Chaldean Town

[1] Circa 2007 the population of the district was mainly low income elderly people and recent immigrants, who were mostly made up of Chaldean Catholic Assyrians.

[1] The neighborhood was usually just a stop point for newly arrived immigrants, who then typically preferred to move to the suburbs of Detroit when they could afford to.

Chaldean retail and grocery stores rushed to fill the void, often popping up in poor, majority-black, inner-city neighborhoods where the residents had few alternatives for their food and shopping needs.

[5] Similarly, many Chaldeans were frustrated with the high rates of crime in Detroit's inner-city neighborhoods, leading them to increase security in their stores.

[5] These killings angered Chaldeans and African Americans alike, even inspiring a small boycott of Middle Eastern businesses in Detroit.

[5] In 1999, Kalvin Porter, a 34 year old black man, was killed in a fight with two men of Middle Eastern descent outside a Chaldean-owned gas station.

[5] His death sparked intense debates between African American and Chaldean community leaders, even involving then-mayor Dennis Archer.

[5] Nevertheless, cooler heads on both sides, including Archer, attempted to ward off further interracial conflict by insisting the killing was not racially motivated and instead should just be mourned as a tragedy by both African Americans and Chaldeans.

[5] In the following years, multiple similar initiatives came into being, including the Harmony Project, which was founded in 1995 by an African American activist, Toni McIlwain, with the goal of negotiating disputes between the two communities, and the Delta Sigma Theta sorority's solidarity event in 2001 that focused on increasing unity between African American Detroit residents and Chaldeans targeted by post-9/11 racial profiling.