The “Mitchell Map” from the late 1700s was the basis for drawing the boundary between the Michigan Territory and the state of Ohio. Inaccurate map-making lay at the heart of the dispute over the Toledo Strip.
Michigan gave away the Toledo Strip in exchange for the Upper Peninsula at a Dec. 14, 1836 meeting dubbed the Frostbitten Convention.
The deal, which ended the Toledo War that Michigan waged against Ohio, was brokered on a freezing day at the original Washtenaw County courthouse, thus the phrase “Frostbitten Convention”.
For the full article, see “Michigan history: Toledo Strip is given up for U.P.”, Detroit Free Press, December 12, 2010.
Additional reading:
The Toledo War : the first Michigan-Ohio rivalry
Toledo War wikipedia entry.
Toledo War entry courtesy of the Michigan Department of Military and Veteran Affairs.
Also see Pasty Central Day in History : December 14, 1836
Emily Bingham, “Best deal ever: 180 years ago, Michigan lost Toledo, got the U.P.“, MLive, December 14, 2016; updated February 20, 2017.
On December 14, 1929, the Kalamazoo Airport received Michigan license number 1 and became the first municipal airport in the state.
The inspiration of an airport in Kalamazoo began in 1925.
In May of 1926, the City of Kalamazoo bought 383 acres of land near Portage and Kilgore Roads. Scheduled air service began between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids shortly thereafter, and the first regular air mail service started in July, 1928.
In February 1929, the field was licensed as the first municipal airport in Michigan. It was named Lindbergh Field in honor of famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh.
Source :
WAKV (Plainwell, MI), The Memory Station Facebook Page
Kalamazoo,Battle Creek International Airport wikipedia entry
In 1936, Harold E. Bledsoe, a prominent Detroit attorney, was the only African American to cast an electoral college vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The Electoral College:
In 1787, founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton advocated through the U.S. Constitution for the Electoral College, a process of having representatives cast votes on behalf of actual voters.
In Hamilton’s words: “(The) immediate election (of the President should) be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station.” He went on to write: “small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”
21st century translation: Common people are stupid.
Hamilton became our nation’s first treasury secretary, serving from 1789 to 1795 during George Washington’s administration. His colleague, James Madison, a slave owner and considered the “father of the Constitution” was even more out cold. He stated that “Negroes” in the South presented a “difficulty … of a serious nature.” He proposed the infamous compromise in the Constitution whereby black slaves would be counted at three-fifths of a human being—not a whole. Madison later served two terms as president, from 1809 to 1817.
More About Bledsoe
The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s leading black newspapers described the 1936 historic first in its December 26th news story subtitled: “Paging Ridley.”
“Believe it or not! Attorney Harold E. Bledsoe, National Democratic chieftain, is the only Negro in the nation who actually voted for the re-election of President Roosevelt… Bledsoe, of course, was a member of the State Electoral College. The only race man so signally honored.”
A Democratic Party wave had swept through the country. In terms of electoral votes, it was the most lopsided presidential contest in American history. Roosevelt carried 46 of 48 states over Kansas Governor Alfred Landon. Frank Murphy, a liberal with strong ties to organized labor, was elected Michigan governor.
Michigan was allotted 19 electoral votes and the group looked like present day Livonia. Other than Bledsoe, there were 15 white men and three white women. They met in Lansing on December 14 in the Senate Chamber of the state Capitol Building.
Justice George Bushnell of the Michigan Supreme Court called members to order at 2 p.m. John Cahalan of Wyandotte was elected chairman; Adelaide Williams of Detroit was elected secretary. The electors wrote Roosevelt’s name on slips of paper and dropped them into a hat.
The Great Migration
In pursuit of a better way of life, blacks and southern white flocked to cities like Detroit. In fact, the city’s black population soared from about 5,700 in 1910 to 120,000 in 1930.
Bledsoe, along with funeral home owner Charles C. Diggs, Sr.; Joseph Craigen also an attorney; and Joseph Coles, led the way during the early 1930s to encourage Michigan blacks to vote for Democratic Party candidates. The men formed the Michigan Federated Democratic Club in 1932 as Roosevelt’s initial run for the U.S. presidency was gaining steam like a Grand Trunk Western Railroad locomotive. In 1934, Bledsoe became the first African American to serve as a state attorney general, an appointed position. Diggs, who operated a funeral home on St. Aubin Street in the Black Bottom community, was elected to the Michigan Senate in 1936.
“We were independent then…not obligated to any party and we weren’t out begging nor were we satisfied with crumbs,” Bledsoe recalled many years later in a September 28, 1963 Michigan Chronicle feature. “Those who were active in politics then had to be willing to help pay the freight for the race’s political emancipation. No other organizations were willing to underwrite our movement, which I think was one of the midwives that gave birth to the Negro’s hopes in organized labor.”
At any rate, as a token gesture, the Michigan Democratic party selected Bledsoe to be a member of Michigan’s Electoral College contingent for the 1936 election.
And so, on December 14, 1936, Harold E. Bledsoe, a black man from Detroit’s North End, cast an electoral ballot for the President of the United States, the only African American to do so..
Source: Ken Coleman, “First black man to cast Electoral College ballot was a Detroiter“, Michigan Chronicle, December 2, 2016.
Detroiter Charles Leroy Thomas earns the Distinguished Cross, the highest military honor not requiring congressional approval; he is the first African-American soldier to be so honored.
In 1995 the Pentagon convened a group who decided that Thomas and seven other African-American soldiers deserved to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. 17 years after his passing, Thomas received that honor posthumously from President William Jefferson Clinton. His niece received it on his behalf. He became the fourteenth Michigan veteran to receive the medal, a medal that he would have received fifty years previously had it not been for the discriminatory treatment that African Americans received during that era.
Sources :
Ted Raimi was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Celia (née Abrams), a lingerie store proprietor, and Leonard Raimi, a furniture store proprietor. Ted was raised in Conservative Judaism; his ancestors immigrated from Russia and Hungary. At seventeen he began his professional acting career doing industrial films in Detroit for Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. He attended University of Michigan, New York University, then finally University of Detroit. Raimi’s older brothers are director Sam Raimi and screenwriter Ivan Raimi.
Raimi’s motion picture acting credits include Wes Craven‘s Shocker, Born Yesterday, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness, Darkman and the Spider-Man series, as well as roles in such features as Stuart Saves His Family, The Grudge, Midnight Meat Train and Oz the Great and Powerful.
On television, he has been seen on shows such as Twin Peaks, CSI: NY, Supernatural and Legend of the Seeker but is best known for his roles as the communication officer Lt. Tim O’Neill on the science fiction television series seaQuest DSV (later seaQuest 2032) and starring as the warrior wannabe Joxer on Xena: Warrior Princess.
Raimi wrote the original “Joxer the Mighty” song in Xena.
Sources :
Over seven days in November 1980, the Free Press ran 52 of Yamasaki’s remarkable photographs, which would later win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. They managed to reveal not just the power (and weakness) of the state, but “the power of the inmates in the prison over the other prisoners,” Yamasaki says. “That’s an extremely important part of it.”
In the summer of 1980 there was a lot of violence in Jackson and guys were stabbed. TheDetroit Free Press prison writer wrote a story saying that the police were rounding up gangs in Pontiac and Detroit and the young gang guys were going into prison and terrorizing all the old guys. That’s pretty much the story the warden and the assistant warden gave this reporter.
This was not what I had heard about prison, that the young guys were terrorizing the old guys, because it’s always the other way around. You go into a prison and you’re called a fish, because of the way you wiggle around and look nervous. Guys will start challenging you immediately. They’re usually the guys who’ve been there awhile and gotten power by intimidation, really.
It’s all about power in a prison. Especially when the funds are low, and the funds were low in Michigan prisons, there’s not a lot of rule of law. The guards, I hate saying this, but the guards are trying to keep an outward level of calm, but basically they don’t want anybody to escape. And it seemed to me at least that there was very little being done to protect the inmates and not a whole lot to protect the guards. There are very few guards that were enforcing the rules that I saw, because of the consequences when they tried to enforce the rules. And the consequences are, there would be active attempts to eliminate the guards who tried to enforce the rules.
Most prisoners carried hidden weapons hidden. This photo ran on the first day of the Free Press series.
Sources:
“Jackson Prison: Armed and Dangerous”, Detroit Free Press, December 14, 1980, starting on 1C (a weeklong look inside the walls at Jackson State Prison)
“Taro Yamasaki and life inside Jackson State Prison“, NiemanStoryBoard, August 30, 2016. The photojournalist talks about how he got unprecedent access — and images — inside the world’s largest walled prison.
Erma Henderson was the first African American woman elected to the Detroit City Council and served as council president for many years. Born in Pensacola, Florida in 1917, her family moved to Detroit within a year, coming north during the Great Migration along with other African Americans looking for work and more tolerant living conditions.
She attended Detroit Public Schools and went on to earn an advanced degree in social work from Wayne State University.
At the beginning of her political career she ran Detroit Common Council campaigns for the Rev. Charles Hill in 1945, and in 1957 for William Patrick. Her success in Patrick’s election made him the first African American City Councilman. A year after the 1967 civil disturbance, she became Executive Director of the Equal Justice Council, charged with collecting data to evaluate the treatment of blacks by the judicial system.
In 1972, Henderson won her seat on the Detroit City Council by winning a runoff election to fill a vacancy, and became the first African American woman to sit on the Council. The event was a milestone for her career, and for her continuing efforts against racism. As councilwoman, Henderson lobbied for equal rights, especially targeting discriminatory loan and insurance practices, called redlining, in which minority recipients were given less favorable rates, terms and conditions. In 1975 she organized the Michigan Statewide Coalition Against Redlining, which led to comprehensive state legislation that outlawed the practice.
Her efforts and ability earned her respect within the Council chambers, and she was elected President of the Detroit City Council by fellow members in 1977, serving 12 years in that role. She was named a notable “Michiganian of the Year” by The Detroit News in 1978. Henderson’s popularity and success prompted a run for mayor in 1989 but she was defeated in the primary by the incumbent, Coleman Young.
Erma Henderson was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 1990, and remained an ardent advocate for Detroit and its citizens until her death on December 14, 2009. She is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit.
Sources:
Encyclopedia of Detroit.
“A Legend Overlooked Again“, Do Haeng Michael Kitchen Blog.
On April 16, 1927 the Michigan legislature passed a ban on the sale of fireworks, a ban that would remain in effect until December 14, 2011. On that day Governor Snyder signed a bill allowing Michigan residents to again buy fireworks legally, providing revenue and doing away with trips across the border to Ohio and Indiana.
Source :
Historical Society of Michigan.
Dave Murray, “Snyder signs fireworks bill intended to spark state economy”, Grand Rapids Press via MLive, December 14, 2011.
On June 22, 2016, Bridge Magazine, The Center for Michigan, and Mission Point Press published a book about the crisis called “Poison on Tap“. It has been described as a “riveting, authoritative account of the government blunders, mendacity and arrogance” that caused the crisis.
In May 2016, it was announced that Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha was in the process of writing a “dramatic first-hand account” of the Flint Water Crisis. The book, titled, “What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City” was released on June 19, 2018 by Random House imprint One World by editor-in-chief Chris Jackson.
Timeline:
March 22, 2012 – Genesee County announces a new pipeline is being designed to deliver water from Lake Huron to Flint. The plan is to reduce costs by switching the city’s water supplier from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA).
Sources :
Flint Water Crisis Fast Facts, CNN, April 8, 2018.
The names are different. So are the locations and details. But the seed for Clint Eastwood’s “The Mule,” which opens Friday, was planted by the infamous Michigan bust of an elderly drug mule for a cocaine pipeline between Mexico and Detroit.
In 2011, Leo Sharp was arrested after being stopped on I-94 near Ann Arbor. The 87-year-old daylily farmer from Michigan City, Indiana, was nabbed with nearly $3 million worth of cocaine in his Lincoln pickup truck and wound up serving time in federal prison.
Whatever happened to Sharp? And how did his strange, melancholy foray into crime lead to the 2018 movie directed by and starring Eastwood, who’s 88 himself and still going strong?
Here are some essentials:
NYT and Twitter: The movie was inspired by a 2014 New York Times article written by Sam Dolnick that took a deep dive into Sharp’s role as a courier for the powerful Sinaloa cartel led by Joaquin Guzman, aka the notorious El Chapo. Dolnick got the idea while scanning Twitter and stumbling on a link involving Sharp’s guilty plea.
Detroit connections: Dolnick’s reporting was adapted for the big screen by Nick Schenk, who also wrote the screenplay for Eastwood’s 2008 Detroit-made drama “Gran Torino.” The result is mostly Schenk’s invention, except for the main character’s involvement with shuttling drugs and growing daylilies. “Fiction filled in the spaces where journalism could not go,” Dolnick wrote last week in the Times.
From wood to stone: In the movie, the lead character (played by Eastwood) is named Earl Stone. His fictional backstory focuses on his past failures in being there for his ex-wife (Dianne Wiest), daughter (Eastwood’s real-life daughter, Alison) and granddaughter (Tessa Farmiga). Andy Garcia portrays the cartel boss, who is named Laton here. Bradley Cooper, Laurence Fishburne and Michael Pena are DEA agents on the case.
Peachy: “The Mule” was shot mostly in Georgia for practical (i.e. film incentives) reasons. As for the setting, Eastwood’s character lives in the Chicago area and is arrested in Illinois and tried in an Illinois federal court.
The road to prison: Real-life drug mule Sharp was pulled over in southeast Michigan, where a dozen Drug Enforcement Administration agents in unmarked cars had dotted a portion of I-94 between Kalamazoo to Jackson on the lookout, according to Dolnick’s 2014 chronicle. The arrest was the result of a months-long investigation: “It was by every measure the biggest cocaine operation Detroit authorities had ever seen. In previous years, a significant bust might be a dozen kilos; now the cartel was bringing in 200 kilos a month.”
Guilty: According to the Free Press, Sharp’s initial version of what happened was that he was forced at gunpoint to haul the cocaine. Eventually, he entered a guilty plea to drug conspiracy. He was one of nearly 20 defendants indicted in the scheme.
Unhappy birthday: In 2014, Sharp was sentenced to three years in federal prison at a court hearing that coincided with his 90th birthday. As described in Free Press coverage, he urged the judge to let him avoid time behind bars and even threatened to kill himself. “I’m really heartbroken I did what I did. But it’s done. I won’t live in prison, I’m just going to end my life if I end up there,” he said. Sharp’s lawyer, who said his client had dementia, argued unsuccessfully that he had been “brainwashed” and threatened by drug lords.
Sending a message: In sentencing Sharp, U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds said said she couldn’t justify not sending the frail senior citizen to prison considering the seriousness of his crime. Edmunds noted that not locking up Sharp would send the wrong message: “If you want to inoculate your organization from punishment … get an elderly person to do your deliveries for you, because they’re not going to go to prison for it.”
Out early: In 2015, Sharp was granted an early release because he had six to nine months to live due to an undisclosed terminal illness. He wound up living nearly a year and a half in freedom. Sharp is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii, a final resting place for those who’ve served in active duty for the U.S. military.
Source : Julie Hinds, “Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Mule’ inspired by senior citizen drug bust in Michigan“, Detroit Free Press, December 13, 2018.