HAMTRAMCK, Michigan — Joseph Campau Avenue, named after a slaveowner who was excommunicated from the Catholic Church, runs north from the Detroit River through the legendary former “Dodge Main” factory before it forms the main drive of Hamtramck, a burgeoning independent city of 30,000 surrounded by Metro Detroit.
If you stroll up Campau (pronounced COM-po) through Hamtramck, you’ll see Polish bakeries, mosques, Yemeni grocers, hipster secondhand stores, and Bangladeshi families. When Campau widens to four lanes at Caniff Street, the vista widens and the view is striking: 18 American flags.
It’s a loud display of patriotism in one of the most immigrant-dense cities in America — 42% of Hamtramck’s residents were born outside of the United States, most of them in Yemen or Bangladesh.
But there’s a story behind those 18 American flags.
It’s a story of culture wars, gender ideology, messy democracy, neighborhood change, religion, and Democratic internecine warfare. It could end up being the story of how Donald Trump wins Michigan and once again becomes president.
The rainbow coalition
On Campau, one block below Caniff, is a four-color mural proclaiming, “Hamtramck, the world in two square miles.” The motto reflects the mind-bending diversity of this small city — a diversity represented visually by a small rainbow arching through the letter H.
The mural is adapted from a famed Hamtramck billboard from the 1980s that used the same rainbow through the H. But over the years, the rainbow has transformed its meaning from a symbol of hope to a sign of diversity to a proclamation of gay and transgender pride. This “pride” variation on the rainbow has not blended well with the religious and ethnic diversity of this town.
The wide stretch of Campau, for a decade, flew the flags of Yemen, Bangladesh, Poland, Jamaica, and dozens of other countries. Then, in 2022, a city official hung up on Campau the latest pride flag, with its colors celebrating diverse sexual orientations and transgender ideology, turning this urban boulevard into a battlefield of the culture wars.
The story starts in 2021 when the Hamtramck City Council voted to fly the pride flag from City Hall’s flagpole. The vote was 3-3, with the three Muslim members voting no. Mayor Karen Majewski broke the tie.
A bit later, City Manager Kathy Anger called Russ Gordon, chairman of Hamtramck’s Human Relations Commission, and told him to sub in the pride flag on Campau for one of the national flags there.
Gordon was the godfather of the city’s flag program. Restoring the flag poles on Campau and getting the various flags up there was mostly his idea, and it happened because of his work and even much of his own money. Gordon’s vision, he told me, was that an immigrant family arriving in Hamtramck for the first time might see its flag flying on a pole and feel at home.
Gordon, last decade, went through Census data to find out which nationalities were represented in the city, purchased those flags and flew them. Often, a local would ask, “What about my flag?” and Gordon would sub that one in. The whole process of which flags to fly and when “was me on a flagpole and a citizen on the street,” Gordon told me in an interview.
Gordon said Anger was relaying a request from the city’s Arts & Culture Commission chairman, Tim Price, who is also a gay activist.
Price didn’t want the rainbow-striped flag of the 2010s. He wanted the “latest and greatest,” as Gordon puts it. That is the one with the multicolored triangle nodding to racial minorities and transgender people.
Those were on backorder in the heady days of 2021, and by the time the pride flag arrived, it was winter.
The flags on Campau come down every year by Thanksgiving because the Michigan winters are tough on flags. “If a grommet comes loose, I’m not going up a ladder that’s sitting on two feet of snow,” Gordon explained.
In the months between the phone call from Anger and the next spring, “there was a little bit of a shift in the politics,” as the new city manager, Max Garabino, puts it.
Garabino, the former police chief of Hamtramck, replaced Anger, and he is professionally obligated to be apolitical. When he spoke with me, he tried to be careful in his word choices. What he called “a little bit of a shift in the politics” was, in fact, a political earthquake.
Muslims vs. progressives
On Election Day 2021, five months after the city began endorsing the pride flag, Hamtramck voters voted in an all-Muslim City Council and threw out Mayor Majewski, replacing her with Ameer Ghalib, a Muslim immigrant from Yemen.
Gordon remained head of the Human Relations Commission and the one-man flag czar. Acting on standing orders from the former city manager, come summer 2022, Gordon ran the pride flag up the pole on Campau.
“For 10 years,” Mayor Ghalib told me, “only international flags were flown on the street. All of the sudden, when I became mayor, they added the LGBT flag.”
Gordon said he had no idea that the pride flag, which celebrates, among other things, the notion that men can become women by identifying as such, would be contentious. “Naïve me, I just put the flag up. … To me, it’s a ‘gay flag.’” He sees it not as a city endorsement of a particular worldview or sexual morality, but as the same message of welcome to gays that he spent a decade trying to send to immigrants.
Ghalib and the city council members objected, arguing that it was a direct affront to the values of half the city. The politicians and Gordon couldn’t find a compromise, so Ghalib backed down. Throughout 2022, the pride flag stayed up. Ghalib says he took criticism from “the community,” the phrase Muslim Hamtramck residents to mean Muslim residents.
Gordon explained the political pressure this way: “The imams deliver a lot of votes, and they were upset about the flag.”
In June 2023, the City Council tried to use its power to end the flag wars. The council unanimously passed a resolution “to maintain and confirm the neutrality of the City of Hamtramck towards its residents.”
The only flags allowed on city property, including City Hall and Campau, were “the American flag, the flag of the State of Michigan, the Hamtramck Flag, the Prisoner of War flag and the nations’ flags that represent the international character of our City.”
Gordon was upset, and so was former Councilwoman Katrina Stackpoole. That’s when “Russ and Katrina decided to take matters into their own hands,” as Garabino put it.
In July 2023, Gordon and Stackpoole called the local media and flew the pride flag. “They went there and acted like a militia and flew the flag again after we passed the resolution not to fly it,” Ghalib said.
Gordon didn’t argue. “The council had already voted. We put it up in protest.” Within a couple of hours, the city had the flag taken down.
That’s when the major media and the state Democratic Party brought down the hammer on the new Muslim-run government.
Newspapers from Detroit to New York to London attacked the government for not flying the pride flag. Democratic state Attorney General Dana Nessel traveled to Hamtramck and helped lead a protest outside of City Hall. Nessel accused Ghalib and the city council of “hatred, intolerance, and bigotry.” She called the council’s actions “evil.”
“The community felt intimidated,” Ghalib said. “The community felt like they are targeting their values, their religious freedom.”
Gordon and Stackpoole have sued Hamtramck, alleging religious discrimination. “There was no reason to take it down except for religious bias,” Stackpoole said. “This was a slap in the face.”
Price also sees religion as the enemy. “We accomplished marriage equality not long ago,” he said, “and now we are having these conflicts all over. I am not surprised it’s because of religion. I was raised Catholic. A lot of people hide their dislike behind religion.”
The media portrayed the resolution as a “betrayal” of liberal tolerance to Muslim immigrants. To Ghalib, it was the progressive backlash that showed the betrayal and animus toward religion.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“The moment we started to represent these people, the former power structure got crazy, and it started creating obstacles in front of us,” Ghalib said. “That’s how it started. This is part of the series of events that led to where we are today.”
“Where we are today” is that Ghalib has endorsed Trump, and much of the Yemeni and Bangladeshi population of Hamtramck has, along with him, walked away from the Democratic Party. Ghalib wasn’t the only one driven into the arms of the GOP by the pride activists. Gordon acknowledged that his lawsuit was a “trigger” for some local Muslim leaders to support Trump.