AADL Talks To: Steve Adams
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As part of Ann Arbor 200, the Ann Arbor District Library and 7 Cylinders Studio (7CS) have produced a documentary film about the closing of Ann Arbor's Jones School. In 1965, the Board of Education closed the majority-Black school. Ann Arbor joined a nationwide trend of school desegregation during the Civil Rights Era. But for these young students, the loss of a neighborhood school foreshadowed changes to their close-knit community. Gentrification came to Ann Arbor on the heels of desegregation.
Compilation video from Phase Ten of the Living Oral History Project, in collaboration with the Ann Arbor District Library and the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County. With Carol Allen, Janie Lee Ross, Sandra Harris, Carl James Johnson, and Alice Brennan-Key.
Carol Allen was born in Alton, Illinois in 1945. Her parents Janie and Thomas Ross moved to Ann Arbor in 1951 and purchased a home on Fifth Avenue. Her father was a cook and her mother was a nurse’s aid and custodian. Carol recalls raising her son Carl Jr.
Janie Lee Ross was born in 1921 in Jackson, Tennessee. Her father was a church deacon, and she remembers attending choir rehearsals. In the 1940s she and her husband Thomas moved to Chicago, and she went to practical nursing school. They moved to Ann Arbor in 1951 and purchased a home on Fifth Avenue.
Carl James Johnson was born in 1945 in Willow Run, Michigan. His family moved to Ann Arbor when he was seven years old, after his mother suffered a stroke. He attended Jones School and Tappan Junior High and participated in the French Dukes drill team in the early 1960s.