Skip Dyes is a Cass County commissioner. He serves district three.

Destination Cass County is the story of how my family — how I — got here.

At the end of reconstruction after the Civil War, Jim Crow laws were put in place to control ex-slaves and maintain the economic advantages by the people who were in control, the majority. Many of those laws of suppression and division were upheld by the Supreme Court in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in 1896. That case upheld “separate but equal laws.”

Fast-forward to Jan. 5, 1914. Henry Ford shocked the world when he announced that Ford Motor Co. would double workers’ wages by going to the $5 day. The $5 was double what most people were making at the time and three-times what most farmers were making. Then, in 1930, John Rust invented the first practical spindle cotton picker. The prevailing thought was it would wipe out the old plantation system in the south. It was a scary thing to the people in the south, especially to people of color because that was the only job they had ever known.

All these things made way for the Great Migration, which started in 1916. This was a time when African Americans decided they finally had options — at that time, 90 percent of black Americans lived in the south but were locked into a system where they could only go so far. 

However, during this time, jobs were available here. Factories were booming, and they needed people, so they solicited people from the south to move to work in the factories. African Americans, for the first time, felt they had economic options. During the Great Migration, up to 6 million black Americans moved to the Northeast and the Midwest from the south between 1916 to 1970. 

My part of this history is my grandfather, Larkin Vorters. He was born in 1895 in Aiken, South Carolina. He went to school until the eighth grade, was literate and worked wherever he could get a job at. In his early 20s, he heard about the Great Migration and thought that he would be a part of it. He moved to Chicago — he was initially going to move to Detroit to take part in the $5 day, but he had never worked in a factory before, and the idea made him nervous. You have to remember that those people who were part of the Great Migration had never left their counties before. They were leaving everything they ever knew and were changing their lives forever — at the same time, they changed our lives forever.

My grandfather worked in Chicago as a sheep shearer and later as an inspector. While living in Chicago, people told him to read the Chicago Defender, a black-owned newspaper. In that paper, he read articles about how you could buy property in Michigan. So, he came to Cass County and found a farm.

The thing my grandfather always found ironic, he would tell me, was the advancement. “The fact that I could buy a farm on my own, I never had that opportunity in the south,” he said.

He worked and saved and bought a farm that my family still owns in Cass County. As he became a part of the Cass County community, he loved Cass County because it was the first place he could stretch out and not be hindered. The south would have hindered him in a way that he would never have been able to do what he did in Cass.

As I was a young man, I would spend a lot of time with him because he had a coal furnace, and I would need to go to his house in the winter so he could keep the heat. He would tell me then that what Cass County could offer him was advancement — a way to move forward. He could not move forward in the south.

Because he loved Cass County, he infected me with that because I spent my whole life with my grandfather before he passed away. When I went to college, he told me, “The fact that you are going to college makes me so glad that I came to Cass County, because you might not have been able to do that in the south.”

My family and a lot of the families in Cass County came here during the Great Migration. I don’t know what the percentage is, but I imagine it is pretty high as most of the black families in the county are immigrants from the south.

My father was a pastor at Chain Lake Church for almost 40 years. When that church burned in 1966, and they rebuilt that church in 1968, it was rebuilt by immigrants that came up from the south. That is how much the Great Migration has changed Cass County.

My grandfather would say, “My single decision changed your life forever.” It did. His decision to move north, which he said at the time was “the promised land” as far as he was concerned, allowed him to go further. It might not have been perfect, but he said it was up to him to go further and advance for the future and his family’s future.