Livingston Today

Asians For Liberty issued the following announcement on Jan 20.

 Officer Clayton Collins was hired as Ann Arbor’s first black policeman in 1950, but there are accounts of someone else breaking the color line more than 100 years ago.

Hired on May 20, 1907, Officer Thomas Blackburn was described in Officer George Camp’s 1940 history of the Ann Arbor Police Department as the first “colored” officer in the history of the city.

But it’s unclear if Blackburn was black.

The answer depends on which historian you ask, and contemporary understanding of racial identifying terms.

Sgt. Michael Logghe’s 2002 book “True Crimes and the History of the Ann Arbor Police Department" notes the discrepancy: “... According to Officer Camp’s report, a black officer named Thomas Blackburn, was hired in 1907. I discovered a photo of Officer Blackburn and it does not appear that he was black. Officer Blackburn was with the department for 10 years and it is open for debate if he or Officer Collins was the first black officer.”

An online exhibit of the University of Michigan Library’s 2014 Martin Luther King Symposium also asserts that the city’s first black officer was hired in 1907: “The city of Ann Arbor appointed their first black police officer in 1907. However, city government took much longer to diversify. Albert Wheeler, Ann Arbor’s first black mayor, was not elected until 1975, more than 100 years after black residents began to settle in the area in large numbers.”

The Bentley Historical Library has a 1908 photograph of a William Blackburn, identified in the caption as the “city’s first African American policeman." The man in the picture does not have features that would clearly identify him as black.

Blackburn was the former constable for the Fifth Ward, the caption in the picture states.

Most other historical mentions of Blackburn, however, identify him as “colored,” and not African American or black. For example, a Sep. 23, 1907 edition of the Ann Arbor News-Argus mentioned Blackburn on the first page, referring to him as “Tom Blackburn, the colored cop.”

“Colored” was a racial descriptor used around the early parts of the 20th century to refer to, as the Department of the Treasury defined it in 1934, “Negros, Indians, Chinese, Japanese and all other nonwhite races.”

One person who disputed the black officer moniker for Blackburn was Collins, who was believed to be the first black officer when he was hired in 1950.

For Black History Month, read about these notable Washtenaw County figures

“Officer Collins had heard about Blackburn and thought he was half-Indian,” Sgt. Michael Logghe’s wrote in his book. “In any event Officer Collins was the first black officer in the modern era.”

“I discovered a photo of Officer Blackburn,” Logghe wrote, “and it does not appear that he was black.”

Logghe followed up his 2002 writings a year later in the Washtenaw County Historical Society Newsletter called “Impressions.” He definitively called Collins the “first black police officer in the city.”

“Officer Clayton Collins worked from 1950-1955,” Logghe wrote in 2003, “and was hired as a result of a letter from Albert Wheeler [later Ann Arbor’s first black mayor] and others asking that the city hire a ‘Negro.’”

Collins later went on to work in several departments at the University of Michigan and spent most of his adult life living in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.

READ MORE MLK DAY STORIES FROM WASHTENAW COUNTY:

Marches, music & more for MLK Day events in Washtenaw County

MLK Day program in Ann Arbor includes townhall with county’s justice leaders

Civil rights activist Angela Davis to keynote University of Michigan MLK symposium

Original source here.