KALAMAZOO, Mich. — Long before craft cocktails and live blues filled downtown Kalamazoo, Black entrepreneurs were carving out spaces of joy, safety and unity in a city like many throughout the U.S. that was shaped by segregation and racial barriers.
Since the 1940s, Kalamazoo has been home to just three Black-owned bars. Each arriving in a different era, each facing its own version of the same struggle, how to build community in a place where opportunity was never evenly poured.
Today, Dabney & Co., a Southern contemporary cocktail bar that opened in 2022, stands as the most recent chapter in that history. Its existence is inseparable from the legacy of places like Mr. Presidents and The Pacific Club, a multicultural bar founded in 1946 by Council Hawes Jr. He was a Black Marine veteran who believed unity could be practiced, not just preached.
Together, the stories reveal how racism and segregation shaped the past and how that past paved the way for the present…