Click here to read or listen to a story about Covert, Michigan based on this book by NPR correspondent, Jacki Lyden.

Click here to read chapter two of A Stronger Kinship.

A hundred and fifty years ago in the heartland of the United States, amidst a roaring sea of racism and hatred, a community decided that there could be a different America. In this place, schools and churches were completely integrated, blacks and whites intermarried, and power and wealth were shared by both races. In order for this to happen, the citizens of this place had to keep secrets, to break the laws of the outside world, to sweep aside fear and embrace hope.

Clark Children, c. 1915.

This, in a region made up of small close-knit communities that were often intolerant, if not outright hostile, to difference. This, in a region where ethnic and racial minorities had to keep to themselves to survive. This, in a time when the rest of the nation slid into the arms of Jim Crow.

This community was Covert, Michigan, and its history is a powerful one. Covert is a testimony to the fact that despite a history filled with violence, hate, and injustice, there was a place where ordinary black and white Americans treated each other as equals and as friends. Covert was not a theoretical utopia; it was a very human community, but A Stronger Kinship is the story of the extraordinary acts of ordinary people.

Now, in an astounding historical detective feat, Anna-Lisa Cox uncovers the saga of this place that took the road untaken. Starting in the 1860's, and for decades later, the people of Covert, Michigan attempted to do what then seemed impossible: love one's neighbor - regardless of skin color - like one's self. Drawing upon private diaries, overlooked documents, oral histories and contemporary records, Cox vividly brings to life true and intimate glimpses of the people who lived there. From William Conner, the black Civil War veteran who went on to become Michigan's first black Justice of the Peace, to Elizabeth Gillard, who survived a shipwreck that left her and her family washed onto Covert's shores, only to come to love the unusual community she came to call home.

A Stronger Kinship brings to light the stories of these and other extraordinary residents of Covert. In doing so, Anna-Lisa Cox presents an America that miraculously once was, and a vision for what our nation might be.

Covert Church Group. c. 1910.

Be grand, grand in your manhood and womanhood . . . . and the day will come when all, regardless of race, color, or previous condition will hand in hand tread the peaceful heights of perfect liberty.
..............-From a speech given at Covert's Emancipation Festival in 1895.