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Bill McGraw's commentary here Monday about "our version of the Confederate flag" is a timely reminder about an Orville Hubbard tribute outside Dearborn City Hall that has drawn negative attention earlier.
The scholar's 1999 book was reissued in 2007 and remains in print.
Noted sociologist and historian James Loewen includes it in "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong," a 1999 book that lists 94 examples of "myths and misinformation."
"Honoring a Segregationist" is the heading on his entry about the 10-foot-tall bronze statue of Hubbard, who he describes as "Dearborn's infamous mayor for 36 years."
McGraw, a Dearborn resident, maintains that commemorating Hubbard since 1989 "in such a celebratory fashion, without a word about his aggressive race-baiting, is dishonest and embarrassing; it’s a cover-up that obscures the reality of southeast Michigan’s ugly racial history."
Similarly, Loewen writes:
As the Detroit metropolitan area grew increasingly diverse, Hubbard's leadership helped Dearborn get increasingly white. . . . It was famous nationally (and locally) for its racial segregation. . . .
In 1948, he helped run a campaign to defeat a rental housing development with the slogan "Keep Negroes Out of Dearborn."
By 1978, when Hubbard left office, fewer than 20 African Americans lived in Dearborn out of 90,000 people -- an astonishing figure, for this is no obscure or distant burg. The edge of Dearborn is less than five miles from downtown Detroit, where three of every four people are black. Indeed, Detroit borders Dearborn on three sides.
Dearborn's mayoral monument went up in 1989.
Amid current discussions of Confederate flag displays and a presidential eulogy Friday in Charleston, S.C., that cited "the way past injustices continue to shape the present,” journalist McGraw concludes: "The reckoning in Dearborn is long overdue."
Writing a decade and a half earlier, author Loewen ends his Dearborn section this way:
Not until white suburbanites are embarrassed rather than delighted to live in all-whit neighborhoods will Orville Hubbard's statue come down.
The writer of "Lies Across America," who's now 73, taught about racism for 20 years at the University of Vermont and later was a visiting professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. His book, reissued in 2007, is available in paperback and e-book.
Book excerpts are via Google Books.
Related coverage:
Our Version of the Confederate Flag Is 10 Feet Tall and Waving In Dearborn, June 29
