To Wax Nostalgic

How the area known as Detroit’s Black Bottom or just “The Bottom” received its name, is not really known.  Some claim it was because black Detroiters and other dark haired minorities were forced to live in the area.

Others claim it was named after the dance, “Black Bottom” that became a scandalous rave throughout the country during the Jazz Age in the 1920s.  The dance was created by blacks in New Orleans.  On January 2, 1927, the Detroit Free Press noted, “Like so many other dances from the United States, the steps and the movements generally have been borrowed from the colored population…” When it hit mainstream America it caused quite a stir.  Many communities called for it to be banned because the moves were thought to be savage, animalistic and too much like bestial African dances.  No father or husband wanted their child or spouse to be caught doing such an unholy dance.  This sense of taboo only seemed to make it more popular and liberating for women.  It eventually became so popular that reluctantly it was “accepted” by high society.  Once this occurred it was no longer considered a savage dance of blacks but the claim was made that the dance originally came to the new world 300 years prior by French colonists!

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During this time, in 1926, Jelly Roll Morton, a jazz pianist and composer, wrote “Black Bottom Stomp” which allegedly referred to Detroit’s Black Bottom.

Finally others claim the name came not from the race of its last occupants, rather it was called Black Bottom by early French settlers because of its rich, fertile soil.  In 1969, a former 55 year resident told the Detroit Free Press that he like everyone else, “…thought Black Bottom got its name because so many black people lived there, most in or just over the edge of poverty.  Then he met an Ottawa Indian who told him it had nothing to do with Negroes, that it was called Black Bottom by the Ottawas, who once lived there, because the soil was so dark and fertile.”  The area at one-point was part of the River Savoyard riverbed, before it was buried as a sewer around 1827.

Black Bottom was first settled by European immigrants who included Greeks, Polish, and Eastern European Jews, before eventually being occupied by blacks migrating from the south searching for a better life.  Black Bottom was located on Detroit’s near east side, and was bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, the Detroit River, and the Grand Trunk railroad.  Black Bottom became the forced residential tract for black Detroiters, and its boundaries changed over time to accommodate the growing black population, who by the thousands were lured to the city in the early 1900s with dreams of making good money in the automotive industry.

For years, former residents recalled all of the good that came with living in The Bottom or in The Valley.  Although the area was overflowing with black, poor, and struggling, southern refugees, it was a community filled with hope.  It was a community of people struggling who relied on each other and were each other’s family.  The community cared and shared.  Although some called it raggedy, a slum area, or a ghetto, for the people who lived there, it was home.  It was the community that set strict rules and respected values.  Many of the adult residents were just a few generations from being slaves or sharecroppers, and they expected their children to do better than them, to take advantage of a good education, and decent wages in the city.

Paradise Valley was famous for its restaurants and soulful nightclubs that featured McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Billy Eckstine, Della Reese, and Alberta Adams to name a few.  Packed in this small area were not just restaurants  and nightclubs, according to a 1937 survey it was reported that there were 48 grocery stores, 97 eating establishments, and 27 drug stores all owned by blacks. The annual payroll was over $304,700.

As drug store owner Sidney Barthwell noted, “Negroes had it made in Detroit until World War II.  We had everything we needed in the Black community.  Discrimination gave us tremendous economic power because we had been compacted in one small area.”  

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Paradise Valley Mayor Chester Rentie bragged, “Paradise Valley and its people spend more money for all forms of maintenance and pleasure, than any other ethnic group in Detroit.  This is amazing when you consider that we have fewer jobs and are the last hired and the first fired.  In its confines we have more places of business actually owned and operated by Negroes than in any other city in the world.”

Gloster Current in June of 1946 wrote the following about Paradise Valley:

“Paradise Valley is a misnomer.  The streets are not paved in gold.  The citizens who walk them are not saints.  Nor are they all sinners.  Toot your horn, turn the corner off Gratiot into St. Antoine.  Enter Paradise Valley.  The intersection of Madison-Gratiot-St. Antoine marks the gateway to one of the most famous sections of America.  Yet little is known about it.  Paradise Valley is at once a myth, a dream; still it lives and breathes and does things.  Walk down Rue St. Antoine when the sun is shining and you will pass businesses doing the Valley’s banking, hair-cutting, pants-pressing, soda-jerking.  Take a tip down the same sidewalks at midnight and you will bump into teeming hundreds of white and black citizens blended into a polyglot mass of humanity, swarming along the sidewalks, spilling into the streets.  Midnight on Rue St. Antoine resembles the carnivals and Mardi Gras of New Orleans…Hundreds of patrons each night crowd into the Three Sixes, the Lark’s Club, Club 606 on Adams Avenue.  They listen and view the shows in the Theater Bar and several other niteries.  For the Valley comes alive at night.  Sometimes the patrons have too much to drink.  Sometimes someone gets rough and the cops are called.  At night the cares and inequalities of being black melt away into the laughter of the Valley.  People come from all over the city to enjoy the fun and gaiety of the spots… Paradise Valley is a mixture of everything imaginable – including overcrowding, delinquency and disease.  It has glamor, action, religion, pathos.  It has brains and organization and business.  Not only does it house social uplift organizations, but it supports the militant protest groups.” 

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