Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • 17

(m TODAY on rnEEP.COM Oak Park teacher Local Express 2 Death notices 6 Obituary 6 Weather 8 Foster care suit named a class action awaits freedom, retrial a 'A 1 i i 1 3 i Li Thursday, Feb. 15, 2007 Metro dept: 313-222-6600, www.freep.com Detroit Free Press DESIREE COOPER Many may settle in area METRO DETROIT ByNIRAJ warikoo free cress staff wriiir Shining a light on Wyandotte at least 60' of the 7,000 refugees would end up in Michigan. He will meet today with officials from the U.S. government and the United Nations to discuss the plight of Iraqi Christians at a refugee conference in Washington, D.C. Chaldeans are Iraqi Catholics; other Iraqi Christian groups are Assyrians and Syriacs.

"It's a nice gesture," Joseph Kassab, executive director of the Farmington Hills-based Chaldean Federation of America, said of the refugee plan. "But it's a drop in the bucket. few people will be helped." Still, the influx could add to metro Detroit's sizeable Iraqi-American communities in Dearborn, Detroit and Oakland and Macomb counties. Kassab estimated that ures. But local Iraqis, while praising the increase, said it won't do much to solve the growing problem of people fleeing their homeland.

For the past two years, Iraqi Christians in metro Detroit have been pushing the White House and Congress to admit a greater number of them into the United States because they have been targets of religious persecution. Iraqis into the United States, but local Iraqi Americans said the increase was too small, given that millions are in need. The government's move is significant only 406 Iraqi refugees have been admitted into the country since the start of the war, according to State Department fig Thousands of refugees could be headed to metro Detroit under a plan announced Wednesday by the Bush administration that would admit roughly 7,000 See REFUGEES, 7B DIGGING OUT you were an African American in one of a number of predominantly white, Detroit-area towns in the late 1890s, you probably knew the tacit rule: Get out of town before sunset. Today you'll still see the legacy of these so-called sundown towns, thousands of which sprang up all over the United States after Reconstruction and flourished through the civil rights era. Such towns have been documented by sociologist James Loe-wen in his 2005 book "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism." "I thought I'd find a few hundred across the coun 1 fx i ft rt 4 5 held in sex with girl, 11 A suspect's video put teens on trail to adult charges EASTPOINTE try, but I found thousands," he said.

One of those towns was Wyandotte. In 1955, when librarian Edwina DeWindt published her history BLACK lllMI MONTH By DAN CORTEZ (RiF PKF.ssSHII HRIIIR AID' of Wyandotte, the chapter labeled "Negro" didn't make the cut. But her research establishing the city as a sundown town remains on file at Wyandotte's Bacon Memorial District Library. "It includes about 50 pages of oral histories, along with local newspaper accounts and minutes from City Hall," said library director Janet Cashin. "I think the publishers may have said, 'We don't need that chapter in the book because it doesn't shed the right kind of light on the J.

KYLE KEENER, Defoit F'ee P's IN DETROIT: Nathaniel Jachim, 21, of Detroit says he spent four hours Wednesday clearing snow from the ice rink at Campus Martius Park. It was late on a June afternoon in Eastpointe when an 11-year-old girl bounded down Collinson Avenue, looking for her dog. Before she could find her pet, she came across a group of teenage boys who asked her to follow them into a nearby home. They didn't bother to ask her age. According to police, over the next two hours, the five teens took turns having sex with the underage girl with one suspect allegedly using a camera on a cell phone to record part of the incident.

According to police, the suspects and the girl herself said she wasn't Winter blast at last Snow, wind are tough for road crews By BEN SCHMITT and STAN DONALDSON FREE PRESS STAFF RII ERS Schools deal with closings. 53 Today's high, 16, low 11. SB trouble and by the afternoon, with the sun beaming on Valentine's Day, most of the snow had melted from the well-traveled streets and highways. vice said 8.3 inches of snow fell in Romulus, up to 7 inches in Troy, and 6.5 inches in Sterling Heights. Many commuters were cursing road agencies for not properly clearing the streets.

But officials and businesses did what they could to minimize the The first significant snow of winter in metro Detroit left drifts and mounds of snow by Wednesday morning. The National Weather Ser See SEX, 7B A shelved history DeWindt, who died in 1999, began the chapter by acknowledging the difficulty of her research. "It is difficult to get an authoritative account of Negro animosity in Wyandotte," she wrote. "The only fact available is the existing evidence that Negroes have never been allowed in for any length of time." The key method used to keep blacks out of the city was through verbal threats, she wrote. Additionally, there was a "general unity of action" never to rent or sell property to African Americans and to refuse to serve or hire them in restaurants or stores.

The effect in Wyandotte, as with many sundown towns, was to keep the towns virtually white. In 1870, Wyandotte had 2,731 residents; none was black. In 2000, of Wyandotte's 28,006 residents, only 146 were African American. Staving off integration "Blacks started recovering from More Dies on freep.com See STORM, 7B COUNTY NEWS CONTINUES ON2B Operation Valentine: Shock and awe DEARBORN For more Valentines, go to freep 'V A By JOE SWICKARD FREE PRE.SS STAFF VVRI1ER ..4 See COOPER, 7B MACOMB COUNTY Population growth starts to weaken Home sales have dropped 35 in Macomb County in the last three years as the population boom has started to fizzle, county officials said. The decline is a stark contrast to the decade-long housing surge north of Hall Road.

"Sales are at a virtual standstill as developers are not purchasing speculative, developable properties," Macomb County Equalization Director Steve Mellon said. County officials attribute Mission accomplished. Navy Corpsman Ray Shirkey's sneak attack from Iraq was a complete success: His computer-launched valentine captured his wife's heart Wednesday. "This is the nicest thing anyone could have ever done," said Diana Shirkey of Dearborn. "I couldn't believe it." Serving outside Fallujah with the 1st Battalion of the 24th Marine Regiment written about by the Free Press as Michigan's Band of Brothers Shirkey e-mailed the newspaper snapshots of the Valentine billboard he made with plywood and red markers.

WilL'SV ARCHIE, Detroit F-w Press Diana Shirkey, 42, received a Valentine's Day message from her husband, who is serving in Iraq, via the front page of the Free Press. His sign, "Happy Valentine's Day from Iraq. I love you Diana," ran on the Free Press' front page Wednesday without Diana knowing it was coming. In a phone call last week, Shirkey said he wanted to surprise her. He did.

"I couldn't understand why people were calling me from work so early saying I might want to look at a story about Ray in the Free Press," said Diana Shirkey, an emergency room social worker at Oakwood Annapolis Hospital, who was moved to tears when her 13-year-old daughter, Alyssa, the decline to Michigan's troubled economy. brought the paper to her Wednesday. The couple also have a son, 11-year-old Evan. She said her father-in-law, John Shirkey, of Canton, told her that trumped the diamond necklace he'd his boy," said Diana Shirkey, 42. "I can so see Dad doing something like this," said Alyssa.

Contact JOE SWICKARD of 313-222-8769 or MARY SCHROEDERDetroit Free Press Bacon Memorial District Library Director Janet Cashin, left, and Valerie Beck of Ecorse read through old clippings that talk about black people in Wyandotte. SEAMAN'S CONVICTION UPHELD, 3B gotten his wife. "He said he just can't top jswickard.Sfreepress.com..