The day after he married Vellmerie in 1951, William Turner left Ragland, Alabama, with friends. They road the train to Lansing, Michigan, following up on a tip from a relative that there were jobs in auto industry.

Turner soon found a job in at the Atlas Drop Forge and sent a two-page love letter to Vellmerie detailing the trains she would need to take and how to make her way safely to Lansing.

For a woman travelling alone during the Jim Crow era this would have been a stressful journey, but Vellmerie and William became part of the Great Migration which brought millions of southern African Americans to northern states in search of a better life.

The couple had six children and lived on Lansing’s westside before being forced to move to the southside due to the widening of Logan Street (Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.) in 1971.

Their son Kenneth was a major videographer on the award-winning documentary “They Even Took the Dirt” about the impact of the construction of I-496 on the predominantly Black community in Lansing.