The Great Migration and Saint John Street

The auto plants needed bodies. Enormous numbers of them. And in the decades after World War One, those bodies came from the American South.

The Great Migration brought tens of thousands of Black workers from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas to industrial cities across the North. Flint was one of those cities. The wages at General Motors, even for the most dangerous and undesirable jobs, were multiples of what a Black man could earn picking cotton or working a sawmill in the Jim Crow South. So they came, by train and by highway, and they settled where they could.

Where they could was largely the Saint John Street neighborhood on Flint's north side, just along the Flint River east of downtown, and the Floral Park neighborhood on the south side. These were not zones of choice. Black workers were excluded from the new housing developments GM built for its employees. Federal redlining maps designated Black neighborhoods as hazardous to investment, locking residents out of mortgages and home equity that built generational wealth in white neighborhoods for decades.

Inside the plants, the constraints were equally explicit. When Black workers were hired at Buick, many were assigned to the foundry, the hottest and most physically punishing work in the factory. Other departments were largely closed to them. They made the engine blocks that Flint was famous for, in conditions that shortened lives.

And yet the Saint John Street neighborhood thrived. A Black commercial district emerged along the main corridor, churches and clubs and barbershops and restaurants. A community took root in the narrow geography that was permitted to it.

In the nineteen sixties and seventies, Interstate Four Seventy-Five was routed directly through the Saint John Street neighborhood. Many homes were demolished. Home ownership among displaced Black residents fell sharply. The highway that replaced the neighborhood is still there. Most of the community never returned.