5510 Saint Aubin Street
First Union Baptist Church
This church’s land (including the parking lots) includes 5500 through 5518 St. Aubin Street. The church uses the address 5510 St. Aubin Street.
In 1950, there were two flats where this structure currently stands and two stores where the parking lot is now. In the ensuing decades, most of St. Aubin Street would be razed as the area lost population. Between here and I94, there’s only one other structure.
I believe that this structure was built in the mid-1960s. The church that built it, the First Union Baptist Church, was founded on February 26, 1946, by Reverend E. J. Maye. On paper, the church was incorporated in 1955 by Reverend Maye, Willie McDaniel, and more. McDaniel would later become reverend at the church.
In 1950, the church hosted a fourth-anniversary celebration for the church between February 19 and the 26th. Reverend Dm. Sanders of Greater Community Baptist Church delivered the anniversary sermon, and there was a free dinner afterward.
In 1953, the church hosted its seventh anniversary with a weeklong program and visiting ministers giving special sermons each night. Likely, these celebrations occurred each year.
In 1967, the assistant pastor at the church was in the news. Reverend Samuel Ward Jr.’s son, Ronald, was arrested and detained for disobeying an order from his commanding officer while serving in the Vietnam War. He said that he injured his ankle while jumping from a helicopter during a mission and refused the officer because of the injury and felt that he was being treated differently than his white comrades.
Representative John Conyers became involved, as he said he had seen and heard of similar discrimination. “On the front lines, everything is okay…but when the troops go back to have a beer, it’s the same old thing—discrimination.” Assistant Reverend Ward Jr. defended his son, saying that he had been enlisted since January 1966 and saw combat in the Mekong Delta and, “If he was going to be a coward, he would have been one then.”
In July 1967, Ernest Goodman, a Detroit civil liberties attorney, took up the case. Goodman had a reputation for representing communists, prisoners, and striking union members. A socialist and Marxist, Goodman opened one of Michigan’s first racially integrated firms and often supported striking unions. The maximum penalty for refusing to obey an order and misbehaving before the enemy was death by hanging. Ward’s mother had received threatening phone calls after the paper reported the news.
In October 1967, Ward had his disobeying an officer and fleeing the enemy charge acquitted and was found guilty of a lesser charge. He was given a dishonorable discharge and sentenced to two years in prison.
Back on St. Aubin Street in Detroit, First Union Baptist Church chugged on.
The neighborhood surrounding the church continued to change as white residents fled for the suburbs and more industry moved in. On June 20, 1974, Reverend E. J. Maye stepped down as pastor, and on January 26, 1975, Reverend W. G. McDaniel took over full-time.
In the early 1980s, the General Motors Poletown Plant was built, demolishing an entire neighborhood connected to this one in the process. Later that decade, the Detroit Incinerator was completed less than a quarter mile from this structure. This cast hazardous air into the neighborhood, an odor you could smell for miles. Through all this, First Union Baptist Church remained open.
On June 23, 1995, Reverend Willie McDaniel died at 76 from heart disease. He was born in Selma, Alabama, worked at the Ford Rouge Plant for 32 years, and pastored the church for two decades. The funeral was at the church pictured here, and he was buried at Elmwood Cemetery.
The church is still operational today and is under the stewardship of Reverend Dwayne R. Flowers. This is one of the only establishments in this section of Poletown East that isn’t heavily polluting Detroit. Hopefully, they can see the neighborhood continue to change positively after decades of slide and, hopefully, already reaching its lower exponential limit.
