Church's name for a decade or more, and in November Ted Cannon along with his wife and one other couple went to establish the Church, in some places lining up scores of people to send them into the waters of baptism.
While in the United States black men were ordained to the Aaronic, and in a few cases the Melchizedek Priesthood within a month, and Joseph Freeman and his Hawaiian wife were sealed by Elder Thomas S. Monson or the quorum of the 12 in the Salt Lake Temple, with their children then sealed to them. Ruffin Bridgeforth, who headed the Genesis Group, an LDS Church organization designed to coordinate outreach to African-Americans primarily in the greater Salt Lake area, was ordained by Elder Boyd K. Packer of the Quorum of the 12 as a high priest.
In Detroit Brother Edwards was ordained to the priesthood, and the next time he drove the bus to the temple he was able to go into the Lord's house.However the building of Zion in the land would see set backs before it saw progress. Due to relocations and other such issues, there was by 1979 no Detroit Ward. There was a Detroit 2nd Ward. It covered the east side of the city, and the suburbs around the north and east edge of the city, from about halfway across the north side of the city. Nowhere did it go north of 14 mile, and half of the way it stopped at 12 mile. North of that was the Roseville Ward, which when formed in the early 1960s had taken in most of the east side of Detroit, although not quite as much as the Detroit 2nd ward, and stetched out to about 50 mile or Imlay City. Some things I have been told suggest at one point it also encompassed all the way east to Port Huron, which is at least 12 miles further east that Detroit ever goes, but mainly north.
while the LDS Church was seeing less membership and a building town down in Detroit, in the general region the Church was growing. In 1976 the London Ontario Stake was formed, removing the parts of Canada that had been in Michigan stakes from them. On the 11th of June 1978, just after the announcement of the priesthood revelation, the Grand Blanc Michigan Stake was formed. Now the Bloomfield Hills Michigan Stake, taking in much of Detroit, and all its north and east Suburbs, at least to a point, stopped at 26 mile in Macomb County and 20 Mile (South Boulevard, yes the northern boundary is South Boulevard) in Oakland County. It actually went back down to 20 mile once you passed the point 12 miles east of Dequindre, putting Chesterfield Township and New Baltimore in the Grand Blanc Stake, but these were shifted back to the Sterling Heights Ward in 1984.
Before we get to that point we have to explain how the Sterling Heights Ward was formed. In January 1981 the Detroit 2nd Ward and the Roseville Ward were realigned into 3 wards. The area north of 16 mile, including the portion of the Troy Ward between Ryan and Dequindre, was moved to the new Sterling Heights Ward.
South of 16 mile Hayes/Chalmers became the divider, or the imaginary line corresponding with Hayes/Chalmers. Hayes actually stops just south of 16 mile, starting up again just north, and stopps again at least 2 times as you go further south.
However just after this happened the economy in Metro-Detroit tanked and many people moved away. The net result was that a month after Chesterfield Township and New Baltimore were put in the Sterling Heights Ward the Sterling Heigghts Ward was discontinued and divided between the Warren Ward and the East Shores Ward along Hayes. However such a move would have been too simple, so the Warren Ward was then renamed the Sterling Heights Ward. Leadership from the Warren Ward was retained.
When I was born in October 1980 no ward going north out of Detroit passed 14 mile. By 1985 some went as far north as 16 mile.
This is where the man who lead the Mormon renasaince in Detroit enters our story.
Michael James Lantz is a true Mormon pioneer. Raised in Roseville, Lantz was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Here he made friends with a man from Detroit, raised less than 10 miles away but in a totally different world.
8 mile was a racial boundary in a way that those outside of Metro-Detroit rarely understand, and even those in Metro Detroit born after 1995 find hard to believe. In 1970 99.5% of the population of Warren was white. In Detroit it was 54.0%. However there were places in Detroit that were at least 99.5% white, and places in Detroit 43.7% of the overall population that was black added up to 100% of the residents. I would say this included black bottom where my girlfriend's granmother was raised, named not for the color of the residents skin but the color of the dirt, but that area had by 1970s been ravaged by urban renewal and freeway contruction, so it had not much population at all.
If you noticed that the figures for Detroit did not add to 100%, you are right. 1.8% of the population was Hispanic, most particularly those of Mexican descent living in the south-west area of the city. 0.5% are according to the table in WIkipedia "other or mixed". This may include some who also identified as Hispanic. It does not in 1970 include any mixed, because one could not mark more than one race on the census until 2000. It does include some Native Americans. There was also 0.3% of the population that was Asian. These were somewhat concentrated in the area of the intersection of Cass and Martin Luther King.
By 1980 the percentage of whites in Warren had fallen to 98.2% of the population. However 1970 and 1980 figures are not 100% comparable.
In 1970 those of Indian descent (that is from India) were considered white, and the census taker was to mark the race. In 1980 those from India were reclassed as white, and a person could mark their own race. The last bishop of the Detroit Ward in the early 1990s before it was split into branches was a man of acknowledged Cherokee ancestry who a census taken would have probably marked as white unless forced to give him his own choice on the matter. The first bishop of the new Palmer Park Ward when it was organized in 2010 was of partial Indian (as in from the nation of India) ancestry, so even if in 1970 he had been given a choice to self identify his race, he could not have identified it as other than white. I find it hard to believe that these factors are enough to account for the change from 99.5% to 98.2, although I may underestimate the hidden Hispanics with acknowledged native roots, since they are not phenotypically (by looks) "Hispanic", it is hard to figure out how to extrapolate the several people I know who are such into a total percentage of the population. It is altogher possible that since some of the people I know who are such come from parts of the US like Arizona and Utah and the south-side of Chicago that are much more Hispanic overall than Michigan, I might extrapolate too high a proportion. Still these changes might be enough to explain why the 99.5% to 98.2% from 1970 to 1980 was more than the change to 97.3% in 1990, when the rules of race definition remained static.
Back to Michael J. Lantz. Shortly after meeting his Afircan-American friend, he was relocated to another part of Vietnam, where he met Mormons and joined the LDS church. After he came back to Michigan he was able to get his high school girlfriend to joined the LDS Church. They drove to the Salt Lake Temple to be sealed because that was then the closest temple.
For a time Mike Lantz was a bank manager in Detroit, the only white person connected with that bank branch.
In the early 1980s he became bishop of the Royal Oak Ward. As bishop he realized that the Church needed to step up missionary work in Detroit. He argued that if Ammon could serve among the blood thirsty Lamanties, the Church could send missionaries into Detroit and have them live in an apartment there. Later as Ward mission leader he got the bishop of the ward to dedicate Detroit for the preaching of the gospel.
However the Royal Oak Ward was then merged with the Southfield Ward. Things turned around a bit a little later.
A branch was formed in Detroit. It went between several locations. In some locations people would walk in the door during sacrament meeting calling out for bus fare. At least one location was a former bar.
In 1991 the Church purchased a Greek Orthodox Church that was for sale since the congregation had all moved to the suburbs. The Detroit Branch was upgraded to a ward, with Bishop Edwards, the black man who had driven the bus to the temple before the 1978 revelation as bishop, and as counselors two white guys living in the near suburbs, south of 10 mile.
After a few years the issues of transportation even within the city, and integrating into the Church large numbers of converts combined with a desire to grow the Church brought about a new policy. The Detroit Ward was split into several branches, the area north of 8 mile was split between the Southfield Ward and the East Shores Ward, which had in 1993 taken most of Warren from the Sterling Heights Ward.
In 1997 the Detroit District was formed. With the exception of the Detroit River Branch in Southwest Detroit, and Brother Jim Rieland in the New Center Branch who had a black wife, and the members in Grosse Pointe Branch, which stretched into the east of Detroit south of 8 mile suburbs, ever member of the distrcit who lived in the district boundaries was African-American, and Detroit River Branch had not only many African-American members but also many Hispanic ones. On the other hand, in 1997 there were almost no African-American Church members in the Bloomfield Hills Stake area left, the main exception being a few adopted children.
In 1999 when the Detroit Temple was dedicated Michael Lantz was serving as the non-resident president of the Grand River Branch, in the north-west part of Detroit. His 1st counselor was Gregorie-Eugene Louis, a 19-year-old son of Hatian immigrants. Louis's father, Lamonte Louis, was president of the Detroit District. Gregoire-Eugene Louis was the first person to receive their own endowment at the Detroit Temple. He then left to serve a mission in the California Arcadia Mission, which one of Mike Lantz's sons would also serve in.
In May of 2003 Mike Lantz was made bishop of the Southfield Ward. This was the only ward in the Bloomfield Hills Stake that included any of Detroit, and it covered an area of less than 3 square miles of the cities 140. The area includes some very large lots, although that does not stop it from having lots of burned out, bordered up and otherwise abandoned homes. Starting at Evergreen Road and for the next 20 miles 8 Mile was the boundary between the District and the stake.
Yet, being a district was not the optimal situation for the progress of the members any more. High baptismal rates had not translated into high retention rates, and baptisms had been too often of women and children, with few priesthood holders. The male children who did get baptized at any age, too often ended up going to jail or prison and opposed to on missions. The small branches created in the mid-1990s had been merged because they could not support the program of the Church in any reasonable way at their size. The branches that were left still bounced between either keeping a branch president in way too long for the good of his family, or using out of boundary branch presidents, which in general meant even more turnover because even if their family went with them to the branch, they would still be away from home excessive amounts of time for meetings.
Even if the 5 branches left were all at the level of being raised to wards, the stake would not have enough priesthood leadership.
In the Southfield Ward on the other hand, there had been at least one African-American called from it to serve on the High Council. At times people who moved out of Detroit to Southfield stayed going to the Palmer Park Ward, in the case of high schoolers at least until graduation.
8 Mile was more of a border in the Church than out of it. The reasoning behind the district was now not worth keeping to. In 2005 the Detroit district was disolved, 3 branches sent to Bloomfield Hills Stake and 2 sent to Westland Stake.
President Lantz and his counselorsmoved to make sure this was not just a chance of boundaries but a unifying of people. The stake pioneer day picnic was moved to Belle Isle, within the city of Detroit. Young men about to leave on missions were called to serve short term in the branches, as were couples about to retire.
Finally in 2009 things were ready to move ahead. The Palmer Park branch was realigned to take in areas north of 8 Mile. Gratiot branch and East Shores Ward were realigned into Warren Ward and Roseville Ward. Only along the St. Clair Shores/Groose Point Park boundary was 8 Mile a dividing line, and there the Belle Isle branch had already gone from the eastside ghettoes into some of the ritziest parts of the greater Detroit area.
No comments:
Post a Comment