Bronze pillars: An oral history of African-Americans in Flint

by Rhonda Sanders

Book by Sanders, Rhonda

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I began working on The Poisoned City, my book about Flint, I knew I wanted to tell it as a collective narrative. This is, after all, a story about a city. It is about power: how it is made, how it is taken, and how it is rendered invisible. What happened in this place—since the infamous water switch, yes, but also over the past century—is experienced intimately. But it is not individual.

That’s how I wanted my book to be. Intimate, but full of voices. Spacious, sweeping, and steeped in history, just like the city itself. Personal, but not singular. *Flint* is my main character.

So, I gravitated toward Rhonda Sanders’ Bronze Pillars: An Oral History of African Americans in Flint. Sanders, a reporter for the local newspaper, published it in 1995. She did interviews with a broad cross-section of the community, collected archival photos, and organized the book in sections that mimic the many dimensions of civic life: Neighborhoods, Jobs, Athletics, Churches, Social Life, and so on. To spend time with the book is like spending an afternoon on a chatty front porch.

Bronze Pillars is threaded together by Sanders’ narration, but she keeps herself in the background, giving space for Flint residents to tell their own stories. Some of them recur throughout the book; others we meet only briefly. What I love is how this remarkable American city emerges through the collective ring of their voices. Not only was Bronze Pillars informative, but it helped me to feel the pulse of this community.

More here: http://annaclark.net/reading-list-rho... This is the latest in the occasional series of posts about books that inspired me, taught me, and challenged me while writing about Flint over the past few years.

[Connor Coyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rhonda Sanders' 1995 book Bronze Pillars is like a brilliant and massive museum built between the covers of a 300+ page, 10-point serif font paperback. Thousands of names and stories reside here, concerning St. John's Street and Floral Park and General Motors and redlining and the Golden Gloves and the Golden Leaf Club and so much besides.

It has taken me a *long* time to finish this book, simply because the quantity and density of information here is truly formidable, but its importance is difficult to overstate. The timing of the publication is significant -- in 1995, Sanders was still able to interview many of the key figures who helped to establish African-American neighborhoods in Floral Park and St. John's Street, both of which were later largely erased by the establishment of I-69 and I-475, and her interviewees were born as early as the turn of the 20th century. A similar project, begun today, would not be able to reach so directly and profoundly to the roots of Flint's Black community, but would have to settle for second and thirdhand accounts.

Moreover, the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach to what merited inclusion (there is a section on "Amusement Parks") is both justified and necessary, as it allows the reader to experience the cultural contours of the community. So often history can read like a dry list of famous and infamous people, but Sanders' history dives so deep, and takes in so much territory, always relying whenever possible upon the direct words of her interviewees, that readers have the experience of encountering history themselves.

Clearly one of the most important books ever written about Flint and a must-read for anyone who seeks to understand this city.