Stories in Pictures from Dearborn's Arab-American Community
About this Exhibit
The Detroit area is home to America’s largest, most highly-concentrated population of Arab immigrants. There are now between 150,000 and 250,000 people of Arab descent living in Southeast Michigan. The vast majority are from Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and Iraq. Arabs have been coming to Metro Detroit since the late nineteenth century and they continue to arrive in the thousands each year. Initially, they were drawn by Michigan’s booming automobile industry; today, they are often refugees of war or victims of political oppression and economic hardship. They come to Detroit in order to live safely among the large networks of kin and fellow villagers that now exist here. During this decade, Arab-Americans comprised Michigan’s second-largest (and fastest growing) minority population.
Not only is the Arab-American community large, it is remarkably diverse as well. Dearborn is home to the largest enclave of Lebanese Muslims in North America, almost half of whom have been in the United States less than ten years. Highly assimilated, middle and upper class Christians, most of whom came to America from Greater Syria before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, can be found in Detroit’s northern suburbs. Palestinian professionals from Israel and the West Bank have settled in Livoinia; and Yemenis, mostly of peasant backgrounds, live in Dearborn’s Southend, a neighborhood which lies in the shadow of the Ford Rouge Plant and boasts its own mosque and business district.
Every three years or so, the Detroit print media run multi-page articles on the Arab community, and in each bout of reporting -- which is usually provoked by political troubles in the Middle East -- the Arab community is presented as if it were a novelty on the American landscape. The fact that Arabs have lived in Southeast Michigan, and elsewhere in North America, for the better part of a century has not yet been fully realized by most Americans.
The suggestion for this exhibit first came in 1984 from Ismael Ahmed, currently the director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS). We assembled a group of photos, many from work I had done with the Dearborn Press & Guide newspaper, and opened an exhibit at the Detroit International Institute in 1985 which eventually hung in the ACCESS building. An arson fire destroyed the exhibit in 1987, which was recreated and then destroyed again in another arson fire in 1991. Updating the work in 1994 Sally Howell and Andrew Shryock produced an exhibit at ACCESS that included many of the images in this site and now resides in the agency’s cultural museum. Many of those photos then became a display at the Smithsonian Institution in 1996. The latest version, titled "A Community Between Two Worlds: Arab-Americans in Greater Detroit", will be housed at the Michigan State University Museum and will open at the Detroit Historical Museum on March 20, 1998. It will include musical instruments, video, family photos and documentary work by other photographers.
Twenty years ago when I began working in Dearborn the Arab community was almost invisible to the majority of the European descendant population. The antagonism against the newcomers was palpable and continued through elections heated with rhetoric in 1980, through the Gulf War in 1991 and even into the term limits referendum in the 1997 campaigns. But during the past two decades they have been coming, getting jobs, buying homes and businesses and becoming a force to be recognized. Since 1993 Dearborn has built three new elementary schools and seen a revitalization of the Warren Avenue business district as the new population shifts and expands.
To acknowledge everyone who helped with this effort would be impossible but it could not have happened without the interest and concern of Ismael Ahmed, all ACCESS employees and volunteers, and the thousands of normally private members of the Arabic community who opened their homes and lives to my cameras. I owe them a great debt.
The photo on the lead page of this site is of Shaykh Ghanim Mansur, renown epic-singer from the Nile delta region of Egypt visited Dearborn in 1993 and paused during his long oral poem/song about love and war in ancient times.
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Millard Berry: Photographs
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