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AADL Productions Podcast: Lola Jones and Carol Gibson
Lola Jones and Carol Gibson are well-known to anyone familiar with Ann Arbor history. Over the past 30 years they have sought out and documented the history of the African American experience in Ann Arbor through a series of projects under the moniker Another Ann Arbor; it is largely through their work that the Ann Arbor African American story is a part of our shared community identity. Lola and Carol stopped by the library to talk with us one day about the work they have done over the years and where they are headed next. They shared with us some of the interesting people and events they have learned about and brought to the community in their television program, their documentaries, and their book. You can now watch one of their documentaries online at aadl.org in our video collection. A Woman's Town was produced in 1991 and tells the story of Ann Arbor through the voices of prominent African American women.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Victoria Loomis
Victoria Suane Milton was born in 1933 and grew up in River Rouge, Michigan. Her mother was of French creole background from New Orleans. In 1938 her father, Samuel B. Milton, founded one of Michigan’s first Black-owned hospitals, Sidney A. Sumby Memorial Hospital. He was also the first Black Wayne County coroner. After getting her BA in social work from the University of Michigan in the 1950s, Victoria returned to work at Sumby Memorial Hospital in purchasing and housekeeping. She and her husband John Loomis had six children, including a set of triplets. She passed away in 2021.
Victoria Loomis was interviewed in partnership with the Museum of African American History of Detroit and Y Arts Detroit in 2009-2010 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Titus McClary
Titus W. McClary was born in 1937 and spent his childhood in Georgetown, South Carolina. After moving to Detroit, he attended Highland Park High School and worked at his uncle’s North End restaurant. During his time in the army in the early 1960s, he picketed a segregated theater and restaurant in Killeen, Texas. In 1965 he became the third Black police officer in Highland Park. McClary ran the juvenile division and helped found a Black officers’ organization. He served as mayor of Highland Park and remained a city council member until he passed away in 2017.
Titus McClary was interviewed in partnership with the Museum of African American History of Detroit and Y Arts Detroit in 2010 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Roberta Wright
Roberta Hughes Wright was born in 1922 and grew up in Detroit. She attended Howard University at age 15 and completed her bachelor's degree at Wayne State University. During the course of her career she was an X-ray technician, teacher, school social worker, and probate attorney. She earned her PhD from the University of Michigan and a JD from Wayne State. After the passing of her first husband Wilbur B. Hughes II, she married Charles H. Wright, founder of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. She wrote several books, including an autobiography titled Reflections of My Life and Lay Down Body: Living History in African American Cemeteries. She passed away on April 2, 2019.
Roberta Hughes Wright was interviewed in partnership with the Museum of African American History of Detroit and Y Arts Detroit in 2010 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: George Ramsey
George Ramsey was born 1938 and grew up on East Warren Avenue in Detroit. He remembers experiencing the Detroit Race Riot of 1943 as a young child and the Detroit Riot of 1967 as an adult. He attended Northeastern High School with classmates who became famous Motown singers. Ramsey served in the United States Air Force and USPS before becoming a road manager for a Motown recording group in the late 1960s. He worked for Motown music producer Lamont Dozier in California in the 1970s.
George Ramsey was interviewed in partnership with the Museum of African American History of Detroit and Y Arts Detroit in 2010 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: David Yamamoto
David Yamamoto was born in 1938 in San Jose, California. He grew up in a predominantly Japanese American community. When he was four, his family was forced to move to an internment camp, Heart Mountain Relocation Center, in Wyoming. The discrimination his family faced during and after World War II shaped his life profoundly. Yamamoto graduated from San Jose State University and got his PhD in special education from Stanford. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship to support his career in educational administration. He has spoken out against civil rights violations throughout his adult life.
David Yamamoto was interviewed by students from Skyline High School in Ann Arbor in 2016 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Anna Noble
Anna Noble was born in the early 1920s and grew up in Pittsburgh with 11 siblings. She worked as a launderer as a young woman. She applied to several nursing schools, but faced discrimination due to segregation. She attended Mercy Douglass School of Nursing in Philadelphia, which was an all-Black nursing school. In 1950, Noble moved to Detroit to take a nursing position at Haynes Memorial Hospital. She became the director of nursing at DMC Harper University Hospital, where she worked for 23 years. Later in life, she volunteered at the Lula Belle Stewart Center, which offered parenting assistance to single mothers.
Anna Noble was interviewed in partnership with the Museum of African American History of Detroit and Y Arts Detroit in 2010 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Author Event | Morgan Parker Discusses Magical Negro
Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy
and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of Black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics—of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.
In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present—timeless black melancholies and triumphs.
For this event, Parker was in conversation with Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Alice Sano
Alice Sano was born in 1929 in Los Angeles, California. When the U.S. entered WWII, her family was forced to move to an internment camp along with other Japanese immigrants. Eventually her father secured a job teaching Japanese to army military intelligence students at the University of Michigan, and they moved to Ann Arbor. Sano majored in music theory and cello at the U-M School of Music, and dedicated her career to teaching music.
Alice Sane was interviewed by students from Skyline High School in Ann Arbor in 2018 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Alma Wheeler Smith
Alma Wheeler Smith was born in 1941. She recalls attending Civil Rights meetings in Ann Arbor with her parents. Her father Albert H. Wheeler was the first African American mayor of Ann Arbor (1975-78). Smith worked for nearly a decade as a TV producer before becoming a politician. Smith (D) served in the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the Michigan delegation from 2005-2010 representing the 54th District. Prior to her tenure in the U.S. House, Smith served in the Michigan Senate representing the 18th District from 1995-2002.
Alma Wheeler Smith was interviewed by students from Skyline High School in Ann Arbor in 2018 as part of the Legacies Project.