Arab Dearborn and the First Arab American Museum
Near Detroit, Michigan
The first Arab immigrants to Dearborn came in the nineteen-teens and nineteen-twenties for the same reason everyone else came: Ford was hiring, and Ford was paying wages that were transformative for people who had grown up in the villages of what is now Lebanon, Yemen, and the Levant. They took the jobs in the River Rouge foundry and the dirtiest corners of the assembly complex. They established mosques and mutual aid societies. They sent money home. Some went back. Many stayed.
The community that grew over the following century became the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States. The Dearborn Arab community is not a single community. It includes Lebanese Christians who came in the early twentieth century, Yemeni Muslims who came for Ford work in the nineteen sixties and seventies, Palestinian families displaced by the wars of the nineteen forties through the present, Iraqi families who arrived after the Gulf War and the Iraq War, and a Bangladeshi community that overlaps geographically with the Dearborn east side. The population estimates range between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand people depending on methodology and geographic boundary. The Arab American population of the greater Detroit area is consistently cited as the largest such concentration in the country.
The Arab American National Museum in Dearborn opened in two thousand five. It was the first museum in the United States dedicated to Arab American history and culture. It documents the immigration waves, the religious diversity, the entrepreneurship, and the civil rights challenges specific to Arab Americans, including the surveillance and discrimination that intensified sharply after September eleventh, two thousand one.
Dearborn is also where Henry Ford's Fair Lane estate sits, on the bank of the River Rouge. The connection is not symbolic. The same company that attracted Ford's global immigrant workforce is the same company whose founder expressed virulent antisemitism and whose ideas about race had consequences in the city he built. Both things sit in Dearborn.
