Free Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli

and was promptly arrested himself for attempted kidnapping, ultimately spending six months in a Detroit jail while awaiting trial. In 1859, the abolitionist John Brown arrived in Detroit with fourteen freed slaves from Missouri. That evening, in a candlelit home on Congress Street, he met with Frederick Douglass, who was in town to deliver a lecture, to plan the raid on Harpers Ferry. Douglass objected, as did the local Underground Railroad agent George DeBaptist, who favored a less conciliatory approach, suggesting that Brown instead stage simultaneous attacks on a number of white churches throughout the South, blowing them up with gunpowder. (Brown rejected this idea.)
    Like that of many other Northern cities of the time, Detroit’s progressive facade proved flimsy as a (white) sheet, barely covering the city’s own rank history of race hatred. Four years after the Brown plot, a light-skinned African American saloon owner named William Faulkner (really) was accused of molesting a nine-year-old white girl, Mary Brown, and her nine-year-old black friend, Ellen Hoover, after they stopped by his establishment one afternoon to warm their feet. Both girls later recanted their story, with Brown admitting she’d made up the charge in order to avoid being punished for her tardiness. Unfortunately, their admission came six years after Faulkner was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. (He was subsequently released.) During Faulkner’s trial, a white mob gathered outside the courtroom. An article in the Detroit Advertiser and Tribune , headlined “Case of the Negro Faulkner,” described how the mob, thousands strong, surged as the convicted barkeeper was escorted by police out to Gratiot Avenue, in the direction of the jail.
    The riotous gang rampaged up and down Beaubien Street, targeting black residents. “The mob,” according to the Advertiser and Tribune ,
    was composed, to a large extent, of young fellows brought up in the “street school”—rowdies and vagabonds, ignorant, unreasoning, and crazy with whiskey and prejudice. Their spirit and their shouts were full of bitter and violent hatred for the negro. “Kill the nigger!” “D——n the nigger!” “Butcher all niggers!” “Stone that nigger house!” “Tear down that nigger dive!” “Every d——n nigger ought to be hung!” We will do the mob the justice to suppose that but a few of them could read, and that they despised, above all things, the free school and the church.
    After the hooligans threated to cut his hoses, the fire marshal allowed the black homes to burn, though fires that had spread to neighboring white-owned homes and businesses were extinguished in the name of the common good. In all, thirty-five buildings were burned to the ground. Other outrages were detailed in the oral history A Thrilling Narrative from the Lips of the Sufferers of the Late Detroit Riot, March 6, 1863, with the Hair Breadth Escapes of Men, Women, and Children, and Destruction of Colored Men’s Property, Not Less Than $15,000 . 8
    Interesting side note: Faulkner was apparently light-skinned enough to be described, by the anonymous compiler of the Thrilling Narrative , as “to all intents a white man.” “If [Faulkner] thought he had one drop of colored blood in his veins, if he could, he would let it out,” an elderly Detroiter is quoted as saying, his claim bolstered by the inclusion of a poem titled “The Riot,” written by one “B. Clark, Sen., A Colored Man,” containing such stanzas as:
    Now be it remember’d that Faulkner at right,
    Although call’d a “nigger,” had always been white,
    Had voted, and always declared in his shop,
    He never would sell colored people a drop.
    He’s what is call’d white, though I must confess,
    So mixed are the folks now, we oft have to guess,
    Their hair is so curl’d and their skins are so brown,
    If they’re white in the country, they’re niggers in town.
    Still, did we mention—business was