The Grand Steamers to Boblo Island Carried a Civil-Rights Case to the Supreme Court

For nearly a century, a perfect Michigan summer day meant a trip to Boblo Island — and half the fun was getting there. Boblo was an amusement park on an island in the Detroit River, and the only way to reach it was by boat. Two grand excursion steamers, the SS Columbia and the SS Ste. Claire, carried thousands of passengers down the river with music, snack bars, and dance floors. People danced before the park even came into view.

The park opened in 1898 on Bois Blanc Island, just over the line in Canadian waters. “Bois Blanc” was hard for Detroiters to pronounce, so they called it “Bob-Lo,” and the nickname stuck — it became the official name in 1949. For generations, Boblo was Detroit’s Coney Island.

But one of those beautiful boats was also the setting for a quieter, more important story. In 1945, a young Black woman named Sarah Elizabeth Ray boarded the Columbia for a graduation cruise with her class. She was ordered to leave because of her race. She refused to go quietly, took down the company’s names, and the resulting legal fight went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1948 sided against the company and upheld Michigan’s civil-rights law — a full decade before Rosa Parks.

The good times ended in 1993, when Boblo closed for good. The island is now a private residential community, so the park itself is gone. But the two steamers — the work of Frank E. Kirby, one of the great naval architects of his day — have outlived it, and devoted volunteers have spent years working to save them.