Detroit Tour Guide Knows Best Path

September 10, 2010

DETROIT — He’s been at this for a quarter-century now, explaining black history to both white and black citizens; explaining Detroit’s rich and complex history to those who know nothing, and to those who think they understand it better than he does.

And he enjoys every minute of it, and then some.

Meet Stewart McMillin of McMillin Tours, founder, proprietor, president and world’s most cheerfully knowledgeable tour guide.

Also, sole employee. “I do it because I keep learning something from the people who sign up for my trips,” said McMillin, a bushy-browed retired school teacher who spends life showing off his passion to those who pay a nominal fee for the privilege, and occasionally sneaking off himself for a trip around the world.

“What I want to do is open up people’s minds. I want them to understand Detroit — and I want them to understand as much as they can the amazing story of slavery in this country — what these people endured, they suffered, the acts of heroism so many performed.”

How did he become a one-man Detroit tourist agency? “Well, you know, race is really what started it,” he says.

Indeed, he came of age with the modern civil rights movement. He’d grown up in mainly white neighborhoods in Wisconsin, where he lived till he was a teenager, and then Grosse Pointe, when his dad was transferred. He first became aware of discrimination in the early ’60s, when his fraternity at Michigan State University blackballed someone because he was a Native American.

When McMillin became a history teacher in the virtually all-white suburb of East Detroit, he started daylong exchanges with mostly black Detroit schools. Soon, he was taking students to see black history sites in Detroit. When he retired after 29 years, he decided to take his hobby to the masses — and has conducted, he estimates, nearly a thousand tours in the years since.

Last month, he led a packed, all-day African-American history and culture tour of Detroit. This month is a little slower, though he’s taking a group through historic Eastern Market on Sept. 23.

Next month, however, he’s leading a three-day tour of Underground Railroad sites in Ohio and Kentucky from October 22-25, visiting key sites in the secret network that helped escaped slaves travel north to freedom and security in Canada.

“We’ve still got some seats left if anyone wants to join us,” he said cheerfully. “This is one of my favorite trips!”

Following that he’ll conduct a tour of Arab and Islamic sites in the Detroit area on November 11, and then, on November 20 and 30, do his popular “Hootch, Hoodlums and Hoods” tour, which combines visits to prohibition and Purple Gang sites with automobile “hoods,” as in former factories, and some of Detroit’s oldest neighborhoods.

Through it all, he is relentlessly cheerful, informative and upbeat. His business card says simply, “Stewart McMillin: Since 1940,” which is literally correct: though he seems much younger, he turned 70 this year. Many of these trips end with a free beer and pizza party at his home, on Seminole in Detroit’s historic Indian Village. The house, like the city he loves, has seen better days.

Magnificent from the outside, the interior is a bit chaotic. The house, in fact, is more a museum of Stewart’s round-the-world travels than anything else, with piles of books and videotapes everywhere, and various rooms dedicated to various countries and continents.

There’s a large 1946 map of his favorite continent in the dining room, and a few large holes in the kitchen ceiling; some damage from ruptured pipes in the kitchen has yet to be repaired.

All this is easier to get away with if you are a bachelor. Mr. McMillin was, in fact, married twice; didn’t take. Currently, he has a girl friend, Diane Moskaluk, a retired teacher like himself.

“Sometimes she comes along; sometimes she doesn’t,” he says, noting that she did join him for a month of his last three-month, round-the-world tour almost two years ago.

He isn’t getting rich off his adventures; in fact, he calculates that he’s been losing a little money, especially since he started renting air-conditioned coaches for his tours. The recession forced him to postpone a grand tour of Canadian Underground Railroad sites till September, and a Detroit church tour till next April.

But he’s still a cheerful optimist, whose biggest problem, a friend and frequent fellow traveler once said, was to “try to avoid telling you everything he knows in one sentence.”

What he knows, most of all, is that racially divided Detroit’s only hope for the future is through understanding, and that “you can’t know where you are going till you know where you’ve been.”

As long as his legs function, he intends to keep leading tours.

Note: Information about Stewart McMillin’s tours is available online or by calling 313.922.1990.

Veteran journalist and national Emmy Award winner Jack Lessenberry teaches at Wayne State University, serves as Michigan Radio’s senior political analyst and writes regularly for several publications. He also serves as The Toledo Blade’s writing coach and ombudsman and is host of the weekly television show Deadline Now on WGTE-TV in Toledo.