Descendents of Black pioneers return to Leelanau for film screening
“The Search for Anna and Levi” to show in Leland—not at hamstrung Sleeping Bear Dunes headquarters
Photo l-r: Kevin Brooks, Carmen Hopson, and Coleen Burton.
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
Northern Michigan has begun to feel like a second home for Philadelphia resident Carmen Hopson. Ever since she received a life-changing Facebook message in September 2022 from Kevin Brooks, an amateur genealogist based in Grand Rapids, who shared photos to show that their ancestors—hers Black, his White—were neighboring farm owners and pioneering homesteaders more than 100 years ago along Little Glen Lake.
The story of the rekindled bond between these two families is the subject of the documentary The Search for Anna and Levi: A Lost History of Black Homesteaders in Leelanau County, which was written and directed by Joe VanderMeulen and funded by the Leelanau Historical Society. The Search for Anna and Levi will show for the second time on Saturday, May 31, at 4 pm at Leland Public School’s performing arts center. A previous screening in February at the Bay Theatre in Suttons Bay sold out, as reported in Berry Kendall’s original story about the project, which we published in February.
This time Hopson and her cousins, Coleen Burton and Phyllis Polard, will attend. Their trips to the County have repeated each May since they met Brooks online.
“It feels like we’re coming home. This is a place where we will be welcomed home,” Hopson told the Sun. “When I was in my early 20s, people would ask me where I’m from. We African Americans, many of us are from down South. But my ancestors Anna and Levi both came from North Carolina to Michigan. So I always said, ‘I’m from Michigan’ even though I’d never been there. My grandmother is from there, so I’m from there.”
Hopson’s grandmother was Australia Brice Young, who grew up on the farm near Little Glen. Brooks shared a baby picture of Young in that Facebook message; the same photo had been in Hopson’s and Burton’s family albums for generations. So they knew the outreach was legitimate.
“Kevin was very gracious and humble. It felt safe and accurate,” said Polard. “To have this factual information about who these people in these pictures were and to have an outsider give us that information felt overwhelming. Every time I think about it, I get tears.”
In Philadelphia, or in Georgia where she recently visited her daughter, the family roots story has made Hopson downright giddy.
“Our level of excitement extends to anyone who wants to listen to our story,” she said. “I would tell anybody I met in the store. Anybody who gave me eye contact I would tell them about my family in Michigan.”
Leelanau Historical Society executive director Kim Kelderhouse chose Leland school for the May 31 screening because the performing arts center seats 250 and features theater-style seating with a screen and built-in projector. (The Bay Theatre seated 170 for the February showing and turned some away.)
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, which encompasses the land where the homesteaders lived, had originally planned to host the second screening at its Visitors Center in Empire. But that space can only accommodate 100.
The National Lakeshore informed Kelderhouse that they could no longer host the second screening following the Trump administration’s March 27 executive order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that cast this nation’s collective reexamination of historical racism as a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
Since Trump took office on Jan. 20, National Park employees have been effectively gagged from speaking with journalists about federal policies and their impact on the national or the local level. In their absence, former Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore deputy superintendent Tom Ulrich, who retired in 2023, has become a de facto spokesperson to the media for our National Park.
On May 17 he gave Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel a tour of the Treat Farm Trail, and shared with her the harmful effects that Trump’s policies and cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency are having on Sleeping Bear’s ability to welcome the deluge of visitors in a few weeks.
“I am certain [Trump’s March 27] executive order is why the Park won’t show The Search for Anna and Levi,” Ulrich told the Sun.
National politics aside, the Philadelphia cousins are ecstatic to spend the weekend after Memorial Day in Leelanau County and attend the screening together with Brooks, and filmmaker VanderMeulen and his wife, Bronwyn Jones—with whom they’ve built a bond.
“We’ve become like family with Joe and Bronwyn. They’re buddies,” said Hopson. “They’ve taken us out for dinner and had us over for meals. We’re waiting for them to come visit us in Philadelphia.”
Hopson recalled how Jones ensured they collect soil from the land on which they stood where their ancestors homesteaded.
“That was phenomenal. One of our cousins later asked us, ‘Where’s my dirt?’ They wanted to make the physical connection to the place, too.”
During their visit, Hopson, Burton and Polard also hope to visit the Empire Area Historical Museum, the Maple Grove Cemetery where six of their ancestors are buried, and the Glen Arbor Bed & Breakfast on the location of the inn where Anna once worked. They also hope to catch a sunset over Lake Michigan.
According to Kelderhouse, there are plans to one day unveil an historic plaque at the site of the homestead where Anna, Levi and Australia lived, on land currently within the National Lakeshore. Nonprofit partner Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear will act as fiduciary and cover the cost of the marker.
