Schools, churches, community clubs, and even a credit union: For more than 100 years, the McDougall Street Corridor was a central part of the lives of Black Windsorites. For many, it was their home. Today, its history is little-known even in the city itself.
Willow Key, University of Windsor graduate student and lead researcher of the digital exhibit WeWere Here: Recovering the Stories of Windsor’s McDougall Street Corridor, is trying to change that. She spoke with TVO Today about community-building and the legacy of this neighbourhood.
TVO Today: What can you tell me about the We Were Here project?
Willow Key: It’s a joint project between the University of Windsor and the Essex County Black Historical Research Society. I’m a member of the society. Its president, Irene Moore Davis, approached me about the possibility of doing a project on the McDougall Street Corridor. The community was founded just east of Windsor’s commercial district in the 1850s by freedom seekers, or emancipated slaves, from the United States.
Over a century, it evolved and became a pretty sizable Black community in downtown Windsor. And then in the late 1950s — which was the case for many cities across Canada — Windsor participated in the urban-renewal funding that was made available both provincially and federally. The city took that opportunity to reimagine what Windsor could look like and the ways in which it could attract more interest from the United States and other parts of Ontario. Part of that was essentially demolishing some of the older parts of the city — and one of the oldest parts of the city was the McDougall Street Corridor.
A lot of people from Windsor don’t even really know anything about the community or its history. Windsor has long been a significant hub for Black Canadian history, but one that is often overlooked for other places in Ontario and Canada. Many of us — Irene Moore Davis and many other people in the community — are hoping to highlight this history to remind people that we’re here and that there’s history here.
I was familiar with the community. When I was informed that there was an opportunity to conduct research and produce a digital exhibit for the university’s online archives, I was super-excited. It was about two and a half years of research and interviewing former residents of the community and putting all that together into something digestible for the public.
TVO Today: How did you already know about the community?
Willow Key is lead researcher of the digital exhibit "We Were Here: Recovering the Stories of Windsor’s McDougall Street Corridor." (Courtesy of Willow Key)
Key: I’m a descendant of the McDougall Street Corridor. My great-grandparents lived in the community until their home was expropriated, and then they actually ended up moving to Toronto. That’s where I was born and raised, and my dad was born in Toronto, too.
That’s a familiar story for a lot of former residents of that area. A lot of people moved to other parts of Ontario. Some people moved to Detroit, and some people moved to other parts of Windsor.
I was familiar with the existence of the community, but there’s very little information and very little literature about it. That was the difficult task. A lot of the research is based on archival documents, whatever I could find in newspapers. A lot of the former residents had their own personal collections of photos and documents from church and organizations and things like that.
TVO Today: Did you find out any information about your own family during this research?
Key: Yeah, actually. One of the older churches in the neighborhood was the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It was one of the two Black churches that were expropriated and demolished. I didn’t know that my great-grandparents had a significant presence in the church community.
They were on a variety of different church boards and organizations. At one point, they actually lived in the parsonage, the house right beside the church. I was able to find a lot of that out by looking at land-registry documents: I’m looking through them, and I see my great-grandparents and I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know anything about that.”
TVO Today: Can you tell me about the process of doing this research? You were combing through the archives but also talking to people who lived in the community and seeing their own personal records.
Key: You got the sense right away that this was a community that was very well-connected. Part of that was because the McDougall Street Corridor was very much a product of its time. There was housing discrimination in the city of Windsor, so it was really the only place that you could purchase a home if you were of African descent. There was also a smaller Chinese community that brushed right up against it, and they experienced a similar situation of housing discrimination. There was also a Jewish community beside the McDougall Street Corridor. It really was the case that a lot of the city’s ethnic minorities were stuck in this main downtown area.
Because of that, people within the McDougall Street Corridor had to rely on each other quite significantly. Many people were related by blood or by marriage. I got the sense speaking with people that they knew of everyone’s families and could even, decades later, remember all their neighbours and all the people they went to school with, because in many cases, they’re related in some way. Interestingly, I would say maybe about 30 per cent of the people I spoke to, just in the conversations we had, we found out that we were related as well. Which is just very strange but also really amazing.
Item from the August 11, 1953, issue of the Windsor Star.
In the 1950s, there were just over 1,500 people in Windsor’s Black community. Not everyone lived downtown, but a lot of them were in that area. So it was a small community, and everyone really knew everyone. You got the sense that it was really an important space for people. It was a place where they felt safe, where they knew that they could find accommodations and access resources that were not always guaranteed outside that area. In my interviews, a lot of frustration and disappointment came through with how that community was treated in the 1950s. There is still an overwhelming sense of disappointment that the community experienced what it did with expropriation and that the community doesn’t necessarily feel the same as it did when people were growing up.
TVO Today: I think you really highlighted that on the website, where you write about the expropriation and its ongoing impacts.
Key: If you know anything about Windsor, the downtown area has had a lot of issues. The space where the McDougall Street Corridor was, the space where the smaller Chinese Canadian community was, a lot of that is now sort of the civic centre — city hall and the Windsor police building. There’s really not a sense of community in that particular area. So the downtown core has had to rely on its entertainment industry, which has also declined significantly for a variety of reasons. By the 1970s, you had a lot of people shopping at malls instead of the downtown-area mom-and-pop shops.
I think a lot of people feel like, if more attention had been paid to how important community is and what it can do for an area, the sense of responsibility people feel when they are in a community and they care for one another and they interact with people, perhaps the downtown core would look a bit different today. If maybe the city had taken a different route, maybe providing people with loans to fix up their homes instead of demolishing and clearing out the area — I mean, it’s sort of hard to speculate about what downtown Windsor would look like today, but there’s no way of hiding the fact that downtown Windsor is really suffering at the moment.
I tried to make a correlation between the lack of a sense of community in that area and some of the problems. This is a decline that was experienced in many other places — look at Africville in Halifax, Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver, Regent Park in Toronto. I think the decline is a good way of looking at how federal or provincial policy is not always the best way of addressing the individual needs of people. It brushes over the needs of communities for the hope of modernizing a space, not really thinking about what the community does for the space.
Windsor Star coverage of the Colored Community Credit Union from 1957 and 1961.
TVO Today: I’d like to talk a bit about the Fellowship of Coloured Churches Credit Union, which the community created to provide banking services that its members couldn’t get from mainstream banks, like loans.
Key: When I was doing some of the online research, I was going through the Windsor Star newspaper from the 1940s. I think it was mentioned in relation to First Baptist Church. It was a financial group that sprang out of the church. There was a concern with discrimination with traditional banks and the fact that it was difficult at times for people within the McDougall Street Corridor to access loans. Or they didn’t feel particularly welcome at certain banks. So the community essentially pooled its resources and helped one another with student loans or mortgages or personal loans.
The community had a long history of doing this. I remember speaking to someone who told me about how, if someone in the community was struggling to pay their rent or their mortgage or for groceries or whatever, they would sometimes organize these things called rent parties, where people would make desserts or bake foods, and they’d have games set up. They tried to raise money for that individual —that was very common. One other thing that I noticed with almost every social organization that sprang out of the community, regardless of what the intention of the organization was, they almost all had some sort of student aid for secondary or post-secondary students coming out of the community.
I think it’s indicative of the way in which the community was formed and the way that it functioned. Everyone had to rely on their neighbours and other people in the community. Financial needs, that was no different. So a credit union made sense for the way that that community functioned. In the 1940s, there was also an interest in promoting Black financial and economic independence.
The best way of doing that, I think the community thought, was to start their own credit union. It was a natural progression of what the community was already doing. It was just kind of a more professional form.
Windsor’s Black Mecca: Recovering the Stories of the McDougall Street Corridor
TVO Today: How widely used was it?
Key: By the early 1960s, they had amassed over 300 patrons. For quite a while, they were they were functioning out of somebody’s home — Hugh Burnett — then they were functioning out of the Masonic Hall. And then they were finally able to purchase their own building in the 1960s.
TVO Today: Did anyone talk to you about the credit union during your interviews?
Key: It’s important to note that most of the people I spoke to were children at the time of the expropriation. There was only one woman who was an adult at that time, and she’s now 101. So they could really only provide me with whatever a child would remember. But I do recall speaking with one woman who said that her mother worked in an administrative position for the credit union. She couldn’t remember a lot, but it was certainly helpful to hear that they were employing people from the community. They had one or two accountants from the community as well. But, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a lot about the credit union from people. Most of the information I was able to get came from newspaper articles about events that the credit union was holding.
TVO Today: What happened to the credit union after the McDougall Street Corridor was redeveloped?
Key: The credit union ended up changing its name to the East Side Windsor Credit Union in the ’60s, just after the expropriation. There were some concerns that the credit union was not as dedicated to focusing on the Black community as it had been previously, and there were some accusations that the credit union was peddling some of the stereotypes that were out there about Black people and their economic status, which were one of the issues with traditional banks. It seems like the credit union, in their attempt to broaden their scope, made some of the members of the community feel like they were not as important to the credit union or were not necessarily worthy of its services.
This is indicative of a lot of the internal problems that occurred after the redevelopment. There were conversations about a generational split between some of the older and younger members of the community and what was the best way of going about improving the plight of Black people in the city now that their main hub was gone. People were scattered across the city, across the province, and even into the U.S.
I think what happened with the credit union is indicative of the fraying of the community after urban redevelopment. It just doesn’t seem like they were as interested as they had been in catering specifically to the Black community.
TVO Today: What does your research tell you about the ongoing discrimination Black people face from the banking sector?
Key: That hasn’t been a tremendous focus for my research. But I imagine, in many ways, Black people, wherever they are in Canada or the United States, probably still deal with the same sort of stereotypes that have always plagued the community in terms of their access to banking.
In many cases, it’s probably just discriminatory ideas about Black people not being able to be good with their money or not being able to save the way that you would expect someone to. Obviously, that also plays into the sorts of employment opportunities that are available. I mean, that was one of the big issues back in the ’30s, ’40s, and ‘50s. A lot of the civil-rights organizations in this region were focused on employment discrimination and the fact that a lot of Black people in the city of Windsor were really only able to get blue-collar, hard-labour jobs. I think a lot of that plays into the stereotypes of what Black people can afford, what kind of loans they should receive or should be given, whether or not they are trustworthy with loans — things like that.
TVO Today: What is the legacy of the McDougall Street Corridor?
Key: There’s a local legacy, and then there’s a much broader national legacy with urban renewal.
In terms of the legacy for the local area and its history: Windsor has a significant legacy of Black Canadian history, one that I think is increasingly coming to the forefront. But, for a long time, people just were not really aware of all of the history that Windsor has related to the Black community and Black history in North America. I think the legacy of the community is one where there certainly were problems — again, this was a community that was essentially established out of discriminatory housing practices — but it’s one that demonstrates the importance of community, the importance of being able to rely on people genuinely caring about you and your wellbeing. And it’s a great example of what can happen when communities come together and genuinely feel like they have a stake in what’s happening in their neighbourhood. People in the McDougall Street Corridor worked as hard as they could to improve their surroundings, the lifestyles that they had, the surroundings and lifestyles of people around them.
In terms of a much broader legacy, this is just another example of some of the unfortunate postwar urban policies that we’ve seen across Canada. There are so many other communities like the McDougall Street Corridor that Canadians just don’t know about. The research hasn’t been done, the literature isn’t there, or it’s slowly being worked on, but it’s hard to know what’s out there without a decent platform.
And I think it plays into the housing issues that we’re experiencing now. Almost word for word, some of the complaints that I came across when I was conducting research on the community, you see those things today: the housing stock is old and limited; the way in which the government is carrying out its housing policies is not in the best interest of people in those areas. So I think it’s certainly a great tool for us to see how we were going in circles and maybe not making the right progress.
TVO Today: Is there anything else about the McDougall Street project that you’d like to bring up?
Key: One element that I was really interested in was the business hub within the community. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on finding informal businesses and shop houses, trying to track down any instances or comments within archival records.
Because there was employment discrimination in the in the city, it was very difficult for Black men and women to find employment, and Black women in particular had this double responsibility of providing for their families economically but also physically, by taking care of children and taking care of the house. A lot of women tried to find creative ways of making income while also being at home.
Black History Month: McDougall Street Corridor
There was one woman who essentially turned her front porch into a sunroom restaurant. People from downtown Windsor and also people from Detroit would come over on their lunch breaks and get home-cooked meals for lunch. There were other instances of people running little restaurants or tea shops out of their homes. There was one lady I interviewed who remembered there was a woman in the community who would cook large batches of meals. It was like a 1950s version of HelloFresh, where you could call her up and be like, “Oh, do you have any meals left? Can I order one?” You would just show up to her house, and there’d be a prepackaged meal there for you, and you could just pay her at the door.
You don’t hear a lot about informal ways that people make money and the way in which only a community like the McDougall Street Corridor would facilitate something like that. Normally, you wouldn’t feel comfortable just going to a random person’s house to get a meal. But if you know everyone in the community, that allows for that sort of business to thrive.
I’m still looking for weird instances where people are going to other people’s homes for some a service like “I need to fix my drapes.” Or “There’s a lady who teaches piano” — that’s not, I guess, as strange as getting a meal from someone’s house, but she didn’t have a studio or anything. She ran it out of her home, and there were also vocal lessons and all sorts of things. Lots of ways that people tried to start their businesses, but somewhat under the radar.
TVO Today: What’s next for your work on this community?
Key: I’m actually just finishing up my master’s degree. Then I’m hoping to maybe write a book on the McDougall Street Corridor. There are so many different aspects of this community to focus on, and this website just lightly touches upon its history. I have a lot more research that we weren’t able to add, and then I’m still conducting research. It’s definitely ongoing.
If you have a story to share about the McDougall Street Corridor, please contact Willow Key at thecurlyhairedacademic@gmail.com.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
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