<Reverb Effect’s theme music, lively and interrogative, plays behind the voice of a narrator, interspersed with historical clips of other voices>
Narrator [a woman’s voice]: How do past voices resonate in the present moment?
Man A: …hear the stories of your parent’s…
Woman A: yeah
Man A: …and your grandparents’ and stuff, so I’m living through them or the stories they told.
Narrator: And how do we make sense of those voices?
Woman B: No, and that’s the story of my life [echo]
Man B: And a case has been made!
Woman B: No, I am not trying to avoid the question, I am trying to clarify the position…
Narrator: What were they trying to say? And whose job is it to find out? This is Reverb Effect.
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Narrator: The histories of American cities in the 20th and 21st centuries are typically defined by patterns of decline and renewal. And following the dissolution of the automobile industry, Detroit became the poster child for American urban decline. As the American media covered the aftermath of the financial crisis, Detroit became synonymous with decaying homes and defunct industrial buildings. In the 2000s, this narrative shifted as the low cost of real estate offered opportunities for investment and growth. Some Detroiters criticize this deluge of real estate development, which they argued had displaced poor residents who could no longer afford to buy or rent in neighborhoods where they, like their parents and grandparents before them, had spent their lives. But beneath this false binary of decline and renewal exists a more complex and dynamic history, a history rooted in the day-to-day experiences of Detroiters and their role in shaping the larger history of the city.
How can we tell histories that speak to both macro-scale historical phenomena while also being attentive to the more granular experiences of everyday inhabitants? For residents of Woodbridge, a historic Detroit neighborhood during back to the 1870s, a community-led oral history project offered the opportunity to do just that. In the summer of 2024, the Woodbridge Neighborhood Development or WND, a nonprofit, began to work on the Woodbridge Oral History Archive. WND is dedicated to a new vision of neighborhood development that gives every resident a voice in development and programs. This work extends beyond physical redevelopment plans since neighborhood preservation and growth is a community project imagined and staffed by neighbors and volunteers around a common goal keeping Woodbridge eclectic and affordable. To get the Woodbridge Oral History Archive off the ground, WND has teamed up with the Detroit Historical Society and Richard Bachmann, a resident of Woodbridge and a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan’s Department of History. Richard was able to secure a public scholarship grant from the Rackham Graduate School to fund this project.
After two months of planning, WND and Richard launched work on the archive by organizing two storytelling workshops for Woodbridge community members in the fall. These workshops facilitated by a local storyteller, Satori Shakoor, from the Secret Society of Twisted Storytellers, were designed to empower Woodbridge residents to tell their own stories before preparing to add them to the archive of oral histories. Richard and Angie Gaabo, another Woodbridge resident, and now the former director of WND invited the Reverb Effect team to visit Woodbridge and attend one of these workshops. The vibrant Woodbridge neighborhood sits just west of Wayne State University campus and Detroit’s historic Cass Corridor district. Its streets are populated by a mixture of stately Victorian homes, empty lots and quirky apartment buildings. The neighborhood has been home to famous figures like legendary baseball figure, Ty Cobb, singer-songwriter Rodríguez, and the political powerhouse Rashida Tlaib. But Woodbridge and its residents have so much more to offer than famous faces and the standard narrative of economic collapse.
Welcome to Reverb Effect, the podcast exploring how past voices resonate in the present moment. In this episode, we will be investigating the power of oral histories and the importance of the everyday. Where do communities interested in preserving their own history, expressing their present, and securing their future begin, and how can academic historians employ their insights, methods, and material means to support and empower community efforts at historic preservation? Exploring the Woodbridge Oral History Archive models one path for communities.
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Narrator: The Woodbridge Oral History Archive is full of fascinating stories that mirror major national events. Local stories and experiences that reflect the de-industrialization of the United States or political transformation over the 20th century are often a key tool for historians to explain complex processes. However, Woodbridge’s archive wasn’t designed as a site for academic experiments or historical extraction. Rather, it has been envisioned as a growing space for community members, past and present. A space in which they could remember Woodbridge’s past as they consider its present and envision a future. Angie Gaabo and Richard Bachmann described their community centered approach to collecting oral histories after the storytelling workshop.
Richard Bachmann: As historians, I think just going to archives and opening boxes and dealing with, not necessarily with that matter, because it’s still very much a life. Right, but it’s just a different format. You know, it’s transfixed in paper or on tapes or something like that. But here, you’re dealing with living beings, at times, you know, strong characters and opinions and contradictions and hot takes on certain people who are involved or certain topics.
And you have to navigate that as well. Memories, which can be treacherous. But what I like about this project is really, when I say it’s a community project, I feel at this point, it’s not just about being embedded in the community and doing this kind of work. It’s really the community taking charge. People, you know, as Carol was just describing, inviting other neighbors to contribute, making connections, suggesting topics, going to the attics or basements to dig up old stuff and they bring it in. And I really like seeing that. I think for me, this was really important that there is ownership from the community of this project. I didn’t want to do this, this kind of like parachute, coming in, doing something, getting out. I wanted to plant the seed, you know, I like community gardening, so I wanted to plant the seed, and you put it there, and then you make sure that it’s being watered and it’s being nourished. But in the end, what comes out of all this, you don’t necessarily know.
Angie Gaabo: I think certainly the people who are participating in it, it benefits them. Like, they’re sort of grounding them, reminding them of, you know, that their story does matter. There’s a lot of I think fear of the change that’s happening and that everything is going to be lost. Everything’s already lost. No one’s paying attention to people who, you know, what this place once was. And maybe we all feel that in life as we get older too. Just that there’s this new thing coming always. I think that this has felt very good for people and they wanted more. They’re sort of asking for more of this and for this to go on. It’s like a, even beyond this project that this be somehow a regular part of, of life here.
But it’s also for the benefit of people who are coming in and the kind of trying towe’re trying to challenge the blank slate kind of approach of anybody can come in and do anything, whatever they want. It’s a blank slate. There isn’t really a history here because part of the places are gone or the people have left or died. People need to sort of give, you know, give that away. Because that’s not the case. So we’re we’re telling a story that hopefully people will then realize they need to weave themselves into rather than kind of draw over.
Richard Bachmann: I think one way of how we doing this is trying to create these spaces and moments where people can connect. I mean this is not just about adding something to, to an event calendar or something like that, right? It’s being very purposeful about bringing folks together. Because what we could have done too is just go to them individually. Like you reach out, you know, we draw on the database you have, we could have just gone to knock on someone’s door or make an arrangement and talk to them individually. And probably some beautiful things would’ve come up. But I think in creating that space first and making people realize what you are, and you realize that it’s wonderful that they have these connections.
And some of them they are not aware of because they might go through several corners or there’s an intermediary in, in between a person that plays an event, but they have these kind of connections. And then you see how, how people light up when something is, oh, this is like, and then surprises. And some stories need to be changed because from their individual perspective it, it looked a certain kind of way or they knew a person in a certain kind of role, but then someone else would bring in an additional. So it’s a side effect, I think.
Angie Gaabo: This was Richard’s idea to bring in someone to coach with the storytelling because, and we ended up getting a wonderful storytelling coach who has a lot of experience with this and guided folks in a way that we’d certainly, I think if we had just been doing it, we would not have been able to do. That absolutely was an unanticipated benefit of having done the coaching because we had tried doing this years ago and we did interview a few people, but it is absolutely not the same thing just to go to their house and say, where did you live? Tell me something about your past here. It’s just not as rich. So, it’s been a good thing.
Richard Bachmann: I mean, it’s almost the way I see it, and maybe that’s the training, you know, but we had a prospectus. So we had a sort of understanding of what this project was supposed to be and how it works and some of the components. But then we went out in the field and things change. I mean, they even changing now, right? This is still very much a process.
But those are people who have expressed interest in the history before. And also people who are very knowledgeable already and other people, their main avenue to Woodbridge history through their personal experience and not necessarily putting a bunch of pieces together or having done historical research before and all that. But just also building that in I think was very important. This is not just like a cookie cutter kind of, this is what we need to do kind of thing. We make certain things up as we go along.
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Narrator: Woodbridge was named for William Woodbridge, who served as Michigan’s governor from 1840 to 1841. Originally an affluent Victorian neighborhood. By the 1950s, the make of Woodbridge had changed significantly. Woodbridge’s oral histories provide an intimate glimpse to the changing neighborhood lifelong Woodbridge. Resident Verde Jackson shared her experiences of life in Woodbridge from the boarding houses of the 1950s to activities of the Woodbridge Citizens District Council during the late 1970s.
Verdell Jackson: My name is Verdell Jackson. That’s the new Woodbridge area. I lived at this address since 1950. So I’ve been in the Woodbridge area ever since there was a Woodbridge.
I came here from Atlanta, Georgia. I was ten years old and my mother was staying there then with her husband, her then husband. And he had bought the house, but he bought the house mainly for rental property at that particular time in the neighborhood, This neighborhood, people that rented out rooms, a lot of people was coming from south north to get jobs in factories. So we went and it was like a boarding house. They put an ad in the paper. You could get a room. I think at that time it was like $20 a week, you know.
We run our own bikes around and we play and we would go to anywhere we wanted to go. We could walk. We could walk up to the museums on Woodward and we learn how to skate a little older. We could walk down to the Arcadia and skate.
Well, on Warren, it was a lot of traffic. And 12th it was a lot of traffic because at that particular time, back in the 60s, 12th Street, all the way down before they had the riot, it was grocery stores, bars, everything down that way. From, I say, from the boulevard to Chicago. It was nothing but a thriving area, you know, like it was almost like Woodward. It had apartment buildings and bars and stores and stuff like that. So was Grand River, Grand River and 14th. We had a style store they call it D I know, I remember it was a clothing store for ladies. You had dime stores, you had pharmacies, you had everything on Grand River. You had furniture stores, you had you name it. It was all from Grand River and Edsel Ford back to Grand River and Trumbull doing that. It was mostly a commercial area with grocery stores, furniture stores, clothing stores, you know, it was all of that.
We had neighborhood patrols. We had neighborhood people that…patrolled the neighborhood like Bill Slade, he had an organization of young teenagers and stuff. And they would watch out for the older peoples because at that time we had a mixed neighborhood. There was a lot of black and white, and most of the white people, older people that had been there for years and years. And so they were trying to look out for them, you know, keep them from houses, from getting broken in. And the older ladies getting accosted and stuff like that. So that was one of the things that Woodbridge was doing and as I said, they put up neighborhood watch signs all in the neighborhood where you could have this big white sign with black letters “Neighborhood Watch” it with a telephone number. So if anything that you saw and was watching, you could always call in. And the office was right there on Trumbull where you could always go up there, you know. And they were giving out grants for people’s, older people’s, or people that bought houses in the area to get their homes fixed up. Same thing they’re doing now.
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Narrator: As the post-war economy cooled in the 1960s, Woodbridge residents face new challenges de-industrialization over policing and entrenched segregation culminated in the Detroit uprising of 1967. The Uprising began outside an unlicensed bar north of Woodbridge. A brick was thrown through the rear window of a police cruiser which led to a series of break-ins, burglaries and arson. When Detroit police were overwhelmed, Michigan State Police and the National Guard were called in to restore order. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh called for looters to be shot. Rumors of sniper fire across the area were overblown according to evidence gathered after the events, but as residents with limited information attempted to make sense of the escalating events around them these mixed reports of gunfire added confusion. Woodbridge’s oral histories capture the profound uncertainty in the neighborhood during the Uprising. Leni Sinclair and Sam Stark, former residents of Woodbridge, spoke to the atmosphere of fear that loomed over Detroit as the Uprising came to its simmering end. Sam Stark was a journalist and community organizer in Woodbridge during the 60s. Leni Sinclair was an artist involved in the Detroit Artists Workshop, a hub of 60s counterculture. Her photographs from that period have since gained recognition on the international stage.
Sam Stark: After the rebellion. I grew up in Northwest Detroit. And so we wanted to see what was happening. We came down to Saint Leo’s area, which is just south of Woodbridge, visitation on 12th Street, and a couple other churches deliver stuff from a Catholic church in Southfield. And there’s one day John didn’t come with me and I was dropping off a bag of stuff at a older woman’s house after 12 Street. “You be careful, now.” And I was the first time I thought, I look nice. And I’m the only white guy here who doesn’t have a gun. You know, I’m not a National Guard. I’m not a policeman. So I would go back and tell my neighbors as it is. Contrary to what the Detroit News was saying, this is not a race riot. This is a rebellion. People are angry about discrimination, housing discrimination. They’re angry about police brutality. You know, food and all that stuff. And we’re still people were convinced that the Detroit News was telling the truth and that this was deliberately started by the Republic of New Africa and that they were out to kidnap white babies.
Leni Sinclair: There was a new Detroit Artists workshop. And and we had a building next door to the one that we rendered that became the Detroit Artists workshop press the poet who was one of the founders, learned how to print things offset press instead of mimeographing. Then when the riots happened in ’67. And we escaped for a week to go to Traverse City to get away from the National Guard. They came in our building and claimed that there may be some snipers in the closet and they were going to check in. And John was just incensed, he wouldn’t even open the door. “Motherf****r, you can’t just come in here. You need to have a warrant. This is America. You can’t just come.” Well, they came in and checked it and no sniper was in the closet and they left. But they could have, you know, they were killing people. They could have easily killed them. And I was standing behind and I had a little baby son. He was just born a few months ago. And, I thought we were going to get shot, you know, with revolution. And man, it was then we at first were really enjoying driving down the street, ignoring all the lights. There was no police on the street or was the new society. And then the National Guard came in and they saw to that, but half the city was already burned, you know, my God, you can still see the empty streets to this day. And it’s like after the World War II in some places.
Lucy Smith: Woodbridge’s collected oral histories capture both tragedy and repair alike. After the events of 1967, new arrivals and longtime residents of Woodbridge worked together to rebuild and reimagine their community. The 1970s was a time of growing activism and community engagement, especially related to anti-war activity and racial issues in the city. Tom Dietz arrived to Woodbridge in 1973, dreaming of a kinder world. Today, Tom Dietz is a trained historian and museum professional in the Kalamazoo area of Western Michigan.
Tom Dietz: I left a Catholic seminary out in Southfield, a Franciscan seminary Duns Scotus on Nine Mile and Evergreen. We had the idea that we would live off in the inner city near the campus where we were planning to go to school, most of us, but that we wanted to live a lifestyle closer to, say, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.
We all were sort of dissatisfied with what we thought we were getting into as far as Catholic priests and training. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement was prominent in the at least in the middle part of the 20th century, and if you’re a Catholic and a Christian, you should be out there working with the poor, helping the everyday people. So we wanted to go to school, but we also wanted to to sort of be in a place where we might be able to reach out and help those in need.
What we did try for a while was having some communal dinners. So different houses would say, I’ll host one this week, you know. We got people on so that we basically controlled both sides of a duplex. So sometimes somebody over on that side of the duplex would make the dinner. This lasted for maybe a summer, a few months. You know, it was always hard getting people’s schedule and getting people to eat the same thing and stuff. But that was that was kind of an effort to sort of build sort of a neighborhood and knowing your neighbors better. It would involve I’ll never a number but sometimes there were maybe 6 or 8 people would come to one of those meals and then you would know, okay, I’ll make it next week or two, you know, whatever, whatever our schedule was. It was nothing like the annual turkey day dinners that we had there. It’s the kind of thing that I hear from friends, younger children who are now adults called Friendsgiving meals instead of Thanksgiving, as all your friends. We were just 20 people and we would just make these makeshift tables that would run the length of two rooms and the people would bring food. So people who were hosting that usually would make for the turkey or the whatever, but others it would just be on the it would be on the Sunday, either the Sunday before or the Sunday after Thanksgiving, because for many of us those days our friends oftentimes became closer to us than our family. Not everybody was estranged from their family, but those of us who were living that kind of lifestyle that oftentimes were, you know, the rest of the family didn’t understand back then, you know. But would see your neighbors and see them all the time and talk to them.
Narrator: But as Tom and other Woodbridge neighbors attempted to improve the suffering caused by decades of neglect, bad policy and institutional racism, the political tensions around the anti-war Vietnam protests came home to Woodbridge in the form of expanded federal surveillance.
Tom Dietz: But it was that happened any number of times that you’d come home, then I’d be coming home from work, go from campus and be walking down the Hancock street or Warren to Avery and then Avery over to Hancock and then down to the house there. That’ll be a car. A big well, I don’t know what the FBI drove in those days, but a big Crown Victoria, a big Chevy Impala, big long sedan, and there’d be two guys sitting in it, two white guys in suits just sitting there. It was kind of odd. I didn’t think anything of it. It didn’t happen to me when I was in the house. But my friends who were living there with me at 1790, they said occasionally one of them would get out of the car, come down to our house, knock at the door and ask if we could see or knew someone. And they…We didn’t know. We never knew who they were. But our sympathies were such that we probably wouldn’t have said no. We haven’t seen them or we don’t know them in any case. And then they would go, you know, they wouldn’t ask to come in or anything just “Okay, thanks”. But that car would sit there.
What we would have said back in the day is you can’t go broke underestimating the stupidity of the government agencies because, I mean, they did stupid stuff like that. I mean, I can remember being at a that we were at there was a vigil up in the church just further north, but before we got up to Chicago and there was someone who had gone to the church and claimed sanctuary from the draft, and there was a big rally and everything there and everybody and for many people was a full church and stuff that was walking out in the evening. And you there were clearly government people standing around who were standing by their cars, you know, making a videotape of everybody that’s leaving now there. They probably did want you to know that, you know, we’re watching.
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Narrator: While Woodbridge has been home to significant tragedy, it is also a place brimming with music and color. The weekend of the initial storytelling workshop included a porch concert series in the neighborhood. It was there that the warmth of Woodbridge, which was so often remarked on in the oral histories, was on full display. It’s no wonder that music lover Ron Fisher, who arrived in Woodbridge in the 1990s never left.
Ron Fisher: Why did you move there? Well, I use that to answer that question frequently. And I said, well, you know, haven’t you ever thought about, like, wanting to own a piece of property or live next to, like, a state park? And so, of course, that confused anyone that I said that to. But the fact remains that one of the reasons I buy here was it was right next to a university. It was right next to a public library, is right next to an art museum. It’s like these are givens, fixed things that can never change. So it was like moving next to a state park. Things that would never would be are fixed. There’s not they’re not subject to some of the unforeseen changes that any city goes through. You know, like, that city got bombed last week or, you know, that neighborhood got bombed last week, or this neighborhood is being taken over by gangs. And it’s like, this is something that you depend on it. That’s what one of the beauties of Woodbridge. I mean, I prefer, you know, this was an income thing, but, you know. Yeah, Indian Village is fabulous. Boston Edison is fabulous. And in a different world, maybe I’d be there. But as far as, you know, the perfect location for someone like me, you know, the, you know, the pretty library and the museum are like things that are true treasures to me. And I’m right there and I can walk.
I used to see on a weekly basis the music director at Wilbur Wright. And one of the things he did was like, especially at this time of year, was the marching band practiced up and down the streets of Woodbridge and talk about the total 1900 music Man kind of like vibe. I hate that word, but I use it now. It was just the coolest thing in the world, you know, like having a marching band marching up and down in front of the Victorian houses. I mean, I guess no one really reacted to it when I was talking about it at the meeting here. But, you know, to someone like me that like not only appreciates the history but is kind of obsessed by it, it was the coolest thing.
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Narrator: As Woodbridge continues to confront gentrification and the growing cost of home ownership, Woodbridge Neighborhood Development sees their history project as an important part of its development work in the neighborhood. Theirs is a preservation project, not of boards and concrete, but one of community.
Angie Gaabo: Well, just like our home repair work, I would say we, we raise funds to, to help homeowners with senior and lower income homeowners of which some of them are folks who are participating in the oral history, people who’ve been here a long time. So they get grants and the objective is to, again, keep them in those homes because these things tend to sort of spiral out of control when you have a hundred year old house. So as things start to fall apart and you don’t manage them, eventually there’s blight tickets and then maybe you’re just adding onto your cost and then maybe you’re even losing the house or you don’t, you’re not paying your property taxes on it, and then the house is seized. So, that’s a program that we’re working on.
And then we’re gonna be expanding next year to also help those same folks with estate and probate issues, wills so that the title to their home is clear and the houses maintained properly because that’s a big problem in Detroit. People lose the generational wealth in a home because it was grandma’s house, but it’s kind of an unclear title. And then the next generation, or maybe the grandchildren think that house is mine now because grandma died. But they never probate it. They never get the legal work done, and it ends up going to the county or wherever and then is sold to an investor. This kind of stuff does happen. So we are trying to stave that off through this, a new project that we’re starting next year.
Richard Bachmann: Preservation. I mean, it is producing knowledge. It’s about conserving knowledge. It’s about recognizing contributions too, in terms of, hey, this is a beautiful neighborhood and I enjoy living here today, but it’s only here not because of the goodwill of some supernatural force or even the city of Detroit as a political entity or Wayne State or whatever is here because of the residents. Without the residents, without the small and bigger things that they’ve done in the past, this place would not exist. So for me, it’s very much about making past experiences and stories accessible to other residents, to visitors, to students, to scholars creating knowledge about this place and its past, but it’s also celebrating and memorializing these contributions and achievements.
A lot of them are from people who would never appear in the historical record. I mean, we have some big shots in the neighborhood. We have artists, musicians, politicians, people who are really the movers and shakers. But I sometimes think that if we as historians, we’re just focusing on these people who have an imprint in the archival record and for good reasons. And understandably so. But when it comes to preserving a place, living in a place, making a place livable, creating community, it’s the people, oftentimes the people who are not recognized and who wouldn’t necessarily even recognize themselves if they had a chance, right? I mean, that’s something we are dealing with too, where, you know, sometimes you have to convince folks that no, this is you mowing the lawn off a bunch of these empty lots and making sure that they’re being maintained and chipping in and providing some money to put on a community event and so on. Even if it’s 20 bucks and so on. But it is all a component of preserving this place and making this place a community. So it’s all significant and important.
Narrator: As professional historians, we are constantly searching for new ways to understand the past and for ways of capturing how these pasts were lived. As people’s presence, we seek out the newest monographs and pour over old documents and dishes to reconstruct a time and a place with particular people in thought, in motion and in play. But the past is not a specimen under a glass to be studied and codified. It lives and changes under and because of our gaze. Instead, residents like Verdell Jackson provide insights into Woodbridge’s history, into the history of a changing and vibrant community. The Woodbridge Oral History Archive and the Woodbridge Neighborhood Development reflect the past, support the present and dream of the future.
Verdell Jackson: No, it doesn’t really worry me because, like I said, I was there when the neighborhood was good. Like when I moved in 1950 and came here from Georgia. It was a beautiful neighborhood. Wasn’t an empty lot on the place. Beautiful trees like arch, you know, it was a beautiful place. So from ’50 to 2024, I have seen a lot of changes. I’ve been there when it was good. I’ve been there when it was bad and I’ve been there when it was good again. So now I’m just sitting and waiting for it to be better.
Narrator: Thank you for listening. Thank you to Cheyenne Petit for organizing and writing this episode. Thank you to Richard Bachman and Angie Gaabo for their time. And the warmest admiration and thank you to all of the Woodbridge residents who shared their stories with us. It was an experience we won’t soon forget. The Woodbridge Oral history archive represents one vital thread of community building, of sharing and knowing our stories. To hear more about the project and explore the archive, visit woodbridgedigitalarchive.omeka.net and the link will be in our show notes. Joseph Ho is our new executive producer. This is Reverb Effect.
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