Hamtramck: From Dodge Main to the First Muslim-Majority City Council

Hamtramck is an independent city of about two square miles entirely surrounded by Detroit. It incorporated in nineteen twenty-two, when Dodge Main, the massive Dodge Brothers manufacturing plant on Joseph Campau Avenue, was drawing workers by the thousands. The workers who filled Hamtramck in those years were overwhelmingly Polish Catholic, immigrants from partitioned Poland who found in this small city a church on every other block, Polish-language newspapers, Polish social clubs, and eventually Polish elected officials. By mid-century Hamtramck was, per square mile, one of the most densely populated cities in the United States.

Dodge Main closed in nineteen eighty. The plant that had defined Hamtramck's reason for existing was demolished. The city lost population rapidly. By the nineteen nineties it was a city in the middle of Detroit's collapse, stripped of its economic anchor, losing residents it could not replace.

The replacement came from Yemen, from Bangladesh, from Bosnia, from Albania. Muslim immigrants, following networks that connected them to earlier community members who had found housing and work in and around Hamtramck, began arriving in significant numbers from the nineteen nineties onward. They opened mosques, halal butcher shops, Bangladeshi restaurants, and Yemeni grocery stores. They sent their children to Hamtramck schools. They began running for city council.

In November of twenty twenty-one, Hamtramck elected a Muslim mayor and a city council made up entirely of Muslim members. It became the first city in the United States with an all-Muslim city government. The Polish Catholic community that had built the city watched this from a much smaller vantage point. Many had left for the suburbs decades before.

The mosques in Hamtramck now broadcast the call to prayer, the adhan, through outdoor speakers, a practice that was the subject of contentious debate in the early two thousands. The city council voted to allow it. The sound carries through the same streets where Polish marching bands once processed on feast days.