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Dublin Core
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Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Isaiah "Ike" McKinnon
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Isaiah "Ike" McKinnon was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1943 and moved to Detroit in 1953. He was a Detroit police officer during the events of 1967, and later became police chief and deputy mayor. He is currently a professor at University of Detroit Mercy.
Interviewer's Name
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William Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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05/16/2017
Interview Length
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00:57:12
Transcriptionist
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Julia Moss
Transcription Date
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06/09/2017
Transcription
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<p>WW: Hello, today is May 16, 2017, my name is William Winkel, this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am sitting down with Ike McKinnon. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>IM: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.</p>
<p>WW: Could you please start by telling me where and when were you born?</p>
<p>IM: I was born in 1943 in Montgomery, Alabama.</p>
<p>WW: And when did you come to Detroit?</p>
<p>IM: Well, my family moved to Detroit in 1953, the reason being that there were more jobs, and my father moved us here and we initially lived in the Brewster Projects, which is infamous for so many great people coming from there. Hopefully I’m one of them [laughter]. But we lived in the projects for a bit and then we moved into the area of the Medical Center on St. Antoine. So I went to Lincoln Elementary, which is now I believe Spain or Carson. But that’s where we started.</p>
<p>WW: Do you remember your first impression of the city?</p>
<p>IM: The first impression was this big, crowded place in which there were very few empty houses. I remember that because, later on as I did research, I think the occupancy rate in 1953 was about 99 and a half percent occupancy. And to see all these people—number one, living in the projects, but number two, all these houses, and I’d never seen anything like this, you know? To see the streetcars and all the cars up and down the street, it was just amazing. Coming from Alabama as a young boy, I just couldn’t imagine, and I was just really moved by the number of people and—certainly being crowded, but stores everywhere and just loads and loads of people. What really stood out for me even more so was that I’d never been around that many people of color. I mean, in Alabama we had people of color but not the great number that we had in Detroit, and it was just amazing for me to see that.</p>
<p>WW: When you came north, did you expect the racism of the South to follow you?</p>
<p>IM: You know, I expected that things would be different in Detroit, because as a young boy, you know, you really aren’t totally aware of all the racism that’s there. Certainly, you know, I went to an all-colored school in Alabama, and when I came to Detroit and going to school there are no white kids in Lincoln Elementary, and that was kind of a surprise. And when we would go downtown, we would see whites and blacks, but there was no integration as such. I mean we saw—there were certain restaurants you couldn’t go to. The thing that really stood out to me, certainly later on in my career, I saw only one black police officer in all those years that I was here in Detroit. I never saw a black police officer in Alabama, there wasn’t any, but in Detroit it was kind of surprising. And so it stood out for me. And those are things that I took note of as I lived there.</p>
<p>And what was really interesting is living close to what was called Hastings Street, which was the place that everything was happening. And to see all these black people with businesses along Hastings Street. And you would see whites who would come there, whether for services or business or whatever it might be, but there appeared to be some interaction. But it was just interesting to me to see that the great number of black people and the businesses that they owned and the places that they went to. But certainly there were places that you couldn’t go to. There were restaurants you couldn’t go to. And my mother and I would go shopping across Woodward at a place, a market called Tomboy. And you had to leave there early because across Woodward we had a great number of southern whites who lived over there, and you were told in no uncertain terms that you had to leave by a certain time, and we would—I was 10 or 11 years of age, and, you know, the things that were said to us.</p>
<p>WW: And how long did your family live at the Brewster Projects?</p>
<p>IM: We lived in the Brewster Projects probably for six months, and then we moved to 4125 St. Antoine. People say, Ike, you have a memory for numbers. Well, you know, when you live someplace as a young boy. 4125 St. Antoine. And that’s when I first met my first group of friends in Detroit. And to see those neighborhoods—they were clean, they were not upscale, but they were clean— and the families that were there. And across the street there was a church called New Bethlehem Baptist Church, and a little store—Mr. Dean’s store—down the street, and this group of friends that I met. But interesting for me was, that’s the first time I became aware of Reverend C.L. Franklin, who is Aretha Franklin’s dad. He had a church at Willis and Hastings, and I would go into the church and hear Aretha Franklin sing, I think she was 14 years of age or younger. And so those are things that really stood out for me living in that area. Then we moved to 4211 St. Antoine, you know, because it was a better house, but that was a neighborhood that I first became aware of things that were happening in Detroit.</p>
<p>And I got my first job. I was delivering coal for 10 cents a bushel. Back in those days we had coal stoves. And I would deliver coal, and sometimes I would make five dollars a weekend [laughter]. You know, in 1953, 1954, as a young boy that was good money. So I would have my wagon and bushels of coal on it, and pull it up around through the area that is now the Medical Center. So those are things that really stood out for me.</p>
<p>WW: The racial incidents you faced at the projects, did those incidents follow you to your new home, or were you more comfortable in your new home?</p>
<p>IM: Interestingly, there were very few racial incidents in the projects, and at 4125 and 4211, except for—there was a nurse who was white who had been killed. At that time Children’s Hospital was on St. Antoine, just north of Warren. And a nurse had been killed, allegedly by a young black man. And so what really stood out for me, and my first true interaction with the police, was over a weekend—and this was really publicized—they arrested a thousand young black men on suspicion of murder of this women. And my mother cautioning me not to go outside, and she cautioned my brother who was three years older, “Don’t go outside because they can lock you up.” And in those days you could be held by the police for 72 hours for suspicion of whatever the crime might be. And what was really kind of even more of a problem was that you couldn’t make a phone call. And this was maintained on your record, that you were arrested for suspicion of murder. And so young black men, or young white men, but particularly poor people, if you tried to get a job, if you tried to go to college, they had on your record that you were arrested for suspicion of murder. So you can just imagine [laughter], you know, if you had tried for something or a job, and you had been arrested four times for suspicion of murder—I mean, there was nothing to it, but that was it. Eventually they had that overturned, but that was one of those things that stood out for me, my mother cautioning me and my brother. And thank god it never came to fruition that I was arrested.</p>
<p>But that was my first interaction. The most—</p>
<p>WW: How old were you then?</p>
<p>IM: I was 12. When I was 14—I was at—I was 13, turning 14, I was at Garfield Junior High School, and I had just graduated to go to Cass Tech, which at that time was supposed to be the second-best school in the country, behind a school in Massachusetts. And I—the first day of school back in ’57, 1957, was a half-day. So I made an effort to go over to Garfield to say some words to my favorite teacher that I’m still in contact with, Mr. Raymond Hughes, he’s 97 years old. So I let him know that I’d gotten into Cass Tech, and he was happy and so forth—because he was this person who was like a mentor to all of us young boys. Anyway, I went to school, said hi to Mr. Hughes, Mr. [Teasley ?], who I’m also in contact with now, and as I was leaving the school, probably around 1:30 or something like that, this car that was at that time called the Big Four—these four very large white police officers—they grabbed me and threw me up against the car and proceeded to start beating me. You know, 14 years old, hadn’t done anything. But the name calling, it was just—it was brutal. And they beat me between my neck and my stomach. And I was saying, “Sir, but why?” And the more I asked why, the more they beat. And what’s really stood out for me is that I remember looking as they were beating me, and the name calling—this one individual, he was just so mean and nasty, the anger on his face—but I looked around at the people. This was an all-black neighborhood. And they were standing around watching. Of course nobody came to my aid, but then I realized why, because if they’d come they would have been locked up and beaten too. And so after they finished beating me up—no reason given other than the fact that I was a young black in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right place at the right time for them—they told me in a very angry way and disparaging way, to get my ass out of there. So I ran home and I didn’t tell my parents. And the reason being that if I told my parents, both of them would have gone up to the Thirteenth Precinct at that time, and they probably would have gotten locked up or beaten too.</p>
<p>But I made myself a promise that evening that I was going to become a police officer. And the reason being that I wanted to make sure that those kinds of things didn’t happen to people like myself, or anyone that was an innocent person who would be savagely beaten by the police. I never knew that I would become Police Chief, or Doctor McKinnon, or Professor McKinnon, or Deputy Mayor. But I made myself that promise. And in 1965 when I was discharged from the Air Force I joined the Detroit Police Department, and fulfilled that part of my promise.</p>
<p>WW: What year did you join the Air Force?</p>
<p>IM: 1961 I joined the Air Force. And went to basic training in Texas, went from there to North Dakota, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, spent three years there. And then I went to the Philippines and then to Vietnam for my last year and a day, and I was discharged.</p>
<p>WW: When you left in 1961 and came back in ’65 you said?</p>
<p>IM: Yes.</p>
<p>WW: Did the city seem any different to you, or did the city seem on edge?</p>
<p>IM: The city was really different in that the young people—what I was a lack of respect for their elders. Growing up in Detroit, we would never swear in front of seniors, we just wouldn’t do that—of adults. I mean, as a military person, as a young person, we would swear. But you wouldn’t do that in front of adults, and particularly—there was something about not swearing in front of adults and swearing in front of women. And so when I came back I noticed this was more prevalent than I’d ever seen before, and I would ask people, “What the heck is going on?” And my friends would say, Man, the world has changed.</p>
<p>And this was in the midst of all the things that had started in Montgomery, had gone through Mississippi, Arkansas, and other places, and the Civil Rights Movement. And I sensed that certainly people were upset, they were concerned. But I flash back to what happened to me as a young boy, and probably this had happened to a lot of people, in particular those people who were migrating from the South. We had an inordinate number of people who migrated from the South to Detroit for jobs, and because of the way that they were being treated in the South. So my assumption is that they came to Detroit assuming that things would be better, but in reality—it was better in a sense of, you had some freedom, but you still had those problems that existed because of the racism.</p>
<p>WW: In 1965 and 1966, given the uprisings going on around the country, did you personally feel that they could happen in Detroit?</p>
<p>IM: Initially I didn’t think it could happen in Detroit, the reason being that when I was in the police academy, when I think they had the Watts Riot, and I think there were—it was Newark? —and we were told about these things, but I didn’t think it was going to happen in Detroit. My assumption was that Detroit—we had the most single homes of any place in the world, I think, at that time. We had this incredible population and people appeared to be working. But I was naïve to believe that it couldn’t happen.</p>
<p>And so in 1966, my first full year as a police officer, I was detailed to work the area of Twelfth Street, Linwood, and Philadelphia, because there was a belief that something could happen in Detroit. So I worked undercover with a man who became police chief, Bill Hart, and a man by the name of Tom Taylor, they were two senior officers. And so we were out to scout the area and see if, in fact, things were going to go—and then nothing happened. So we got to ’67, and again, my assumption was that things were going to be okay. However, not to realize that there were other forces that were working, that there were people who were truly, deeply upset and concerned about what was happening in the country, which led to 1967.</p>
<p>WW: Do you remember how you first heard about what was going on?</p>
<p>IM: Absolutely.</p>
<p>WW: Could you tell me more?</p>
<p>IM: I was in my apartment at 3265 West Boston, Apartment 101 [laughter], and my phone rang at six A.M., and it was Sergeant [Claddy ?] Barryman. He says, “Ike,” he says, “This is Barryman.” He said, “The riot just started last night; we need you to get to work right away.” And I didn’t—maybe I was in a daze or something, but, “Sarge, you’re kidding—Sarge, you’re bullshitting,” is what I said. So I hung up the phone. So right away the phone rang again [laughter], and he says, “Ike, I’m not kidding, there’s a riot coming right here, get to work right away.” Not realizing that the riot was just a few blocks from where I lived. I was at West Boston, and Wildemere was a block from Dexter, and it was all over the area. So I jumped in my car, got my uniform, and took off for work.</p>
<p>On my way to work, I could see some stores on fire. And, my god, this is crazy. And this is 6:30, 7:00 in the morning, Sunday morning. But I also saw people on their way to church, I saw people who didn’t know things were going on, they were living their lives as they would—had been. So I reported to duty, and they assigned me, along with another officer, to go back to the Tenth Precinct, where I lived, and we were assigned to work there during that time. And as I got to the precinct, they had a scout car with four officers, and they were sets of three scout cars. So 12 officers. And we went on patrol. And it was beyond one’s imagination as to what one saw—what I saw. And the people—I mean, they were stealing, they were looting. I mean, thousands and thousands of people walking down the street with sofas, with TVs, with whatever they could have. You know, it was beyond one’s imagination that this was happen. And I said, “Damn, this is happening in my city.”</p>
<p>And so we went on patrol, and we started trying to stop people from looting. And as you locked up X-number of people, and you got them in the car and you took them back to the precinct, there were hundreds and hundreds of people that would go back into the stores. I remember this one—there was a drugstore at Rochester and Linwood, and, I mean, we went in—we caught people coming out, in the store with loads and loads of stuff. And as we got them and put them in the car, you could see in the rearview mirror, just looking back, I mean, hundreds of other people running into the stores and just taking stuff. So to me it became almost comical. Because I realized at that time that we were overmatched, and we were outmanned. We had 55 hundred police officers, but the city had a million-and-some people, you know, and if they all were going to rebel and do what those looters were doing, we were outmatched.</p>
<p>WW: What were the expectations that were presented to you as a police officer when you’re going out there? Like, go out and arrest people, or go out and just try to contain the situation?</p>
<p>IM: Go out there and contain, and arrest if you can. But there were no specific instructions that were given—you know, if you had a well-trained police department, and you were dispatched to a certain area, this is what you were supposed to do. But we were not. We were ill-equipped to handle that situation. And the belief was that, certainly, this wasn’t going to happen in Detroit. For instance, the 12 of us were driving down Linwood and I was the only black person, I should tell you, with this group of 12 officers and one sergeant. And so we’re driving on Linwood and people are looting. And my sergeant, who was not the brightest guy in the world, says, “Okay, let’s get out of the car and let’s get into a line across Linwood, and we’ll get these damn people off the street, okay?” And so I’m going, okay, you know, this is interesting. But you’ve got to be mindful of what you say and how you say it. As I said, he wasn’t the brightest guy. So we’re across Linwood just south of Davison, and so the sergeant in his inimitable way yells out, “All you fucking niggers get off the street!” And I’m going, oh my god, you know, we’re going to die out here, we’re going to die [laughter]. And the people, it’s like in unison they say, “What did you say?” “I said all you fucking niggers get off the street!” And I mean, they started stoning us. I mean, god, I’m going, this is the dumbest guy in the history of the world, you know. And here I am caught up in this, the only black guy there. Of course, I’m certainly—my history is that I’d heard this word countless times on DPD [Detroit Police Department]. And so we ran back and got in the cars, and took off.</p>
<p>So this was just one of the examples of the craziness of how it was, and of the type of people that we were dealing with on the department [laughter]. I laughed then and I laugh now because I remember I got home, I called my buddy, Jess Davis, we graduated from the academy together, and he was telling similar stories that happened with him. He said, “These guys are ill-equipped to handle this kind of situation, and you just can’t do that and hope that it’s going to resolve itself now.”</p>
<p>WW: Were there any other stories from those early days that you’d like to share?</p>
<p>IM: Sure. There’s some funny stories. And again, my attitude or disposition is that if something’s funny, it’s funny, and I’m not going to overreact to anything. I’ve always been a person who was somewhat relaxed and calm and cool. And so we had taken a group of prisoners downtown to 1300 Beaubien, and on the way back we decide that we’re going to go up Michigan Avenue and got to Livernois and go down Livernois. On Michigan Avenue, west of Junction, we see these people looting. And so we also see this big white Cadillac convertible that’s driving next to us, and we had three police cars, marked police cars. And these guys pull up in this white Cadillac and there’s two guys, one the driver in the front seat, the other guy in the jump seat, and there’s a sofa that’s across the back of the car with the convertible top down, and two guys are holding TVs. And I started laughing, I said, “This is absolutely incredible, I mean, where in the world could you see this kind of stuff happening?” And it was so comical to me that these things were over and over and over.</p>
<p>It became a reality for me when I was going home that night. A sad reality. I had my 1965 black Evergreen Mustang convertible. Back in those days, the back window you could zip out, it was plastic. So I was in uniform, my badge on, my shield on. On the lapel here you had the insignia of the precinct you worked, which was two. I didn’t have my hat on. But I had everything that identified me as a police officer. As I pulled up off the Lodge Freeway, made a left turn onto Chicago, this car pulls up with two older white police officers. And I said, “Police, police, I’m going home.” And they both got out of the car with their guns drawn. I stepped out of the car in uniform. And they said, “Tonight you’re going to die, nigger.” And I said, “What?” And it was like slow-motion. I could see the one officer with gray hair and a brush cut start to pull the trigger. I dove back into my car and with my right hand I pushed the accelerator and took off as they started shooting at me. And thank god they missed me, but I drove home and I called my sergeant. And I said, “Sarge, this is what happened.” And he said, “Well, Ike, you know, there’s some assholes out there.” And I said, “You’re telling me there’s some assholes out there?” [Laughter] That was all that ever happened. So that was a sad reality to me that here we had these two police officers who shot at me, and it hit me in terms of, if they shot at me, a fellow police officer, what are they going to do to other people in the street, the city? And I always question the number of people—we had 43 people that were killed during the riot. How many of them were like me? Because if we go back to what happened at the Algiers Motel incident, where there were three young men killed— these are the people who are supposed to serve and protect the people of the city of Detroit. And we have this code that we live by, allegedly, and the first paragraph says that as a law enforcement officer, my fundamental duty is the serve mankind, to safe-guard lives and property, protect the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation, respect the constitutional rights of all to liberty, equality, and justice. That’s the first paragraph. And so I always tried to live by that, and I said to myself and I said to my sergeant, they sure as hell were not respecting the constitutional rights of all to liberty, equality, and justice, and this guy says, “Sarge, you’re right, they’re assholes.” So it gave those individuals who had any thoughts or hatred for people their literal license to kill. And I’m sure that that’s what happened, so— [phone rings] I’m sorry.</p>
<p>[Break in tape]</p>
<p>WW: Did you ever feel that level of unwelcome or the threat against you before this in the police department?</p>
<p>IM: Oh yeah, my very first day in the police department. I was assigned to the Second Precinct. And I experienced some racism before but my assumption was that when you joined the police department things were different, that we had this code that we live by. So my very first day I walked into the Second Precinct and went to the front desk and said to the officers there that I’m probationary police officer McKinnon, I’m here reporting for duty. The guy says, “Go upstairs, go upstairs.” I went upstairs and that was the squad room. In the squad room there was a pool table, Ping-Pong table, and it was a big room, and an area that we had roll call. And so I walked in and everybody was white. Oh god, okay. So nobody spoke. And I recognize this one guy, this guy I went to high school with. And I called his name and extended my hand to shake his hand. Didn’t do it, turned his back. So the sergeants come up for roll call. And they would say, “Roll call, fall in!” And everybody would—it’s not like you see on TV, the people sitting in chairs, you would stand at attention and you would do a movement to stand to the person next to you. So the sergeant starts calling out the names and assignments. And like, two is the precinct and one would be the territory, two-one, okay, so Smith and Jones two-one, so-and-so scout two-two—so we get to scout two-seven, and he gives this officer’s name, I still remember it, and then he says, “McKinnon, scout two-seven.” And at that point the officer says, “Jesus fucking Christ, I’m working with the nigger.” Now this is at roll call, my first night on the job, and everybody starts laughing. The sergeant said nothing, but everybody’s laughing. And when you’re faced with that horrible reality of what you’re dealing with, what do you do? But I had made myself a promise and a pledge that I was going to be on the department to try and stop those kinds of things from happening. So even if I had responded in kind and tried to fight these guys, this crazy black guy who attacked this white officer at roll call, who was going to say that I did something right?</p>
<p>Anyway, so after roll call, you would walk out to the cars, and I walked to the car with this guy who made this comment. I said, “Excuse me, am I working with you?” Didn’t say anything. I said, “Excuse me, am I working with you?” Nothing. So I turned around and walked back to the sergeant who was standing with the clipboard. “Excuse me Sergeant, am I working with that officer?” He said, “Yeah, that’s your partner.” So I went and opened the door and got in the car. Never said a word. We worked together for eight hours, didn’t say a word. Didn’t say a word.</p>
<p>At 5:30 the next morning we’re driving around—he’s driving, I’m just sitting there—and he pulls up to a restaurant that’s on Michigan Avenue just east of West Grand Boulevard—turns the engine off, gets out, walks into the restaurant, sits at the counter and orders food. And I started laughing. I said, “If this guy thinks that this is going to drive me off the job, that’s not going to happen.” So I jumped out of the car, ran to the restroom quickly, came back out, and never ate, never said a word to me. So I call other black officers and asked them about their experience. Same things, same things. It’s ironic that— the next day the same thing happened. The third day this guy by the name of Andy Parker—you remember the names of people who are good to you—he comes up after roll call, he says, “Hey, Andy Parker, what’s your name?” I said, “Ike.” He said, “Nice to meet you.” That was a true change from the first two nights. And he told me this, he said, “Listen, there are some assholes on this department, you know, and they’re going to try and drive you away.” He said, “Don’t let them get under your skin.” I said, “Thanks a lot, I really appreciate that.” And that truly helped too, you know.</p>
<p>But that—I think every black officer before me and after me—well, not after me, but about the same time—experienced the same kind of welcome on the department. But you had to be thick-skinned, you had to know that you had to be there because if you were going to make a difference in the community you had to stand tall, which is what I think we tried to do.</p>
<p>WW: Did you see your situation improving at the precinct leading up to ’67, or no? Was it more of the same—</p>
<p>IM: It was more of the same things. There were some officers who treated you better. Others, they just didn’t speak to you. They just didn’t. And of course you would see them on the street acting or saying things to people—there was not a day that went by that I did not hear a racially derogatory term, either towards me or towards someone else on the street. An example, I was working with this white officer, and this elderly gentleman, he had his lunch pail—back in those days, guys carried lunch pails—it’s about probably 5:00 in the morning, he’s walking to work. And this guy—officer who’s driving pulls over, and he says, “Hey boy, come here.” I said, oh Jesus, man, this guy’s probably in his sixties, you know? And the old man is, you can tell he’s an old southern guy, and his speech was just— “Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir.” And he said, “Where the hell are you going boy?” “I’m going to work, sir.” He said, “Goddammit boy, you shouldn’t be out here on the street.” “I’m just going to work, sir.” And I exploded. And I said to this officer, I said, “Listen, you asshole, this man is not a boy.” I said, “You will get his name and you will call him by his name, you understand that?” So the officer said, “You don’t talk that way to me.” I said, “Listen, I will kick your ass.” I said, “Right now I will kick your ass.” So this old man-- can you imagine this old man, just petrified because here’s this black guy dealing with the white officer and they’re about to fight. And I said, “Are you going to charge this man with anything?” No. I said, “Listen sir, I am sorry this happened to you. Why don’t you leave and go.” He said, “Yes sir, officer.” Can you just imagine the story that this guy told somebody later on. So this officer—I said, “Listen, let’s go, right now.” I said, “I’m going to kick your ass right now. Let’s go. You don’t treat people this way.” He said, “Listen, you’re supposed to be my partner.” I said, “I’m supposed to be your partner? You haven’t fucking talked to me the whole night and now I’m your partner?” I said, “You’re going to treat this man this way?” “I’m going to go into the station and tell the sergeant about this.” I said, “That’s fine.”</p>
<p>So we get into the station, and the sergeant was a very fair person. And I said, “Sarge, this is what happened. And I’m right, and he’s wrong.” So this officer took off sick and went home. And so the sergeant, he said, “Ike, listen, you’re standing up strong for what you believe in.” He said, “I’m sorry these kinds of things are happening.” I said, “Well, Sarge, thank you.” But that’s as far as it went with supervisors, I mean, they wouldn’t step up and say this guy is wrong and those kinds of things. But that was a start of things that I saw happening, and started taking action because of what had happened to me. And it was important—and I would talk to other black officers and white officers about the necessity for people standing up. We’re supposed to serve and protect, not to beat people’s asses or to talk to them slightingly. And that’s what I started doing.</p>
<p>WW: Going back to ’67, did you go right back into work after that incident?</p>
<p>IM: Oh yeah, the next morning I went to work. And I told guys about that and—“Jesus Christ, man.” And that was it.</p>
<p>WW: And during this week you stayed working out of the twelfth—</p>
<p>IM: Tenth precinct.</p>
<p>WW: Okay. How did—backtracking again—when you first arrived that early Sunday morning, what was the atmosphere in the Detroit Police Department? What was the situation like? Was it chaotic?</p>
<p>IM: It was chaotic because we didn’t know what we were doing. We really didn’t. They told us, if you have a shotgun, go get it, because we didn’t have the weapons, you know. And again, we were not prepared for it.</p>
<p>WW: What was the feeling in the police department when the state police and the National Guard came in?</p>
<p>IM: There was help. But there was this un-relying feeling that these guys were ill-equipped, too. I mean, no one was prepared to handle this. State police were seen as guys who did the freeways, and National Guards were seen as people who were weekend warriors, so there was not any respect for them in that sense of speaking, but they were help just in case things went crazy. But they were—these were guys who, as I said, were weekend warriors who appeared to be petrified as to what was going on in the city. And nobody wanted to get shot, you know, but they were not police people, they didn’t know how to handle those kinds of situations, and to a certain extent neither did we.</p>
<p>WW: Was there—by the time the federal troops came in—</p>
<p>IM: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>WW: Was there, like, a breath of—like a sigh of relief then?</p>
<p>IM: Absolutely. There was a sense of respect in that, the 101st, they don’t bullshit, they come in and they take care of business. And you had all these black people who had been in the 101st or in the Airborne or things like that, so they knew that things would be serious. And you never saw these guys do anything out of the way in terms of taking someone’s life or beating someone’s ass or things like that. They were strictly strong, and they were respected by the people in the community. It was amazing how that happened. I mean, there was lack of respect for the National Guard, but for the 101st, that was serious.</p>
<p>WW: Did you have any interactions with either the National Guard or the federal troops that week?</p>
<p>IM: Yeah, yeah. I was with the National Guard one night— I don’t remember which night it was. And we were on patrol in the area of Linwood and Joy Road. And all of a sudden these shots start ringing out, and you could hear the sound of shots but you could see the bullets skipping along the pavement. And so it was the first and only time I’ve been able to do a cartwheel. I dove out of the jeep and I did a cartwheel, two of them, and landed up against the wall—there’s a bank, Detroit Banking Trust it was at that time, the building’s still there—I landed up against the wall, and the bullets were still skipping along the pavement [laughs]. And me and the National Guard’s people and I think there was one older Detroit police officer. And we didn’t know where the shots were coming from. And so the older police officer said, “Shoot those lights out.” And so the comedy here was that everybody was trying to shoot the lights out, and they kept missing the lights [laughs]. And so it was a comedy, I wanted to say, I don’t believe this stuff—and with rifles and everything—and so finally this older guy, he’s just, “I got it.” And it was like the movies. He has a chew of tobacco in his mouth, you know, he spits out the chew of tobacco, shoots the streetlight out, and he’s right under the streetlight, and the damn thing falls right on his head [laughs]. There’s comedy in everything that you see, to a certain extent, but I’ll never forget that. And it’s my assessment that probably most of the shooting came from guys trying to shoot the streetlights out. And it caused problems. And maybe that was what was happening with us, when I did the cartwheel out of the jeep. It was a frightening time.</p>
<p>WW: Do you remember how you first heard about the Algiers Motel incident?</p>
<p>IM: Sometime during the insurrection, someone said there were three colored men had been killed at the Algiers Motel. I didn’t question as to why at the time it would happen, but that was the word that I got. And I think that was the first inkling that something—and then right after the riots. There was word within the police department that three white police officers had killed three young black men, and it was at the Algiers Motel, so. And I had lived at 237 Philadelphia, which was not too far from the Algiers Motel, at some time later, so it was interesting for me. And I had been on patrol in that area, too, so that stood out for me.</p>
<p>WW: How, for you, did the week wrap up?</p>
<p>IM: Well, it ended with me going back to my precinct, the second precinct, and on patrol. We were working 16, 18 hour days. It was tiring, it was hot as hell. Hot as hell. There was no air conditioning in cars. It was—we didn’t know the number of people that had been killed, we didn’t know the amount of property that had been destroyed, although we were there to see the houses burn, the buildings burn, but in its totality we didn’t know. The news media didn’t report the fatalities, didn’t report all the bad things that had happened. And so because we were working so much, we didn’t know everything that was going on. I had seen things, but to the extent of how it had impacted me, it didn’t really truly start impacting me until it was all over. And that’s when we were coming down from all these days of being on guard, and I started getting migraines. Never had a migraine in my life. Migraines. Went to the doctor and he said, “It’s stress. It’s the stress that you’re under.” And who wouldn’t have that kind of stress after all these days of being involved in these things that we had been.</p>
<p>WW: You’ve referred to ’67 as a couple different things. How do you interpret what happened in ’67?</p>
<p>IM: Well, it’s a rebellion. It’s a rebellion. It’s a riot. But probably the proper term would be to say rebellion. When I was out there in the midst of it, I said, “Man, this is a riot.” But the more you look at it, the more you think about it being a rebellion.</p>
<p>WW: Given the stress that you were under, and everything that you’d experienced, did you ever think about moving out of the city?</p>
<p>IM: No. I never thought about moving out of the city. I thought that part of my goal and mission in life was to make this a better city, and to make people better. I realized that this was a set-back for us, but it was my goal to continue to stay here and do the best that I could. And that was it for me.</p>
<p>WW: In the immediate aftermath of ’67, how did the Detroit Police Department react? Especially when—how did they react when people said they had lost the rebellion?</p>
<p>IM: Well, understanding that the Kerner Comission said after the riot, rebellion, that America was moving towards two societies: one black, one white, one rich, one poor, that’s true. Now, I mean, it’s even more so, we have more separate societies. Well, the police departments—the police department and police departments across the country felt that the best way to deal with this was to train—to arm themselves. And that’s what Detroit did, that’s what others did. We did training in prevention, but we didn’t do training in terms of officers understanding how they should talk or deal or treat people. In addition, we didn’t do a good job of the recruitment of people into the police department, black and white. And so, every police department in my estimation has to do a better job of ferreting out those individuals who might have some problems. It wasn’t just having a gun, it’s also being able to talk with people, to understand people, and everybody didn’t need to be locked up. Everybody didn’t need to be shot. And most police departments, they got tanks, they armed themselves better in case something horrible happened. We also had to think about this in terms of, you can’t arrest everybody, you can’t kill everyone, you have to look at this in terms of, how do we eliminate the potential for something like this happening again? And throughout the years I’ve seen the potential for that happening again, be it Rodney King, or other people that have been shot or involved with the police in any action. We as police people had to look at what can we do. We can’t arrest, at that time, a 1,900,000 people. We can’t beat up a 1,900,000 people. We have to look at, how do we as law-enforcement officers contain and make sure that we handle the situation better than we have in the past. And that’s what we started doing. And we went about serving and protecting, in my estimation, the wrong way. So it was—we had people who had been a part of this, who had been part of the racial climate, black and white, who had not adjusted to the reality of this changing world. That’s what happened with Detroit, in my estimation.</p>
<p>WW: Skipping now to present day—</p>
<p>IM: Sure.</p>
<p>WW: How do you feel about the state of the city today?</p>
<p>IM: I think that we are light-years ahead of then, but we don’t want to fool ourselves and say that things like that couldn’t happen. The police department’s done a great job, the political part of it has done a great job in terms of recruitment, in terms of identifying, but sometimes all it takes is one flashpoint to kick something off. We looked at the number of young men of color who have been killed across the country. And we have to understand that there’s that potential for anything kicking something off. And just because Detroit’s 81 percent African American doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. So whether it’s a black officer or a white officer, the potential’s always there. So we have to be, hopefully, one step ahead of handling those kinds of crises, and hope that it doesn’t get back to that point. Because we had, in 1943—we had riots before that, with ’43, we had ’67, and the potential is there. We had—when they killed the guy up on Fenkell and Livernois, by Bolton’s Bar. There’s always that potential. So every time there’s a potential of a flashpoint, every time, that might happen, you know. We hope that we’ve done a good job. I mean, I tried to do it when I was chief, I certainly tried to do it as a deputy mayor, and now I try to do it as a professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, to continue to educate people, to—so many people don’t know the reality of what happened then, they don’t know the history of the city, they don’t know the history of the racial strife that has been in the city, and there’s some people who still have this anger and hatred in their hearts, whether black or white. And that’s frightening to me. You know, I mean, I talk to people who live outside the city, and some inside the city, who believe the best way to handle things is to lock people up, or to beat their asses.</p>
<p>WW: Are you optimistic for the city moving forward?</p>
<p>IM: Always, always, absolutely. I think that, in the last few years, we’ve been very, very proactive in terms of working towards a community. If we go to Dennis Archer, who was mayor, who tried, who had a different set of circumstances, economically. Mike Duggan has a different set of circumstances economically because there’s more. And there are people who appear to be—I’m talking about in the city—appear to be of the mindset that we don’t want these kinds of things to happen again. If we could continue to educate people, if we continue to change their mindset in terms of what is happening in the city, how can I make a difference? If we can continue to do that, we can have a profound impact on this city.</p>
<p>Because we were just in Italy two weeks ago, and I’m on the board of Catholic Charities USA—and people were asking, are these changes happening in Detroit? They say, We’re concerned because of what happened 50 years ago. So the world knows about Detroit. As deputy mayor, I spoke with countless visitors and they wanted to talk about how they could help. I said, “Spread the word about the change that we’re going through.” And they’re trying to do that. But there will always be the people, though, who will be downtrodden and speak slightingly of the city. But we’ve got to get our own act together in terms of thinking of the good things that we can do, and that’s one of the most important things that we can do. Speak—Emily Gail used to have this thing of “Say nice things about Detroit,” back in the eighties. Well, yeah, we want to say nice things about Detroit, but we want to do nice things. And there are a great number of people who are investing in the city. The job market is so much better. And that makes—if we get people to get jobs, get people to get education, which is at the forefront of everything we’re trying to do—education is so important, and we have a lot of young people who are uneducated, and so they have to have hope for the future.</p>
<p>WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today.</p>
<p>IM: Oh [laughs], you got me going.</p>
<p>I’ve lived in this city for, what, 64 years. I’ve lived through the good and the bad, and things that stand out for me are things that I hope we can educate people to. And that’s why I got into this field of education. As a law-enforcement officer, I tried to educate—I locked people up, but I tried to educate. Because it was more important for me to educate people, to get them to think about the future. During this process of living in the city and growing up, I watched a lack of men, African American men, take a role in education. When I say that, I mean, if we can get men of color to be at the forefront of education for themselves, for their families, in particular for young men, we could have a profound impact upon what’s happening in our society. That’s not just Detroit, but throughout the country. We always hear about the black fathers who are not there, but what I’m saying is take responsibility. Get those young people into some form of education. And what would even be better is if they became educators. We don’t want them to be educated in terms of the best way to do drugs and things like that, but become educators. Just think about this: in all the years I was in junior high, high school, grade school, I had three African American teachers. And 11 years I was in college, undergrad, masters, PhD, I had no African American teachers. But yet I still flash back to Mr. Hughes, Mr. Teasley, who were my seventh and eighth grade teachers, and the profound impact they had on my life. Think about how if we as a society, in particular blacks in society, talked to our young people about the profoundness of those men who could have that impact on your life. And so that’s where I’m going next, with this. I mean, it’s so important, at my age, at any age, to continue education, and that’s what I’m going to try and do.</p>
<p>WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>IM: Thank you, it’s my pleasure.</p>
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
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57min 12sec
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
William Winkel
Interviewee
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Isaiah McKinnon
Location
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Detroit, MI
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Isaiah "Ike" McKinnon, May 16th, 2017
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Ike McKinnon shares his experience of growing up in Detroit, being a Detroit police officer, and the events of ’67. <br /><br />This interview uses profanity and/or explicit language.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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06/13/2017
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit Michigan
Format
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Audio/mp3
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Algiers Motel
Aretha Franklin
Brewster Housing Projects
Detroit Police Department
Hastings Street
Kerner Comission
Looting
Michigan National Guard
Michigan State Police Department
The Big Four
United States Air Force
-
http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/e1de8a8d67dd87e842788a6a9b69480c.jpg
a1af5fc6830e3cb021c88546b07e18ed
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Darryle Buchanan
Brief Biography
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Darryle Buchanan was born July 28, 1955 at Hutzel Hospital in Detroit. He grew up in Conant Gardens, Highland Park, and Virginia Park between Twelfth and Fourteenth Streets, right at the epicenter of the unrest. He characterizes the events of the summer of 1967 as a “rebellion” primarily in response to police brutality. Buchanan still resides in the city, and is concerned with the contemporary issues facing the black community.
Interviewer's Name
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William Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, MI
Date
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12/13/2016
Interview Length
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00:54:26
Transcriptionist
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Emma Maniere
Transcription Date
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02/03/2017
Transcription
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<p>WW: Hello. Today is December 13, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Detroit, Michigan. I am sitting down with Mr. Darryle Buchanan. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>DB: Thank you for having me.</p>
<p>WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?</p>
<p>DB: I was born in Detroit on July 28, 1955 at Women’s Hospital, which is now Hutzel Hospital.</p>
<p>WW: Did you grow up in the city?</p>
<p>DB: Yes I did.</p>
<p>WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?</p>
<p>DB: I lived in several neighborhoods. When I was born, my father was in the military, so my mother–single woman, 20 years old, she was living with relatives–at one point we lived down on Hastings and Canfield. It was kind of interesting going back and remembering that because that whole area has been replaced by I-75. We lived there for a moment, and for the most part though I remember growing up on the Northeast Side in Conant Gardens, that’s where I first started school. We moved from there to Highland Park, which I absolutely loved living in Highland Park. My parents divorced and we moved onto Virginia Park which probably is where I would say where I grew up.</p>
<p>WW: What were some of the differences between those neighborhoods? Do you remember them being staunchly different or kind of along the same lines?</p>
<p>DB: Highland Park was probably the most different of any of the communities that I lived in. It was very integrated, and very viable in those days because Chrysler Headquarters was still in Highland Park, and a lot of management and executives lived in Highland Park. I would actually see them walking to and from work everyday. It was interesting because even at lunchtime, they would leave, go home, have lunch, and then go back. It was just a very different time. This was the early Sixties, ’61 to’63 is when we were living there.</p>
<p>WW: Are there any other memories you’d like to share from growing up in either Virginia Park or in Conant Gardens?</p>
<p>DB: In Highland Park, I was eight years old, and we were practicing for my first communion. I was raised Catholic.</p>
<p>WW: Uh-hm.</p>
<p>DB: I went to Blessed Sacrament, which is not too far, Belmont, where we were in Highland Park. During the rehearsal, I remember one of the nuns running into the church and telling us all to get on our knees and pray, that the president had just been killed. That was something that you never forget, I don’t care what age you are, I was eight years old, and that’s a day that I remember like yesterday.</p>
<p>WW: Wow.</p>
<p>DB: Especially being Catholic, all of the excitement around having a Catholic president, what he meant to that. In that time period, that was the thing that stuck out most to me.</p>
<p>WW: Wow.</p>
<p>DB: Funny thing: you know how little boys are, especially back in the early Sixties, we’re just coming out of World War II and Korea, we all had army helmets and guns and we played war and did all that stuff. You don’t really know the difference between ethnicities or anything like that. Going to a Catholic School, you have a lot of Chaldeans, a lot of Filipinos as well as white and black students, and I had this one Filipino friend, and we were all just kids, we weren’t shy, you know, we’re walking down the street and he said he was talking about, “What are we going to do? What’s going to happen to us?” Then he said, “What if the Japanese attack us?” All the little boys looked at him like, “What are you worried about?” you know? Because we didn’t make distinctions, we just know that he looked Asian, and that was it. We just said, “You should be okay.” That’s the most memorable thing about that time for me.</p>
<p>WW: Uh-hm. Given the diverse community that you grew up in, both in your neighborhood and at your school, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhoods growing up or did you venture around the city? And if so, did you feel comfortable venturing around the city?</p>
<p>DB: That’s the one thing that caused me a lot of problems when I was a little boy: I had wanderlust. I just, for whatever reason, I had no problem walking around the city, catching the bus around the city.</p>
<p>On the east side and west side of Woodward, streets have different names. I knew that my favorite cousin lived on Glynn, and Glynn is Belmont, where I went to school, on the other side. So I just happened to look over there one day, and seriously, I was about seven years old, Friday afternoon, I looked over there and I said, “Glynn? My cousin lives on Glynn.’ So I just started walking down Glynn, and I walked down Glynn all the way, got to the expressway, had to go around, come back on the other side and keep going down Glynn. Eventually, I got to my cousin’s house and walked in and they were sitting down getting ready to have late lunch, so I sat down and next thing I know it’s Friday evening and we’re just running around playing, and my mom is panicking, she’s calling looking for me, and my aunt was like, “What are you talking about? He’s sitting at the table with us right now.” That’s just how it was for me. It was just an adventure. I just loved growing up then. It was a different time. It was just easy just to get around. I mean a seven year old on the bus? I’m talking about getting on the DSR [Department of Street Railways] bus and you can’t event imagine, people worry about their kids getting on school buses now, let alone getting on DOT [Department of Transportation] buses. East side/west side, and it’s funny because even now my sons are always asking me, “Dad, how do you know this?” I say, “I grew up here. I know everything about Detroit.”</p>
<p>WW: [Laughter.]</p>
<p>DB: Just drop me off and I guarantee you I can find my way back home. It was a good time, a very different time.</p>
<p>WW: Growing up, do you remember any tension growing in the city? Either economic, racial­ – ?</p>
<p>DB: Until I moved on Virginia Park, I never really noticed anything. I was friends with, as I said, Filipino kids, Chaldean kids, white kids, I would go to their house, we would visit with each other. I didn’t notice anything different until I moved onto Virginia Park. Then some stark realities started to set in for me that I wasn’t ready for but I lived through and it was just a stark difference going from one environment to the other. Not to say that it was bad, it was just different.</p>
<p>WW: Would you mind elaborating on some of those differences?</p>
<p>DB: Well, one, just the number of people that lived in the community. We moved in with my father’s parents, and they owned a two-family flat on Virginia Park, and right next-door was an apartment building, and up and down the street, there were all two-family flats, multi-level and multi-unit dwellings. So small apartments, big apartments, four units, and that kind of thing. So there were way more people living in that area than I had seen either growing up in Conant Gardens or in Highland Park. But it was good, a whole lot more people to play with for sure, and a whole lot more people to get into trouble with as well.</p>
<p>Along with that, I noticed differences just in poverty rates and things like that. I had really never seen people that were struggling financially, families struggling. It wasn’t like I separated myself from them, they were my friends so it was no distinction in terms of me versus them or income or those kinds of things, but I did notice just the difference there.</p>
<p>The other thing that I noticed was the police presence that was in that community. I barely ever saw the police before in my life until I moved over there. And then it was just a regular occurrence, seeing police. You know, I think my first time being involved with the police or the police saying anything to me, we were little boys, we found a pack of cigarettes and we’re running around trying to find matches so we could light them up. We were in the alley–because we used to play in the alleys, the alleys were actually pretty nice to play in then–and then these police rolled up on us, and, “Hey, what are you doing?” and started chasing us because we were smoking cigarettes. I was scared, for sure, but couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. It’s like why go to those extremes when you could have just as easily said, “Put those down” or “Give them to me” and they’ll throw them away? But to chase us, I thought it was a little bit extreme. So, just from that aspect, I noticed there was a difference from being a little boy kind of naïve growing up in Highland Park, now I’m a young man–not even young man yet, I’m still nine, ten years old growing up over there. All of the sudden, I started seeing that it’s a little different over here.</p>
<p>WW: Going into ’67, were you still living on Virginia Park?</p>
<p>DB: Yeah, yeah. I actually, from ’63 until adulthood, that’s where I lived. Grade school, high school, and college, that was the base for me living there. So yeah, in ’67 I was right there. I actually, I turned 12 that week. I turned 12 that week. It’s one of those things that you’ll–like the assassination, this is burned in my memory. Sights, smells, sounds, things I just, I have flashbacks of them.</p>
<p>WW: Where in Virginia Park where you?</p>
<p>DB: Right on Virginia Park between Twelfth and Fourteenth Street. Yeah, right at the epicenter. Our house was – it now is on the corner of Fourteenth because they tore down the apartment building that was next-door. So I got to see and feel the entirety, the intensity of the whole event.</p>
<p>WW: Did you and your family go onto Twelfth Street at all growing up? Was that your main thoroughfare?</p>
<p>DB: When I first moved over there my mom was telling me, “Now, we’re moving to a different neighborhood, you stay off of Twelfth Street.” You know that’s the worst thing you can tell a little boy, what not to do, because I started going on Twelfth Street. I didn’t have a choice really because the school I went to, St. Agnes, was right on the corner of South La Salle Gardens and Twelfth Street. It didn’t make sense to walk all the way back to Fourteenth a lot of days when I can just walk right down Twelfth to Virginia Park and come home.</p>
<p>I’m going to tell you, man, there were so many things that I saw, it was just alive. It was alive. There were stores, there were theatres, there were restaurants, I mean, it was a fully self-contained area. There was no reason for you to ever leave that neighborhood to do anything. Just think about on my block, on Virginia Park, just Twelfth Street between Virginia Park and Seward: just in that strip, in my block, there was Dr. Maben’s Pharmacy, there was Hope Brothers’ Barber Shop, there was Fishman’s Hardware, there was the Chit Chat Lounge, there was a beauty shop in there, but then there was Picnic Barbeque, and then there was actually a dairy on the corner where we would go and buy milkshakes, Boston Coolers, ice cream, all that, and then a market on the opposite corner right there. There was no reason to ever have to leave the neighborhood to do anything. You could just go up and down Twelfth Street: clothing stores, you name it, gas stations, everything right there. I thought it was probably the best time of my life in terms of growing up and being able to see life from every aspect. There were church people, there were hustlers, there were regular, everyday folks, families, just doing what they do. It was – economically, there was a way for everybody to do something, make some money. I remember as a little kid–just because of the way the neighborhood was, the people that lived there, I was a little boy that never, never had to go without money. All I had to do was walk down the street and just ring the doorbell: need somebody to pull your weeds, cut your grass, shovel snow? I would even make money just walking up to the store and I’d ask people, “I’m going to the store, you need anything?” And they would say, “Yeah, bring me back whatever.” And I’d bring it back, and they’d give me a nickel, a dime, or whatever. That was good money. If you had a quarter back then, you could buy a pop and a bag of chips. For a little boy, that was good. I saw jitneys, I don’t know if you know what a jitney is, but a jitney is, they’re the original Uber drivers. So you go to the market and not everybody had a car, and so the jitneys would see you shopping, and a lot of them just had regular folks and would see you coming, and say, “I got you on your way out.” No problem. So they would load up your groceries, take you to your house, unload them, and go back to the market and get the next one. When I saw the Uber thing, I said, “Seriously? That’s nothing but a jitney. That’s wild.”</p>
<p>WW: How did you first hear about what was going on on Twelfth Street that night on July 23?</p>
<p>DB: Well I told you I went to Catholic School. At St. Agnes, I was an altar boy, a safety patrol boy, I did all that stuff, right? So, throughout the summer, you still had a schedule as an altar boy and I remember getting up to do 8 o’clock mass and my mother was an emergency room tech at Henry Ford Hospital. So she knew I was getting up to go, and I was actually up and ironing my cassock. So I was up ironing, and I could hear activity, and I said, “Man, wow, people are partying early today.” I could smell some smoke, and I was thinking people are barbequing or something. So when my mom called, she said, “You’re not going to church this morning,” I said, “Mom, I have to. What are you talking about?” She said, “There’s a riot going on on Twelfth Street and you’re not going to be able to get to the church anyway, so just stay, I’ll be home in a minute.”</p>
<p>Immediately, I went out to the front porch, and I noticed that all the noise that I was hearing was people milling about and going up and down the street. The looting really hadn’t started yet, but it was just a matter of time before all that broke out. My grandparents were there, we woke, and then we were just on the porch for the most part just looking up and down the street, neighbors milling about, talking about what was going on. Then my mother came home in a police car, and I was like, this is interesting she always caught the bus. But I guess bus service was disrupted, so the police brought her home in a car.</p>
<p>Now, my social consciousness is starting to come about, and by the age of 11, now I’m about to turn 12, and it concerned me seeing my mother in a police car because now I’m trying to get a feel for what’s going on up there but then seeing the police bringing my mother home, I was worried about how the people in the neighborhood were going to see our family because later, as my parents, my grandparents got away – well I got away from them, and of course you know I went right up to Twelfth Street just to watch everything. It was really something to see. It was really something to see. So many people so angry all at once. But I understood what was going on, because, as I told you, I had been dealing with this whole police presence for quite some time. What I’m saying is when you grow up in that neighborhood, you learn to play cops and niggers when you are young. The story about the cigarettes, that was typical of the kind of things that happened to us in that neighborhood.</p>
<p>For the older guys, I could see that it was even worse. There were guys that were teenagers that I saw growing up, and I just thought they were the coolest guys in the world; they used to wear their crisscross sweaters and their mohair slacks and their gypsy split shoes–that’s how they dressed going to high school. I was like, “Man, when I grow up, I want to be just like them.” Well, in the interim, a lot of those guys ended up going to Vietnam, and so they’re coming back from Vietnam about the same time that this is going on and they weren’t the same. They weren’t the cool people that I knew when I was little. They were dark, they were disturbed. You could tell something was wrong with them. They’re in the mix now too, coming home to have to deal with those same conditions. I remember seeing a guy that lived in the apartments that I told you were next-door to us, and just hearing all that going on that night, he just clicked into survival mode, and I saw him with his gear on jumping out the side window of the first floor of the apartment. I don’t know where he went, and I don’t think I ever saw him again. But I just remember seeing that and I was thinking, “Man, this is way worse than anything I could have ever imagined.” All that happening at the same time that we have this police presence in our neighborhood, and naturally knowing all these things, we’re now wearing naturals and we’re talking about Black Power.</p>
<p>I remember my mom used to, I said she worked at midnight, so in the daytime, she would sleep and certain things had to be done, and she would put me on the bus to go–and I mean, again, you know, it’s no big deal – go downtown, pay the Hudson’s bill, pay the light bill, take these light bulbs and exchange the light bulbs–that’s when light bulbs were actually free. That was part of my growing up, that was my responsibility as the oldest boy in a single-parent household. Inevitably, every time when I’d catch the Fenkell bus, they’d either be somebody from the Nation of Islam, or somebody from the Black Panther Party who would be there talking to me, telling me, “Young Brother, this is how you need to conduct yourself. And when you’re stopped by the police, you need to know how to answer, how to respond. You need to know these things in order to survive. Young Brother, do not wear your hair so long, you won’t be able to escape the pigs. Don’t wear bellbottom pants and do not wear platform shoes, you will not be able to get away.” These are things that were engrained in us as little boys in that neighborhood. Then, when I would have a conversation with somebody form the Nation of Islam and they started talking to me about how I should I take care of my body, and how I should eat, and how I should dress, and how I conduct myself in public. It was a different time in that I really feel like most of the young men of my generation, we were kind of raised up to be soldiers in terms of the Civil Rights Movement and just all of the turmoil of those times. This was all just a part of that. So seeing my mom get out of that police car caused me a little bit of concern.</p>
<p>That night, we’re now moving into where the National Guard and the Federal Troops were coming in, and there was basically martial law, so the curfew, lights out, and at night, they came and picked my mother up again to go to work but this time they picked her up in an unmarked police car, I had never seen one of those before. Totally blacked out, no insignia on it whatsoever, and when they came and knocked on the door, and she left out with them. They left and they didn’t even turn on the lights in the car and I mean they shot down Virginia Park so fast, it was kind of shocking to see.</p>
<p>You look at all that and my concern now is how’s that going to be taken in the neighborhood, how are they going to feel about us? Because I had seen black businesses on the corner of Virginia Park and Twelfth Street was Dr. Maben, he was a pharmacist, and I couldn’t believe that they actually broke into Dr. Maben’s drugstore and looted it because it was a black business. So right then I knew that black, white, Jewish, whatever, none of that mattered right now. That’s just how out of control the situation was. So my concern for my mother was real. Okay?</p>
<p>Then you add to that, the next morning when they brought her back, she came home – this armored personnel carrier came down my street ‘ding, ding, ding, ding,’ it’s like making this noise and you can’t help but notice that, right? So I run to see what is all that, and the thing pops up, the soldier pops out, and here comes my mom, popping up out of this armored personnel carrier, like, “Okay, thank you,” came on in the house, and I was like, this is unbelievable, totally unbelievable. But I think because most of the people in my neighborhood knew my mother and my grandmother. They were both nurses, and they just knew them as healers, so I don’t think that they looked at them as being compliant with them. They’re just healers, that’s what they do. We didn’t really have a concern, but I’m 11, I don’t know that.</p>
<p>WW: After your first trip up to Twelfth Street, did you go back at all, or did you, after what you saw the first times, did you stay hunkered down at your house?</p>
<p>DB: You couldn’t keep me off of Twelfth Street, and I just kept going back. Each time I went back, there was less and less of Twelfth Street than I remembered. I actually saw a building, and if you’ve ever seen a building on fire, the building’s on fire, when it collapses, there’s this rush of cool air that comes out of the basement–because remember this is in July, so you’re thinking everything is just hot–but when the building collapsed, you can actually feel this cool air rush all the way across the street. So I’m standing on the corner of Virginia Park and Twelfth and this cleaners was on the opposite side of Twelfth Street, and when that building collapsed it was weird. I actually saw rats running out of the building on fire down the street. I saw some things that day, I saw some things. Just the smell of the burning building, and then it was just everywhere; that smell was everywhere.</p>
<p>One thing that I always think about is back in those days, the police sirens now, they kind of give you like a ‘whoop-whoop’ kind of sound, back then it was like a long drawn out ‘wwrrrr-wrrrrr’ and normally you would hear it and it would be a police car, fire truck or something going by and that was it, but it was constant, it never stopped. It was like a constant drone of sirens that just never went away. After a while, it just started to sound like wailing, like crying. It’s almost like the city was dying and it’s that crying sound that you heard. It was eerie, you can’t forget it, you never forget that. The worst thing is that, as I said, it was probably the most vibrant neighborhood community and then it wasn’t. It was like it just died, and it never, ever came back. There’s been attempts trying to rebuild. I know my grandfather was part of the Virginia Park Association, and they put in a Community Center and a little shopping area right there, and that was a source of pride, but it was nowhere near as robust as Twelfth Street was on its own.</p>
<p>WW: That week, was your house threatened by fire at all?</p>
<p>DB: No. We were far enough away from Twelfth Street that there was really no–and there were no fires on my block. The buildings were looted, but none of them were set on fire.</p>
<p>WW: Oh.</p>
<p>DB: The fire I was telling you about was across Twelfth Street, so it was between Twelfth and Woodrow Wilson. So it wasn’t on my side. Actually, that was separated because it was a trailer rental lot that was next-door to it, so when it burned, it just kind of burned on its own, separate from anybody’s community. There may have been a house that was behind it, that was I think it was singed, and I think it may have had some fire damage, but on my side of Virginia Park, nothing really happened. So, no, there was no threat of any fire.</p>
<p>The one thing that I did see a lot, was a lot of just the police presence more so. Living next-door to that apartment building was interesting because on the roof there was an antenna on the roof, with everything blacked out, the lights out. I woke up to the entire apartment building being surrounded by state troopers and federal troopers and they all had their guns drawn pointing at the top of the apartment building. There was a state trooper in our backyard that was next to a tree that was in the yard, and he had the gun drawn on the top of the building, and I remember crawling all the way to the window and peeking up and trying to see, look up there, and the guy looked over and he said, “Get out of that window”. I got away from the window and crawled back. We slept in my grandparents’ dining room that entire week under her dining room table. There’s no air conditioning, so the windows are up, so you see and hear everything that’s going on, so when that happened, I immediately started running toward the windows to see what was going on. That’s another one of those things that you don’t forget.</p>
<p>WW: Were you, granted you were really young, did you understand what it meant for the National Guard to be coming in?</p>
<p>DB: Well, I knew that–</p>
<p>WW: Or did you see them any differently as you saw the police?</p>
<p>DB: Well, yeah I did. As I got older, then I found out that there was a huge difference between where I was and other portions of the city. See where I was, on the west side, we were at the epicenter of everything; I mean Virginia Park is only like five blocks from Clairmount, where it originated, and so the federal troops were the ones that came there. Now the interesting thing about them is that they don’t spook easy, man. I mean, they would talk to us. They were stationed on the corner, and we would just go and stand there and talk to them and the guy would talk to us; he was just mellowed out. He wasn’t in Vietnam, and I’m sure he’d been there, so he wasn’t sweating this very much. I just remember sitting there, talking to him, he took his helmet off, put it on the ground, and he sat on his helmet, and we just sat there talking to the guy. Just mellow. Now, what I heard is that my cousins lived on the east side, and they said the guys that they were dealing with were nothing like that. Now, I didn’t know at that time that that’s where the National Guard was, so those are Reserves that are pulled up and these guys are being called up to duty and being put into this situation; they’re coming from wherever in the state of Michigan and they just, they didn’t know, whereas the federal guys they were like, “This is not a big deal.” I mean it’s a big deal, but they’ve seen worse, just the way they responded was totally different. I did know that there was a level of seriousness and concern for safety and everything else, but I didn’t feel like these guys were a threat, like something was going to happen. If anything, I felt like they were going to stop things from happening. And it did, it did really settle things down in the neighborhood for the most part. And then it just seemed like from there, it spread out from where we were–which it had to do because they had to calm that area down first –but it spread out the other areas of the city, and I think that’s what prolonged the whole rebellion.</p>
<p>WW: Awesome segue: how do you refer to what happened in ’67? Do you see it as a rebellion?</p>
<p>DB: When I was younger like everybody else, we called it a ‘riot,’ and as I got older, I started to understand it more, because, as I was telling you, the confrontations that we had with police, and actually confrontations Ihad with the police made me change my opinion about it, that it wasn’t a riot. Because typically when you think about a riot, you’re looking at people going after each other. In ’43, people were going after each other, okay? In ’67, nobody was attacking anybody. They were against the police and there was some economic tensions that were going on so people were looting, stealing, doing all that, but it wasn’t like people were being attacked. No specific group was targeted, so it couldn’t really be a riot in the classic definition of a riot because there were no groups going at each other other than people going after a system that was very oppressive for the people in my neighborhood, myself included.</p>
<p>I remember once my mother, when she did get a car, she got this Olds 88 which was like a tank, I think it was like a ’66, just an absolute tank. She picked me up from basketball practice, and my brother and sister were in the car. She said, “Stay in the car.” This is right on the Boulevard and Twelfth where there was a Cunningham’s and an A&P. She said, “Stay in the car, I’ll be right back.” I said, “Okay.” She gets out, and I’m coming from basketball practice, I’m thinking, “I’m cramping, I need to stretch,” I got out the car. And when I got out the car, my brother and sister locked the door, so now we’re playing. I opened the door, so I jumped on the bumper of this tank and I’m jumping up and down on the bumper and I’m telling my brother, I’m yelling, “Open the door! Open the door!” They’re laughing, saying, “We’re not going to let you in! We’re not!” I didn’t notice out the corner of my eye that an unmarked police car had pulled up on me while I’m jumping up and down on this car. I turned and looked, and it’s The Big Four. They got out, and they started walking toward me, and this is when my Black Panther training kicked in, and I’m standing there and talking to them and I had my hands where they could see my hands and I’m telling them, “What’s the problem, officer?” So this one cop walked up and grabbed me by the lapels of my coat–this is how small I was and how big this guy was–he picked me up by the lapels of my coat, my feet were dangling, and he was shaking me, and he was saying, “Where’s your knife?” I said, “Officer I don’t have a knife. Why are we doing this? I haven’t violated any rules, I’m playing with my brother and sister. What have I done, officer?” I’m just trying to humanize this whole thing, I’m not, “Where’s your knife? Where’s your knife?” My mom came out of the market, she has on her work clothes and she looked at them, and they looked at her: they knew each other. Remember, she was an emergency room tech. These cops had brought in some young men before, and she recognized them. The words that started coming out of my mother’s mouth right then, I couldn’t believe it. The officer looked over there at her, they eased me down back on the ground, got back in the car and drove off. So I was standing in that parking lot, looking at their car pulling off, I was like, whoa. Then I looked over at my mother, and I started thinking, “I think I want to go with those police officers.” That’s just how it was. I was playing.</p>
<p>I was a little boy playing with his brother and sister, and my brother and sister, they’re in the car, now they’re crying, it’s a mess, and it’s for no reason whatsoever. Because a little boy was playing in the parking lot. That’s just the kind of stuff that was going on until it got to the level of S.T.R.E.S.S. [Stop The Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets] – and this is after the riot but the riots didn’t stop that. If anything, it intensified it. Those are the issues that we had to deal with, that I had to deal with, from the age of eight ’til the age of 18 when I left and went away to college. Those are the things that were going on. So, looking back, I can’t say that it was a riot, it was a rebellion. Because being a rebellion, it did result in some changes being made. The Big Four, S.T.R.E.S.S., all of that, they were abolished, and it had to be, otherwise, we would’ve lived in constant fear of the police. We just didn’t have a good relationship with the police department in my neighborhood. It was not, it was not a riot, it was a revolt; it was us saying to the system, “Get off our backs.”</p>
<p> WW: Earlier you said children of your generation were raised to be soldiers. Do you think that was a benefit?</p>
<p>DB: It should have been. It should have been. I say that because we were raised with a certain consciousness about what we were supposed to be doing to advance the civil rights movement. The doors opened wide, opportunity started coming our way, and I was up at MSU [Michigan State University] and there were more black students at MSU at that time than they’d ever had. Clifton Wharton was the president then, and there was intentional work on recruiting and graduating black students through MSU. So when I say that the doors opened wide and the opportunities came, we got caught up in the me-ism of that time. When I look at a lot of the things that go on, and what’s happened since then, I really feel the personal responsibility that it was my generation that dropped the ball on this because we were raised with a certain mindset, a certain consciousness, and then we bought into the me-ism of the Nineties and the corporate life and all of those things. We forgot about the movement. I jokingly say to people all the time, “We went from ‘It’s Nation-time’ to ‘Hey baby, what’s your sign?’” We weren’t doing what we were prepared to do in terms of community building. Yeah, we were successful, corporately, and things like that, but we took our eye off of how we got there, and how we got there is that those in front of us, when they paved the way, they made sure that they brought us in behind and said, “Okay, this is what you need to do.” That didn’t happen. So that generation of young men who started to fill prisons and get caught up in all of the drug trade and all of those things, those are my sons. These are my grandchildren that I’m working now trying to save. That’s why I do what I do, and it’s more, not personally failing, I mean I’ve got two sons who are doing exceptionally well, but overall we forgot what we were supposed to be doing. Yeah, there were challenges, but there’ve always been challenges. There are challenges now. What are you going to do? So that’s my motivation when I get up in the morning: just to remember that I was called upon to do something, and how do I do that now?</p>
<p>WW: Very nice. Is there anything else, any other stories you’d like to share from either that week before we move on, just to go past it?</p>
<p>DB: I had never seen that kind of madness before in my life in terms of it just seemed like there was everybody just kind of lost their compassion, they lost their soul. To just go and just destroy property like that, especially–I mean I was standing in front of Dr. Maben’s Pharmacy, and I was begging people, I was crying, I was like, “What are you doing? Dr. Maben is a black man. What are you doing? He serves our community.” But the madness overtook everything, and it destroyed which was once a very viable, strong, black community. Strong in terms of, we weren’t quite there politically, but economically, for the most part, we were self-sufficient.</p>
<p>My uncle, when I was talking about Hastings earlier, he was a pharmacist. When I was a little boy, I used to think all the time about my family was rich, I just thought we were the richest people on earth because my Uncle Smitty was a pharmacist, my Uncle Joe down the street was a barber, he had his own barber shop, and my Uncle Clement was a mechanic and he ran his little mechanic shop out the back of Digg’s Funeral Home. Diggs, they had a funeral home that was around the corner on Canfield, but in the back, my uncle said, “Hey, let me rent that out, and I can fix cars back there and I’ll fix you cars.” They were like, “Cool.” That’s what he did. But the one I loved the most was my Uncle Bunch, and I didn’t know Uncle Bunch delivered coal in the winter and ice in the summer and he picked up junk but Uncle Bunch had a horse, and for a little boy, a horse is like the coolest thing in the world; I just used to think, “Uncle Bunch has a horse.”</p>
<p>So I saw all of that, and then I also saw, when I-75 came through there and it just wiped out all of that. Then we moved into the other areas, onto Twelfth Street and then like that, and then I watched how just the madness made us destroy our own economy. It just changed a lot of things; I think it changed our own perceptions about who we are. And it was really nobody that could stand up and speak in a way to help understand what we were doing, and how that was going to impact us.</p>
<p>So, here we are, 50 years later, we’re seeing a resurgence here, Midtown, downtown. Twelfth Street’s not coming back. Anybody that lived on there and saw that, they know what I’m talking about. Just being over there, you didn’t have to go anywhere else. Northland was like an overnight trip as far as I was concerned. There was no reason to go to Northland, didn’t have to. We were totally self-sufficient. We don’t have that anymore, we don’t have that self-sufficiency. Our neighborhoods are dominated by other people who – I’m not blaming anybody, it’s the way it is but we don’t have a viable black economy anymore, not like we had then. When I was talking about Dr. Maben and my uncle, they were pharmacists, there was a group of black pharmacists who would get together and have fundraising events, big dinner dances, those kinds of things – they were real big back then – and they raised funds, they had scholarships and all kinds of things. There’s no black pharmacist group like that now. So a lot of those things don’t exist anymore since 1967. That was kind of, when I talked about that wailing, those sirens, truly was the death of our community and our economy. It just kind of cast us out to the winds.</p>
<p>So we see that now, and it’s like we casts dispersions on people who live on the other side of Eight Mile and all these kind of things, and it’s like we’re caught up in things that had nothing to do with how do we bring back what we once had? How do we do that? So if I want to leave on anything, that’s probably it. That’s my biggest concern because now I have two sons who are capable, they’re educated–I mean my oldest son graduated in four years from college, and he’s working, my youngest son is about to graduate from college–in these times, a lot of people say, “Well, that’s it, I’ve done it,” but I haven’t. Because there’s so many young men that they interface that need the same opportunities, that need to be able to do the same things. How do we make sure that we do that? Not to the detriment of anybody else, that’s not what I’m saying.</p>
<p>WW: Uh-hm.</p>
<p>DB: I’m talking about me, just like anybody else would be concerned with themselves.</p>
<p>WW: Thanks so much for sitting down with me today, I really appreciate it.</p>
<p>DB: It was a pleasure, man.</p>
<p>WW: Thank you so much.</p>
Original Format
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Duration
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54min 26sec
Interviewer
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William Winkel
Interviewee
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Darryle Buchanan
Location
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Detroit, MI
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A-_XWCrs4jE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Darryle Buchanan, December 13th, 2016
Description
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<p class="Normal1"><span>In this interview, Buchanan discusses his experiences growing up primarily in Virginia Park during the 1960s. He notes the escalated police presence in the community, and details several anecdotes of police brutality he experienced as a child. During the unrest, his mother was transported to and from work by the police and National Guard, once in an armored personnel carrier. He recalls the events in great detail, remembering the smell of burning buildings “everywhere” and the constant police sirens which sounded like “wailing.” Buchanan discusses the importance of Twelfth Street as a site of black economic self-sufficiency, which he claims no longer exists, and will not exist in the near future despite the revitalization of Midtown and Downtown Detroit.</span></p>
<br /><strong>***This interview contains profanity and/or explicit language</strong>
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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02/03/2017
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral history
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
82nd Airborne Division-US Army
Arson
Black Business
Black Panther Party
Childhood
Children
Detroit Police Department
Growing Up In Detroit
Highland Park
Looting
Michigan National Guard
Nation of Islam
STRESS
The Big Four
Twelfth Street
Vietnam War
Virginia Park
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http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/a415f2fe9253fca98c7e1285bb09f1f8.JPG
8a8a3dd80dec736f91faa82af9322573
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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David Bruce
Brief Biography
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David Bruce was born in July 1944 in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up on the West Side of the city. After serving in the Air Force, he joined the Detroit Police Department in 1966. He was at the blind pig raided on July 23, 1967 when the unrest was sparked. Bruce still resides in Detroit.
Interviewer's Name
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William Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, MI
Date
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10/19/2016
Interview Length
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00:48:57
Transcriptionist
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Emma Maniere
Transcription Date
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11/08/2016
Transcription
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<p>WW: Hello. Today is October 19, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am in Detroit, Michigan. I am sitting down with Mr. David Bruce. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>DB: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.</p>
<p>WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?</p>
<p>DB: I was born July of 1944 in the city of Detroit. I was born in Women’s Hospital in the colored ward. While I was being born, my father was in WWII, he was down in Guadalcanal fighting in the colored army of the United States of America. I lived on the west side of Detroit. Went to Thirkell Elementary, Durfee Junior High, and Mackenzie High School. I graduated in ’62. After graduation I went into the United States Air Force; I was in the air police. When I was discharged from the service, I joined the Detroit Police Department–that was March of ’66.</p>
<p>WW: Backtracking a little bit, what street did you grow up on the west side?</p>
<p>DB: There were a few streets. I grew up initially on Blaine, which was between Twelfth and Fourteenth. When I went to Thirkell and then after Thirkell I went to Durfee, and then to Mackenzie. When we first moved up, when we were on Blaine, it was mainly a Jewish neighborhood, so when we went to school at Durfee, we had the regular holidays, and we had the Jewish holidays. We were off during the Jewish holidays because most of our teachers were Jewish, so there was no school. So, we had it made at Durfee: we had regular holidays, Jewish holidays. The school was mainly Jewish and white back then; it was an integrated school. The neighborhoods, we still had Jewish people living there, and there were white people, Jewish and white. I can remember vividly, this one Jewish neighborhood, they would build a shanty or a shack in the entrance to the home, that was during one of their religious holidays. People were very nice back then, we really didn’t have a lot of prejudice back there, until I went to Mackenzie.</p>
<p>When I went to high school, that’s when I really experienced the prejudice. Our graduating class in 1962, there were only nine African Americans that graduated. It was predominately white. Across the street from the school, they had one restaurant for the black kids–that was called The Box–and then further down the street there was a pizza place, and that was for the white kids, so everything was more or less segregated. The only time there was more than one other African American student in one of my classes was when I was in gym or study hall. Then that was it.</p>
<p>Then I went into the service–</p>
<p>WW: Why did you join the Air Force?</p>
<p>DB: Well the Air Force–well, I just felt like I wasn’t ready for college. And so, that was a job, it was peace time. I joined the Air Force, I went to Germany, I spent three years in Germany, and it was a nice experience. I had my 19 birthday in Paris, my 20 birthday in London, my 21 birthday in Spain. So I got a chance to travel, and it was a very good experience. Back then, it was prejudiced, it was segregated. The bars were segregated, the German girls that went with the white guys, they were called cheeseburgers. The German girls who went with black guys, they were called hamburgers. It was prejudiced. It was right there: you could see it, it wasn’t covered up or anything. You knew who your buddies were, you knew who to hang around with, you knew who not to hang around with. That was my experience in the service. Then I joined the police department.</p>
<p>WW: When you came back to Detroit, after your time away, was the city still the same to you, or did notice any growing tension in the city?</p>
<p>DB: To me back then, the city was the same. I was out of the service only three months before I joined the police department. I saw my old friends and went back to the old neighborhood, there wasn’t anything really changed. The only thing that was changed was when I went further back to around Blaine and Twelfth like that, the Jewish people had moved, so it was predominately African American neighborhoods. That was the only change. When I went to Durfee, there was Boston, Chicago, Edison, Atkinson, Longfellow: those were extremely nice homes. They were all African American, and they were beautiful neighborhoods. There was no change that I could tell.</p>
<p>Then I joined the police department, and I felt some of the changes.</p>
<p>WW: What were some of the changes?</p>
<p>DB: Well, first of all, before my class, the city of Detroit only allowed two African American male officers per academy class. So when my class came up, there were nine of us and the class behind us was nine. So there was 18 African Americans in the police department academy for the first time in the history of Detroit. That was a big change there.</p>
<p>Then we went out to the precincts. I went to the Tenth Precinct, and there were only, approximately – on the day shift, we rotated shifts, so there was only about 10-12 African American police officers at the Tenth Precinct in 1966. They put us together. There was one time I worked with a white guy, and he only said seven words to me the whole eight hours, and that’s, "Are you ready to go to lunch?" I said yes, we went to the restaurant, I went in, I sat at the counter, and approximately two minutes later, him and two other white guys came in and they sat on the other side of the restaurant. After our 30 minutes was up, got the car, he showed up, and then that was it. We did our patrol, and he still didn’t say anything to me for the rest of the day. That was one of the main things, I said, "Well, you know who to work with, and you know who not to work with." That was the eye-opener right there. One white officer said, "You know, the only reason why we tolerate you is because you wear a blue uniform." That’s the only reason why things went the way they did. But there were some great white guys, that was only a couple out of 60-70 guys at a precinct. All total in the Detroit Police Department back in ’66, I don’t think there were over 450 African American police officers out of 5,000. You had to deal with it, you deal with it.</p>
<p>WW: Uh-hm.</p>
<p>DB: That was it.</p>
<p>WW: Did that discourage you? Facing all of this racism, did you ever think, I’m just going to leave the police department?</p>
<p>DB: No, it was a job. You faced that in regular life, no matter what job you had, back then, and I would imagine sometimes now. But back then, the handwriting was on the wall. You knew what you had to do, you go to work, you do your job, made sure you did it right–we didn’t have all the bickering, well, actually the Tenth Precinct was 90 percent African American, so we didn’t have that much trouble. People respected the police, the police respected the people, 99 percent of the police officers respected the people, you only had that one percent that you knew who they were.</p>
<p>WW: When you say 90 percent of theTenth Precinct was African American, do you mean the populous in the–</p>
<p>DB: The populous.</p>
<p>WW: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>DB: Yeah. There were white people that lived, maybe on Oakman Boulevard, which was very nice. Russell Woods, that was a very nice area. Actually the whole Tenth Precinct, 98 percent of the precinct was very nice. There were only a few little pockets in the precinct that the houses were rundown. But other than that, the houses were very well kept. If you go around behind Henry Ford Hospital, you can see where they refurbished all the homes there, and the homes are going for $100,000. You look at La Salle Boulevard and Oakman Boulevard and you go to Chicago and Boston and that area, and the homes are still what I would call very, very nice homes. If you put those houses out in the suburbs, you would pay $5-600,000 because most of those houses were three stories, they had a finished basement, one story for the living room, dining room, kitchen, and they had bedrooms, and then they had more bedrooms on top. The houses are still very nice. The Tenth Precinct was a nice precinct. We didn’t have a lot of trouble. We had Twelfth Street, that’s where most of the pimps and prostitutes and junkies were, but it wasn’t that long of a stretch, it was maybe about six blocks right on Rosa Parks. That was the only kind of shady area. They had restaurants, barber shops. There was a movie. There was one bar there called Klein’s Show Bar that had top-notch jazz entertainers that would come in. They had Boesky’s Deli which was an extremely good deli. We had Hughes’ Barbeque. Altogether, it was pretty good, except you just had the prostitutes out there–that’s the only thing you really dealt with on Twelfth Street, were the prostitutes. The rooms above the businesses, that’s where the houses of ill-repute, that’s where the ladies of the night would take their customers, that’s where they took care of their business. But other than that, it wasn’t that bad.</p>
<p>WW: Did you notice any growing tension going into ’67?</p>
<p>DB: No. No, I really didn’t.</p>
<p>WW: Okay. And you were involved in the Blue Flu?</p>
<p>DB: I was there during the Blue Flu. It started with the DPOA, Detroit Police Officers’ Association, owned a building on Jefferson called the Sentinel Building. They would have dances and catering. And so the DPOA had a dance, Cass Technical High School had a dance at the same time. From what I understand, a couple of white police officers and their wives were on the elevator, and a couple of African American teenagers from Cass were on the elevator, some words were exchanged. I believe one of the students told his father, Nicholas Hood, who was a city councilman, or it was a friend of Nicolas Hood III that told him, and he told his father. They went into it they took the officers to court, and when the white officers went to court, that’s when white police officers called in sick for the Blue Flu. During that time there were officers walking up and down in front of the precinct, and we had a skeleton’s crew, usually there were about nine or ten cars working at the midnight shift, but we only had maybe about five or six that night. During the Blue Flu, things that showed prejudice was my partner, James Roby and I, they would put up a duty roster and behind our names we were called ‘N scabs.’ I was a roommate with Charley Henry, and I lived across the street from my parents, and they would call my parents’ house and say, "Tell you N son not to come to work." It went on like that for a couple of days. Then the riots started. After the riots started, they told all the ones that were off walking around on the Blue Flu picketing, told them to come back to work because they needed everybody that they could have.</p>
<p>WW: Were you working that Sunday night? Or Saturday night, sorry.</p>
<p>DB: Yes. I was working Scout 10-1 with Frank [Lappam ?], really nice guy. When the clean up crew, that’s what they called it – when they busted the blind pig what they would do was they would let the women go, and then they’d take the men to jail, and it was only a $25 fine if you were loitering. If you ran the blind pig, the judge would give them maybe a $250 fine. The guys that ran the blind pig would pay the fines of the people that were there. That’s how the blind pigs were. The clean up crew, mainly they had two African American officers, they had two white officers, and they had a sergeant. The duties of the African American police officers were to go to blind pigs, try to get numbers men, try to bust bottle joints–a bottle joint was where people would go to Chicago and buy liquor, they had liquor wars in Chicago, they would buy liquor, come back to Detroit – you couldn’t buy liquor on Sunday, so they worked out of apartments and they would sell bottles of liquor to you. That was the only place you could get it. White police officers, their main job was prostitution. They would go and try to get a case, so, that was it.</p>
<p>The night of the riot, like I said, I was working with Frank [Lappam ?]. My roommate, Charley Henry, was working clean up, and Joe Brown was working clean up. He was in the class behind us. They passed off Joe Brown as a basketball player for the Cincinnati Royals that were in town. They went in, they busted the joint. They got a call that said, "Well we need a car for uniformed presence." So my partner, Frank, said, "Well let’s take that run," scout 10-1 and take it.</p>
<p>So we got there, and when we got there, a crowd had already gathered across the street. They had already let all the women go because you couldn’t pat women down and it was a pain to take them to jail because if you had to search them, you had to call in Women’s Division; Women’s Division back then, they weren’t in uniform, they had their own division, they took care of boys under 10, rape cases, abuse, and that was it. They didn’t patrol or anything. So all the women were gone. There was this one guy across the street, he had a green polyester shirt on with the puffy selves, more or less like a Jamaican shirt, he was the one that was agitating. The auto got there, that was prisoner transport, men started coming down, getting into the prisoner transport. The last one that came down was drunk, I mean he was drunk-drunk. When he went to step onto the auto to go in the back, he fell. Guy across the street–the guy I call Mr. Greensleeves–said, "Look, they knocked him down." That’s when the bottles and stuff came at us. We started calling for help. We got everybody in the auto, took them to the precinct, and we were told to go meet at Crossman Elementary School which was on Clairmount and The Lodge.</p>
<p>So we were there, and everybody was sent to that area. We had to sit there in the parking lot and Lieutenant Ray Goode took his driver, and they went down to assess what was going on on Twelfth Street. When he came back, somebody had thrown a brick or a bottle through the window and hit him and he was bleeding on his–Lieutenants and above wore white shirts back then–he was bleeding on his shirt. So we sat there for a while, then we got WWI helmets, those flat helmets and they gave us those helmets. [phone rings] Lieutenant Reginald Burke took about 10 of us, and we went down on Twelfth Street, and we had riot batons and we were put in our riot formation, and while we were doing our little march trying to clear the area, people up on the roofs were throwing stuff down at us–bricks and bottles, people started sailing plate glass at us, and you couldn’t see the plate glass coming, but you could hear it fall. So Lieutenant Burke said, "Nope. Let’s get out of here." So we went back to our cars, went back to the Tenth Precinct, and that’s where we were for a while.</p>
<p>WW: When you first pulled up to the scene of the blind pig, was it normal for a crowd to gather for arrests?</p>
<p>DB: Oh yes, yeah. You figure it was still around 80 degrees, no air conditioning, people didn’t have air conditioning, they had window fans, so people were out in the street. It was right after the bars closed, so there was still people milling around on Twelfth Street. They used to have this guy would walk up and down the street, he had a little push cart, and he had hot tamales and hot sausages in it and he would sell both, so there were people buying that. The tamales and the hot–they were very good. He had a clientele on the weekend. There were people out. I guess they were just milling around, but they knew this place got busted, and they let the women go. They could see women coming out of there and no men, so they knew it was busted.</p>
<p>WW: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>DB: So they started chanting, "Let ’em go, let ’em go." Like I said, it was only a $25 fine. $25 was a nice amount of money, but the blind pig owners paid for it. Really, there was nothing–you might spend a couple hours in jail and then you were let go, then you’d had to go to court three or four weeks later and that was it. It wasn’t strange to see people milling around that time of night.</p>
<p>WW: Earlier you said you weren’t anticipating anything massive happening that summer. What was the mood when you were waiting in the elementary school parking lot? Do you think that this is going to calm down or this is going to get bigger?</p>
<p>DB: We had no idea until Lieutenant Goode came back bloody and saying that the stores were being looted. There was a shoe store there called Cancellation Shoes and they had very good quality shoes, so people were breaking in there, stealing the shoes. They were breaking into the restaurants. The thing about it is white people were helping black people steal, black people were helping white people steal, so it definitely wasn’t a race thing, it was definitely–I guess they call it a "civil disobedience."</p>
<p>WW: What was your next step?</p>
<p>DB: Other than going back to the precinct and being at the precinct for–I worked 23-and-a-half hours that night. There wasn’t a lot that we were doing because they had to set it up where we could have three cars and a caravan. We had three cars, four police officers in each car, and go around and try to stop looting. People saw us coming, they would run, and we would go into the stores, lock up people. That was it. It was just containment, really.</p>
<p>WW: Mmhmm.</p>
<p>DB: The State Police, they came in and we were still trying to contain everything, but we couldn’t. They brought in the National Guard, and I think National Guard had to be–I believe it was 100 percent white, I don’t think there were any black men in the National Guard.</p>
<p>WW: Okay.</p>
<p>DB: [Laughter.] When they came down, my opinion, I think maybe 80 percent of them were afraid. They’d never seen probably more than three or four black people at one time because I believe most of them came from up north. The other percent, they just didn’t give a damn. They say, "Hey, we’re here." [phone rings] They shot out all the streetlights. The National Guard shot out all the streetlights. This one house on the southwest corner of La Salle, very nice neighborhood, very nice house, National Guard drove down the street in their personnel carrier they had .50 caliber machine guns on them. I guess they claim that somebody shot at them with a .22, and they opened up on this house. I believe you can still see the .50 caliber bullet holes in this house–well, they didn’t go all the way through–but you could see where they chipped it off. I think it’s still there, I’m not sure.</p>
<p>One night we were riding around and there were shots fired on Virginia Park and Linwood. So we got out of the car, we went in the alley so we could run between the houses, and I was the fourth one coming through the house. First three got shot: Johnny Hamilton got shot in the butt, Frank Ball got shot in the arm, and I can’t remember who the third one was. I crawled out there to try to pull them back, but Frank Ball told me, he said, "No, don’t come out here," and as soon as he said that, four shots passed my head by about an inch. Now, I’m pretty sure it was National Guard, because they were shooting tracer bullets, and you could just see them coming. At that time, we were wearing motorcycle helmets that were white. I think they were just shooting at a target.</p>
<p>Then they came, they sent a tank, and the tank got there, and they opened up and fired and blew a house down. Now, those shots came from that area, but I guess they figured that you had three police officers shot, and the bullets must have came from across the street, but they didn’t. But they brought their tank in and they blew the house down, more or less.</p>
<p>WW: When you first heard that the State Police and then the National Guard were coming, did you originally have a sense of relief?</p>
<p>DB: State Police, people consider them very professional because they work by themselves, they have very large scout car areas. You have State Police that if they get a call, it might take them two hours to get there, and two hours to get back. So we figured the State Police, they’ll be more professional. I thought that the State Police were more professional. I liked them.</p>
<p>National Guard, we had nothing to do with the National Guard. But just watching them operate, like I said, I believe most of them were afraid, and they didn’t know what they were doing, so they shot at everything.</p>
<p>Then they brought in the 101<sup>st</sup> Airborne. They brought in the real professionals, and they’re the ones that came in and more or less calmed everything down. That was the end of the riot.</p>
<p>During the riot, they had put all of the black police officers together. So we were in four scout cars, four guys in a car. We were riding around one night and the dispatcher came on, he said, "We got four N males walking eastbound on Oakman Boulevard." And the senior man of the crew picked up the mic, he said, "What did you say, dispatcher?" And dispatcher said, "I <em>said</em> there was four N males walking eastbound on Oakman Boulevard." The senior officer said, "We’re coming down there." As soon as he said that, over there, "This is the Tenth precinct Desk. Report to the station immediately." They were going to make sure we didn’t go downtown. But the thing is, once we got there, communication was behind a steel door. The only way you could get in was to be buzzed in. There wasn’t anything we could’ve done even if we went down there, we couldn’t have got in. Then again, you didn’t even know who said it.</p>
<p>WW: Mmhmm.</p>
<p>DB: It was the idea that here you are during the riot, you have a dispatcher out there dispatching people and he’s going to use the N word. That’s the way it went.</p>
<p>WW: Was there other examples of growing racial tension in the police department during that week?</p>
<p>DB: What had happened was, like I said, they put all the black police officers together so when other police officers saw us coming, even if they were doing something, they stopped. But most of them didn’t do anything really bad for us to even, really for us to have the confrontation. It was just that we rode around and we did our job and we really didn’t see abuse. But there was plenty of abuse. I know the prisoners we would bring into the station, it was hot back then. There wasn’t that much room in the precinct, so they put all the prisoners in the garage. One end of the garage was shut and they had a tank there with the National Guard. The other end of the garage, they opened the door halfway, and they had a tank there with a guy, National Guard, standing there with a .50 caliber machine gun pointed into the garage making sure that if you ran, you were going to get shot. But people weren’t going to be stupid enough to run and get shot, so it was just the idea that was really, really, really an atrocity right there: all the people piled into this one little area with the temperature the way it was, day and night. So what they did was they opened up Belle Isle and sent the prisoners to Belle Isle. I guess that was more humane. It was more humane than having 50-60-70 people packed into a little garage where you could just barely sit, barely move around. Couldn’t go to the bathroom, they weren’t being fed anything. They had to move those people out.</p>
<p>Then it calmed down. A lot of the white police officers transferred out and came out to the Sixteenth Precinct, the Fifteenth Precinct, Fourteenth Precinct that was predominately still white areas in the city of Detroit. In fact the northeast side of the east side of Detroit, that was called Copper Canyon, and I guess that was around Kelley or someplace out there–I’m not too familiar with the east side. But on the west side, more houses west of Telegraph, that was White Copper Canyon, houses from Telegraph east to Lasher, that was Black Copper Canyon. In fact this whole neighborhood here, at one time there was three police officers on that side of the street, two on that side of the street, three around the corner, two counting me on this.</p>
<p>WW: Mmhmm.</p>
<p>DB: It was the area, mostly police officers. A lot of them moved to the suburbs, some of them moved out of town, and a lot of police officers down outside of Las Vegas because of the taxes. You have your up north, then you have some that went down south.</p>
<p>WW: The first day you mentioned that you worked 23 hours. What were your shifts like the rest of that week?</p>
<p>DB: The rest of the week, my shift was 12 midnight to 12 in the afternoon. We worked 12 hour shifts. Trying to find a place to eat was kind of hard [laughter]. Especially when you have 16 cops walking in the restaurant at one time. A lot of the people in the neighborhood cooked food, brought it to the precinct to feed us, so we got a chance to eat. Not a lot, but we got a chance to eat. It was better than nothing, I’ll put it that way.</p>
<p>WW: [Laughter.]</p>
<p>DB: And that was the riot.</p>
<p>WW: You mentioned how white Detroit officers transferred out of the precinct. What was the reaction from the higher-ups in the police department?</p>
<p>DB: I really couldn’t say because I didn’t know higher-ups in the police department. There were only–was it two?–two African American commanders, deputy chiefs.</p>
<p>WW: I should say, was there a renewed focus on community engagement, or did you see, "We need to be stricter about policing," along those lines?</p>
<p>DB: I think that they said, let things calm down. That was the main thing: "Let things calm down." I can remember John Conyers and a few other higher-up black men went down and tried to calm the situation down a little bit. I imagine they talked to the police department and said, "Hey, you’ve got to hire more African American police officers." They started, but it wasn’t–it was a lot more than what it was before. Like I said, my class and the class behind us, that was nine in each class. So I think after that, they had seven, eight maybe African American police officers go on through. They tried to attempt to even things out. Like I said, back in ’66 there was only approximately 400 African American police officers on the job, and that counted maybe one, two commanders, maybe one or two inspectors, maybe 15 lieutenants, a couple of sergeants; there weren’t that many African American supervisors.</p>
<p>I remember one day I went up to the desk and I asked the sergeant could I get four hours court time–court time is where you went to court and you build up court time for going to court. I asked him for four hours and he said, "No, I can’t give it to you." And I was still standing there, and a white guy walked up, and he said, "Hey George, can I get four hours court time?" He says, "Sure, go ahead." I looked at him, I said, "I just asked for four hours court time, you told me I couldn’t get it." He said, "Well, you didn’t get it." Well, who was I going to complain to? We had one black sergeant, and he was in the Detective Bureau, and that was Norville Hendreth, so that was our only supervisor, and then after the riots, we had a couple more. It was a little bit better. We even got two black lieutenants, that was a lot better. You were put in a position where there’s nothing you can say or do really, and there weren’t that many African American police officers around, and there weren’t that many supervisors around, so you did what you had to do, you put in your eight hours, and you said, "Phew, I got through those eight hours." That was it.</p>
<p>WW: Did you think about leaving the precinct with those other officers?</p>
<p>DB: Oh no, uh-uh, no. I still had friends that lived in the Tenth Precinct. In fact, my future wife lived in the Tenth Precinct. No, I didn’t want to leave.</p>
<p>It was funny, a buddy of mine, Frank Staples, he was at the Fourteenth Precinct, and so he gets a call one day, and they go this house, and they take of whatever they had to do–he was working with a white guy–and after they left, the woman called the station and she said, "When I call for a police officer, I want a police officer, I don’t want an N police officer to come to my house." He said, "It was time for me to get out of that precinct, if the people don’t like you, then you know." Frank and I were partners, we worked together for a while.</p>
<p>The police department eventually got a lot better. In fact, I think right now that Chief Craig, he’s doing a hell of a job. He is. It’s gotten to the point where the Detroit Police Department is a lot more professional than most police departments around.</p>
<p>WW: Are you confident with the city moving forward?</p>
<p>DB: Oh yeah, yeah. You can see it. You can see Ilitch with his new stuff. And with [Karmanos ?] when he built Compuware. I keep getting a brain freeze with the guy that’s Quicken Loans –</p>
<p>WW: Gilbert.</p>
<p>DB: Gilbert. He’s come in, he bought up–not only did he buy up a lot of property downtown Detroit, but he bought up a lot of property in Midtown. From what I understand, people that work for him, he gives them a stipend to move into the city of Detroit. So if you look at Midtown and downtown, they’re building it up.</p>
<p>Out in the neighborhoods, my neighborhood is a great neighborhood, we still have a lot of mostly retired people out in this neighborhood. Parts of the outer city needs a little bit of help. There’s pockets on the west side, pockets on the east side that they need to tear down a lot of houses and do something with that property. I don’t think people realize how big the city of Detroit is. Not only do we have two cities within our boundary lines, you can take–I forget–San Francisco and maybe two other cities, I really don’t remember what they were, and you could put those cities inside Detroit. So our square footage is very large.</p>
<p>WW: Mmhmm.</p>
<p>DB: Very large. Our population back when I was on the job, it was up to two million. I guess now it’s only about 700,000 if we’re lucky. We’re moving forward. You can see the baseball stadium, the football stadium, the new hockey arena, they talk about the Pistons coming to Detroit. Detroit, it’s getting there. It’s going to be a great city in the next five to ten years. It’ll be just like it–well it won’t be like it was when there were two million people here–but it will be nice, it will be real nice.</p>
<p>WW: Is there anything else you’d like to share today?</p>
<p>DB: No, I guess that’s about it. That was the riot, how it started. One time, they were talking on the news, they kept saying that white police officers raided the blind pig, and I told my wife to get on the computer, it was Diana Louis, and I told her to get on the computer, I said, "Hey, wait a minute, it was two African American police officers that busted that place, Charley Henry and Joe Brown. They’re the ones that got in and busted the place." She said, "I just heard that there wasn’t all white police officers, it was two black police officers."</p>
<p>A lot of people said it was a race riot; it wasn’t a race riot. White citizens weren’t out there running around killing black people, black people weren’t running around killing white people. I believe 99 percent of the people that were killed during the riot were killed by the National Guard–maybe 90 percent, I won’t go that far, maybe 90 percent.</p>
<p>They said, it was never proven, but they said four white police officers went into the Algiers Motel and killed two black men and two white women.</p>
<p>WW: It was alleged that three white police officers and a black security guard killed three black men in the Algiers Motel.</p>
<p>DB: I was always under the impression it was four white police officers killed two black guys and two white women.</p>
<p>WW: There were two white women there.</p>
<p>DB: Oh.</p>
<p>WW: They were let go.</p>
<p>DB: Oh well. That’s how rumors get started [laughter].</p>
<p>WW: I did forget one question. Do you see it as a riot? That’s the term you’re using, or do you see it as–another term is ‘rebellion or ‘uprising’?</p>
<p>DB: Civil disturbance. Yeah, I guess it was a riot. It was a riot. I don’t think it was a rebellion. You have to realize that it started in the Tenth Precinct with, at that time, 85-90 percent African American. The homes that were burned down were owned by African Americans, or they were renting from white people. They burned down black businesses, black homes. Firemen went out there to put the fires out, people were shooting at them. It was, I think, it was a riot.</p>
<p>WW: Okay.</p>
<p>DB: It was a riot.</p>
<p>WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I greatly appreciate it.</p>
<p>DB: Oh, okay.</p>
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
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48min 47sec
Interviewer
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William Winkel
Interviewee
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David Bruce
Location
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Detroit, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CIxCNREIikk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
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Title
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David Bruce, October 19th, 2016
Description
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In this interview, Bruce focuses primarily on his experience as a Black Detroit Police Officer during the 1967 unrest. He was at the blind pig on 12th and Clairmount the night it was raided, and discusses the racism that plagued the Detroit Police Department before and during the incident. He describes the aggressiveness and inexperience of the predominately white National Guardsmen, and the inhumane treatment of people incarcerated during the unrest. Bruce believes the increased hiring of African American police officers and leadership has ameliorated the discrimination he faced in the 1960s, and is similarly optimistic about the future of the city as a whole.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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11/08/2016`
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Algiers Motel
Blind Pig
Copper Canyon
Detroit Police Department
Detroit Police Department - Women's Division
John Conyers
Michigan National Guard
Tanks
Tenth Precinct
Virginia Park
-
http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/416032879e3e1701b83211a7482289de.jpg
8fb39c2dc9fbb493dd2f07d6709bc35d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Virgil Taylor
Brief Biography
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Virgil Taylor was born in Detroit in 1955 and grew up on the west side of Detroit, a few blocks from 12th and Clairmount. He worked as a police officer and in security for a number of years, and now runs an organization called Urban Requiem for Detroit.
Interviewer's Name
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Hannah Sabal
Interview Place
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Detroit, MI
Date
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07/23/2016
Interview Length
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00:32:20
Transcriptionist
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Hannah Sabal
Transcription Date
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08/01/2016
Transcription
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<p>HS: Hello, this is Hannah Sabal. The date is July 23<sup>rd</sup>, 2016. I am in Detroit, Michigan for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am sitting down with Virgil Taylor. Thank you for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>VT: Hi, Hannah. My name is Virgil Taylor.</p>
<p>HS: Can you tell me where and when you were born?</p>
<p>VT: I was born in Detroit, January 18<sup>th</sup>, 1955.</p>
<p>HS: Where did you grow up?</p>
<p>VT: I grew up in Detroit. I was born on Hazelwood and what was then 12<sup>th</sup> Street. When I was 3, we moved to Elmhurst and 14<sup>th</sup> Street, which was approximately about, maybe a mile away from where Hazelwood and 12<sup>th</sup> was.</p>
<p>HS: What was your neighborhood like growing up?</p>
<p>VT: I lived in a lower-middle class/working class neighborhood. My recollections of the community at that time was that everyone kind of lived in the same area, within so many block radius. You kind of knew what people did or what their status was based off what block they lived on. Where I lived, which was around the block from Central High School, was a lower-middle class/working class neighborhood. Most of the people on my block were traditional nuclear families, primarily black, but we did have white people that lived on the block. There were a number of Jewish people that still lived on the block when I was a kid growing up there. That had been a traditionally Jewish neighborhood, and then there was a migration into that neighborhood of blacks and a migration of Jewish people from that neighborhood I believe to Oak Park.</p>
<p>HS: What did your parents do?</p>
<p>VT: My dad had been a laborer. He was actually a boiler maker. But my dad was stricken blind shortly after I was born, and my mom had been a housewife. But when my dad was stricken blind—my dad did go back to work, but my mom ended up initially working in the schools. Then after my dad passed in 1963, my mom went to work at United Way. But my mother didn’t have an education, so she went to work in some other types of programs that they had, helping other people in the community.</p>
<p>HS: All right. Did you go to Central High School?</p>
<p>VT: I did. I went to what was then their campus bordering Tuxedo and I want to say Calvert to the north, Linwood to the west, and La Salle to the east. That campus was then Roosevelt elementary, Durfey Middle School, and Central High School. I went to Roosevelt and Durfey exclusively. Central I did for two years, then I left Detroit and finished high school in Lansing at Lansing Sexton.</p>
<p>HS: So in the ‘60s, you were a young kid, a teenager. What did you like to do with your time?</p>
<p>VT: The typical kid stuff. There was a lot of activity in our neighborhood. I guess—and I didn’t know it as a child—but our neighborhood, strong foundationally. A lot of neighborhood block clubs and neighborhood organizations. Around the block from us, over on Webb Avenue, was Visitation which later became St. Martin de Pore’s, and after that, it doesn’t exist anymore. But the archdiocese over there was very, very strong. There was a rec center at Visitation, so we went there a lot during the summer months to swim at their recreational activities. I grew up across the street from what was New Mt. Zion Baptist Church. Very strong organizationally in our community, and they had a lot of programs for kids, recreational programs in the basement and the parking lot there. At Central’s field, there were ongoing programs for kids and families, and so the schools there, all of them, at night traditionally would be open until about nine o’clock for after-school programs. So for instance, my mom would go there to take flower arranging classes or cake decorating. Men went there to take shop classes. That was kind of just what was normal in our community. The kids would go for after-school programs there. During the summer months we would do usual kid stuff, but we had the Fischer YMCA. There was another YMCA in Highland Park. So as kids we would get on our bikes and we’d either go the schools—if they didn’t have open swim or recreational programs, Visitation did, or we would go to the YMCAs. But we were also pretty free. As long as you were home by the time the streetlights came on, we got on our bikes and went wherever. We’d go to Palmer Park, we’d ride our bikes all the way out to Rouge Park and go swimming there. It was a remarkable neighborhood. Interesting because I didn’t know as a child some of the things that were culturally remarkable at the time. The Nation of Islam temple was right there on Linwood; it was across the street. My barber was a member of the Nation, so when I went to the barbershop on Saturdays, the talk that I heard was largely from members of the Nation and some of the things they would talk about. But it never appeared to me to be—I mean, it was just people talking about a host of things, community issues and things of that nature. One of the barbers that was in there was a Baptist, and another was like a numbers man, so it was kind of a fascinating exchange, but I never thought much of any of it. It was just the normal discourse. The neighborhood, again, most of the women on my block were housewives, primarily. Some women worked, I guess. My friend Tony Luffborough, his mom worked in the plant. Many of the mothers were housewives on the block. I grew up in the neighborhood which I would think in the traditional American culture would mimic anything that you would think of. There were women on the block that kind of watched out for all of the kids and kind of tell on me when I did stuff. Most of the men in our neighborhood worked—not most, they all did. It was unusual for a father to not be in the home. My dad passed away in ’63, so there was no father in the home. That wasn’t the norm. This whole myth about black men not being in the home, no that was just not true. I can tell you why that happened, when it started to happen, but it was not true as a child growing up. Like I said, very traditional neighborhood. 12<sup>th</sup> Street as we called it, which is now Rosa Parks, was a retail strip. All up and down 12<sup>th</sup> Street were every kind of shop you could imagine: hardware store; the confectionary, which is a form of a party store; there were other party stores; barbershops; seamstress shops; and then there were little shops that lay on the outsides of those blocks, and a lot of times those were industrial shops, small factories, that I now know were lower-level tier four or five factories that provided things to the automotive industry. But they may be a shop that only has four or five employees. It was that type of community.</p>
<p>HS: Do you have any siblings?</p>
<p>VT: I have one brother, older than me. He’s five years older than me. My brother was the quintessential good boy—at least that’s what everybody else thought. My brother is pretty remarkable. He’s a professor now. He was the captain of the safety patrol, he was the captain of the cubscouts, so I came up always, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” He was academic and athletic all-American, you know, so here I come, clumsy little brother, but just a normal kid. My brother went on to graduate from MSU and he’s a professor at MSU now.</p>
<p>HS: I’m the youngest sibling of a guy who’s doing exactly that, so I know where you’re coming from.</p>
<p>VT: It’s not fun. It’s like you’re always, that’s the standard you’re held to. Especially when you know that this creature is far from perfect, but what they’ve perfected is the art of that image that they keep up in front of adults.</p>
<p>HS: Oh, yeah. I grew up in elementary school and middle school, “Why can’t you be more like Daniel?” Anyway, so ’67. You were about 12 years old at the time. How did you hear about the events?</p>
<p>VT: Walked out onto the porch that Sunday morning, and didn’t understand what I was seeing. It was chaos, it was chaotic. Richard Rudolph, one of my neighbors who lived across the street—who grew up in a different home. Richard didn’t go to school. The Rudolph family didn’t have grass most of the time. They put down sod but they wouldn’t take care of it. They were a nuclear family, but education wasn’t important. The block club used to have regular fits about the Rudolph family. Richard came running down the street and he had a tray of rings, and he was just giddy as he was running. He had been looting up on 12<sup>th</sup> Street. There were people running all over, and my mother came out. My mother was very much a disciplinarian and traditionalist. We weren’t going anywhere. She didn’t know exactly what was going on, but she knew it wasn’t right and we weren’t leaving the porch. So I witnessed the early part of the day from the porch. Our street, at that time, we had all down Elmhurst these beautiful Dutch elm trees that provided a canopy over the street. Suddenly the police were coming. The police were on firetrucks, which we had never seen. The police had on helmets we had never seen. There were two huge apartment buildings across the street from us, and something happened and the police came with like armored vehicles or trucks or something, and they surrounded this apartment. There was, I want to say, I believe there was gunfire. I know I remember them going in, and I know I remember them bringing young men out. I had seen these guys, but I didn’t know them. I remember them bringing these young men out of the building. All of it was pretty confusing. Having grown up—I was 12 years old. In my neighborhood, things had started to change the year before because I think what started happening was drugs were coming to the community. That started around ’65, ’66. Guys started going to Vietnam and coming back with mental health issues, though we didn’t know that’s what it was at the time, so they were coming back “not right.” That started creating chaos in homes. We started having home invasions, something we had never had. All that started occurring when young men went away to Vietnam and came back drug-addicted and with mental health issues. All of that started to just have a major influence in the neighborhoods, as I recall. I was too young to know any of the socioeconomic conditions. When I look back now, my mom—my mother grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She was born there at the turn of the last century. I think black people in particular from the south viewed life as difficult or challenging, but like I didn’t know we were poor. My mom and dad never let us know that. I didn’t know what poverty looked like. I ate every day, I had clean clothes every day, our lights never went out. This was just life. You didn’t think much about it. So when I discovered years later that there were major socioeconomic things occurring in the black community, I didn’t know anything about it as a kid and I was shocked. I was sheltered from that by my parents. But I do know that there was a drastic change that was starting to occur. Our house was one of the first houses to get broken into, and that was in 1966. My brother was going into his senior year, and I remember they had stolen our television and his clothes primarily, so someone had been watching him. As I recall, I think they stole his coat from school and got his keys out of it, that type of thing. Our neighborhood though, disastrous. The idea that someone would go into someone else’s house. Because I grew up in a neighborhood where you didn’t lock your doors. You slept with the windows open. You never thought that someone would come into your house. But the influx of drugs into the community started to change those dynamics. As I understand now, socioeconomic conditions, because there was not equity in jobs, even in the factories. I think as technology was taking hold and factories were changing, blacks were probably the first to be displaced. So I suspect that all of that, and then there was the cultural awareness that was taking place in the ‘60s, the revolutionary change, and I suspect that all had something to do with it, but I couldn’t tell. When people talk about was it a riot or a civil insurrection, for me it was a riot because the places I grew up with, the place I knew, those were the places that were destroyed and the people I knew that were doing it, that wasn’t civil unrest. Now maybe there were socioeconomic conditions that influenced it, but Richard Rudolph was looting. He had no social conscience about what he was doing. It was opportunity to go and steal.</p>
<p>HS: Just to get a little geographical context, Elmhurst and 14<sup>th</sup>, that’s only a couple blocks away from where the rioting started?</p>
<p>VT: Well, Hazelwood, where I was born, was only about a block away. I would say about six or eight blocks north, yeah. So it was close. Where it started there, on the corner of Clairmount and 12<sup>th</sup> Street, and if you would look at a map at 12<sup>th</sup> Street, the stores, the retail really went really north, but it went to some degree south. Elmhurst, Monterey, Richton—Richton would end the retail area. A lot of looting was taking place all along there.</p>
<p>HS: Are there any other things that you witnessed or experienced or did your mom just keep you at home?</p>
<p>VT: No, the 101<sup>st</sup> Airborne came and they took over my school. They took over the campus. The campus became an armed camp. There were helicopters, there were tanks—there was a tank on my corner. My mom made food for the soldiers that were posted there. My mom was very much a traditionalist, as most of the people in my community were. They frowned upon the rioting. They were very, very hurt, very, very angry, and very supportive of law enforcement and the military coming in to restore order, because this wasn’t what we did, as far as they were concerned. After, that was Sunday, I want to say about maybe Monday or Tuesday when it appeared that things had been quelled, we could leave and we went up to the field and the military was there. It was fascinating to watch. It was troubling to watch. I’m a kid, I’m 12, and I’m looking, my school’s been transformed into a military base complete with helicopters and tanks and soldiers on post and all of that. We were pretty conflicted. I was certainly a young man, I had started to become aware of the movement and the revolutionary concepts, but I was still, I was 12 years old. There was no one talking to one us about these principles or what had happened. It was kind of organic, taking place. So to go up to the school—like we have now Black Lives Matter and the whole police—I didn’t grow up hating the police. I was 12 though, bear this in mind. I wasn’t driving yet. But I didn’t remember my brother having encounters or talking about the police as bad people. That wasn’t part of our concept of the police. I grew up as a kid with the police coming to school to talk to us. Detroit back in the ‘60s had a policeman’s field day and a fireman’s field day. Those were big, big events that kids came from all over came to. Again, I wasn’t racially conscious, but I grew up in a black community, so I just didn’t give white people a whole lot of thought. I had white teachers, but I didn’t look at white people—I do remember though, there were two white guys coming down 14<sup>th</sup> Street with a shopping cart. They had been looting, and I remember people converging on them. I do remember that.</p>
<p>HS: People from your neighborhood?</p>
<p>VT: Yeah, well, I think they weren’t on my block, but they were from the general neighborhood, and they kind of chased them down. From what I recall it wasn’t pretty. What made them think to come over there is a little beyond me. It was a scene change. I guess things were already in process, but it was just a scene change. The neighborhood never recovered; it was never the same.</p>
<p>HS: How long did you stay in that neighborhood for?</p>
<p>VT: My mom moved from there—I went away to college in ’72, I went in the service in ’75—my mom must have moved from there around ’74-ish or so, because she was there, but when I went into the service, she had moved, so she must have moved in ’74, thereabouts.</p>
<p>HS: Did she move from the neighborhood just because the general deterioration or was there a specific reason?</p>
<p>VT: She was saying that things were changing, and then the landlord where we were living, where she had lived, she said if they went up on the rent she was moving, and he did. She didn’t need that house anymore, either. My brother and I were both gone, so she moved into a smaller apartment at the time. Things were changing. Nothing like what you’re dealing with now, but we weren’t as comfortable with her being there anymore by herself.</p>
<p>HS: That leads me to my next question: How have you seen the city change?</p>
<p>VT: I saw the city die. Detroit died in my estimation. That happened in the ‘80s. It was in a decline. I was gone, I went away to school, I was in the military, I came back. I was in East Lansing for a brief period as a cop myself, but I came back into Detroit. I owned a security company here; I used to do all the security at Joe Louis and Cobo Arena, most of the major events facilities around Detroit. Then I was in corporate America, but I was involved outside of the city and I lived in Southfield, but in the ‘80s, I want to say that Detroit literally died. It was pretty much a ghost town. I watched the disinvestment from this community. Nobody cared. And the people that stayed were two groups: the people who couldn’t escape and the people that lived off the people that couldn’t escape. Then, I want to say here in the last ten years, there’s been people that have had a vision. This is a lot of good property, this is an amazing place, so there’ve been people that have moved back in and taken advantage of the opportunities that exist here. I don’t personally think that’s a bad thing. I understand the sentiments of people who say gentrification and all of those things, and I don’t necessarily disagree. However, I think of the challenges that we have to be honest about—I was talking with some friends of mine about properties that we have seen—many of us could have bought some of those properties. You know, office space or retail properties or whatever, but we don’t have the wherewithal to restore them. That’s because of inequities in the system, because of inequities in finance and things of that nature. We don’t have wealth in the black community. So for people that would argue that you do, I would argue that no, you don’t. That’s historical, and that has been as a result of a whole host of—and I’m not the guy to scream “racism,” but I’m a historical freak, and that has everything to do with race in this country, and a white-male-centric perspective, and the establishment of a system that that’s what it has supported. It has denied certain other groups opportunities, breeding subsequent cultures that have not been able to function as well. And when there have been efforts for people to try and do certain things, there’ve been systems in place that denied those, so hopefully now we’re starting to look at things, but it’s going to take quite a bit to right that ship. You’re talking about hundreds of years of practice, of mentality, of ideology that are subsequently difficult to dismantle. It’s not a simple fix. I see great things for Detroit. I think that there are tremendous opportunities here. I see great things happening here. We’re twenty years out, I think. I think that there’s somethings that are going to be remarkable over the next five years, ten years, but I think we’re twenty years out. We’re in a scene change now in the nation, and this nation is going to have to come to grips with some things, and unfortunately, I think, you have people that are exacerbating age-old problems as opposed to trying to resolve them. It’s sad, but the thing that I think is good about it—because I have friends from all walks—I’ve been fascinated on social media to see some of my friends, and sometimes it’s like, oh my god, I never knew that you thought like that. And I think to some degree, some people are dismayed themselves, they didn’t know. As long as everything is kind of okay and it’s kind of comfortable, and what grandma and them were saying, that little racist stuff, it’s not me, I don’t really believe that, until it gets laid out in your lap and yeah, you do, because that’s what you grew up with. So subsequently, I think we, I always equate it to having a sore, a cut. First you got the wound, then you got the scab, and it’s got to heal. At least we got the cut now, it’s kind of scabbing, and it’s not pleasant, but I think ultimately, at the end of the day, my grandchildren will be benefitting from the pains that we’re experiencing, that we needed to do a long time ago. It just hasn’t been necessary, I guess.</p>
<p>HS: So you said that you saw the city die. In your opinion, what do you think killed the city?</p>
<p>VT: Disinvestment. I think that the auto industry was struggling already, technology was changing, this was the blackest city in America, and nobody gave a damn. There was no effort here, but you know, it wasn’t just here. I worked for America Financial in Wooster, Massachusetts. I saw something similar there. My ex-wife is from New York. Her family was like around Brooklyn. The textile industry—technology is, I think, the beast that nobody anticipated. What technology would do, and the speed that technology was able to eliminate the need for manpower has hbeen remarkable. I think no one will step up and say—like, when people like these modern politicians, “Oh, the jobs have been shipped over—” No, not true. Not true. Some of that is true to some degree, but the reality of it is that you have technology—first off, they create things now that once required twenty-seven parts requires one. And then they create something to create that part! Those are twenty-seven jobs that get eliminated. So you didn’t have, what you had not had, and I think this is a problem with our system of government, because you have elected officials and they have to pander to their constituents. They’re not necessarily the brightest bulbs themselves, but secondly, they’re going to keep telling the constituency something that’s just not true. You can’t get that job anymore putting that widget in there. That’s never, ever coming back because that widget doesn’t exist. Those shops that are talked about up around my neighborhood, those little shops that were rivet-making shops, they don’t need that. Those guys had good jobs, and they didn’t need a car. That’s not coming back, so you don’t have decent politicians that will tell you the truth. That’s never coming back! We’ve got to rewire our mindset, and that is a large part of the problem. This was a laborer’s town, this was a union town. Go down and drive around the teamster’s complex. I remember in the early ‘80s, that place would be packed. It’s a ghost town. Go down to UAW—ghost town. Because you don’t have that membership anymore. When I grew up, and I was talking about the schools having after-school programs that were for adults as well as kids, that’s because you had a thriving tax base. You had two million people here, working. They’re paying taxes that they can contribute to after-school programs. The schools are vibrant and all of that. You’re dealing with a shell of that. So I think, again, it goes back to the disinvestment in the community, and I get it. But you also have decentralization. You have conglomerates. I grew up in the music business, too. My uncle was the Temptations’ and the Supremes’ first manager, so I grew up in the Motown family. I was involved in the music business in the ‘80s. When I was involved in the music business, radio stations here were locally owned. Well, they got bought out by multi-national corporations. Those companies that were locally owned here were very attuned to what was going on in this community, the type of music that would be played in this community. These multi-national corporations took over, and they don’t care what our kids here. They couldn’t care less. “Hey, that’s kind of popular, play it.” One of the first things they did was fire all the DJs, because those were radio personalities. Martha Jean McQueen, she was the pulse of Detroit. She told women what to do on Fridays. She’s gone, and they did not replace her, so there is no community conscience coming from the radio. All those little things are the fabric of the community. The churches—the churches have become big business. They’re not social conscience, I don’t care what they say. They are not. They are businesses. I have a friend that went into—she’s a minister. Everybody in the church is a minister now. She was telling me that she was doing a women’s program. Under the Bush Administration, there was no separation of church and state. The Bush Administration started as opposed to you having grassroots organizations that the government would make grants to, the churches are getting that money. Then I said to her, “Do you get paid?” “No.” “Where does the money go?” “To the church coffers.” It’s going to the church? Pastor drives a Bentley! Something is wrong with this picture! The pastor that was at New Mt. Zion that was across the street from me, I wouldn’t have known him if he spit on me. He was not a celebrity. He was a pastor. He didn’t drive a big, beautiful car and he wasn’t carried out on a chariot or something. These are the things, but these are social phenomena. When I say that the city died, if you study history, it’s the same as Rome died or any major, you know. Lack of social conscience, lack of leadership, government interference, perhaps because there’s a need to keep people quelled, perhaps. I don’t know. All of those things, I don’t too much get into, but if you go back and trace the history, it makes perfect sense. If you wanted to create a monstrosity, what happened to Detroit in the ‘70s and ‘80s would be the perfect experiment. If I wanted to create a mutated society, do what you did here. Remove all the stores, remove all the economic opportunity, remove all of the everything, disinvest, and leave people to fend for themselves. What do you expect to get? You create a monster. You create a being that learns to survive. It ain’t going nowhere. The scary part is when people have to fend for themselves and are continuously being preyed upon, they start to develop a different mentality. Once there’s no more carcass on the bone here, what do you think they’re going to do? They’re mobile. Also, it impacts the mentality of people beyond that community. You know, I work with kids, I work with kids in communities from all over, and then people are freaked out in Warren or Sterling Heights when their kids are behaving the same way. Well, what do you think they’re going to do? What do you think they’re watching, “Leave it to Beaver?” They watch BET. They see the social phenomena, this music, this technology again, and it’s pervasive. Subsequently, it changes everything. I think that that disinvestment was the great sin. Racism was the other great sin. You had a lot of hostility on both sides, so one side is saying, “Y’all did this,” and the other side is saying, “Y’all did this,” and the truth is somewhere in the middle. There are greater sins on one side than the other. We just have not worked to heal our issues. I think that’s kind of where we’re heading, I’m hoping.</p>
<p>HS: Final question: What would your advice be for future generations?</p>
<p>VT: Get to know people. Really, conscientiously get to know people, understand people. Have some empathy. That’s been one of the greatest challenges, because as I tell people, the conversation of race is not easy. It’s not pleasant. But it’s necessary. I don’t have to agree with you, but I need to understand your perspective, and I need to respect you. I need you to understand me and respect me and hear what I have to say. I had a friend recently tell me, a white friend—I posted something on Facebook, and she basically said, “Well that’s invalid.” You don’t get to invalidate my opinion! Who told you you could do that? And that is far too prevalent. You can’t invalidate—it’s like me invalidating a position of yours because you’re a female. As a male, I cannot. I have no right, but conceptually, I need you to help me understand, and there’s some things I’m never going to understand, but I have to yield to you in some things, and then I need you to respectfully yield to me when I say as a man, I don’t get that. I’m not understanding. There is where we agree to disagree. Okay, I got you, let’s leave that alone, now. We got it out, let’s move on. We haven’t been willing to do that. We’re so busy telling someone else they’re wrong, and I’m right. The truth is probably in the middle, as in most things.</p>
<p>HS: That’s great advice. Is there anything else you wanted to add?</p>
<p>VT: Nope. I appreciate the opportunity.</p>
<p>HS: Well, thank you for coming in.</p>
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
32min 20sec
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Hannah Sabal
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Virgil Taylor
Location
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Detroit, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/55Dm_v9l2LY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Virgil Taylor, July 23rd, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Taylor describes the looting and chaos that he witnessed during the summer of 1967. He also discusses the many issues Detroit faces today, including racism and disinvestment.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
09/20/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Childhood
Children
Growing Up In Detroit
Looting
Martha Jean "The Queen"
Race Relations
-
http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/3c2febdc53839d1ee492b7348056cbf9.JPG
dd9a5efa3956f0fc992d771b5a0f44fd
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
A language of the resource
en-us
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/20/2019
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Ronald Navickas
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Ronald Navickas was born in 1936 in Pontiac, Michigan and grew up in Highland Park. He served as an Air Policeman from 1954 to 1958 when he took a job with an armored truck company. He worked with them until 1969 when he moved to Florida. He and his wife moved back to Michigan three years later, lived in Sterling Heights for 25 years, and now reside in Shelby Township.
Interviewer's Name
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Julia Westblade
Interview Place
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Detroit, MI
Date
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08/23/2016
Interview Length
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00:36:14
NOTE: The recording is broken into two tracks
Transcriptionist
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Julia Westblade
Transcription Date
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09/12/2016
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>JW: Good Morning. Today is August 23, 2016. My name is Julia Westblade. I am here in Detroit, MI with the Detroit Historical Society’s 1967 Project. Can you tell me your name?</p>
<p>RN: My name is Ronald Navickas.</p>
<p>JW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. Can you tell me where and when you were born?</p>
<p>RN: I was born November 3, 1936 in Pontiac, MI.</p>
<p>JW: Did you grow up in Pontiac?</p>
<p>RN: No, I did not. My family moved from Pontiac, actually from Michigan to the state of Maryland when I was very little. We spent probably the first four or five years of my life in Maryland and then at the beginning of the World War II we moved back to Michigan to Pontiac and then in 1942, I believe it was, we moved to Highland Park, MI where I attended the schools and lived until I went into the service in 1954.</p>
<p>JW: What brought your family back at World War II?</p>
<p>RN: I think it was monies. Due to the fact that we were living on a farm in Maryland and when push came to shove the demand for workers was paramount here in the area. So my mother worked out at Willow Run. She was a line inspector when they were building the B-24s. My dad was a draftsman for Lincoln at that time and living in Pontiac, she had to commute every day from Pontiac to Willow Run and my dad rode the train from Pontiac to Detroit to his job.</p>
<p>JW: Did your mom continue to work after the war ended?</p>
<p>RN: Yes she did. My mother and father divorced when I was ten years old. We were living in Highland Park at that time. She continued working. She worked for Burroughs – at that time it was Burroughs Adding Machine Company. I have no idea what my father was. I think he was working for Fischer Body but I’m not sure at that time but we had nothing in common and he had departed and end of story as far as he was concerned. </p>
<p>JW: What was your neighborhood like growing up in Highland Park?</p>
<p>RN: Very diversified. A lot of different ethnic groups, in fact, I still meet with some of the guys I went to high school and grade school with even to this day. We had a very unique city. It was independent of Detroit even though it was surrounded by Detroit we had our own water supply, our own fire, our own police. We had two hospitals, our own educational system and it was the best of both worlds living there at that time.</p>
<p>JW: Did you primarily, when you were growing up, did you primarily stay in your neighborhood or did you explore around the city?</p>
<p>RN: Well, we could explore because we had a transit system at that time, the DSR, where we could jump on a streetcar, go downtown. We did a lot of walking in Highland Park. Everybody basically knew everybody. It was a situation where we were a little enclave very much – I would say not cloistered but we were a very proud little city.</p>
<p>JW: So you primarily stayed in Highland Park but did you go explore with the bigger city of Detroit at all?</p>
<p>RN: We did. Sunday back in those days was a typical Sunday drive. We would get in a car and we would of course drive over to Belle Isle and we would have to do the routine of going across the boulevard, getting to the bridge, and going under the tunnel and having to honk the horn. That was traditional. And then of course getting out and walking around Belle Isle and seeing what was and what wasn’t. It was always families that were out at that time, something that you don’t see that much of anymore.</p>
<p>JW: What were your impressions of the city at that time in the 50s and early 60s?</p>
<p>RN: I thought it was a box of gems to be discovered. It had anything and everything that would boggle your mind. Things today that we look back and we laugh at but, I mean I remember the huge stove down on Jefferson as you went going to Belle Isle and I was always amazed by that because I could never figure out who would stand there and cook on it. Going up the State Fairgrounds, you used to have car races there years ago and so many different aspects of the city that were just beautiful to go look at.</p>
<p>JW: Then you said you entered the service in what year?</p>
<p>RN: I went into the regulars in 1954, I was originally in the reserves. I was stationed out at Selfridge. I was an air policeman out there at 17 years old. Still wet behind the ears but I went into the regulars in 1954. Left Detroit. Went to San Antonio, TX. Did four years and was a nuclear and thermonuclear weapons mechanic when I was in the Air Force. Came back out of the service in 1958 and couldn’t find a job because nobody needed a hydrogen or atomic bomb repaired so I went to work for an armored car outfit and they were located on Seldon between Cass and Second. We had started out there as a rookie driver and worked my way up to a messenger were I had my own route and my own vehicle and everything.</p>
<p>JW: Is that where you were working throughout the 60s?</p>
<p>RN: Yes, I started there in 1958. It actually was 3 months after I got out of the service. I left there in 1969 and moved to Florida where I went and married my wife.</p>
<p>JW: Very nice. In the early to mid 60s, did you notice any tension in the city or anything?</p>
<p>RN: Towards the – about 1966 – correct that, I would say 1965, I noticed that there was a lot of stress and of course I think it was created by the Detroit Police Department. At that time they had a STRESS unit and it was looked upon as though it was a special tactics type of outfit who predominantly went after minorities which I didn’t see. Of course I was never involved in it but there was a lot of – I could see ethnic slurs, I could see tension in places especially when I worked in downtown Detroit. I worked all over. I worked from Eastern Market to Western Market. I worked down in the Port Authority and all the wholesale houses for all the produce companies and I could notice that there were attitudes then that were displayed that because more and more evident as time went on but when the civil unrest I’ll put it – it wasn’t a race riot as people want to call it in my opinion, it was an upheaval. We first noticed, it was a Sunday morning, I had finished playing golf at I can’t even remember the name of the golf course now. Anyway, Glen Oaks, I believe it was at 13 Mile and Orchard Lake Road, we were coming in off the golf course and noticed a huge, huge fire and at that time we went in to actually have a drink after our round of golf and they had the television on and we saw what was going on. I immediately left there and went home to get my family. Low and behold, one of my golf partners was my wife’s uncle and what I ended up doing was taking my family from Highland Park to Northwest Detroit to get them out in what I thought was a safe area. As I drove back into Highland Park, I could see madness. People breaking windows, just looting and I didn’t care what store it was. They were just grabbing anything and everything. I got my family out to my friend’s house. I went back to the house and it was all hell broke loose. I was in the house and I could feel the building, my house start to shake, it was rumbling and then I realized it was tanks heading from one of the armories down Hamilton through Highland Park and going down the Davidson and about a half hour or so afterwards, I heard the gunfire, the 50 caliber open up and that in itself was a very, very sobering moment. I stayed at the house. I could hear gunfire. Monday morning I got up and went to go to work and in the process I was driving down Hamilton in Highland Park. I was approaching Davidson and I saw an individual standing out in the middle of the street, armed and come to find out it was either a paratrooper from the 101<sup>st</sup> or the 82<sup>nd</sup> Airborne who was questioning me where I was headed. I was in full uniform and I had my sidearm on, my weapon, and I had another weapon in the vehicle to take with me. And in the course of it, he actually warned me not to go in which I totally appreciated. And then I noticed there was a sandbags off to one side and they had a 30 caliber machine gun trained on me and that sort of made my mind up. I wasn’t going to go into town. I turned around, came back, called into the office. I told them what had just transpired and come to find out all of the armored cars that we had with our company had been not commandeered but had been requested and taken over by the Detroit Police Department and the rest of the State Police, they were using them to transport people from point A to point B for safety reasons. When I finally did make it back into work, it was almost total devastation. Places that you would never feel that would be touched by any of this were gutted. Going past tall apartment buildings and windows smashed out and curtains flapping in the air. It looked like a bombed out city and there was still sporadic gunfire. In fact the Saturday after I was making a stop. My driver had gotten out to get the deposits from the company and as he came back out, he needed some other bags or whatever, I can’t remember, he went back inside and as I was sitting there doing some paperwork, I felt the truck rock and I thought he was back to drop off more money and there was no one there and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Did it I think two more times and finally he came back out. I opened the door and I asked him had you been out knocking on the door. He said no, I was inside. Come to find out we had taken three shots to the side of the armored car which came from a burned out building and we had no idea. We couldn’t hear the reports from the rifle because they were firing from inside. It was – even that, almost a week later, there was still chaotic conditions. There were still squads of police going after idiotic snipers. It was something that no matter who relates it, it’s unbelievable.</p>
<p>JW: You said you took your family to a friend who lived out of the danger zone, why did you then come back? Why didn’t you stay with your family?</p>
<p>RN: I think it was a little bit of, I don’t think it was false bravado, but I think it was a little bit of I don’t want anybody messing with our house. Because I was allowed, and legally so, to carry a weapon, I figured that I could protect the house. I knew almost every police officer on the force in Highland Park. I had three or four of them that were very, very close friends of mine and I figured if push came to shove, I could give one of them a call if something happened. Of course, that was the days with no such thing as a cell phone and you needed a landline and if I needed help, I could be there rather than just leave it open to somebody looting it. But I guess it was just, I wanted to protect the property.</p>
<p>JW: So did you stay alone in the house for the rest of the week?</p>
<p>RN: Yes, I stayed – I went and I picked up the family, I think it was about three days later I picked them up. Brought them back and I was totally, totally blown away by what we witnessed on our ride back from the Northwest side of Detroit to Highland Park. It was one stop that we used to have that our company used to service was Star Furniture which was on Livernois just south of Puritan and it was now just a smoldering hulk. There were so many things that you wouldn’t believe. Safes that we had in stores that had been melted right down to the concrete. The only thing left was the capsule that contained the monies. There was just things that I don’t even know how to describe some of it. I won’t say it was horrific or horrendous but it was unbelievable.</p>
<p>JW: As you were driving out to pick up your family, how far out did the damage go out?</p>
<p>RN: When I went to pick them up, I would say from where we lived, at that time we lived on a little one block street called Kirwood, it was between Pilgrim and Puritan, one block west of Hamilton. To drive out Puritan, I would say, if I went across Livernois to going toward Schaffer, there were signs of looting out about that far. I don’t know anything that transpired other than that area or from me going in town because I made no attempt to go anywhere else. I do know that the curfew was on. People were having, if you needed gas you had to get outside the city to buy gas. You couldn’t buy gas in Highland Park, you couldn’t buy gas in Hamtramck. You had to go north of 8 Mile because the idiot fringe was using it to make Molotov Cocktails so they figured they would restrict the flow. Well, where are you going and where are you going to get it. As far as any type of incendiary makeup fuels and oils and whatever, but as far as the devastation that I saw, I would say it would be to Puritan up toward Shaffer and that was it in that area, but heading into town, south of Highland Park, I never saw anything happen in the city of Highland Park.</p>
<p>JW: Okay,</p>
<p>RN: Which to me was a compliment to all of the people, all of the residents, but once I crossed from Highland Park into Detroit, it was a different world, totally.</p>
<p>JW: Did the Highland Park police stay in Highland Park or did they go out into the city and help there?</p>
<p>RN: They basically were protecting in the city, I don’t know if a few of them were handed off to other agencies. My buddies all stayed in Highland Park. My one brother-in-law had just graduated the day before from the Detroit Police Academy when this started and it was unbelievable. He ended up going to Vietnam and he said it was almost the same way when he saw what was happening here in the city back during the riots. Or I shouldn’t say he went to Vietnam. He had been to Vietnam and had come back and said it was just as chaotic here as it was there. Unbelievable.</p>
<p>JW: So then you said you stayed in the area until 1969?</p>
<p>RN: Yes.</p>
<p>JW: So why did you move?</p>
<p>RN: Number of reasons. The situation that took place created a carrying a gun. I almost killed a person.</p>
<p>JW: We can stop for a minute if you would like.</p>
<p>[End of Track 1 00:21:51]</p>
<p>[Start of Track 2]</p>
<p>RN: I had been making a stop and in the course of I had ten thousand dollars on me and an inebriated person who was joking at the time created a scene and in the process I was forced to draw my weapon and I found out at that particular moment that the gun had become mightier than me. I decided at that time that a change of venue would be best. Thank God it happened because I went into partnership with a friend of mine. We decided to go into business. We ended up – he was a Detroit Cop who had had enough, too, and we both moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida where I met my wife. We got married, lived down there, moved back here it was three years later, wasn’t it? Have resided in Michigan ever since.</p>
<p>JW: When you came back did you move back to Highland Park?</p>
<p>RN: No, Highland Park was on the demise then. People had used the terminology “White Flight” for reasons that I will never know. No, my wife and I moved back to Detroit. We hadn’t two nickels to rub together at the time so we moved back to 6 Mile and actually Seymour and Gratiot Detroit’s northeast side and we lived there for a period of time and then we moved out to Sterling Heights. Lived out there for 25 years in our house and we now reside in Shelby Township.</p>
<p>JW: How did you find the city when you came back?</p>
<p>RN: Changed. Drastically changed. Polarized. I see a city even today that is polarized but to me it’s just my opinion, I see a city that is following in footstep with our country. I don’t understand it but for reasons that certain factions have, it’s divide and conquer right now as far as I can see. I see a city that is building. I see a city that is predominantly putting a lot of rouge and lipstick on but I don’t see any substance. I see a town that right now has looking here, I can look across at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a place I used to go to when I was a kid in grade school, loved it. Still do. And my wife and I used to go for the Wassail Dinners years ago and now we hardly even come into the city and not for fear but there’s really nothing here that we would want to become part of anymore. And we’re members of the Detroit Zoological Society. We used to volunteer there. So many different things that we used to be a part of in this city and now sadly to say, we just don’t want to be a part of it and we feel in the past there was some commonality to it. I would go to ball games all the time. I would be at Olympia all the time. When I was a kid I was hung up on sports. Now I don’t even want to partake in any of it and it’s because of, I find, attitudes that – and it’s always using the same terminology. “White Flight.” It’s “You people did this and you people did that.” I don’t know why. I can’t figure it out and nobody can explain it to me.</p>
<p>JW: What do you think would need change in the city to change that view?</p>
<p>RN: People’s attitudes towards each other. I see there is so much I would say individualness if there is such a word. I see people today who think more of themselves than they do of the whole. I see more selfishness. I mean, think when you sit back and look at the city of Detroit, 40s and 50s when I was grade school and high school, it was nothing to jump on a streetcar and go from here to there. To go to amusement parts, we had so many of them around the area. Today, I mean, they reopened up Belle Isle and it turned into a beautiful park. Prior to that, if you drove over to Belle Isle, you had to be careful where you drove because of the broken glass. It was just the attitudes and we some that is still there. There’s a lot of beauty in this town. Beautiful stuff, but you only see about four different factions that are benefitting from it. Why do we need another hockey arena? We had one that was torn down, this one of course is on its last legs so we’re building another one. We’re going to have a soccer arena in town. Not we. Detroit’s going to have. And if you get a chance and just a plug for the, what is it? United States Baseball League out in Utica. Grassroots place, but people feel comfortable. People feel safe there. And to cross 8 Mile Road, I don’t know. I have no idea just what my own personal thoughts are about trying to create, it wouldn’t be a Utopian situation because you’re going to always have people who begrudge others something but just the decency towards each other would be appreciated.</p>
<p>JW: So do you have any wisdom for the city of Detroit?</p>
<p>RN: Yeah, don’t relive the past. Right now all I can say is that I enjoyed my time when I was here working here. I enjoyed my time visiting and seeing all the jewels that were on display for the city and for the people of the city. And now I just see, I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m not that knowledgeable in the English language, I’ll put it that way.</p>
<p>JW: Is there anything else you’d like to add or any other memories you have?</p>
<p>RN: Oh, memories? Geeze. I could start singing the song. No, I just, I do appreciate what you’re doing here because there’s so much of that year that should be remembered. Not for the tragedy that took place but things that took place with people actually coming together to help each other during that time. Everybody hears about the Algiers Motel incident. Everybody hears about so much negativity and there was a lot of people who bent over backwards, like in our neighborhood in Highland Park. The street I lived on, we had a diverse neighborhood. People, black, white, pink, purple, plaid. It was every group you could think of. And we all liked each other and even after the riot, or the civil unrest, let me correct that, even after that, we still liked each other. It wasn’t a situation where somebody held a grudge against you because you were of a different color. They liked you for who you were. Now that seems to have changed. If you’re of a certain color, you’re frowned upon. You are thought less of and I don’t think that’s right.</p>
<p>JW: Why do you call it a civil unrest rather than a riot?</p>
<p>RN: Well, I would say it’s a civil unrest of the simple reason that it was basically the whole city. It ignited so fast and spread so fast, I mean, when you say a riot, a riot had to me, my definition of a riot is something that happened in one locality. This was throughout the city. There were people who were just aching to get involved. I had stocks that I didn’t even recognize. I had about three or four places I had to go on Trumbull and we had no idea what was left, what customers we still had with the company. And I would have to call in to my office if a specific customer wasn’t open. Well, the day that I went out, that Saturday after the unrest, the reason, I was on the two-way radio and I was on Trumbull where I must have lost it was six customers in a row. And it wasn’t because they were closed; it was because they were no longer there. The buildings were torched, they were gone. Burned to the ground. They were still removing bodies from the basements of some of these stores where people had been looting and got trapped inside and it was something like I say. It was from here to there. It was a situation you had to experience. You had to sit there and say to yourself and say I can’t believe human beings would do this to each other and for what? And a lot of hate. A lot of hate came out of it but it was everybody. It wasn’t just one specific ethnic group. People shot for looting, I mean, it’s just. I told my wife, I still remember going into one store that was a customer, in fact, it was just around the corner from here. It was over on Third near Seldon and when I pulled up to make the pickup I noticed that the front plate glass window had been smashed out. It was boarded up. The brothers who owned the inner city market that serviced the area were being brought up on murder charges because the people who had come through, had broken the window out, jumped through the window and when they jumped through the window, the brothers were waiting inside with shotguns and blew them back out onto Third. Because of the attitude at that time, because they were protecting their property, the city didn’t see it that way. Or somebody didn’t see it that way and they were charged with murder. I’d have no idea what took place afterwards if they were found not guilty or whatever but it was a time that the city after all these years is still trying to heal. Hopefully it will.</p>
<p>JW: Alright, well, thank you so much for coming in to share your story.</p>
<p>RN: I appreciate it.</p>
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Audio
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
36min 14 sec
NOTE: The recording is broken into two tracks
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Julia Westblade
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Ronald Navickas
Location
The location of the interview
Detroit, MI
Video
A link to the video
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6Y_P0cubPG8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Ronald Navickas, August 23rd, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
Ronald Navickas was an employee of an armored truck company in 1967. He discusses his childhood in Highland Park and his memories of the week of July 23, 1967. He talks about why he moved and his impressions of the city when he returned and how he feels about it today.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
09/16/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
Language
A language of the resource
en-US
Type
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Oral History
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
||||osm
Highland Park
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
82nd Airborne Division-US Army
Belle Isle
Detroit Workers
Gas Ration
Highland Park
Looting
Snipers
STRESS
White Flight
-
http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/de5b1718769fe671008ebb6784eb9735.JPG
37ec7a400f8245e19d9dd02a23d634bb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
A language of the resource
en-us
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/20/2019
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
James Tessen
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
James Tessen was born in Detroit in 1943 and grew up on the east side. He attended Michigan State University and joined the Air National Guard in 1966.
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
William Winkel
Interview Place
The place where the interview was conducted.
Detroit, MI
Date
The date of the interview in MM/DD/YYYY format.
08/08/2016
Interview Length
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00:22:46
Transcriptionist
The first and last name of the transcriptionist.
Hannah Sabal
Transcription Date
The date of the transcription in MM/DD/YYYY format.
08/24/2016
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>WW: Hello, today is August 8<sup>th</sup>, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am sitting down with Mr. James Tessen. Thank you for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>JT: Pleasure being here.</p>
<p>WW: Can you please tell me where and when you were born?</p>
<p>JT: In Detroit, 1943.</p>
<p>WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?</p>
<p>JT: I was 6 Mile/Gratiot area.</p>
<p>WW: Was that neighborhood all white?</p>
<p>JT: Yes, it was. Yes, it was.</p>
<p>WW: What did your parents do for a living?</p>
<p>JT: Banking. My dad was Standard Federal, and my mother was Manufacturer’s Bank. I grew up in banking.</p>
<p>WW: What was your neighborhood like growing up?</p>
<p>JT: Fun. Memories of just playing a lot with the kids. The things I remember the most were the huge trees. All the neighborhoods were just huge, huge elm trees.</p>
<p>WW: Did you wander around the neighborhood or the city growing up, or did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood?</p>
<p>JT: No, I was fairly mobile at that time. We went just pretty much everywhere on bikes, Chandler Park, even went as far as Belle Isle on bikes. Even to the Woodward Fair Grounds on bikes. That was our mobility, and certainly the busses because the busses at that time would go everywhere and the reliability was incredible.</p>
<p>WW: Did you feel safe traveling the city growing up?</p>
<p>JT: Oh, absolutely. Never gave it a second thought.</p>
<p>WW: What schools did you go to growing up?</p>
<p>JT: Grade school was Welkins, and the high school was Osbourne. I think we were the first graduating class, the first summer graduating class at Osbourne high school.</p>
<p>WW: Were those schools integrated?</p>
<p>JT: No.</p>
<p>WW: Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, did you sense any growing tension in the city?</p>
<p>JT: No. I was probably too young to be aware of anything like that. The key to me was just playing baseball with the guys and my paper route. That was pretty much my life. That was fun.</p>
<p>WW: What did you do after high school?</p>
<p>JT: Went to Michigan State, and after graduating Michigan State, worked at Ford Motor Company in their management training program. Then eventually left there and went into banking.</p>
<p>WW: What drove you to join the National Guard?</p>
<p>JT: It was just kind of an afterthought. I had come down from Michigan State to actually apply to the navy as a fighter pilot, but then because I wore glasses that didn’t work. I was ready to go into the air force. They wanted me. I was getting ready to be sworn in there, but I had put my name in the Air National Guard and all of a sudden they called and said they had an opening. It was like only two weeks before the Air Force commission. I took the Air Guard.</p>
<p>WW: What drove you to join the Air National Guard instead of the Air Force?</p>
<p>JT: Just to be able to continue schooling, if I wanted, working and so on.</p>
<p>WW: What drove you to become a member of the armed forces in the first place?</p>
<p>JT: Well, at that time, you didn’t have much choice. If you didn’t go down there voluntarily, you already had your draft card, and you knew you were going to be called, one way or another. It was non-negotiable.</p>
<p>WW: You joined the Air National Guard, correct?</p>
<p>JT: Air National Guard, correct.</p>
<p>WW: What year was that?</p>
<p>JT: Probably late ’66. I think it was in the fall of ’66.</p>
<p>WW: What work did you do with them?</p>
<p>JT: It was administrative. I was in charge of training. That was my main function because all the guys that were in there had to have different status requirements, continuing education, so I was kind of in charge of all the ongoing training.</p>
<p>WW: What unit did you serve with?</p>
<p>JT: It was called the 127<sup>th</sup> Combat Support Unit. We were based, at that time, out of Metro Airport.</p>
<p>WW: During this time, did you continue to live in Detroit?</p>
<p>JT: I had gotten married—in fact, we had just gotten married in May of ’67 and we lived in Dearborn.</p>
<p>WW: Dearborn? What’s the reason you chose Dearborn?</p>
<p>JT: Moved in with my wife. She had an apartment there, and once we got married, that’s where we lived.</p>
<p>WW: In the late ‘60s, coming back from Michigan State, did you notice any growing tensions in the city? Did the city feel any different than when you had left?</p>
<p>JT: No, because I was pretty much removed from city involvement. I’m starting my new life, so my participation with Detroit itself was fairly limited. So I really didn’t notice anything.</p>
<p>WW: Going into the summer of ’67, did you anticipate any violence that summer, given the mood around the country?</p>
<p>JT: No. that’s a very good question, but it just didn’t register. We’re just caught up in our young lives, and anything you would read or hear was somewhere else. Nothing we thought for here. Just wasn’t in the cards.</p>
<p>WW: How involved were you with the National Guard? Was it your full-time occupation?</p>
<p>JT: No, you put in six months initially, then for the next six years, you would put in two weeks plus a weekend every month. I enjoyed being there and I took the role seriously and did my progressions. I really enjoyed the camaraderie at the time.</p>
<p>WW: Going into ’67, you’re still living in Dearborn, correct?</p>
<p>JT: Yes.</p>
<p>WW: How did you first hear what was going on in the city?</p>
<p>JT: Very good question. The first I heard about it, I was picking up my brother from Metro Airport. Ironically, he was in the Air Force, and he was coming up on leave. I heard my name on the speaker system at Metro Airport and my first thought was, this isn’t good. What’s going on? Come to find out the officers were calling everyone, tracking them down saying, “Report for duty.” That was the first I heard about anything. Huh? You know.</p>
<p>WW: Did they call your house first to find where you were at?</p>
<p>JT: They must have called my house, yes, that’s the only way they would’ve known I was at the airport. The either called my house or got ahold of my wife, because it was in the afternoon. I can’t remember, maybe she called the airport. That was probably it, maybe she called the airport.</p>
<p>WW: When you arrived, when you were reporting for duty, what was the mood of the officers?</p>
<p>JT: The mood was absolute confusion. This is in no means disrespectful to the unit, but no one knew what was going on. We were just like, huh? What’s happening here? Can I go into a little—?</p>
<p>WW: Yeah, go right ahead.</p>
<p>JT: What was interesting—you have to remember at the time, no one really had a handle on this and it was viewed as an insurrection. I’ll come back to that word later. We had no training, being in the Air Guard, for crowd control. Our first assembly when we had to report in was at Metro. They put us on busses, took us to the far side of the airport, and for hours, we were practicing crowd control. Flying wedges, Echelon Riot, how to move a crowd because I don’t think the officers, anybody really knew what was going on. That was the main concern at that time was crowd control. So we practiced for hours, pretending to move a crowd back, left, right, and so on. That was the very first that we knew what was going on. Then we were given our carbines and a limited number of bullets, and then we were obviously on active duty. We got on busses and were transferred to the headquarters, on Beaubien at the time. Everyone stayed on the lawns there until there was some action, something going on, and they would point to Huey, Dewey, Louie, get on the bus, we’re going to go out and see what’s going on. Oh, okay. It was just confusion, confusion, confusion.</p>
<p>WW: The people in your unit were actually given bullets when you went downtown?</p>
<p>JT: Yes, oh, yes. We didn’t load the rifles, but we had—</p>
<p>WW: You kept them unloaded?</p>
<p>JT: Yeah. I don’t recall—we had them in the clips, but you had them separately.</p>
<p>WW: Aside from not being trained for crowd control, was the training that you had received any help during the rest of your duties in Detroit?</p>
<p>JT: No, because we never did anything with crowd control. Never. At least my unit.</p>
<p>WW: What other duties did you perform, aside from crowd control, during the riot?</p>
<p>JT: Oh, quite a few. Can I elaborate?</p>
<p>WW: Go right ahead.</p>
<p>JT: First, as I said, you’d go on calls, getting on a bus to various hot spots, and that lasted, we were on duty for two or three weeks. That lasted a while. Later on, there were so many people arrested, they couldn’t find a home for them, so the bath house at Belle Isle was turned into a prison. I don’t know if you knew that. That was a fascinating experience just to watch what was going on. There were police boats patrolling the island, twenty-four hours, constantly. Our job was to sit on top where the roof looked into one of the yards, and then prisoners would come out for breaks and so on. They just needed people on the roof just in case there was a break-out or whatever. There were never any problems, but that’s what we were doing there. I do recall—and this is going to sound strange—driving around the island and I kept thinking of World War II movies because there were gun placements on the beaches. I remember thinking, oh my gosh, this is like John Wayne movie! My head was spinning at that young age, seeing this machine gun tower on the beach at Belle Isle. It still resonates with me.</p>
<p>WW: Wow. Were you stationed at Belle Isle for the majority of that week?</p>
<p>JT: Maybe four or five days, then we’d move around, different things. One thing I’d like to mention, early on, the 127<sup>th</sup> Combat Support was a reconnaissance unit. And the airplane was an RF-84, which means it was made by Republic—it was originally a fighter—but ours were converted to reconnaissance, so there’s a camera in the front of the airplane, in the bottom and in the nose. The planes would fly low across the city taking pictures. That sounds fine until you look at a picture of an RF-84F, because when you see a picture of it, you’ll see the wing tanks. They were huge gasoline wing tanks right underneath. The rumor started that they were napalm and that our unit was bombing, napalming the city with all the fires going on. You talk about a bad situation getting worse, oh my god. It wasn’t napalm, it was the fuel tanks! Low-level flying over the city taking pictures, so they finally figured out and they let the pilots leave the wing pods at the base because we were only flying from Metropolitan Airport to Detroit. They could do it on internal fuel. But initially they had the wing pods. Oh, my God, you talk about fear going throughout the city. We quickly changed that. Looking back, like oh, my gosh. Towards the end, you know where the I-75 bridge is near the Marathon Oil Refinery? Well on the other side of 75, there’s a park. I don’t know the name of the park, but there’s a park there. And in the park, I think it’s still there, I’m not sure, was a transmitting tower. At the time, this was pre-cellphone, and that transmitting tower, its function, it was the only link between the Detroit police and all the downriver police. That was the only communication. I go back to the word insurrection—no one really knew what was happening, so that had to be protected. So the Army Guard was there. They had a machine gun at the base of the tower, and then my guys from the Air Guard, we patrolled the perimeter. We were there for about a week, making sure no one tried to go in and destroy that tower.</p>
<p>WW: Was there any attempt?</p>
<p>JT: No. Oh, no. It was really kind of nice because the residents and would come over around five o’clock and bring food. That was great! I’m laughing because we really enjoyed the company of the people. There was a line they couldn’t cross, it was fine. We were well-fed, and then come curfew time, they’d have to go back home and we’d say, “See you tomorrow.” I’m not saying that we blew it off. We were trying to keep it light, but everyone was really friendly. They knew we had a job to do and that was it. There were no incidents whatsoever.</p>
<p>WW: In other areas of the city, did you find residents equally as welcoming?</p>
<p>JT: That was the only time we actually had—from my particular pocket—interaction with it.</p>
<p>WW: Aside from you and other fellow Detroiters, what was the mood of other National Guardsmen who weren’t from the city, coming in?</p>
<p>JT: What do you mean, like the mood?</p>
<p>WW: So, like, when you came to the city, you knew the city. For National Guardsmen who had never been to Detroit, do you know if there was a sense of fear with them?</p>
<p>JT: No. Everyone knew we had a job to do because as it progressed, then the—it was either the 82<sup>nd</sup> or the 101<sup>st</sup> came in. Then we remember seeing them commended. That was, I think, towards the last week, or maybe week and a half. Then they were deactivated before we were. We were the first in and the first out. Doesn’t make any difference one way or the other, but that was our only other interaction with full military was when they came in. It was primarily crowd control and so on.</p>
<p>WW: When the federal troops came in, was there a sense of relief that they were coming in or worry that it was that bad that they had to come in?</p>
<p>JT: Neither. Well, probably because they had a little more aggressive training. I don’t know if it was relief, but, oh, okay, fine. They didn’t look down on us, and we really had very little, limited communication. Okay, fine, come on in, guys.</p>
<p>WW: Are there any other stories from that week you’d like to share?</p>
<p>JT: No, that’s pretty much it. The bath house prison certainly left an impression. Wow. Just being there.</p>
<p>WW: You stayed with the National Guard, I’m guessing, for another four years after this?</p>
<p>JT: You had the six-year commitment.</p>
<p>WW: Did the riot have any effect on the training the National Guard received? Was crowd control added?</p>
<p>JT: No, not to my knowledge. We just continued with summer camps and training and having the pilots fly their missions and so on. To tie back, I would say no, there was no direct follow-through. Maybe, it could have transformed for new guys coming in in basic training, which I was already past that, but for us, continuing going up to the two weeks’ summer camps at Phelps Collins, in Alpena, I don’t recall any throwback.</p>
<p>WW: Being a Detroiter, what was the feeling coming to the city and seeing the city on fire for you?</p>
<p>JT: Quite sobering. You were trying to take it all in because really not being aware of problems, I mean, life went on. To see that and the smoke and seeing things on the news and hearing things, you wonder, it was just shock. Whoa, what’s happening? You just kept repeating that question to yourself: What’s going on? What’s going on?</p>
<p>WW: Did the events of ’67 change the way you look at the city? At least, at the time?</p>
<p>JT: Yeah. Yeah.</p>
<p>WW: Did the city become less inviting and welcoming, do you think, after that?</p>
<p>JT: Not to me, because I grew up in Detroit. I was always very proud of Detroit. Even now, all those years coming downtown, you just find joy by looking at different buildings. You drive by feel, you just kind of know where things are, even in different parts of the city. So for me, there was never any concern, fear, or trepidation of coming to the city because I didn’t grow up with that. Things were a little tense, but it was still Detroit. You participated as normal as you could.</p>
<p>WW: You and your wife never had any ideas of leaving the metro area?</p>
<p>JT: No. From Dearborn, then we went to Dearborn Heights, and then Riverview, and now Northville. We’re still kind of on the fringe and always will be.</p>
<p>WW: How do you see the city today?</p>
<p>JT: Better. I think there’s still tension. I think there’s more of an openness to talk and an understanding. You’ve gotta remember, for my age group, growing up late ‘40s, early ‘50s, you were kind of isolated from all this. Nothing registered. This is the way you grew up. There’s no right or wrong. That’s just the way you grew up. I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but okay.</p>
<p>WW: Are you optimistic for the state of the city going forward?</p>
<p>JT: Yes, yes, I am. Yes, I am. The recent—I forgot the names of it—going back to Detroit for the Osbourne clean-up, the Denby clean-ups, this is real. This is not phony. I’m in the Northville Kiwanis and we participated. It is not to get for publicity. This is truly felt that people want to be there. I think the people that go there are well-received. This is huge. This is huge. I think this is definitely making a difference. Yeah, this is good.</p>
<p>WW: Thank you so much. One final question I forgot to add: How do you interpret the events of ’67? You said the National Guard viewed them as an insurrection.</p>
<p>JT: Well, the government officials and so on, that was my interpretation of how they viewed what was happening. This thing was just escalating exponentially and out of control.</p>
<p>WW: Do you see it as a riot or a rebellion? How do you interpret the events?</p>
<p>JT: Just what it was called, a riot. Things just reached a point and it exploded. It was just a combination of events and the spark was there and just boom, that was it.</p>
<p>WW: All right. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I greatly appreciate it.</p>
<p>JT: Thank you. I enjoyed it. </p>
Original Format
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audio
Duration
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22min 46sec
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
William Winkel
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
James Tessen
Location
The location of the interview
Detroit, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ERuggreT938" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
James Tessen, August 8th, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Tessen discusses growing up on the east side and how and why he joined the Air National Guard. He then describes the various duties he performed for the Guard in the city during the unrest of 1967.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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08/26/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
82nd Airborne Division-US Army
Belle Isle
Detroit Metropolitan Airport
Michigan Air National Guard
-
http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/02e9d3ada01d971ae0a063c33a8c264c.jpg
7f1bbe17ea028aca9077b1cd7c1e92a2
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
A language of the resource
en-us
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/20/2019
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
John Crissman
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
John Crissman was born in 1939 in Detroit, Michigan. He began working at Detroit Receiving Hospital as a trauma surgeon on July 1, 1967. He was drafted in 1967 and lived in Cleveland before returning to Detroit where he served as the Dean of the Wayne State Medical School from 1999 – 2004.
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
Hannah Sabal
Interview Place
The place where the interview was conducted.
Detroit, MI
Date
The date of the interview in MM/DD/YYYY format.
07/11/2016
Interview Length
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00:20:02<strong><br /><br />Note: The audio is broken into two tracks</strong>
Transcriptionist
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Hannah Sabal
Transcription Date
The date of the transcription in MM/DD/YYYY format.
<strong></strong>07/14/2016
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>HS: Hello, this is Hannah Sabal. I am in Detroit, Michigan. The date is July 11<sup>th</sup>, 2016 and I am conducting an oral history interview for the Detroit 67 Oral History Project with John Crissman. Thank you for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>JC: It’s a pleasure.</p>
<p>HS: Can you start by telling me where and when you were born?</p>
<p>JC: I was born in 1939 in Detroit, Michigan.</p>
<p>HS: What neighborhood did you grow up in?</p>
<p>JC: I grew up in Charlotte, Michigan, out by Lansing.</p>
<p>HS: Out by Lansing, okay. And what did your parents do for a living?</p>
<p>JC: My mother was a housewife, and my father was a traveling salesman.</p>
<p>HS: What was your neighborhood like growing up?</p>
<p>JC: Small town, middle class.</p>
<p>HS: Was it integrated?</p>
<p>JC: It was a white town. Small town.</p>
<p>HS: Where did you go to school?</p>
<p>JC: I went to MIT for my bachelor’s degree, then I went to West Reserve for my medical degree, and then I went to the University of Michigan for my surgical internship, then I transferred down to Detroit Receiving Hospital, July 1, 1967.</p>
<p>HS: So you had just moved to Detroit in July of ’67?</p>
<p>JC: Correct.</p>
<p>HS: And what was it like moving into the city?</p>
<p>JC: It was Detroit. It was a segregated city; there were certain areas you couldn’t live in. I ended up living near Chandler Park. I commuted downtown, which was maybe four miles.</p>
<p>HS: When you moved into the city, did you notice any tensions?</p>
<p>JC: I talked to a lot of my patients at Detroit Receiving Hospital. I remember one old black lady. She took me under her wing, and she said, “Doc, be careful. There’s something going to happen this summer, and it’s not going to be good. So watch your step.”</p>
<p>HS: So this woman knew that something was going down.</p>
<p>JC: The undercurrent in the black community was there was a lot of unrest.</p>
<p>HS: Were you working when the riots started, or were you at home? How did you hear about it first?</p>
<p>JC: I went to a Yankee-Tigers double header, and when we were coming home after the came toward Chandler Park with a friend of mine, I saw the smoke and I wondered if something had started.</p>
<p>HS: This was on Sunday?</p>
<p>JC: This was on Sunday. I wondered if something had started or—there were a couple fires for sure. We got home, and we’re watching my TV, and we’re watching another ballgame, and I still remember this—this big section came across the TV: “Would the Pontiac National Guard please report to their armory.” And I knew what had happened. I knew the riots had started; had no idea where, when, how much, and then I got the phone call that, about an hour later, to come down to Detroit Receiving Hospital.</p>
<p>HS: When you heard about the events, did you think back to the black patient that you had who said something was going to happen?</p>
<p>JC: Not really. We knew something was amiss. I’d heard it from a number of patients, but I remember it from this one lady specifically.</p>
<p>HS: You went into work on Sunday?</p>
<p>JC: Absolutely.</p>
<p>HS: What was that like?</p>
<p>JC: Actually, it was pretty quiet. There was a paradox because the emergency room basically closed down, because there won’t any of the routine, ambulatory emergency room patients coming in. The first night was reasonably quiet until, maybe late in the evening. But the only things we saw were major trauma.</p>
<p>HS: What was the atmosphere in the hospital like? Was it tense? Nervous?</p>
<p>JC: Nothing. I mean, Detroit Receiving is a trauma hospital. There’s patients all the time. In fact, it was kind of ironic, as I said before, it was kind of a little more quiet. Then the major trauma cases started rolling in. Now I was a new kid on the block in surgery, so my responsibilities were not to go to the operating room, but to take care of all the post-surgery patients and all of the patients out on the wards. I did do some of the initial triage in the emergency room.</p>
<p>HS: The traumas that you received, were they mainly GSWs [gun shot wounds], or—?</p>
<p>JC: Most of them—there were a few gun shots, a lot of stab wounds, and all various kinds of trauma. One of the memories that I have that’s the strongest is that on one of the wards, we had all of these young, muscular black males. It was like 90 degrees in there, they were all sweating in there—glistening, actually—they all had had abdominal operations, and they had all had tape on their abdomen, and they were basically laying in bed. We had these little stomach pumps going, “Tch tch tch tch tch” and there are like 40 of them. It was an eerie kind of situation to be in. The patients were just great. They knew they’d been hurt, they knew they’d been operated on, they knew they’d been saved, and they were very grateful that someone was taking care of them.</p>
<p>HS: I’d imagine so. What else do you remember from that week? Did you work most of that week?</p>
<p>JC: I was at the hospital, I think, for four straight days. I have many memories of those four days. One of the burning memories is that so many people were arrested and the jails were full. You’ve probably heard this before, but they put buses on every corner, and then they would put a port-a-john over the sewer inlet, and you’d look out there, and I don’t think these guys got fed very often. But they were all out in front of the hospital, they were all through downtown. You’d look out there once in a while and see them, they’d be allowed off for handling the bathroom activities, and I guess they got some food, but they were basically incarcerated on the buses.</p>
<p>HS: Anything else? Any other stories?</p>
<p>JC: Oh yeah, I got lots of stories.</p>
<p>HS: Please just go for it.</p>
<p>JC: It was about the second or third night, we were in the recovery room where all the patients come after they’ve finished their surgery, and it was on the fourth floor of the old Receiving hospital, and it had frosted glass windows. We were in the recovery room, and we heard a funny noise, “Ping!” Didn’t think anything of it. I think I was the only physician in there with a number of nurses, obviously. Then we heard another, “Ping!” and everybody started looking around. “What was that noise?” When we heard a third one, we realized that someone was shooting at us from across in a parking deck. We immediately hit the lights and pulled all the patients out into the hall, then informed—they had a police command post on the first floor of the hospital—and we called down and told them that somebody was shooting at us from the parking deck across the way, and the police went out and killed the guy.</p>
<p>HS: Wow.</p>
<p>JC: Which was fine with me.</p>
<p>HS: Well, I mean, he was shooting at you, so…. That’s intense.</p>
<p>JC: Probably one of the most interesting parts of it was when it first started, it was all handled by Detroit Police force, and they became overwhelmed, obviously. Governor Romney called in the National Guard, and these guys looked like somebody off the street that someone had put in uniform. It was a mixture of characters. Some overweight, some underweight, not very military in manner or deport. They did the best they could. Then President Johnson shipped the 101, I think the—</p>
<p>HS: 82<sup>nd</sup>.</p>
<p>JC: The 82<sup>nd</sup> airborne, put them out at Selfridge, and we knew this! We heard about all this downtown! And he held them there for a day, just to embarrass, I think, Governor Romney. When they released the Airborne into the city, it just shut the riots down. These people used to come in, a number of the non-commissioned officers and some of the soldiers would come in and eat at the cafeteria of the hospital. So I got to know them, got to talk to some of them. Very impressive, very tough, very lean, and not somebody you’d want to—</p>
<p>HS: So they appeared more professional than the National Guard?</p>
<p>JC: They appeared frightening. They’d all just gotten back from Vietnam. They were obviously very, very controlled, commanding soldiers. We had one kid that got into the emergency room. He was about 18 years old, maybe 16. Can’t remember, overweight, and just scared out of his mind. We couldn’t figure out how he got in the emergency room until we talked to him. The story he related to me, who was trying to take care of him, was that his brother—these are two white kids—his brother had driven up from Ohio with his brother, found an apartment, and were shooting at soldiers. The airborne were running around town in jeeps with 50 caliber machine guns on the back, and if they had any fire from an apartment, they’d just start blasting the apartment. They killed the older brother, who was the sniper. This kid came running down out of there. They probably would’ve killed him, except that he stumbled and fell on the steps and knocked himself out. This kid was so scared that he was going to get killed, and he came very close to it.</p>
<p>HS: From your understanding, they came from Ohio specifically—</p>
<p>JC: This is what the boy told me, that the brother came up to kill some cops or army people.</p>
<p>HS: I don’t know what to say to that.</p>
<p>JC: Well, we just saw it in Dallas.</p>
<p>HS: Yeah, that’s true.</p>
<p>JC: There’s nutcases out there, there’s no question about it.</p>
<p>HS: That’s why this project is so relevant, you know? Any other experiences? Note-worthy experiences?</p>
<p>JC: Let me think. I’m sure there’s more, but I can’t remember them all.</p>
<p>HS: That’s fine. After the riots ended—I know Detroit Receiving is a trauma hospital, but did the traumas go down at all after that week, back to their norm?</p>
<p>JC: Well, everybody in the city was basically holed up, particularly in the black community. Anybody that got ill had no place to go because you couldn’t move. As soon as the riots ended, there became more normal movement, and we saw an upswing in emergency room routine traffic. That was, I guess, basically a sign that things were returning back to normal. Now, I lived on Dickerson right across from the golf course on Chandler Park. We were sort of at the edge of the black community. There was a public housing on the other corner, off of six mile. There was a big liquor store there, and that liquor store got hit and cleaned out. I came home, and I told my wife—and we had a young baby—I said, “If you have any problems, keep the car gassed, just go north.” I came home, I think, on a Thursday night and there were just lines of people sitting on their porches with deer rifles, waiting for someone to come across Chandler Park, so I felt comfortable that my wife and child were safe.</p>
<p>HS: So your wife and child didn’t have any problems then?</p>
<p>JC: No problems at all.</p>
<p>HS: Was your neighborhood affected at all?</p>
<p>JC: Well, the liquor store about 800 yards away was robbed. One of the funny things that came out of this was all the liquor stores were completely wiped out. And about six weeks after the riot ended, we started seeing alcoholics coming in with chronic pancreatitis, which is a complication of drinking, so the conclusion I reached is a chronic alcoholic, given all the alcohol he wants, will develop pancreatitis in six weeks.</p>
<p>HS: Yeah, that makes sense. How long did you live in Detroit for?</p>
<p>JC: Just that one year, ’67-’68. Then I went into the military. All male physicians were drafted in that era.</p>
<p>HS: Did you end up serving in Vietnam?</p>
<p>JC: I did not, I’m not sure why. I was a trauma surgeon at that time, even though in my first year, but that was the most popular medical specialty at that time, they wanted partially trained general surgeons. But I didn’t go to Vietnam.</p>
<p>HS: When you returned from the service, did you continue to live in Detroit, or did you move somewhere else?</p>
<p>JC: I went back to Cleveland, where I went to medical school. Then I returned to Detroit in 1981, and I’ve been at Wayne State since then.</p>
<p>HS: You are the Dean of the medical school?</p>
<p>JC: I was at one time.</p>
<p>HS: Okay, that’s awesome.</p>
<p>JC: Actually, 1999 to 2004.</p>
<p>HS: You were the dean during those years?</p>
<p>JC: Yeah.</p>
<p>HS: That’s great. You’ve been in Detroit a fair amount, then. Have you noticed any changes in the city?</p>
<p>JC: The blacks now provide a majority of the leadership in the community, and I just came from the DAC—The Detroit Athletic Club—and I know a lot of the prominent black, both politicians and entrepreneurs and business people. That certainly is a welcome relief, there’s a lot of black that have very prominent roles in the community. I drive through the east side almost daily. The ghettos, though not as heavily populated, have not changed a great deal. There’s still tremendous amount of unemployment, young blacks walking around with apparently no role in life, and that has not changed.</p>
<p>HS: Where do you see the city headed?</p>
<p>JC: I think that the rebirth of downtown and of central area, where we’re sitting today, is a huge step in the right direction. I think the real crucial element is going to be restoration of the public and charter schools. If that’s accomplished, I see Detroit resurrecting itself and young families moving back into the community. But I think it’s all going to be crucial as to how public and charter—I include charter under public education—I think it’s going to be very crucial to see how that does.</p>
<p>HS: If you had a message for future generations of Detroit, what would it be?</p>
<p>JC: Well, I think everyone has to continue to work in the direction they have. One of the saddest parts is so many, particularly the black male population, has been lost to society for various reasons, and I wouldn’t even pretend to be able to interpret those, but I think that’s really a sad element. If anything could be done to restore that, I think it would be a huge move in the right direction. I think Detroit—if it gets its educational program back together—people don’t realize, back in the ‘50s, Detroit Public Schools was an excellent organization.</p>
<p>HS: That’s what I’ve heard.</p>
<p>LC: Yeah, and they’ve lost all of that wherewithal and experience, so forth. But I think Detroit has a future. I think it’s going to be slow in coming, but I think it’s clearly headed in the right direction.</p>
<p>HS: Sounds optimistic. Do you have anything else you’d like to share with us today?</p>
<p>LC: I could go on for a long time, but I will end it at this. I probably fulfilled what you needed.</p>
<p>HS: Oh, definitely, yeah. Well, thank you for sharing your stories, we really appreciate it.</p>
<p>[End of Track 1]</p>
<p>[Beginning of Track 2]</p>
<p>HS: This is a continuation of John Crissman’s story.</p>
<p>JC: One of the patients I took care of in the intensive care was a fireman. He obviously was fighting a fire and he was on one of these elevated lifts, and they lifted him into a power line. He was essentially electrocuted. He had electrical burns in his frontal lobes and both of his eyes, and out his left arm. I took care of him for a number of days. As I mentioned before, I did all the scut work, because I was a young guy on the service, so I got to take care of all the patients after surgery. He lived for about five days, eventually died, and I remember his wife coming in. I can’t remember if they had any children; of course, they wouldn’t have come in. But it was a very sad situation. Subsequently I got to know some of the fire chiefs, and they remembered the incident very dramatically as the one fireman that was killed in the riots. That’s it.</p>
<p>HS: Okay.</p>
<p>JC: That’s the only story I forgot.</p>
<p>HS: Okay. </p>
Original Format
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audio
Duration
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20min2sec<br /><br /><strong>Note: The audio is broken into two tracks</strong>
Interviewer
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Hannah Sabal
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
John Crissman
Location
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Detroit, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sElEQ60f3EM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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John Crissman, July 11th, 2016
Description
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In this interview, Crissman tells of being called in to Detroit Receiving to work as a trauma surgeon.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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07/15/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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auido/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
Coverage
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||||osm
Detroit Receiving Hospital
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
82nd Airborne
Detroit Receiving Hospital
Detroit Tigers
Governor George Romney
Gun Violence
Medical
Medical Staff
Michigan National Guard
Snipers
-
http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/4d92baa33bd0f64e957f1938ae38500c.JPG
7d06a85357ffe4ec2e9af964dae74fe3
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Michael Krotche
Brief Biography
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Michael Krotche was born in Detroit in 1941 and grew up in a Polish community in Hamtramck. In 1967, he was working for the Detroit Police Department as a beat officer. After retiring from the police force, he worked as a personal driver. He now lives with his wife in Sterling Heights.
Interviewer's Name
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William Winkel
Interview Place
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Sterling Heights
Date
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06/15/2016
Interview Length
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00:43:06
Transcriptionist
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Hannah Sabal
Transcription Date
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06/17/2016
Transcription
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<p>WW: Hello, my name is William Winkel. Today is June 15, 2016. We are in Sterling Heights, MI. This is an interview for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project and I am sitting down with Michael Krotche. Thank you for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>MK: You’re welcome.</p>
<p>WW: Can you first tell me where and when you were born?</p>
<p>MK: 1941.</p>
<p>WW: 1941? And you grew up in Detroit?</p>
<p>MK: I grew up right on the border of Hamtramck and Detroit.</p>
<p>WW: What was your neighborhood like?</p>
<p>MK: Polish. Very Polish. I went to a great school that taught Polish, masses were in Polish—well, I say mass, sermons were in Polish, at that time it was still Latin mass. Very, very ethnic, very stable, everybody knew everybody. Just a great neighborhood.</p>
<p>WW: What did your parents do for a living?</p>
<p>MK: Dad worked at Plymouth automotive plant. My mother had a myriad of jobs. She worked at some factories, she worked at the Fisher building doing maintenance. We weren’t poor, but we certainly weren’t affluent. Both my parents worked to put us through parochial schools.</p>
<p>WW: What school did you go to?</p>
<p>MK: I went to Our Lady Queen of Apostles for grade school, then I went to Catholic Central for high school.</p>
<p>WW: What year did you graduate high school?</p>
<p>MK: ’59.</p>
<p>WW: ’59? What was it like growing up in the city? Did you stay in your neighborhood or did you venture out?</p>
<p>MK: Yeah, yeah, very much in the neighborhood atmosphere. I can’t say, other than the fact that—I started caddying when I was eleven years old—</p>
<p>WW: You started what-ing?</p>
<p>MK: Caddying, at the Detroit Golf Club. So I started caddying at eleven, and the fact that I went to Catholic Central, which was like a new neighborhood for me, it was Outer Drive and Hubbell. So I wasn’t very familiar with it, but we were pretty much neighborhood oriented, and that was just the times I guess.</p>
<p>WW: Throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, did your neighborhood become integrated or did it stay—</p>
<p>MK: No, it was an ethnic, Polish neighborhood. Most of the people there spoke Polish. Not in their daily lives, but they certainly were capable of it. Like I said, the parish was Polish. The schools were Polish. I wasn’t a Pole! In fact, my mother was Irish, but my father was born in Austria of Polish descent, but I certainly wasn’t being considered Polish.</p>
<p>WW: Are there any experiences you’d like to share from growing up in that neighborhood?</p>
<p>MK: It was just a great neighborhood. We had a lot of kids, we did things together. Probably my first really leaving of the neighborhood was when I went to high school. Ten of us took the test at Catholic Central—I didn’t want to go there, but my buddies did—and two of us made it. And I ended up going out there, and it was probably one of the best things I ever done. But I can’t say I had a lot of really outside exposure until I went to college. I went to Wayne out of high school for basically two years, and in the middle of my sophomore year, my dad died. I was nineteen, I was the oldest of four siblings, I had to go to work. So I quit in my sophomore year and I joined the police department as a cadet and I was in an administrative position for two years until 1963 when I turned 21 and I became a sworn officer.</p>
<p>WW: When you went to Wayne State, did you move down there or did you stay in your neighborhood?</p>
<p>MK: No, I lived at home but I drove myself to school every day. I was selected to play freshman basketball. That was probably my first exposure to African Americans. Cause half the team was white, half the team was black. The coach was black. So that was probably my real association because like I said, the neighborhood that I grew up in was white and Polish. It was a very ethnic neighborhood.</p>
<p>WW: What did you study when you went to Wayne?</p>
<p>MK: Early on, it was just general studies. I had intentions of becoming a cop, even though I was kind of forced into joining the department earlier than I had planned to, because of my dad’s death, but I had always envisioned myself as being a policeman. Always what I wanted to do.</p>
<p>HS [Hannah Sabal]: So would it have been a degree in criminal justice?</p>
<p>MK: They didn’t have a criminal justice program at the time. I went into the general studies with the idea that at some point in time, probably in my second year, I would start looking for a major to declare, but it would be something in the law end of it. In the back of my mind, there were times I thought about being a lawyer, but that didn’t really turn me on.</p>
<p>WW: And what year again did you join the police department?</p>
<p>MK: ’61. February of ’61.</p>
<p>WW: What precinct were you placed into after you joined?</p>
<p>MK: When I joined the police department as a sworn officer, it was February of ’63.</p>
<p>WW: Okay.</p>
<p>MK: And I went to the 7<sup>th</sup> Precinct, which was Mack and Gratiot. I was there for a year, and one of the precincts had a ticket strike of the officers, and as a disciplinary process, they transferred a bunch of them out and a bunch of officers that were in my particular class, academy class, had just completed their probation so they went out and said, “okay, we’re going to replace these guys with younger officers,” and I got transferred without any say-so, just got a phone call saying, “You’re going.” I was there from ’64 to 1970.</p>
<p>WW: At that time the Detroit police department was all white, correct?</p>
<p>MK: Well it wasn’t all white, we probably had—on my particular shift—out of probably fifty officers, we probably had four or five that were black.</p>
<p>WW: Okay.</p>
<p>MK: And there was nothing any different about them than any of the white guys. I mean, everybody got along. Nobody thought of them as black and nobody thought of us as white. I mean, we were all cops.</p>
<p>WW: Was that just the mode in your particular precinct or do you think that that was city-wide?</p>
<p>MK: I can’t speak for other precincts. You know, I can only speak to the precinct I was in. We had probably out of maybe—and again, I’m guessing—150 total officers in that precinct, we probably had ten that were black. There weren’t any problems. Everybody got along. They were all integrated crews: blacks work with whites, whites work with blacks. There weren’t any problems.</p>
<p>WW: For being a police officer in the 1960s, did you notice any tension growing in the city?</p>
<p>MK: Yeah. I think in our precinct maybe a little more than others, because we had a group—basically they were the Black Panthers, is what they were. They were over on Kercheval right near McClellan in a storefront. The year before the ’67 riots, they had created a little turmoil and it resulted in us—not us, but in the department bringing in extra resources. It was kind of tense. It was the prelude to the following year. And that particular group had some people that were known as Black Panthers, and at the very least had an allegiance to the Black Panther movement at that time. And they did some things to try to stir up the pot. There were a couple situations where they got involved in arrests, or they weren’t a part of it, but they intervened. But we had some broken windows, we had some stuff that lasted a couple days. It was kind of a prelude. I certainly never saw ’67 coming.</p>
<p>WW: You didn’t?</p>
<p>MK: No. I mean there were issues—obviously there were issues—but I don’t think, I think if you talk to most of the guys at that time, the vast majority would say they didn’t see it coming. I mean, there were some incriminations, you had some people that were obviously stir up the problems from both sides, but it wasn’t something that I would have forecast.</p>
<p>WW: Where were you living in 1967?</p>
<p>MK: In the area of 8 mile and Gratiot.</p>
<p>WW: On the Detroit side?</p>
<p>MK: Yeah, on the Detroit side. In fact, the very first block in the city limits.</p>
<p>WW: Were you on duty that Saturday night, Sunday morning?</p>
<p>MK: I sure was.</p>
<p>WW: Can you speak about that?</p>
<p>MK: [speaking at the same time] I was working midnights. I had requested a couple hours of comp time because my mother was going to have a little family get-together at my mother’s house. And my mother lived right on the border of Hamtramck and Detroit, where I grew up. About 5 to 6 that morning, we were driving into the precinct lot, and the dispatcher came on and said, “There was a little incident on the west side.” And that was all that was said. Nothing else. “Just a little incident on the west side.” So I went in and I said to the lieutenant, “What do you think?” in light of what we had just heard. He said, “If it were any big deal, we would’ve heard about it by now. Get outta here.” I said, “Okay,” and I left. I went home, I got my wife, got my kids, and I went to my mother’s. I was working midnights, so by the time that we got there, it was roughly ten o’clock probably, by the time we fed the kids. And my sister’s bedroom faced to the west, so that’s where I went to sleep. I went to sleep about ten o’clock, and about twelve-thirty, one o’clock my wife came upstairs and she said, “The station’s on the line.” And I said, “The station?” And she said, “Yeah!” So I get up out of bed and as I did I looked out the window and I could see big rolls of black smoke to the west. And I thought, there must be a hell of a fire somewhere. That’s probably why they’re calling. So I went downstairs, and I answered the phone, and the lieutenant’s on the phone, and the lieutenant says, “How fast can you get here?” I said, “What the hell’s going on?” He said, “We’ve got a big problem right now.” He said, “We need you to get in here as soon as you can.” I said, “Okay.” She took me home, dropped me off, I changed, got my uniform on, I went to work, and I got home the next day at three o’clock. So I was gone roughly twenty-four hours. And that was my introduction to it, like I said, we had no idea there was anything going on! Other than this thing coming on saying there was a little incident on the west side.</p>
<p>WW: Throughout that first day and into the second day, did the police department feel like they could control what was going on?</p>
<p>MK: Yeah, I think they did, but it was starting to escalate. On the east side, particularly, where I was. We started getting looting, little bit of burning, more looting of stores and so forth. There was a liquor store that I think was at Mack and—I think it was Bewick. The State of Michigan liquor store. That thing got cleaned out in no time flat. I mean, they went through the doors in, man, no time flat. It’s funny because I watched Baltimore and I thought, man there’s a repetition, same thing that we saw. We had some shooting, there was some sniper fire. Like I said, there was some burning but we didn’t have a lot of fires, it was more looting than everything else. By Monday it had really escalated. Monday, it took off. I think by the time I left on Monday, it had to be three o’clock, three-thirty, we knew we had our hands full. And we knew that we were losing it.</p>
<p>WW: Given that sense, was it a relief when the National Guard came in?</p>
<p>MK: Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. They had some things—if nothing else, a show of force that we couldn’t exude. I mean they brought in certain vehicles and weaponry—just the sight of it had to be a deterrent in some respects.</p>
<p>WW: Was it the same feeling when the federal troops moved in? The 101<sup>st</sup> and the 82<sup>nd</sup>?</p>
<p>MK: Probably, at that point in time, I think we started to feel like we were getting a little bit of a handle on it, but yeah, without a doubt. I mean when you see army, when you see a tank driving up and down the street, yeah, it gets your attention. They had a command post set up at Southeastern High School. They had a fifty-caliber mounted on the, kind of a round-a-bout, on the lawn of the school. That got your attention. You see that big gun out there, you knew that people weren’t playing games anymore. But yeah, the Guard was probably the first big thing because we started to feel like we were getting some support. When the army came in, that was—I think once the army came in, things started to calm down real fast, whether it was because those that were involved in the damaging and the looting and the rest of it, just [16:04??] but now they’re serious. Now maybe we better pull our lines a little bit, but I’d say start of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, it was probably Wednesday before we started to get the feeling that maybe we’re starting to get a grip on this. More so on the west than on the east side, where I was at. The west side had a lot more burning, a lot more fires, we may have had more shooting. We had a sniper that somehow that got into an old abandoned show across from the 5<sup>th</sup> precinct, and he took some shots at the precinct. And there were some other sniper instances. We had one sniper from Kercheval and St. Jean. You knew he was a sniper because you could see the tracers coming in. We knew we were under fire. He was shooting tracers at us. It was a strange time because you were scared to death, I’m sure most of us were, you didn’t know if you turned the next block if someone would take a shot at you. People were running around carrying stuff that you know is stolen. But at the same time you could go after some of them, but you knew if you did, you’d be sticking your neck out. There could be a whole lot more waiting for you. So some of it was allowed to slide for the first couple days. But the liquor store, they hit that. It was a State of Michigan liquor store, and it got cleaned in no time flat. There was a market, they cleaned that out, and that one they burned. They burned it and it was robbed. Over on Willowbridge and Mack.</p>
<p>WW: After the federal troops moved in and the disturbances quieted down, was there a sense of relief or anger? How did the police department react?</p>
<p>MK: You know, I can’t speak for the department. I can only speak for myself. It was a feeling of frustration, in some respects, because we had seen the city terribly damaged. We were in the national—probably international—headlines. It was never going to be the same. 12<sup>th</sup> Street was never going to be the same. The east side was never going to be the same. Just the attitude in the city was never going to be the same. One of the godsends was the Tigers. That World Series in ’68 was a godsend because it created a kind of unified approach to something that everybody became a part of. That had a big, big impact on maybe lessening what could have been some really bad feeling after the fact. There was a sense of relief after it finally subsided, but there was also a sense of depression because we had seen so much done, so much damage. 12<sup>th</sup> Street was basically eradicated. A lot of people lost homes that shouldn’t have lost homes. Businesses that shouldn’t’ve closed. White and black. It didn’t matter. We knew then that it was never going to be the same. It was never going to be the same.</p>
<p>WW: You spoke about how your first shift lasted nearly twenty-four hours. What were the rest of your shifts like that week?</p>
<p>MK: I got off Monday around three o’clock, and I had to be back for the midnight to 12pm shift, so I worked midnights to noon for the next, I would say, week. I can’t remember exactly when we went back to an eight hour shift, but it was at least a week. Usually we would be busy from the onset, from around midnight until, maybe six, then there’d be a lull, and then it would start to pick up again around, after daylight, around nine o’clock. We’d start to get some incidents and some problems. The other shift, the guys that worked the noon to midnight, they caught bad times. Certainly much worse than we did. In part, because there was a curfew and you had to be off the street—and don’t hold me to the hours because it’s been a while—but it was like eight o’clock to eight o’clock, so we could be driving around at two o’clock in the morning and you wouldn’t see a soul. You wouldn’t see headlights, you wouldn’t see anything. Then all of a sudden you hear, “Pop! Pop! Pop!” The officers that worked the noon to midnight, they got their butts kicked at times.</p>
<p>WW: You spoke about how looting wasn’t heavily—arresting for looting was heavily done because you were sticking your neck out.</p>
<p>MK: We made a lot of arrests for looting, but there were a lot that you just didn’t have a choice, because number one, you were outnumbered. Severely outnumbered. We had four-man cars, and in a lot of cases, they would have caravans of three cars with four officers each. And still, if you pulled into that liquor store, you talk about being outnumbered. You’re outnumbered. There was a safety blanket that you had to maintain.</p>
<p>WW: Was the curfew heavily enforced?</p>
<p>MK: Yeah, and I think a lot of the arrests that were mandated during that time were because of the curfew. A lot. Some people just didn’t take it to heart at first, and when they end up in the bowels of the Bastille, they realize, yeah, I guess they’re going to enforce it. Oh yeah, we had, oh I can’t tell you how many people at one time in that precinct under arrest. 100? And probably at least 50% were for broken curfew. Because that was the one way they had to convince people that you had to stay off the streets. You have to get off. We were going to enforce it rigorously and they did. We arrested—myself, probably a dozen. And most of them were after midnight, and they were out there foolishly. Why would you be out there under the circumstances, unless you’re potentially up to no good? The precinct itself, we had upwards of a hundred prisoners at one time. In fact, we had to store them in the garage because that was the only place, secure place, that we could do it.</p>
<p>WW: How do you interpret what happened in July 1967? Do you see it as a riot? Do you see it as a rebellion?</p>
<p>MK: I’ve always referred to it as a riot because in my connotation of a riot, it’s where public law has been allowed to be trampled on and it was. I mean, there were some individuals that came out that thought that they could talk to the group that started the whole thing, which was the blind pig, and there were some public officials that found out quickly their voice wasn’t being heard. Now I wasn’t there, but I’ve read enough about it that I know that’s what happened. It was a warm night, blind pigs were a dime a dozen. Every precinct had them, every neighborhood probably had them. Certainly in the black community, they were just a social entity. They were illegal, but they were there. It was just a fact of life. And I had done some raids on blind pigs, and we never had any problems. People knew that what they were doing was wrong, you weren’t after the people that were the party-goers; we were after the people that were running it. So maybe two or three people would go to jail, all the stuff would be confiscated. Some of the customers might or might not get a ticket, life went on and they’d be open the next weekend. I mean, seriously, they would! But that particular night, whatever the mood was over there—and I wasn’t there, so I can’t speak to it—must’ve got a little out of hand, and once it got out of hand, six o’clock on a Sunday morning is probably the weakest time for law enforcement. You’ve got the fewest resources. And that’s what happened.</p>
<p>WW: Backtracking a little bit, when you were with the police department, what was your primary work? Just a moment ago you said you did a couple raids, were you on the vice squad?</p>
<p>MK: I was a patrolman from ’63 to ’70, to ’71, and ’71 I got promoted to sergeant. And that entire time I spent in the precinct on the street. Then I was a sergeant on the street for about a year and a half, and I was asked if I would take over the Police Athletic League program, which at the time was miniscule. It was very, very small, but they had visions of advancing the program, and they had an agreement with Chrysler Corporation to come in as a big sponsor and really expand the program. I had a reasonable background in athletics. I had some experience in buying equipment and that. And they asked me if I would come in and take it over as a sergeant. I had bosses above me, but basically I was running it for a time. Chrysler came in and that thing took off. They started spending money, they started sponsorships, it went from a very small program to where it’s at today. I mean, they’re renovating the site of the old Tiger’s Stadium. They’re going to put their new offices down there. So it really took off. And I was there for almost two years, and I was ready to be a cop again. I was an athletic director, but I was ready to be a cop again. So I went back to a precinct and I stayed there, and then I got promoted to lieutenant. Basically I spent my last fourteen years on the street.</p>
<p>WW: And when did you leave the police department?</p>
<p>MK: I left there in April of 1987. Chrysler made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. They came to me and offered me the job as Lee Iaccoco’s body guard. Driver/bodyguard. I really didn’t want the job, but they recruited me, recruited me, and I took it as a one-month trial. I was there two days and said, am I nuts? What am I thinking about? So I left the department officially in April of ’87 and I was with him for eight and a half years. And then I did internal investigations for Chrysler for eight and a half years, and I retired, and just before I retired, they made me another offer I couldn’t refuse, which was a part-time position doing kind of what I was doing towards the latter part of my career, which was investigating people that were out on disability and on workman’s comp that were suspect. They gave me that position. I ran everything from Boston to Vancouver. What I did basically was manage the cases. I contracted out a lot of surveillance work, I reviewed all the surveillance work, and if I thought that there was a basis for discipline against an employee, I would take it to the higher-ups and they would make the decisions, and then I would go interview the employee after he’d been interviewed by our doctor. It was a fun job, probably the most fun job I ever had. You really got a sense of the human psyche. Some of the people…we had one that was blind, couldn’t see; she could drive everywhere better than me! I spent almost 25 years with the department and my only regret’s probably the last couple years, because it got to be so political. It really, really became political. I went through Affirmative Action, I was one of those passed over, bitter about it. I’m probably a little bitter about it to this day. I had to go back and retake, retest. I was 22 on the promotional list, and they promoted about sixty, but I didn’t get it. Because what they did is take one white male, one white female, one black male, one black female. So if you were 22 on the list, are you number 10 white male, or number 22? Cause that’s how it went. But later on, the union took it to court, and because of a labor issue about a year and a half before, the commissioner then made the comment as Affirmative Action was being invoked that if there were any openings in any rank, we’ll fill them. Well here come like twelve openings for the rank of lieutenant and he wouldn’t fill them because they had promoted all of the black males, all of the females, white and black, there was nothing left but white males, so he didn’t want to promote. They gave him another test. Next test came along, they couldn’t pass me because I got so high up. I actually got promoted, and they went back and went to the union, I ended up getting 10 months of back seniority and 10 months of back pay. That was kind of an after-effect in the long run of the change in the city. Because when Coleman came in, things changed dramatically. Particularly the police department. Particularly the police department.</p>
<p>WW: When did you move out of the city?</p>
<p>MK: 1988. I had three cars stolen in a period of nine months, three of my cars. And at the last one I said, okay, I had a new car that I had purchased for my wife got stolen and torched, and I said, “Okay,” I told her, “Go find us a house,” and she did a rock star job and here we are.</p>
<p>WW: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?</p>
<p>MK: Like I say, in some respects I kind of had a sheltered life until I went to college because that was just the neighborhood I was raised in. The city, to me, the real change came with Coleman Young. That’s when the real change came. Even after the riots, STRESS, which came in under John Eccles, probably a major factor in Coleman’s election. But after he came in, everything started changing dramatically. Certainly, certainly with the police department because we went from, probably we had 85% male white, maybe even more than that, to suddenly we were getting a large influx of recruits that were blacks and females both, a lot of females. And that caused some problems, a lot of problems. Did the riots affect the city? Oh, absolutely, no question about it. The election of Coleman I think was probably the major factor. In fact, I’m convinced it was the major factor. Because things were turned upside down. His vision of the city was much different from previous administrations; pretty much different than probably the populous as a whole.</p>
<p>WW: How do you see the city going today?</p>
<p>MK: You know, it’s funny I see a turn-around that I didn’t think I would’ve saw three years ago, four years ago. My biggest fear for the city yet remains the residential aspect of it. My wife and I lived, like I said, near 8 mile and Gratiot. I drove through there about a month ago. It was enough to make me sick to my stomach. I mean, it was a bedroom, bungalow kind of community. Brick homes, nice. You drive down the street, they’re burned out, they’re vacant, they’re abandoned. That’s probably the one area that’s going to take the longest. Until people feel safe to come back. Downtown—I love what I see downtown. I’m glad to see that they’ve finally got the M-1 Project going, I’m glad to see the arenas, the casinos, the housing down there. You’ve got Gilbert, and the Illitches, and other people who have committed their resources to bring that area back, but until the residential areas are brought back, Detroit as a whole is not going to come back. We had 1.7 million people living there in Detroit, when I graduated from high school in ’55, to 700,000 now. That’s where it’s at. It’s in the residential areas. The east side of Detroit is decimated. I mean, absolutely decimated. When we got married, we lived on a street called Lindhurst which was basically 6 mile, well maybe between 6 and 7 Mile on John R. street. You can’t drive down those streets. They’re so strewn with garbage, you literally can’t go through them. You don’t know what street you’re on because there are no street signs. Until that gets turned around, individual homes, people wanting to live back in the city, they’ve got a long haul. Downtown, magnificent. Some of the business areas I’m really pleased to see come back. My granddaughter goes to Wayne. She lives off of Ferry and Cass in one of those 120-year-old apartments, and we go down there occasionally to pick her up and we’ll go have breakfast. It’s amazing to see what Wayne State’s done. I mean, I started out there, but in a different era. To see where that’s come, to see the medical center. My wife was an RN down at Harper Hospital for years. She’s only been gone ten years, but in ten years it’s amazing how much has changed for the good. I’m optimistic for the city. I hope that they continue on the same vein that they’re going on right now. The mayor is a former graduate of my old high school, so I got a little special place for him, but I think he’s done a good job. But he’s got the Gilberts, he’s got the Illitches, he’s got the big money that’s willing to invest, and that’s what it’s going to take. You didn’t have that ten years ago. That’s why, if you drove down Woodward, it looked like a ghost town. It was funny because one night, Mr. I and I were driving home one night from the ball game, we’re driving down Woodward, and there was nothing. He said to me, “My God,” he says, “You could shoot a cannon down these streets!” Yeah. And I said, “This isn’t unique. This is the way it is.” But some of that is starting to turn around, we’re starting to see some of those buildings being renovated, businesses coming into it, so I’m optimistic for the city. I think it’s got a hell of a start to come back. But the residential area, that’s got to be the key. Number one, the biggest reason I think the residential area has to come back, taxes. You don’t have that revenue right now that the city desperately needs. And that’s where it’s going to be. The tax base in the city has been totally eroded, totally. Business can support a lot of tax, but until they get the residential areas up and running, get that and the schools. The school system is pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. I can remember one night when I was still with the department, we had to go up to Northern high school, which was on Woodward; they’d had a break-in. And for whatever reason, they had a bunch of papers, essays, term papers that were outside the building, outside the window. I’m certainly not a professor of English, but I picked them up, starting reading them, and they were horrific. I mean the English, the spelling was horrific! I thought, my God, these are kids that are getting cheated. They’re getting short changed if this is acceptable. They’re getting cheated. I went to Wayne, I’ll never forget. We had a guy who was a professor, he was a Hungarian Freedom Fighter, and he’d come here in 1957, I think. He taught a class and one of the subjects in this day was schools, public schools versus parochial schools. And he made the comment, “I can tell by reading a paper who went to public school and who went to parochial school.” Some of the kids that went to public school took offense to it. He said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a paragraph. All I want’s one paragraph. I’ll grade them and I’ll tell you which is which: who went to public and who went to private.” He missed on two. And I’m not downgrading public education, don’t get me wrong. But that night at Northern, I read some of those papers and I thought, oh my God, how can you accept this? We’re cheating these kids! These kids are being cheated if that’s acceptable! They’re being cheated.</p>
<p>WW: One final question that I did miss earlier: Of the arrestees, were they primarily black or a solid mix?</p>
<p>MK: I would say probably 90% of those arrested—maybe I’m a little off, maybe 80% of those arrested were black. The area that I patrolled was probably 90% black. I can think of one Hispanic that we arrested and the only reason I think of him was because to this day, we’re convinced he was one of the snipers. Couldn’t prove it, but we knew damn well he was.</p>
<p>WW: All right. Thank you very much for sitting down with us today!</p>
<p>MK: Thank you. I don’t know what I’ve contributed, but…</p>
<p>WW: Greatly appreciate it.</p>
Original Format
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Audio
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43min; 06sec
Interviewer
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William Winkel
Interviewee
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Michael Krotche
Location
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Sterling Heights
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NwEQRg7cEus" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Michael Krotche, June 15th, 2016
Description
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In this interview, Krotche discusses growing up in a Polish community in Hamtramck and his experiences as a Detroit police officer on duty during the summer of 1967,
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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06/21/2016
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
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Audio/WAV
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
82nd Airborne
Black Panther Party
Curfew
Detroit Police Department
Detroit Tigers
Gun Violence
Hamtramck
Looting
Mayor Coleman Young
Michigan National Guard
Snipers
STRESS
-
http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/e7d9c9265a2667cd132037d91d0ed22f.jpg
a1af5fc6830e3cb021c88546b07e18ed
Dublin Core
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Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
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Detroit Historical Society
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Written Story
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Text
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In 1967 I was a Detroiter and in between my junior and senior years at the University of Michigan. I was working that summer as an ER/OR orderly at what was known that year as Detroit General Hospital. It had been Receiving Hospital before that and would become that again before becoming part of DMC.
The Saturday night the riots started I was working the night shift in the ER at Detroit General. I noticed a lot more police activity around the ER early that morning but not much in the way of increased patient count as I prepared to go home from my shift Sunday morning. As I was leaving two Detroit police detectives asked me where I was going. I told them I was going home and they asked where I lived and how I was going to get there. I was a northeast Detroit resident and told them about my route home via I-75 (Chrysler). They looked at each other and said “OK, but don’t go anywhere else”. I knew something was up but there was absolutely no public mention of what was going on at 12th and Clairmount.
I got home about 7 AM and told my parents that something was going on nearer to downtown. We turned on the TV, but there was nothing to see or hear. About 10 or 11 AM I got a call from the hospital asking me to return to work because they really needed the help. My mother absolutely would not let me drive there so I told the hospital that I could work but they needed to get me there. That seemed to be a common response from hospital staffers and the hospital offered to pick me up in an ambulance along with some other employees who lived near to me. They came by that afternoon and for the next 3 or 4 days I was at Detroit General.
A lot of things are a little fuzzy but some things are not. I remember working both in ER and OR. I remember wrapping 10-15 bodies by myself and wheeling them down to the morgue. We used to wrap the deceased in the green OR sheets and cover them completely before transport. I remember that the morgue drawers quickly filled up and I left the gurneys with the wrapped bodies in the aisles of the morgue but inside the refrigerated area. And I remember sleeping on an unused operating room table a couple of times.
Probably my most vivid memory is hearing gun shots outside the hospital even though the main riot area was father away. And mostly I remember the arrival of the 101st Airborne about 2 days into the riot. The Michigan National Guard was having a hard time getting a grip in the situation so they called in the 101st. just returning from Vietnam. They ate with us in the cafeteria with their M-16 rifles slung over their shoulders.
When they showed up things calmed down in a hurry. I remember one patient who apparently had been shot by the soldiers. He was bleeding profusely from several gunshot wounds and they couldn’t get blood into him faster than it would bleed out. They stopped trying after a while and I wrapped that body in about 6 sheets to try and contain the blood from dripping over the edge of the gurney. He had wounds from his upper torso down to his legs like he had been strafed and the exit wounds were a lot bigger than the entry wounds.
After I finally got home from the hospital, I and a couple friends took a tour of the Clairmount area after it had been secured – there were still NG troops stationed in the area. It truly looked like a war zone with all the debris and burned out buildings. I took some Polaroid pictures but those have long been misplaced along with my commendation letter from the City of Detroit that they gave to the hospital staff that helped during the riots. It’s OK that I lost them – I remember enough.
Original Format
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Email
Submitter's Name
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Kenneth Ura
Submission Date
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06/17/2016
Dublin Core
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Title
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Kenneth Ura
Description
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Ken Ura was an orderly at Detroit General Hospital in July 1967 when the unrest initially began and was called back again the next day to help.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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06/17/2016
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
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Text
Language
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en-US
Type
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Written Story
Coverage
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||||osm
Detroit General Hospital
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Detroit General Hospital
Gun Violence
Michigan National Guard
-
http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/a8928d4d38b0042a9ef7605a4fd260f5.png
db9c584602637b92c45565d09dfc1e60
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iTTGZjZmPYg" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Anthony Fierimonte
Interviewer's Name
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Ric Mixter
Date
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10/10/2014
Interview Length
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00:51:35
Brief Biography
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Anthony Fierimonte joined the Detroit Police Department at age 17. In 1967 he was working vice, and was involved in the raid on the blind pig on July 23. Fierimonte took advantage of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration programs to attend college, eventually earning a doctorate. As a professor, Fierimonte taught racial and ethnic diversity-related courses, sociology, and criminal justice. Fierimonte now resides in Florida.
Search Terms
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Detroit Police Department, undercover, 12th Street, blind pig, STRESS,
Interview Place
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Detroit Historical Museum, Detroit, MI
Transcriptionist
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Bree Boettner and William Winkel
Transcription Date
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02/15/16
Transcription
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<p>Ric Mixter: Tony, can you tell me first your first and last name? So I have it on tape. <br /><br />Anthony Fierimonte: I’m Anthony Fierimonte. <br /><br />RM: How do you spell that? <br /><br />AF: I was born Antonio Luigi Giuseppe Fierimonte. My mother thought I was going to be the Pope. She was mistaken [laughter]. Anthony Fierimonte. F-I-E-R-I-M-O-N-T-E. <br /><br />RM: Tell me about your folks. Your dad did what? <br /><br />AF: My dad, Pasquale Fierimonte, worked for the city of Detroit. The Department of Street Railways, which was the bus line. Streetcars and the bus line.<br /><br />RM: What was his job specifically? What would he do? <br /><br />AF: He was a mechanic and unfortunately one of his jobs was grinding brake drums that were made of asbestos and that’s what killed him. He died of —but I gotta tell you a story about my dad. When he retired – it was in the sixties – he retired and got a job somewhere else and then he retired again, but he wanted a new house. And he informed me that because the city of Detroit hired him and gave him a job for all those years, what he’s gonna do is build a new house in Detroit. So in the sixties he built a new house in Detroit. And he told me, “Son, you’re a policeman now and you've got to do exactly the same thing. You've got to live in Detroit.” So, I bought a house about eight blocks from him in Detroit. And he was so dedicated to the city, it was amazing.</p>
<p>RM: I’ll bet.</p>
<p>AF: Really, really nice. <br /><br />RM: What age was it where you thought, “I want to put a badge on.” When did you become – <br /><br />AF: Well, I went to Pershing High School and I got so many tickets from speeding and stuff. I really said, “Boy, I’m in trouble.” And there was a police cadet program that you could start at age 17 and then you worked in different police stations, in downtown and headquarters. And you answered switch boards and bank alarms and all kinds of stuff that came into the switchboard. And I said, “Well maybe if I became a police cadet I’ll quit getting all these tickets" [laughter]. But my buddy’s father worked in a cruiser called “the Big Four” and there were three plainclothes officers and one uniformed driver and he told us stories about the Big Four. And they had DeSotos or Buicks, while all police officers had Fords. So I thought, “Boy, this is great!” So that’s really what— It was Mr. Jepson. I remember his name and I applied for the police cadet program and I made it, and I started 17 in the police department. <br /><br />RM: Woah. <br /><br />AF: Right out of high school. <br /><br />RM: Now, you took it very seriously, because I saw you were first in your class when you – <br /><br />AF: Yeah, I was scholastically and that was a lot of fun. <br /><br />RM: Why was it so important for you to achieve like that? <br /><br />AF: I just – I wanted to be the best at whatever I did. And I said, “If I’m gonna be a policeman—” Oh! I gotta tell you another story. So there was an Italian inspector, Pete DeLuca, and he used to live with my dad in a rooming house. And he said to me, “What precinct would you like to go to? I can send you anywhere you want.” And I said, “It doesn’t make any difference.” And he sent me to the tenth precinct and I worked the area where unfortunately the riot started. But I said that and so, therefore, that’s where I ended up. <br /><br />RM: Describe the city at that time, what was happening? <br /><br />AF: Oh my god. Great! It was the biggest single family residential city in the United States of America. And there were probably between 1,400,000 and 1,600,000 people at that time, so vibrant. And the black community came in Detroit [during] World War II because there were jobs here in the factories and stuff. And that’s how Detroit became a terrific city to live in and I just love Detroit, it was great. J.L. Hudson’s downtown, the toy department on the twelfth floor [laughter] and we’d take the street car down there. And it was just a great place to live. <br /><br />RM: What was the department like was it becoming more integrated at that point?</p>
<p>AF: That’s really interesting because I actually became a police officer in 1962 and they just started integrating [squad] cars. So having gone to Pershing, where [it was] half black and half white, I didn’t understand this integration as being a problem. Yet, a lot of white police officers really fought it. They didn’t want to be part of the integration. Some police officers quit and I just didn’t see any problem with it. So, we got integrated and it was a slow process, but it worked. It worked because later in the ’67 era, the Federal government started having civil rights classes for police officers. Plus, the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAP) started paying for college if any police officer wanted to go to school. And then when you went to school, they taught police service in the community and race relations and slowly it broke the ice. And I was so excited; I signed up for the first class and went for 16 years until I got my doctorate [laughter]. And I really appreciate the federal government. What they did and it was just wonderful. And it really helped break the ice for the police department. <br /><br />RM: And still in the city there were dark sides, where you needed a VICE team. And you kind of gravitated towards that didn’t you? <br /><br />AF: Yeah what happened, I had about 40 or 50 days on the police force and a sergeant, Gus Cardineli, pulled over one day – I was walking the beat on Twelfth Street, no PREP radio, by myself, no problem. And he said, “Hey kid, you want to go undercover?” I couldn’t believe it! I had 50, 40 days on the job. I said, “Absolutely!” So he took me under his wing and he says, “Show up. You’re going to be arresting prostitutes, going at the illegal gambling casino, blind pigs where the illegal liquor is sold, and you’re going to do that kind of stuff. And oh my god, I went home just jumping up and down with joy. It was just great. We worked every other month nine at night till five in the morning and then on days, we looked for numbers men. Do you know what numbers men–? Numbers men is just like when you go in and play three numbers. It was illegal then and the people would go around and say, “You want to bet today?” and they would give them a quarter or fifty cents and they would bet three numbers and then at a certain time, based on horse races, they would calculate different horse races and come up with a number. Now, the number was the mafia number. The Italian community ruled that. They ruled that for probably about 15 years, but half way through that there was the black Pontiac number. There was a black number and a white number and the numbers were different. It was supposed to be the same scenario [laughter]. I think when too many bets came in on a certain number, they changed it. I don’t know. But anyway, that was on the day shift and on the night shift we did the other thing and it was really exciting. <br /><br />RM: Was there a bigger crackdown when Cavanagh came into office? <br /><br />AF: No. I've got to correct something. Every precinct had a “clean-up crew” that did this type of thing: liquor enforcement, beer and wine stores selling to minors, bling pigs. Every precinct had one, white community and black community. It wasn’t singled out for just the black community at all. And I've got to admit to you, working in the black community was twice as much fun as working in the white community and I’ll tell you why. Because as we made these raids and stuff, they would go along with it and say, “Hey, you busted us. This is it.” And I did eventually go into the white community and do the same thing, and they always had a friend who was a judge and a police commander or lieutenant and “you can’t take me in. It’s going to be the end of my life,” and I said, “What B.S.” You know? It was much more fun in the tenth precinct. And that’s the true story. <br /><br />RM: Can you explain the Blind Pig, what’s the origin of the name? <br /><br />AF: Yeah, it started during prohibition because you couldn’t get booze anywhere, so people – oh I don’t know where the world started “blind pig” but that was the nickname they gave it in the prohibition days. And this is what’s happening with Detroit which was really kind of exciting. The Baptist ministers, especially the black Baptist ministers they were all tight with any administration it was, Cavanagh, Cobo. Who was the Italian mayor? Miriani. And what they would do, they would say, “Hey you've got to stop these people from doing, going drinking all night, you know, we’re the church.” And so they made sure all the bars closed at 2:30, liquor quit being served at 2 o’clock, so you got this element saying, “This is it, come to church tomorrow” then you got this other element saying, “I’m not ready to quit drinking I want to have some fun.” I always wondered what would have happened if the city would have allowed bars to be open until 4 or 5. Las Vegas of course does, some other cities, Florida allows – you buy a longer license so you can stay open till 4. But they didn’t, the Baptists were strong, so you had this dichotomy. And so we were told to enforce the law, and that was the law. You couldn’t do anything in that venue after 2:30 in the morning and you had to be licensed. And now a blind pig you could, mostly to sell liquor, then a step up there was prostitutes and you could go in a room and do whatever you wanted the prostitute to do. Then there would be dice tables and you would gamble and you could do all that stuff in a blind pig. Any time somebody took a cut of the money it became illegal and that gave us the right to break in to rescue the undercover officer that was inside the place. So we would give him, after we saw him walk in the door, we’d give him five minutes to make a wager or buy a drink and see the guy accept money, see him take his cut, gambling table take his cut, and then we would raid the place. And it was, from ’62 when I started, to the riots, the night of the riots July 23, 1967, a crowd would gather when we made a raid it was something to look at, you know. But we never had a problem. But the country was getting tense and things were happening all over, and a lot of the black community was unhappy [with] what was happening. Because they felt they were segregated and they couldn’t get employment that they wanted, and they were stuck in, apartments that had been cut up and one apartment became two. And just a few people had air conditioning in the hot summer nights and they would go out on Twelfth street and Linwood and Dexter and they would go out to see what’s happening and it got out of hand. <br /><br />RM: You sent in two officers in to the one that happened in ’67? <br /><br />AF: Yes, yes, we had a Sergeant Howison who told me he would kill me if he ever saw me again [laughter] he was a relief sergeant, he was a patrol sergeant but he was filling in for the night. I was the crew leader and we had two black officers, Charles Henry and – my mind just went blank.</p>
<p>RM: That’s okay.</p>
<p>AF: So, Charles Henry and [flipping through notes] I’m not going to tell you ever [laughter]. Joseph Brown. Charles Henry and Joseph Brown. And Charles Henry ended up becoming a commander, and he was a really, really nice guy – and I don’t know the career of the other officer. Sergeant Art Howison stayed in the patrol. But I've got to tell you a side issue, so now Congress calls the police commissioner in Detroit, I’m guessing Ray Girardin—no it wasn’t Ray Girardin. Anyway the police commissioner, the number one guy, he was an appointee, and Sergeant Art Howison went with him to Washington, DC to testify in Congress and Sergeant Art Howison was really clever on the way back I believe on the train, he asked the commissioner if he could have permission to live out of the city, because at that time nobody could live out of the city, police or fire, and he gave him permission. So I was always, wondering what if I would have gone along, I could be living on a lake somewhere, in a cottage but anyway. He was a fine sergeant, and all the guys were great, really great. <br /><br />RM: The day you went in, what was the cue that you guys could come in then? Did you have wireless? <br /><br />AF: I had an informant, and the informant, I would, he would give me stuff, you know, you work with informants and you gave him breaks because you've got to barter. And he says, “I got a hot party going on tonight at 9123 Twelfth Street, Twelfth Street just north of Clairmount, two buildings, upstairs,” and so got together with Henry and Brown, and I says, “Hey, let’s give it try, you go down there and see if you can get in.” They did and they couldn’t get in so then they came back and I says, "You know what, wait ‘til some beautiful ladies go up to the door and go in with them." Sure as heck, they got in. So then it was real simple, all we had to do was wait five minutes and they knew they either do it or come back out, you know. And they actually were able to get up there and make an illegal buy and so I says, “Hey this is easy we’re going to break the door down," so we went up and we, just four or five of us, because we had no problems with blind pigs, and we couldn’t get the door down. We couldn’t break the door down. And you know, now they have all those [gestures a ram], but then we didn’t. And the fire truck happened to come by and says, "You wanna borrow our ax?" and I says, "No, you do it," and they were able to break the door down. So we went up these tall flight of stairs and we go into the room. We expected 15 people, 20 people. There were 85. 85 in a room that fit, tops, 40. And we went in and announced, “Police, everybody calm down it’s a raid, dah dah dah dah dah.” And they started throwing cue balls at us, there was a pool table. So I grabbed my police officers to pull them out of the opening into the hallway and other blacks held onto the black police officers. "You’re not taking anybody to jail!" [laughter], they meant well. Anyway, we got them out there, we closed the door and they started throwing things out the window. Chairs, throwing cue balls and they drew a crowd so then we had a PREP – I think we had a PREP by that time, PREP radio – and I called for a paddy wagon, you know to take the prisoners in. And I says, "I think I’m gonna need two or three paddy wagons," I says, "They’re really a fight in there." I could hear them fighting. And the dispatcher says, "We don’t have enough personnel in the city,” honest to god truth I can’t believe this, “to send you the paddy wagons.” We have 204 – I learned later, we had 204 police officers working the whole city of Detroit, 1,600,000 people. And we had 5,000 police officers at that time, but it was a weekend and all kinds of people got time off. I don’t know, I don’t know. So, they had a special patrol force, these are people just out of the academy that are being trained and the sergeant that is in charge of the patrol force heard my calls and he came with the men, and then the cruiser, remember I told you about the cruiser, they pulled up and a crowd gathered and somebody broke the back window out of the cruiser, the Buick—great looking car—and it got out of hand. We finally got paddy wagons and we loaded the paddy wagons and took them into the tenth precinct, which was brand new on Livernois and Elmhurst, brand new police station. We were at Joy and Petoskey before in a building that was built around 1900. So this was such a nice improvement and I told one of the police officers, go into the deli on the corner and call us on the phone every once and a while and tell us what’s going on. And I go into the police station with the prisoners and Lieutenant Ray Good, I’ll never forget this guy loved him, older gentleman, and I says, "Boss, you better get out there. There is a big problem brewing." and he said to me, "Fierimonte, you’re always exaggerating, every time you do something you exaggerate." I said, "Boss, I’m telling you, go." He says, "You know what I’m going to 5 o’clock mass, I’ll stop out there and take a look, but you know Tony, I’m wasting my time." Half hour later he comes in he’s bleeding from his forehead, [laughter] somebody threw a stone at him, "Fierimonte, I’ll never talk to you again! What did you do, you dumbass? What the hell is going on?" Anyways, he then started the ball rolling for MO4, which means calling all police officers in. A huge crowd had gathered and they started to break in to these stores. Now what was interesting, I consider it a riot; I don’t consider it anything else, because unfortunately they broke into black businesses, they broke into white businesses, they started stealing everything out of the stores and then the mayor was notified and he went out there with Senator, god who was it, state Senator. I think he’s still a state senator. <br /><br />RM: Levin? <br /><br />AF: No, no, no, black senator. <br /><br />RM: Oh. <br /><br />AF: Conyers! Could have been Conyers. I’m almost positive. And they gave the order, don’t shoot, be cool, just let it go. That was the order they gave them, and word got out. Word got out, and suddenly there’s, you know, 50,000 people on Twelfth Street just helping themselves to everything. I think part of what they said was okay, but part of it was not, because people started dying. They got into a fight in a meat market, looting the meat and they hung one of the guys on a meat hook, and killed him. Then on Seward and Twelfth was a liquor store, and while they looted the upstairs, some guys went down to get the cases of booze downstairs and the guys upstairs put the place on fire and everybody in the basement died. And that really started to escalate, and the most – I’m jumping ahead a little bit because this was a 14-day situation. I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but picture this: when the fire department came out, they would shoot at the fire department. So on Linwood – and I have pictures of this for an eighth of a mile – on Linwood they were breaking into the stores on Linwood and then they would set the stores on fire and then they would go down Pingree to put the stuff they’d taken into their homes. Now you gotta understand, this is very important, this was probably ten percent of the people in the community. This wasn’t everybody. I mean all kinds of blacks came up to us, saying, "Please help us" and ten percent of the rioters, easily, were white. It was a festive occasion but it was deadly. Then every single house on both sides of the street for an eighth of a mile burned to the ground, and I have the pictures and everything. And it was just mind boggling. <br /><br />Now I want to lighten this up. So two guys stole a Munzt TV with a stereo and a radio. These were really long – you probably got them in the museum here, and they got into a fight. One guy split the damn thing in half and the other guy called the police. So, that was the easiest two arrests ever made. [laughter] Another thing, they went into a carpet store and stole a ream of carpeting and put it on the roof of a Volkswagen and all four tires splayed out and it was just funny and tragic at the same time. Now you've got to remember the majority of the black community wasn’t involved in this but then you've got to look at it another way, they were destroying the stores in their neighborhood that they had to shop in and a lot of people in the neighborhood – it was a poorer neighborhood – didn’t have cars and they had no place to shop to. And this lasted for years after all this fire and everything. I became an anti-sniper, working 12 midnight to 12 noon and I got that silly police car that I loved with no back window. And we put a piece of plywood under there and we put a Thompson submachine gun on the trunk and we were supposed to shoot back at the snipers. Trust me, I couldn’t hit anything with that machine gun, if I had thrown it at them, maybe I would have hit it. That thing danced all over the place, it was a .45 and it was a joke, you know. Then a company called Stoner lent us weapons that could go through brick, and they brought in a special squad, dressed in all black who – they would go out, if somebody shot out a window they’d shoot back. 47 people died during the riots in 1967, but what really stopped it was not us. The State Police couldn’t stop it, the National Guard couldn’t stop it, the 101st Airborne came in from Vietnam and they brought tanks and the tanks went down the street, and I only have one story about the tanks that I was involved in. We had somebody shooting out of a church steeple and we were at Davidson and Woodrow Wilson, and south was the church steeple, we could see the flashes. And the guy opened the lid on the tank and said, "Block your ears," and he shot the steeple right off the church [laughter] with the gun and once that started happening and, there was you know, military in there and they treated it very aggressively, everything stopped. Now if I can go aside for a minute there was something else to think about, a year later unfortunately, Martin Luther King got killed and the instructions from the police department – I was 28 when that happened – was to take enforcement action immediately and within two or three hours everything had stopped and nothing happened. There was no problems, but for the first two or three hours there were. They were looting on Grand River and everybody’s coming home from downtown Detroit out Grand River to the Redford area and everything stopped. So, you know, it’s easy to Monday morning quarterback, do you go back and say, "Well we shoulda done that," you know. But Cavanagh was feeling for the community, you know, and they were suppressed and they note they had problems with jobs and a lot of it exists today unfortunately. You know it amazes me that there isn’t even good bus service to the suburbs so people can take a bus and get a job in the suburbs, a lot of people would like to do that. Now I know Detroit’s making a comeback and I love it and the community, it’s going to be strong and great but it’s going to take time. I went on to become an adjunct professor at Wayne State University and I taught Police Service in the Community and some race relation classes and when they put my name on the syllabus they would say police officer and I’d get 98 students because what police officer could say anything about race relations? We had a ball. We had a ball. We did a lot of role reversals and all kinds of really neat things and it was so much fun. And when I got my doctorate, I had retired, and I started helping troubled police officers. I worked with a physiatrist in St. Clair Shores and then when the patients would not show up, because police officers have a tendency to not show up because they don’t want to deal with the problems they have. I started investing in real estate and that became my third and final career, I have a Fierimonte Street in Clinton Township, we built a couple hundred condos, I was a small partner —25 percent— shopping centers, built a restaurant called Tony Pepperoni’s and retired from there moved to Florida and now I buy condos on the intercostal, fix them up and sell them. I’m on my twenty-ninth one. <br /><br />RM: Wow. <br /><br />AF: I did volunteer work in Broward County, Florida, which was really really nice, it was in a major crisis situations I worked with the families of the deceased. And I’m also on the Pension Board for the City of Deerfield Beach and three other organizations. I don’t wanna bore you to death. <br /><br />RM: No, you’re not. <br /><br />AF: But, I’m 74 years old and the police department was the greatest job I ever had. Really the greatest <br /><br />RM: Tell me a little more about when the tanks rolled in. What did the Police Department feel? What was the feeling of this massive military force was coming in? What were you feeling? <br /><br />AF: Great relief, really great relief. It was, we needed it. We couldn’t handle it, it’s just sporadic shooting and you’re driving down the street and suddenly somebody’s shooting at you from a window and they came in. Now, there was a Lieutenant Bannon, he retired as I think a deputy chief, now he could hear radio communication between people. The Panthers, you remember or have you ever read about the Panthers? So there were groups and they’re organized to do the shooting and everything. And I always wondered what did they think it was the end of the world? Now the flip side of that was there were some police officers, I know one that got fired, who thought it was gonna be the end of the world, who thought we were gonna rule the community with, you know, all force. But the Black Panthers were a big issue with the sniping. <br /><br />RM: Let’s talk about once the tanks came in, you said you saw the one steeple get blow up? <br /><br />AF: Yes <br /><br />RM: Did you see that it was starting to calm down at that point? <br /><br />AF: Yes, it really calmed down quickly, in a matter of I think three or four nights. <br /><br />RM: Wow, and then what happened? How did—? <br /><br />AF: Everything got back to normal, it just ended. And that’s how they happen that way today. They just end. You know the Rodney King thing in California, they do 3-4 million dollars’ worth of damage and then it ends. And, did Rodney King deserve to be beat up that night, you know? It’s up to the courts, that’s the court’s decision to make not a policeman’s. That’s how it goes. <br /><br />RM: Was there a grudge by the police then because of what had been happening?</p>
<p>AF: Yes, after the ’67 riots there was a grudge, and that’s when the Federal government came in and there was some great reports, the Kerner Report on the riots and all kinds of instructions of how to quell – how to improve the relationships between the police departments and the community. Now, I gotta tell you an interesting story, when Coleman Young became mayor in 1974, the black community was seventy percent of the population and in the police department they were thirty percent of the population, so I mean something to think about. I had the honor of working for Deputy Chief Frank Blount, who is deceased now, and he became one of my best friends, and he wanted to make that right. I proposed to him and the mayor at a meeting that we hire – they were laying off at Chrysler Corporations in ’74, the gas crisis and everything – I said, "Let’s go after the black community those people that worked at Chrysler for 5, 10, 15 years, let’s hire them as policemen." I says, "You know they’ve got a proven track record and everything," and the mayor said – it was his call – "I got elected by the people of the City of Detroit and I don’t care if somebody was arrested once, let’s lower the qualifications, let’s hire the people off the street, that’s the people who voted for me," and I always think that was a problem because why not go for the best? But he felt we’re going to hire black people that live out of Detroit? Should we do that, shouldn’t we do that?’ And he made it clear we’re not doing that. And I got involved – if I can go for a minute – I got involved in Boston Bussing, Judge DeMaso ruled that they had to cross district [bus] in Detroit. So they sent me to Boston with Deputy Chief Frank Blount, Sergeant Vivian Edmonds and two other officers and we talked to the police department there, how did it go, what problems did you have? And one police officer that was on a motorcycle between buses as they were being crossed district, somebody threw a brick out of a window. It didn’t hit him, but he died of a heart attack and so the Boston Police Department was up in arms a little bit. But, Boston is segregated. The Italians, the blacks, and the Irish, they’re segregated geographically because there’s water between the neighborhoods, and there was a third way. And I’ll never forget this as long as I live, I went up to an Irish superintendent, I mean he was like number one, and I says, “How do you feel about blacks being cross district into your schools and your neighborhoods?" He says, “Blacks? We don’t even want the Italians!” [laughter] I thought this is great, you know when I teach college, this is going to be great. You know, it was a great response. It brings back a lot of memories.</p>
<p>RM: I’ll bet. What happened right after the riot?</p>
<p>AF: They decided they had enough of me at the tenth precinct. I don’t know why. [laughter] So they sent me to the fifteenth Precinct on Gratiot and Connors and there —<br /><br /> Oh I've got to stop for a minute. So, my mother was from the old country and my dad, and my mother didn’t want me to be a policeman. So I told my mother because I took business in high school, and I knew how to type, I’m a clerk in a police station. [mimics Mother] “Bless you son, bless you. You have this wonderful job, don’t go outside. You could get hurt. You can get hurt” And then the riots broke out [laughter, mimics mother] “I should spank you like I used to when you were young!” But I got transferred to the fifteenth precinct and I worked plain clothes, I was a patrolman still, I applied for a job as Chief of Police of Clinton Township, MI and I came in number two and there was an inspector in the police department that didn’t get accepted and nobody could believe it. Anyway, I didn’t take the job, I had no choice. But interesting how I didn’t get the job, there was a black constable working the black community in Clinton Township, this is a good lesson, and they says he’s been there forever, we’re going to become a police department, would you make him a police officer and he’s really good with the community. And I had been reading managers associations on police departments and how to organize them and everything and I say, "Yes, I definitely would, but he’s got to pass the basic test." And I didn’t get the job because of that answer, they wanted me to say, "Of course I’ll make a policeman out of him." What I should have said is, "Yes, let me train him, let me talk about how to pass the test, let me work with him, and we can get him through, once he qualifies." I made the wrong answer. And they told me why I didn’t get the job and that was why. They hired a Police Sergeant from Grosse Pointe who ended up stealing from the property room, you know where evidence is stored. He lost his job. I then applied for Chief of Police in Lighthouse Point, FL and I came in number one. 300 applicants. I was a Lieutenant and came back and I told them I’d accept the job and I hired an attorney to do the negotiating, Calkins was his name, and they started calling me at the Detroit Police Department. I was Head of Staff for Deputy Chief Frank Blount, and somebody cut out an article in the Sun Sentinel and sent it to the Chief that I had accepted this job and Frank Blount got wind of it. Oh my god, between him and my mother! My mother: "You can’t move, you can’t leave, you’ve got two sisters here to take care of. This is terrible how can you do this!" I says, "Ma, come to Florida it’s a great place, you’ll love it down there." “No, no, no. You can’t go.” I turned the job down, but I got two more promotions from Coleman Young, I became an Inspector and then a Commander. So I was number 3 out of 5,000 men. That wasn’t bad. But there was a lot of Commanders, it’s not. But, I went to the fifteenth precinct and suddenly they asked me if I wanted to work white rackets, clean up, morality, or whatever you want to call it. And I said sure. But it wasn’t as much fun like I said previously. Everybody, "You can’t do this to me I’m important,” you know, “I’m this, I’m that.” But I did it there, then I was sent to research and development as a writer and I stayed there a year and a half and I became a detective and got transferred to the fifth Precinct. Then three months later I became a sergeant – you had to take tests for this. And sure enough, they put me back in morality in charge of this crew and then I became a lieutenant of special operations which included all that stuff. Then I went to work for Deputy Chief Frank Blount, then I went to the FBI Academy, I did three months there, session 112 they call it. That was an honor. And that’s about it.</p>
<p>RM: How about the police department itself in ’67 did you see a big change? You mention all this stuff coming from the federal government to kind of change the mentality a little bit? <br /><br />AF: It was a very slow process. Very slow process. <br /><br />RM: What did you see? <br /><br />AF: When affirmative action started, they would take an exam. People would take an exam, and if you were an officer in the first ten then they would pick an officer that was 40 and promote him over you it became embitterment, really, really — you know. And Frank Blount used to always say, “I got all my promotions by being on top of the test and I earned them” but the mayor had a point because we gotta get supervisors of the black community as supervisors to even out the score card because every time somebody called the people it was all white. So it’s a tradeoff, and it was a slow process. Let me ask you a question, what do you think of the police department now? <br /><br />RM: It’s tough for me because I’m from Saginaw, I don’t follow this close.</p>
<p>AF: Oh are you? [laughter]</p>
<p>RM: Yeah, I’ve got family members that are officers. <br /><br />AF: Do you?<br /><br />RM: Yeah, so I guess I’d be a little more jaded. Do you think it could have been done different? Would you have done anything different during that blind pig or during the time that you were there? <br /><br />AF: Well, we made a raid, a crowd gathered like always, but suddenly they started breaking into windows and stuff and stealing, and they never did that before. So how can you do anything different, you know? And when we made raids after that, it was totally different. There were a lot of police at the raid and – we didn’t even have uniformed policemen when we made the raid. There was nothing to it, just nothing to it. It was just a "hey you’re drinking, you got caught, you’re running a blind pig" and we would normally take the engagers to court, the ones running the place. <br /><br />RM: A lot of the same faces then? Would you see a lot of the same people? <br /><br />AF: Yeah, mostly in the numbers rackets you’d see a lot of the same people. And, I was working with a guy nicknamed Harry the Horse and we caught a guy with a stash of numbers and money and stuff. And he says, “Hey you can’t arrest me I know Harry the Horse” and he was talking to Harry the Horse [laughter] stuff like that, you know. We had great cooperation, remember, all of our information was coming from the black community, so they wanted these places closed down because they couldn’t sleep at night and it was in residential neighborhoods, with the exception of the one on Twelfth Street, but still there were houses right behind it, you know.<br /><br />RM: People might think that riots are inevitable, if you look at what’s happening in Ferguson. What are your thoughts on that? With people and all the studies you’ve done. <br /><br />AF: You know that’s a good question and that’s one I don’t have the answer too. I really don’t. Now there saying that the Ferguson Police Department is too white, you know, but how many black citizens applied for a job to be a policeman. That’s another way to look at it too. And can you pass the qualifications? <br /><br />RM: Do you think the police are under fire? <br /><br />AF: Oh! [nods head] <br /><br />RM: Do you see that at once every kind wanted to be an astronaut, a cop, or a firefighter? Do you think that’s true today? <br /><br />AF: No, not at all, it’s dangerous. Not because black or white, because of dope. You get people on drugs and they need a fix. I mean they kill you even though you start to give them the money, they’re so jittery they’ll kill you. And that’s the biggest problem. You know, forget about race. In Detroit the crime is high, Flint is higher, right by where you live in Saginaw and it’s the drug issue over and over and over again. I always wondered if we would legalize this stuff in some kind of orderly way so they can get it, would it really make a big difference and stop a lot of these crimes, it’s an interesting issue. <br /><br />RM: Tracy mentioned, when I first started talking about you, that you came to the museum and said, "I started the riot!" How do you fit into all of this, what do you feel? <br /><br />AF: I was sitting at home flipping through my scrapbook for the first time in ten years and I says I wonder if anybody would be interested in hearing my story” and I went to — I forgot where I went. I was talking to somebody and he says, "Go to the Detroit Historical Museum. They’re really down to earth and nice people, and they’d like to hear it." So I called and I talked to Adam Lovell and suddenly they were interested because they were going to do this presentation in 2017 and I met them with Joel Stone and we talked for an hour until they got sick of me and they says, "We’ll get in touch with you." <br /><br />RM: Why do you think it’s so important to preserve this, this piece of our history? <br /><br />AF: Well, to learn from our lessons, of course that’s always the case and we gotta put all these civil disturbances all together and come up with a way to put a stop to them. Because the end result: nobody wins, nobody wins. Communities are destroyed, businesses are gone and nobody wins. And that’s why I’m here.<br /><br />RM: What did I miss? Is there anything else, I mean what’s the number one thing I can’t miss when we tell this story? What do you want, I guess you kind of put it in a nutshell right there. <br /><br />AF: Yeah, don’t forget the comedy part, because there was a lot – Oh! I got another one but I don’t think you want to tell it. [Laughter] <br /><br />RM: Well, let’s hear it! I’ll be the judge of that. [Laughter] <br /><br />AF: We were, there was an African Antiquities place and they broke in and as I’m running down the alley after one of the guys he turned and threw a spear at me [laughter] and I still have the spear! [laughter] Course it was funny at the time but I felt sorry for the business owner, they had destroyed the place, and it was a black owned business, you know<br /><br />RM: It’s hard to put any kind of, I guess any kind of reason, into a lot of that isn’t it?<br /><br />AF: No, it is. They’ve – all the fires, you know. The fires have been a big thing in Detroit, at least the day before Halloween it’s kind of subsided, you know. And everybody loves this new mayor, so I think if he tears the burned out houses down —and look at the renaissance of the Grand Boulevard area and Downtown and its exciting, you know. <br /><br />RM: So you think something was learned in ’67? <br /><br />AF: Well, it never happened again. Never happened again. Wait let me knock on wood [laughter, knocks head].<br /><br />RM: That’s awesome.</p>
**
People
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Cavanagh, Jerome
Girardin, Ray
Duration
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51:35
Interviewer
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Ric Mixter
Interviewee
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Anthony Fierimonte
Location
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Detroit Historical Museum
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Anthony Fierimonte, October 10th, 2014
Description
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Former Detroit Police officer Anthony Fierimonte discusses his experiences on the force--including his role in the raid on the blind pig at Twelfth Street and Clairmont Street on July 23, 1967.<br /><br /><strong>NOTE: This interview contains profanity and/or explicit language.</strong>
Subject
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1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan, Detroit Police Department—Detroit—Michigan
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
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MP4 video
Language
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en-US
Type
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Moving Image
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Blind Pig
Detroit Police Department
STRESS
Tanks
Tenth Precinct
The Big Four
Twelfth Street
-
http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/d59b26f2e07b5b69d6f46a6de8ff253a.jpg
a1af5fc6830e3cb021c88546b07e18ed
Dublin Core
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Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Written Story
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Text
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In 1967 I was employed as an Industrial Hygiene and Safety Engineer for Michigan Mutual Liability Company at 28 West Adams in Detroit and lived in Warren on Hayes and 13 Mile Rd. When I was discharged from the Air Force at the 1st USAF Hospital, I stayed in the Active Air Force Reserve in the 436th Medical Service Unit. In July 1967 my unit was on Summer Encampment. On the Sunday of the start of the Riot I was returning from taking my wife and son to stay with her parents in Cleveland. Upon approaching the Lodge and the Ford I could see clouds of smoke. When I checked into my Unit I learned of the riot.
There are a couple memories that stick in my mind. The first involves President Johnson on the evening network news saying there were no Federal Troops committed to Detroit. I watched that newscast while sitting in the Selfridge NCO Club with members of the 101st Airborne who were deployed to Detroit…so much for truth from Washington that day. My second memory is of the 101st helicopters leaving Selfridge and flying over my house in Warren. It was like a scene from Apocalypse Now with Robert Duvall playing Wagner. My last memory was returning to work at Michigan Mutual and coming down Oakman Blvd into Detroit. I remember seeing business districts burned out and in subsequent days seeing areas also destroyed.
Fast forward to today and I see that much of the areas of destruction were never rebuilt and vibrant Detroit neighborhoods are now in decay. It is nice to see Downtown coming back, but the City is still a shell of its once vibrant self.
Original Format
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email message
Submitter's Name
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Henry B. Lick
Submission Date
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03/20/2015
Search Terms
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101st Airborne, Active Air Force Reserve, Oakman Boulevard, Selfridge Air Force Base
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Henry B. Lick
Description
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Henry B. Lick recalls memories of the actions of some officials and government presence in Detroit, July, 1967.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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07/13/2015
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Text
Language
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en-US
Type
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Written Story
Coverage
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||||osm
Detroit, Michigan
101st Airborne
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Oakman Boulevard
Selfridge Air Force Base