The Social Geography of the Bottoms

“Social geography” can be thought of as the combination of cultural and environmental arrangements within a given area. Social geography doesn’t merely define the boundaries of a neighborhood, it describes the meaning of places and the people who live in a community, and how those meanings are connected to the physical landscape. Perhaps the most important illustration of the social geography of the Bottoms is defining the boundaries of the Bottoms and other nearby neighborhoods, the Midway and Washington Heights. Velma Adams has described the distinction with clarity: “Midway… used to be Kalamazoo Street up to Champion and you lived on Champion and you were part of Midway but when you were down on Barney, Hamblin, and that you were in the Bottoms then.” The distinction between the neighborhoods was often less clear to other community members. Describing it on another occasion, Adams and fellow interviewer Thelma Jones related each neighborhood to the others.

Velma Adams: “Yeah, going south, from the river, the river that ran behind the Center, the Kalamazoo River, from there on up to Upton, that was the Bottoms."

Thelma Jones: "Because it was always the Bottoms kids and the Heights kids…Midway was in between."

Velma Adams: "Midway – what is now Jackson – used to be Kalamazoo. Midway was Kalamazoo, Michigan, VanBuren and Champion…and then the Heights was after that."

 

Church of God, on Capital Ave., SW

In terms of the activities within the Bottoms, the Hamblin Community Center was the anchor for the children of the community. Neighborhood youths would congregate for dances, parties, movies, or games of basketball. For families as a whole, the churches of the Bottoms were frequently the hub of social, educational, and religious activities. Alma Richardson Horton recalls [] the importance of The Church of God in Christ. “But basically that’s where we heard all, we learned everything at church, spent all of our time in church as a child. Until we got 17 and 18 years old. All the music we knew was church music.” She went on to describe the community’s pride in the church. “That was, we had lots of other churches in Battle Creek back in them days. But people would leave their church and come down to the Church of God In Christ. You’d be so proud of that little church, people be out, looking in the windows…Yeah. At that particular time, even though it was called the Bottoms, I think every person in Battle Creek that was Black knew about that church. And knew about Bishop Coles. He was known all over Battle Creek. Everybody knew him.” The Church of God in Christ on South Washington was a place for musical and religious education, social interaction, and physical recreation in the open field near the church building. A network of activities located around the church helped create the strong sense of community within the Bottoms.

Jackie Latham remembers [] how the nearby sanctified church filled a similar role as a center of activity. “I remember Reverend Adams used to barbecue down there all the time. Right by the church. And we used to hang out down there, hoping he’d give us a bone of barbeque. He had some good barbecue. We’d go down there and look in the church when they was having service, and watch those people shouting down there.”

The physical arrangement of the neighborhoods was an important factor in the Bottoms’ social relationships. Nearly fifty years after the Cement River Project displaced the community, Leonard Wanzer can still recall [] all the residents on his block where Clyde Street met Washington. “I grew up with all these kids, I’ve known them all my life, ya know. Wilma and Lena [Barlow] lived next door… on the right side, on Washington. They lived at 210 and 212. I lived at 218 and my grandparents lived at 222 and then the Perkins lived next door to my grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Perkins. The Evans’s lived on Clyde Street, and, Odie and Lillian [Cromwell] lived on Clyde Street. And my other grandparents lived in the area also. My other grandmother lived at 250 Washington.” Just one block saw nearly the whole of Leonard Wanzer’s extended family mixed in with youthful friends and adult couples, forming the geographical and social core of his neighborhood.

Rich Manufacturing Company

Meanwhile, the social networks of the Bottoms were not solely connected within the community or even to the boundaries of Battle Creek. The migration patterns of people into and out of the city meant that their social networks had links all over the state, around the country, and into Canada. Reverend Rhan’s recollections of his youth illustrates this complexity. His father worked at Rich Manufacturing, rooting them in Battle Creek, but Rhan’s family had moved to Battle Creek from Ontario, where his mother had been a minister. The Reverend’s working life from youth through adulthood had taken him to the celery fields of Portage in his younger years, around the world during his military service, then back to Michigan again in his later years.


The interweave of local, regional, and global social networks is part of what made the Bottoms such a culturally rich and tight social community. From Chicken Charlie’s to the Church of God in Christ; Ypsilanti, Michigan to Chattanooga, Tennesse, the social geography of the Bottoms was a rich landscape of meaning. Empty fields could be just as meaningful places as schools for memorable gatherings, while community leaders like Reverend Amos and Julia Milner, because of their proximity and their involvement in the Bottoms, could be just as important figures to the children of the Bottoms as any political or entertainment figure.