Celebrating the contributions of Black American Muslims to Detroit's public life

In a series of upcoming events, Western Michigan University will celebrate five years of collaboration with Dream of Detroit (DREAM), a neighborhood revitalization organization highlighting Black American Muslim leadership and contributions to Detroit’s public life.  

DREAM is a Muslim-led non-profit dedicated to building a healthy community through community organizing, strategic housing and land development to revitalize and empower a marginalized neighborhood on the west side of Detroit.  

Since 2020, Dr. Alisa Perkins, associate professor in the Department of World Religions and Cultures, has partnered with DREAM to create “The Detroit Muslim Storytelling Project” a public humanities project including an oral history archive, film and publications focusing on the contributions of Black American Muslims to Detroit’s public life.  

Throughout the storytelling journey, Perkins has worked closely with long-term project collaborators including Mark Crain, executive director of DREAM, and Dawud Clark, Project Homecoming manager. When Perkins and DREAM

 first joined forces, the initial idea was to train young people within the Black American Muslim community to carry out interviews with their elders. These interviews, filmed on iPhones or Zoom, taught the young community members Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR): a research method emphasizing collaboration with the communities and people represented in the project.  

The storytelling project was immediately a hit. In collaboration with Amy Bocko, associate professor and digital projects librarian, over fifty oral history interviews were archived in a ScholarWorks online database through WMU libraries. From there, the storytelling project only grew, and the idea to expand into a documentary film was born. 

With support from the Pillars Fund, Whiting Foundation and Henry Luce Foundations, and multiple grants from WMU, about $350,000 was raised to support the community-based team, including hiring professional filmmakers, taking the documentary to the next level and amplifying these community stories. 

“As we were doing these interviews, we knew we wanted to do a documentary telling the story of Dream of Detroit,” Perkins says. “And the person we chose to focus on was the most charismatic, most camera-friendly out of the set of interviews: Dawud Clark.”  

After 31 years of incarceration, Clark came to DREAM to help start Project Homecoming, it’s re-entry home for formally incarcerated citizens. The documentary, “Homecoming: A Journey of Faith and Justice,” tells his story—from getting off parole, to marriage and homeownership, and becoming a full-time employee at DREAM.  

“It tells the larger story of DREAM’s work with housing justice through the lens of one specific, very dynamic person,” Perkins says.  

The documentary, which is now in post-production, and other outputs of the Detroit Muslim Storytelling Project are made possible through a variety of funding sources from Western and beyond. Perkins received the Presidential Innovation Scholarship in 2022-2025 to help fund her work on the project, as well as multiple Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Award grants to include WMU interns in the project.  

WMU will welcome both Crain and Clark to campus April 10-11. The events scheduled will discuss the impactful work of DREAM, covering a variety of topics including neighborhood revitalization, housing justice, re-entry for incarcerated citizens, and the public humanities partnership between DREAM and WMU.  

A list of public events can be found below:  

Housing Justice in Detroit Events