Covert: the township that integrated America a century early

Covert Township holds one of the most remarkable and least-known stories in American history. Beginning in the 1860s — while most of the country enforced segregation by law or custom — the Black and white families settling this corner of Van Buren County simply built one community. The school was integrated from the mid-1860s. Black residents voted here before the Fifteenth Amendment required it, and were elected to township offices: William Conner, a Civil War veteran, became Michigan’s first Black justice of the peace right here in Covert. Neighbors farmed together, worshipped together, prospered together — by choice, sustained over decades.

Historian Anna-Lisa Cox spent years documenting how this happened and told the story in her acclaimed book “A Stronger Kinship.” Her conclusion, more or less: Covert’s people decided that thriving together beat hating apart, and then kept deciding it, year after year. Today’s Covert is a quiet lakeshore township of orchards, blueberry fields, and a town park on Lake Michigan — and a place whose history asks a question worth living with: if they could do it in 1866, what’s everyone else’s excuse?