Work Description

Date: 31 December, 2023

Dataset Title: Aquatic Spaces: Black to the Water

Dataset Creators: David Porter

Dataset Contact: dporter@umich.edu

Funding: The Michigan–Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis

Research Overview:
Launched in response to the growing crisis of narrative infrastructure, the Detroit River Story Lab is a collaborative, public-facing initiative that leverages the sociocultural, economic, and ecological centrality of the Detroit River corridor to reimagine it as an urban case study in narrative placemaking and civic renewal. Beginning with the premise that place-based storymaking is vital to sustaining democratic values and community capacity for self-determination, the Lab partners on projects designed to support the narrative capacities of local urban communities through the story-telling channels of community journalism, place-based education, and public history.

There are many stories from across a variety of periods and contexts that foreground the prevalence of aquatic racialization in our region. These include the legal restrictions placed on Black residents’ access to the Detroit River in the aftermath of the successful escape of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn from Kentucky slave catchers in 1833, repeated episodes of the often violent expulsion of Black workers and residents from Wyandotte and other sundown towns along the Detroit River between the 1870s and 1940s – and the repeated erasure of these stories from official published histories of these towns, the Bob-Lo Excursion Company’s policy, in the 1930’s and 40’s, of barring Blacks from the ferry boats that provided access for Detroiters to the Boblo Island amusement park, a policy famously up-ended by the US Supreme Court in 1948 after being challenged by a 24-year-old Detroit, Sarah Elizabeth Ray, after being ordered to leave the boat, the demolition of the predominantly Black, riverside neighborhood of Black Bottom in Detroit in the 1950s in the name of urban renewal, the UN’s 2014 appeal, on the grounds of basic human rights, for the city of Detroit to restore access to water sourced from their own Detroit River to residents who can’t afford monthly water bills, and consumption restrictions on Detroit River fish important to local populations owing to long histories of environmental degradation

Considered together, these cases would seem to point to an undertheorized dimension of racialized systems of hierarchy and exclusion in the Great Lakes region and possibly the US more generally. The origins and long-term effects of zones of racial exclusion in the economically decisive domains of work, education, and housing are by now well known. The role of waterways as similarly delineated spaces of privilege and oppression is less commonly noted; in a state whose history has been so thoroughly defined by its lakes and rivers and so regularly scarred by racial conflict, the phenomenon of aquatic racialization calls out for integrative examination and public reckoning.

More information about Aquatic Spaces can be found at https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/detroit-river-story-lab/.

Methodology:
The data in this deposit are primarily photos (JPEG) documenting the Skiff & Schooner Program which provides place-based, experiential learning opportunities to high school and college students in communities up and down the Detroit River. Participants had the opportunity to hoist the sails on a historical tall ship, row wooden skiffs they’d crafted with their own hands, and participate in hands-on learning labs, offered by community experts and U-M faculty, on topics ranging from principles of buoyancy and the resurgence of Great Lakes sturgeon to the many-layered histories of Belle Isle and the Midnight Station on the Underground Railroad. A representative set of items were posted to the Egalitarian Metropolis site (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/egalitarianmetropolis/).

Instrument and/or Software specifications: NA

Folders contained here:
-Aquatic_Spaces.zip
> DRSL Logo contains the Detroit River Story Lab's official logo.
> DRSL Presentation at UM-Detroit Center.zip contains images of DRSL grad student researcher Skyler Leslie. She is shown talking with visitors about interpretive signage she's been developing for Historic Fort Wayne.
> DRSL Schooner Sails.zip contains images of the Skiff & Schooner Program.
> LSA Learning Stations for DRSL Schooner Trips.zip contains images of the Skiff & Schooner program.
> Materials on EM Web.zip contains the images, videos, and text of the Aquatic Spaces project page on the Egalitarian Metropolis website.
-AquaticSpaces_EgalitarianMetropolis.html - HTML capture of project page from Egalitarian Metropolis site
-DetroitRiverStoryLab.html - HTML capture of linked project page on LSA Detroit River Story Lab site (destination page of "Aquatic Spaces" button on Egalitarian Metropolis site)

Use and Access:
This data set is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC 4.0).

To Cite Data:
Porter, D. (2024). Aquatic Spaces: Black to the Water [Data set], University of Michigan - Deep Blue Data. https://doi.org/10.7302/mck6-1445