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African-American Associations
As long as African-Americans have lived in Ann Arbor, they have formed organizations to develop a sense of community and to counteract the discrimination they faced in daily life. In 1843, the abolitionist newspaper The Signal of Liberty reported the formation of a delegation to represent Ann Arbor at a national convention of African-Americans. Click here to see the article.
The churches were not the only institutions that served to build a sense of community among African-Americans in Ann Arbor. The Dunbar Civic Center, located at 4th and Ann Streets, served as a multipurpose facility, offering cooking and crafts classes, lending books from its library, organizing sports teams, and renting office space to African-American businesses. Black soldiers returning from World War I organized the Dunbar Center in 1919 as an alternative to local agencies, where African-Americans were often not welcome. Click here to hear Lettie Wickliffe tell such an example from her childhood. Local people bought shares of stock in the Center to provide it with funds used to purchase a building at 4th and Ann Streets and to acquire various supplies. Click here to see materials relating to the Dunbar Center. [link to membership card and stock certificate] Named after the poet and writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Dunbar center became a center of Ann Arbor's African-American community. Click here to listen to Martha Graham remember the role the Dunbar Center played in her childhood.
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Students On Site is a community
project of the Arts of Citizenship Program at the University of Michigan,
funded in part by the Michigan Humanities
Council and the U-M Office of the Vice-President For Research.
This website is a collaboration between the Arts of Citizenship Program
theCHICO
Project of the School of Information
and the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan.
Churches have always served as important institutions for community building. They proved especially important in Ann Arbor because of the dispersion of African-Americans in separate parts of the city. Ann Arbor's African-American churches, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Second Baptist Church, were not only places to worship but provided multiple services for their members and the city. For example, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Second Baptist Church served as a major relief agency for the city's poor. 
