In mid-March 2026, construction along Monroe Street in Greektown is an endless buzz of things awhirl, being broken apart and put together again. Amid this chaos sits Second Baptist Church, a nearly 200-year-old messenger from the past speaking into the environs of the present. It reminds the casual viewer that some things do not change so drastically as to be unrecognizable; instead, they change thematically, sometimes rhythmically: an old Detroit set against the rising din of a “new,” if not “newer,” Detroit.
As the original streets, concretized, are crushed, demolished, and remade behind fences narrowly accommodating agitated pedestrians, Second Baptist remains an archetypal, anachronistic sentinel, watching over the subtle transformation of a city currently engaged in a spirted conversation with itself. Again, it is witness to a new age, from the early part of the 19th century to the “color line” of the 20th, and now to the social media and AI-technologized encroachment of the 21st century, firmly ensconced in its second decade and counting.
The building now bears witness to the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding and the fifth official marking of Juneteenth — commemorating the liberation of the last enslaved people to be freed after the Civil War — as a national holiday. The overarching theme of freedom rides softly across the words, across the winds of time, bending and ardently tested.
Perhaps no other building — an institution unto itself — represents freedom as powerfully as Second Baptist Church. You step through those heavy wooden doors and enter an incredible story.
But Second Baptist isn’t just a Detroit story. It also belongs to Windsor. You might think of Detroit as the talkative one and Windsor, a great listener.
What hasn’t been discussed as widely is the Detroit-Windsor connection. Everyone knows the first part of the story, but what happened after a slave made it as far as Detroit, then to Second Baptist Church, and finally rowed to freedom in Windsor, Ontario?
Kimberly Simmons embodies the answer to this question. As a dual citizen (her father is American, her mother Canadian), she can articulately and passionately speak to these dualities — the same ones that will mark the anniversary of the nation’s founding.
She knows this history all too well.
Discovering Family Connections and Black History
Before diving deep into historical oceans, Simmons was a bank manager for 20 years. A Cass Technical High School graduate with a deep curiosity for American history, she was particularly drawn to the Underground Railroad’s lineage running through her veins, deeply embedded in the oral histories of her family — the kinds of stories told on family porches, at big gatherings, and during quiet moments at the dinner table.
“The Underground Railroad story is an American and a Canadian story, and the connection is across our river, right?” she says. “So the stories that are attached to that history are cross-border stories. A lot of the stories — not all of them, but a lot of the stories — start on one side and end up in the other or vice versa. Our river tells this story.”
Simmons’s ancestry traces back to the Mayflower — she has the documentation to prove it, and that’s just the “white” side of her family. She is very attuned to her family’s history, which starts in the 17th century and continues through the 21st century with her work as the executive director of the Detroit River Project. But that’s getting ahead of the narrative; Simmons usually likes to start with Caroline Quarlls, who, according to most accounts, was the first enslaved woman to “travel” on Wisconsin’s Underground Railroad in 1842, seeking her freedom. Eight years later, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 ensured that whether free or not, any slave could be brought back to their owners, even if they traveled to the north.
The Underground Railroad — run from the late 18th century to about 1865 — was a network of people who served as “conductors” to help enslaved people find freedom in the north. This included various routes through the country. The enslaved were hidden. Once they reached Detroit generally — and Second Baptist Church specifically — they were ferried to Windsor, Canada.
Quarlls’s route took her from Wisconsin to Canada and into the arms of the Sandwich First Baptist Church in Windsor, a sister church of Second Baptist. Quarlls married Allen Watkins, an escaped slave from Kentucky, in 1844. Today, the Watkins family has a street named after them. It remains “Windsor’s only thoroughfare named after a family of African descent,” according to the University of Windsor. Moreover, the home built by Allen’s grandson Homer Watkins on that street in 1917 is listed on the Windsor Municipal Heritage Register: “The neighbourhood has been home to four generations of Watkinses. In honour of the family’s contributions to the community and church, Lot Street was renamed Watkins Street in 1963.”
Simmons proudly proclaims, “We’re still living on [that] land … [and] they can’t get rid of us!”
All of this was made possible by a teenager, who, on the Fourth of July, reportedly declared her own independence by escaping while the family was away celebrating the nation’s founding.
The Burlington Historical Society writes, “Caroline Quarlls, a 16-year-old fugitive slave from St. Louis, Missouri, was the first passenger on Wisconsin’s ‘Underground Railroad’ in 1842. While it is not clear that she ever ‘stepped foot’ in Burlington, she was hidden on farms just outside Burlington in Spring Prairie township and was met and helped by several Spring Prairie and Burlington citizens …”
Simmons “discovered” Quarlls while going deep into rabbit holes one night. Little did she know that her axis would shift ever so slightly.
“I started doing some investigation because growing up, I knew that our family was Underground Railroad,” Simmons says. “It’s just one of those family stories, and that night, I was just curious … doing a Google search, I typed in Caroline Quarlls, and her picture came up. Now, I do look a little bit like her. … I am the second great-granddaughter of William, who was her youngest boy. She had three girls, three boys, and then there were three that were Allen’s originally. She was hidden for a time in Milwaukee. That’s why she’s tied to Wisconsin.”
Her lineage as Quarlls’s great-greatgreat-granddaughter has led her to an intriguing life as the co-author of the 2019 book To the River: The Remarkable Journey of Caroline Quarlls, A Freedom Seeker on the Underground Railroad.
Simmons served as a historian and production consultant for the PBS documentary miniseries The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross and was featured in the ARTE-TV (European PBS) documentary American Rivers — Detroit River, which debuted in Berlin, Germany, in November 2016. She also contributed to the anthology A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland from Wayne State University Press (2016).
Simmons is the founding president and executive director of the Detroit River Project, a nonprofit organization with the mission of designating the historic Detroit River as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. She spends a great deal of her time bridging the gap between Detroit and Windsor and educating others, including the next generation, on the importance of this history.
From helping to develop K-12 curriculum to serving in various capacities as an educator and public speaker on the issues of freedom, the Underground Railroad, and its relevance today, Simmons keeps busy.
“I would say that what I do is showcase our stories, the unknown stories,” she says. “Because inevitably, if you walk up to a man or woman on the street [and ask them about the Underground Railroad], first off, they may not even know what that is. [If they] do [know], you say, ‘So what have you heard?’ ‘Frederick Douglass’ — that’s what you’re going to hear. Out of 90% of the people, 10% may be able to take you a little bit further, and they probably read a book or something, but just on average, that’s what you’ll get.”
Douglass has several grandchildren in Michigan, she notes. And even though Harriet Tubman did not make it to Detroit (or Second Baptist Church), she also has descendants in the state. It is a harsh reality for most Blacks in America that they, unlike Simmons and the descendants of Douglass and Tubman, can’t trace their family histories so easily.
“That’s because we were separated,” she says. “It was a moment where I realized that using my family’s history and the fact that it’s so well documented … I could use that story, my family story, as a catalyst to get other people interested, to find out who they are.”
Second Baptist Church: Then and Now
History has often been described as “stories,” “dates and locations,” “a record of conquests and defeats,” and the “rise and fall of empires.” Most can remember taking a history class in which the textbook did not perfectly align with the world outside the classroom. Because for history to breathe, it must be real. Second Baptist Church was founded in 1836 by 13 formerly enslaved men.
For people such as Simmons, Black history comes alive daily — in their blood, in their ancestry, in their purpose and activism, in words and deeds. Pastor Lawrence Rodgers, a millennial, knows his history intimately.
He has served as the church’s 24th senior pastor since 2021. Prior to this role, he pastored Westside Church of Christ in Baltimore.
The son of a retired truck driver and middle school English teacher, Rodgers benefited from a two-parent household that had strong church roots in North Carolina. He remembers his town as segregated, a place where people struggled and lived by modest means. Even the pastors did not display the gold, expensive cars, and other adornments often seen in certain communities. No, he notes, some of the pastors had holes in their shirts.
“I felt at a young age that the church should [and could] serve as a utility to reduce these disparities, and so I just started doing work as a preteen,” Rodgers says. “To that end, I got trained in every aspect of church, life, and ministry. I preached my first sermon at 16 years old. I’ve been committed to social justice and social compassion since as far as I can remember.”
The Underground Railroad conjures — as it should, by definition — trains, train tracks, steam whistles, and conductors. This was, of course, a metaphor and continues to be a misperception of Second Baptist’s role in helping slaves escape to freedom in Canada.
“We don’t have any tunnels underneath our church,” he says. “The way we got people to freedom was by putting them in a wagon with a false body and hiding them there from slave catchers. And they were riding the wagon to the Detroit River, which maybe is about 12 minutes from here, and then they would get into a steamboat run by George DeBaptiste, and [he rowed] them over the river. And that’s how we would get people across the river, but we don’t have any tunnels.”
The Detroit Historical Society writes, “One of most notable abolitionists in Detroit’s network was George DeBaptiste. Born a free man in Virginia in 1814, he relocated to Detroit as an adult. A respected entrepreneur and business leader, he owned a barbershop and a bakery in Detroit before purchasing the steamship T. Whitney, which he used to secretly transport slaves from Detroit to Canada.”
It’s an amazing history, one that should be recounted, discussed, and remembered. But, Rodgers muses, “the battle isn’t won. While we have a lot of comforts with entertainment scrolling and cell phones and media, these things may make us feel … almost like an opiate.”
If, as W.E.B. Du Bois proclaimed, the “problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colorline” — that is, race relations in Detroit — Rodgers sees escapism as the problem of the 21st century.
“Everybody wants to escape,” he says. “If everybody tries to escape, we’ve created devices, substances, streams, [and various] things to escape. Everybody wants to escape, and no one wants to really dig in and do the work. … The technology can feel like an opiate. It can numb you to the injustices of the world around you.”
Memory combats this, an active approach to thinking of Black history beyond the month of February (and now June).
The church engages with its community in a wide range of activities for youth. In other words, Second Baptist continues to make history — a different kind of history, but no less impactful.
Rodgers fondly recalls a special visit to Second Baptist Church after becoming pastor. A “gentleman,” as Rodgers called him, had visited one Sunday with his family. The reason was simple: He wanted to connect with the space, to see it with his own eyes.
He came from Canada, Rodgers recounts, “because he said Second Baptist helped his family to get across the Detroit River. And he came all these years later to really experience the space where his parents found freedom. So that really touched my heart.”
Keeping Track: The Underground Railroad in the 21st Century
Simmons and Pastor Rodgers represent a continuation of the freedom fight. It is not about the removal of physical shackles; rather, it is about removing shackles of the mind and the rewriting — or rewiring — of history.
I had the advantage of experiencing the silence and majesty of the building. The satisfying creaking of the wooden floors, portraits of the church leaders adorning the walls, hundreds of years of history running right beneath my feet, all around me. Even as the sound of construction outside intrudes, like some “machine in the garden,” I know that the narrative is still alive. The work of Second Baptist continues.
I got a personal tour from Second Baptist Church member Bobbie Fowlkes-Davis, an unassuming, wise Black woman who has been a member of the church for decades and is, as she proudly told me, a “deaconess,” the wife of a deacon. She summed up this encounter with living history perfectly.
“Second Baptist Church is the oldest Black church in Michigan,” she says. “The oldest Black churches are all over the United States. What that means, ‘oldest Black church,’ is that the church started during slavery before the states were formed. There was no Michigan. This was a wooded area out here. You [could] see the river through the trees. The river’s still [in] the same place, but now you got all these buildings and sidewalks and streetlights. You didn’t have all that when we came here.”
The change from outside is palpable, but some things never change. The inside of the building feels immutable yet invariably open to change, reflected in its new leadership and mission for the 21st century.
As I walked around Second Baptist, Simmons’s words as we concluded our chat rang true and linked everything together in my mind about Black identity and its ties to not only Second Baptist Church but to the Black church in America, from oceans to rivers to borders of varying types. The diaspora is inexorably connected and celebrated in surprising ways.
“So all of the story of people of African descent in this region can tie itself back to a church, back to that church,” Simmons says of Second Baptist. “It is the mother church … that is significant on both sides of the border.”
Cornelius Fortune (Ph.D.) is a metro Detroit-based writer, lecturer, public ethnographer, and scholar. His work has appeared in the Detroit Metro Times, Yahoo News, Midwest Living, The Journal of American Culture, and other publications.
This story originally appeared in the June 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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