WW: Hello, today is June 22nd, 2016. My name is William Winkel. We are in Detroit, Michigan at the Detroit Historical Museum. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am sitting down with Reverend Dan Aldridge. Thank you for sitting down with me.
DA: My pleasure.
WW: Can you tell me where and when were you born?
DA: Yes, I was born in Harlem, New York—sometimes called the Village of Harlem—on February the 23rd, 1942.
WW: What was it like growing up in Harlem?
DA: Well, Harlem was, as a young man, it was dynamic. It was crowded. There were lots of personalities always around Harlem. For example, I palyed little league – played at the YMCA – and one of the people I was very close to was Jackie Robinson. Roy Campanella, who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he owned a liquor store in town, nearby. Monte Irvin, who played for the New York Giants, he was a rye-and-go beer salesman at the corner store. On my corner was Mal Whitfield, who just died, who won a gold medal in the 1948 Olympics. I lived across the street from Althea Gibson, who was a well-known tennis player. There were musicians, there were singers, Harlem was very down with cultural people. My pastor was friends with J.A. Rodgers who was a historian. I had the opportunity as a little boy to meet Jack Johnson. Harlem always had that kind of artistic energy, athletic energy, and I was also in junior high school with John Carlos, the fellow who stuck his hand up in the ’68 Olympics. I went to the seventh grade with Franky Lymon, who made “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” There was artistic energy and there was athletic energy. Harlem was crowded. It may well have been dangerous—you thought there was danger around you. You saw danger, at least I saw some. People also used drugs. I was familiar with people who were smoking marijuana and using what I came to know as heroine. But there were positives and negatives. I went to the Apollo all the time because my mother, she lived nearby, she took me. They tell me that I saw every single show at the Apollo from 1943 until 1953. I’m not clear about that, but that’s what they tell me. But I do remember meeting all the Duke Ellington, Count Bassey, Phelonius Monk. White musicians like Woody Herman and Woody Herman’s band. There was an artistic energy in Harlem. There was an athletic energy. There were lots of people. It was busy. I had a lot of friends. There was some danger but I really was much too young to be really impacted by it. We lived in the Polo Grounds (where the Giants played). There was a racial dynamic seeing overweight white men, at that time in Hawaiian shirts, which was popular in the ‘50s, walking, getting off the subway train and had to walk from where they parked their cars to the subway, making the Polo Grounds, watching the Giants play baseball games. Harlem was a very black place then, not like now. But compared to now, for example, in my neighborhood, we had one white police officer, Murphy, who pretty much ran the whole neighborhood. He didn’t involve himself in day-to-day matters, but if he saw you doing something, he’d walk by and say, “Hey, look, fellas, when I walk by, I’d like this corner clear, or something like that.” He was never an issue. “Okay, Murphy! By the time you get here we’ll be gone, or we’re quiet down,” or whatever. We had one white guy in the community, he was a pharmacist. I forget his name. Everyone loved him. Harlem was an interesting place. The entire country has changed. You can’t imagine one police officer, I don’t care how big he was, what color he was, just walking around the neighborhood, saying, “Hey fellas.” But people had more respect for each other in general. We were a far more civil society. Harlem was a tough place to live. It was tough relative to other places. It was not tough compared to generally how it is now, in most big cities.
WW: Growing up in Harlem and going into the ‘50s and early ‘60s, were you increasingly exposed to, say, the Civil Rights Movement or any of the social movements of the day?
DA: I was very much aware then because my aunt is Dorothy Hite, who is president of National Council of Negro Women. She is my mother’s sister. She lived nearby. I lived on 149th Street, and Aunt Dorothy lived on 150th Street, and she was involved in everything from Marcus Garvey all the way up to the Civil Rights Movement. She was a ghost writer for Marcus Garvey. She was the assistant to Mary McCleod Bethune, she was one of the best friends of Eleanor Roosevelt. She used to come by and take her out to lunch together. Just imagine how different, how much has changed. My mom had a job at the YWCA. She and Eleanor Roosevelt were friends. Eleanor Roosevelt would drive her own car to Harlem, park out in front of the YWCA, go in and get my aunt, and they would go out to lunch as girlfriends. Now, we couldn’t even imagine the wife of the president driving her own car, right? On any street! Just going to dinner. No guards, no threats—“Who was that?” “Well, that was Mrs. Roosevelt.” No one wanting to get her autograph, no one harassing, bothering, or threatening her, she and my aunt—they would just go, my aunt’s friends were Eleanor Roosevelt and Lena Horne. Nobody bothered or harassed any of that. The notion that Mrs. Roosevelt could drive herself in Harlem and pick up her black friends, and they would go eat the way girlfriends eat now without any—at that time, it was just amazing. I was aware of that. I was aware of black nationalist movements because I lived near—well, first of all these movements were in the city. If you were a kid, and you went to the barbershop and got a haircut, you heard all this stuff buzzing around. You may not have known what to make of it, but you were cognizant of something going on. I live also near—I went to Frederick Douglass Junior High School for one year with John Carlos, and near there was a store on 125th Street and Lennox Avenue called the African National Memorial bookstore, which is a store where you’d normally see Malcolm X taking pictures out front of the store. That man was Mr. Micheaux. Now Mr. Micheaux is the brother of Oscar Micheaux, the great film maker. That was his brother. His name was Louis. Back when I was in the seventh grade, I had a project to do. I was supposed to write something on Negro history. Among that group, you couldn’t use the word “Negro.” You had to use the word “black.” I’d always go to Mr. Micheaux’s store to get some materials for my project. I said, “Mr. Micheaux, do you have any—I want to write something on Negro history. Can you help me out?” He said, “We don’t have any Negro history materials.” I’m in the seventh grade, I’m looking at all this stuff all around me, right? I went home and my father says, “Danny, did you pick up your materials for homework?” “No daddy.” He said, “Why not?” I said, “I went and asked Mr. Micheaux about some Negro history materials so I can do my project and he said he didn’t have any Negro history materials. But I saw them all around!” He said, “Oh, next time you go to the store son, you’ve got to say ‘black.’ You’ve got to say ‘black.’” So I go back to the store the next day and I said, “Mr. Micheaux, do you have any black—” “Oh, yeah, we got a bunch of those!” In those ways, I was aware. Plus there was the racism and discrimination against blacks in stores, mostly by what I think were Jewish merchants. I think there was some tension in that regard. Also, my father worked with the transport workers’ union. He was a motorman. And so they were fighting against, fighting to have the unions recognize that he was falling behind this Irishman named Michael J. Quill. I will never forget, he would say, “This is Michael J. Quill. [unintelligible].” We had to listen to all his speeches on the radio and my father made us read the special union papers and be aware of stuff, so I was aware in the sense that I had parents that were aware. My parents, you know, made me aware as much as an eleven-year-old boy can be aware of what’s going on. You know there’s something happening.
WW: Did you increasingly become more involved, say, throughout high school and right after high school?
DA: No, not in high school. What happened, we moved to a place called Corona, New York, which is—there are two communities which are right near each other. They’re called Corona and East Elmhurst. They’re separated by a street called Norland Boulevard. When I oved there, they were predominantly—well Corona was predominantly Italian community with some Irish and a small group of Jews, and blacks moving in. Blacks were beginning to move into East Elmhurst. Those who lived on that side of Norland Boulevard made more money than my parents made. That neighborhood flourished because of the nature of segregation. A number of folk went forth and lived together who today wouldn’t. For example, down the street from me lived Calvin Buss, who is now the minister of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, the big Abyssinian church. Nearby was Eric Holder and his family. I lived right near Harry Belafonte. I lived on 94th Street, Belafonte lived on 97th Street. Malcolm X lived on 97th Street, Willy May lived on 98th Street. 105th Street was Louie Armstrong. 107th was Dizzie Gillespie. 112th was Cannonball Adley, his brother Nat Adley. Ella Fitzgerald, her husband Ray Brown. All over, there were musicians and artists and the like who—athletes—that was like their first move out of Harlem. They wanted out of their apartment and wanted their own homes. In fact, I still own that home today. My brother and my son, I’ll never forget. We moved to Corona in 1953, and then we moved to East Elmhurst in 1956. It was only six blocks away. It was essentially the same neighborhood, although as kids, you know, you divided the neighborhood based on what side of the street you lived on. It’s essentially the same neighborhood.
WW: What year did you first come to Detroit?
DA: I first came to Detroit in 1965. I had a—I participated in the Civil Rights Movement when I was in college, and I was thought to be a threat. I don’t think I was much of a threat, but at that time, in small historically black colleges, particularly those that were state-run, state-funded—they were funded by the state—so the administration was deathly afraid of anything that raised any kind of voice because they thought it threatened their funding. I got kicked out of school.
WW: What school?
DA: Tennessee A&I State University. I was in school with [unintelligible] Rudolph, that’s where I first met Cassius Clay. We were both 18 together. He was exactly five weeks older than I am. He and Wilma were dating at the time, and I was friends with Wilma. We were 18, and all of us were just kids. That was in 1960. He had just returned from the Rome Olympics, as had Wilma. [unintelligible]. We were classmates. Anyway, I went to Tennessee State. I participated in the first movement and marches, demonstrations. In 1960, as soon as I got there really. The National sit-ins. The second wave, not the first wave. The first wave happened before I came to school, in early 1960. I didn’t come until August, so I got involved later, in the second wave. I helped to successfully integrate—me and a bunch of other people—but the movie theatres and the restaurants, and that would’ve been 1960 and 1961. I first saw Dr. King in 1961 at Fisk University, which is another historically black private college, which was down the street from Tennessee A&I. They call Tennessee A&I, Tennessee State now, but then it was called Tennessee Agriculture and Industrial State University. Now it’s just Tennessee State University. It’s highly integrated. The only white person on campus at that time was one accounting teacher that I remember. Anyway, I participated in the Civil Rights Movement. At some point, I was thought to be problematic, and I got put out of school in 1965 for something I had nothing to do with. I was accused of leading a panty raid, me and another fella from Detroit named Carl Stone. Neither one of us were involved. We were coming back to campus while the raid was going on. We didn’t understand what was going on. So we walked up and they said, “Oh, they’re the two leaders!” Leaders of what? At that time, particularly in black schools, there was no democracy. You can forget students’ rights. That was a fiction. They put us out of school, both myself and [unintelligible]. He finished as a teacher at Osbourne, I think. So then, but he thought I was a bright student, so one of the administrators called Henry Henny who was a lawyer here, said, “We’ve got this bright kid, he got in trouble, but we think he’s worth saving.” He said, “Well I can get him a job here in the factory.” Then I had another classmate named Felix Matlock, Jr., whose father, Felix Matlock, Sr., was the assistant to congressman Diggs. He said, “Well, since I’m in school, I won’t need my room. You can stay in my room.” So I went to go stay with him. And Henry Henny, the lawyer, got me a job at [unintelligible] Engine working the midnight shifts. I worked here for seven months, and then the fellas at the plant, at [unintelligible] Engine got together and put me out, told me that I was too smart to be in a plant, and we know school is starting, and you getting out of here. You’re not staying here. So I went back to school and finished Tennessee State in June of ’66. I came to Detroit because, having lived here before, I knew Detroit. I didn’t know anywhere else. I was not anxious to go back home and live under my parents’ roof. I had gotten accustomed to a certain amount of freedom. My mother did not believe in freedom or liberty at all. That was not doable. So I came to Detroit.
WW: What were your first impressions of the city?
DA: Oh, to me, Detroit was a dynamic place. It was different because first of all, I used to like to go down to Washington Boulevard and just walk. They had so many nice, lovely stores. Just walk in the stores. I used to like to eat, on occasion, at the Statler Hilton, just eating something nice. They had a lot of jazz here. I fell in love with the jazz music. I used to go to Drome Bar every Sunday and listen. That’s on the corner of Lesley and Dexter. I don’t think I ever missed a show there for years. It was called the Drome Lounge. It was basically a bar, a jazz club and a bowling alley too. I liked that, I didn’t drive. I found the city very easy to get around in terms of transportation system, the bus system. So Detroit was really a dynamic, energetic city. It was my first time really hanging out with older men, folks in the factory. I was not accustomed to all of the prostitution and the gangsterism. Now one can say they had that in New York, but I wasn’t around it, and if there was, I was too young to know anything about it. I was shocked at prostitutes on 12th Street, looked like hundreds of them. And down on Columbia Street and Elizabeth, at what is now basically Comerica Park, in that area. I’d get off at night and the guys would take me there, and they would frequent prostitutes who would just be in windows, just like you see in Harlem. I was 23. I was totally surprised by all that kind of stuff, because once again, we moved out of Harlem into Queens. I never saw any of this kind of stuff before. It was all totally shocking and brand new to me. I also liked Wayne State University. Met a lot of nice people [unintelligible]. He became friends, I met Kenny Cockrel there, and I met Lonnie Peek there. Then there were a lot of good people—I met Elliot Hall. There were a lot of good people around. Also, in terms of white guys, I became friends with Frank Joyce, who had led People Against Racism, who worked for the UAW. I had lots of friends here. I got involved with Reverend Cleage’s church here, what was first called Century Now Church of Christ, which evolved into the Shrine of the Black Madonna. I had a lot of very good friends there who were very much interested in the community and what’s going on and helping people out and talking about Black Nationalism and reading books, everything. Frank Vaughan had just opened up a book store on Monterey and Dexter. I liked Detroit very, very much. I could have easily gone back to New York. But I like Detroit. I prefer Detroit to New York.
WW: When you first came here, did you sense any tension in the city? Or when you came back in ’66 to stay, did you sense any tension?
DA: You know, I didn’t really sense any because I didn’t really know anything about the history of the city. People who lived here weren’t talking about it. When I first came back, I really tried to groove on what they’re talking about. My consciousness was more in terms about what was happening nationally and what was happening in the south. I was not altogether clear about Detroit. I didn’t know anything about the Negro movement here, those developments. I had what I would call a Black Nationalist consciousness, but most of mine was fueled by my experience in the south and the civil rights movement of the south, and what was going on nationally. I wasn’t totally attuned to what was happening in Detroit, and as such I became so over time, but I wasn’t initially.
WW: By 1966, you’re firmly in the Black Nationalist camp, would you say?
DA: Yeah, I would say that. I was influenced by Stokely Carmichael’s call for black power, which my sense of black power was there was not black power against the white people—though that’s how many white people heard it—it was really about self-determination and having control over your community and the institutions in your community. I was attracted to that. I was well-read. I had read all of Marcus Garvey’s stuff, probably most of the things by W.E.B. Dubois, I had read Lerome Bennett, I had read John Frankman, I’d read [unintelligible], so I had read—I was what you could consider well-read in history. I read all this stuff about Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright. I had what I would call a literary consciousness. A lot was formed by stuff I had read.
WW: When you came to Detroit to stay, where were you living?
DA: Initially when I came to stay, I was living at a little place on Pigree and Linwood. Eventually, I was married when I came here, to my first wife, and then we had a very nice flat at 2736 Fullerton. I’m sorry, Glenwood. 2736 Glendale.
WW: In ’65 or ’66?
DA: ’66.
WW: Were you still living there in 1967?
DA: Yes.
WW: In the year that you were here or so, from 1966 to 1967, did you become involved in any organizations? And what did you do after college here?
DA: Well, I came in. I was hired on the campus by Chrysler Corporation as a Personnel Manager Trainee to work in Highland Park at the main office, which was at 341 Massachusetts Avenue. I worked there and then I moved around. They had like an apprenticeship, so, like, I worked—it helped me learn Detroit, too—I worked at Mack Avenue Stamping Plant, which was like on Mack and Alter Road. Not quite Alter road, but out that way. I worked at Mack Avenue Stamping Plant, which is now called Chrysler North, or something like that. I worked at Mack Avenue Stamping Plant, I worked at Huber Avenue Foundry, I worked at [unintelligible] Engine, and those were the primary places where I worked. And also, I worked at Highland Park Assembly Plant. I did small stints, three or four month stints at those different places.
WW: Going into 1967, did you sense anything coming?
DA: No. I was very involved in what I would call the Black Nationalist movement. People talked about something happening, but I didn’t sense anything. I wasn’t attuned to it. We read books, we talked a lot about the movement, we talked about racism, we talked about the kinds of things we would do to help ourselves, to help the community. We talked about racism, but nobody ever talked about violence. That doesn’t mean somebody didn’t say something every now and then, but it was not predominant part of any conversation. We talked about the history of Black Nationalism, the history of African American history and culture, African history and culture, sometimes European history. Philosophy. People like [unintelligible]. That kind of thing. European philosophy. One of the young guys who was studying it would prepare this, you know. We did that. I was in college at Wayne. I was working in the management, training position. But I was working on my MBA, which I hated, by the way. I never got it.
WW: During this time, was that when you became friends with Kenneth Cockrel Sr. and Reverend Lonnie Peek, you mentioned.
DA: Yes. Lonnie Peek. Herb Boyd and I were closer, because we read a lot together. We compared stuff together, which we do today. I knew Kenny Cockrel, we weren’t friends. Honestly, we never cared for each other, or I never cared for him. It appeared to me the feeling was mutual. That’s the best I can return. We knew each other. We were cordial, cordial but distant. Kenny did not like—he dated white women exclusively, and he said that he had never met a black woman who was worthy of being married to a black man of intelligence. He would tell me about all the black men who had made something of themselves who were married to white women. He would name Richard Wright, he would call off all the people, African leaders, and I was simply appalled by that. I said to him, “What about your mother and your wife?” He was dating white women, but he was married to a black woman (who was the mother of his son). Kenny always said disparaging things about black women, and about all women. Some of the white women got included in the fire. He’s like Donald Trump. He may start off with one point, but sooner or later, he got around to everybody. Which was amazing to me because the dynamics of white people, they loved Kenny. Sometimes the worse he talked about em, the more they, “Isn’t he something? Isn’t he something?” It’s an amazing thing to me. But I worked with him, we worked together on some projects like the Algiers Motel tribunal. Herb Boyd, Lonnie Peek and I were friends. Lonnie Peek and I were practically inseparable at one point, you know. Herb Boyd was at my house every single day. We spent hours and hours together. Now, Lonnie was my friend. Lonnie was not a well-read person, so I had a different relationship with him. He and I were just friends. We just liked each other. We were just friends. Herb and I were both friends, and I would say we would intellectual soulmates. We read books, compared stuff, dreamed stuff, talked about the bigger stuff. Just like anything else, you have different relationships with different people for different reasons. Lonnie and I, at one point, were just inseparable. I like him. He was warm, he was friendly, he was serious. We worked on projects together. I was friends with Jim Ingram. All the people in the movement, I became pretty much friends with. And the center of a lot of our activity was around Century Divine Church of Christ, which eventually became the Shrine of the Black Madonna.
WW: How did you first hear what was going on July 23rd?
DA: Well, on July 23rd, I was in Newark, New Jersey at the Black Power conference that weekend. I didn’t know anything about what was going on. Someone in the hotel stopped me and said, “Aren’t you from Detroit?” I said, “Yeah.” “You gotta get outta here.” I said, “Why?” “Haven’t you heard about the riots in Detroit?” I was in a hotel with a television. I said “No,” and went back to my own room and turned on the television. Everybody thought of themselves as a revolutionary, and so, how could you be in Newark when the revolution was going on in Detroit? I got out of there and came back to Detroit to see what was going on. My family was here, too. That’s how I heard about it.
WW: So you came back on Monday, I’m guessing? Or late Sunday?
DA: I came back either Sunday or Monday. No, you know what, I think I came back that Sunday night. Because what happened was I flew in, and at that time, Detroit was racially segregated, and the young white fellas had commandeered I-94. They were just riding up and down with rebel flags, waving a machete, like that. I was picked up from the airport by Dorothy Duberry, and we were trying to get in, and we couldn’t figure how to get in. She was raised in Detroit, particularly she was raised in southwest Detroit, so she knew how to get off of the I-94 and find the place that we stayed that night until things were calmer. Then we came in that Monday morning. Didn’t take the highway. Took what she called the backway. I imagine, we must’ve come out on Jefferson or something, I have no idea. But we came in the backway and came into Detroit. I got a chance to see what was going on. I called Lonnie Peek who at the time was my compadre, and he and I, you know, drove around to see what was happening, observing the curfew, of course. But to see what was happening.
WW: What were your first impressions?
DA: I was shocked, stunned. Community was burning and on fire. There were people looting. None of which we were a part of. I can say I was scared. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know what to do. Should you go to work? Can you catch the bus? The police ran around wild, engaged in mayhem. You were unsure. I was unsure.
WW: After you and Peek went driving, you just hunkered down? How did you spend the rest of your week?
DA: Well, one of the things—and we observed the curfew because we thought that we would be targets—there was no need of us to bother with the curfew. During that time, we went around trying to discourage young people from looting. Try to tell them, “This is not what it’s about—and staying inside, having conversations about what was going on. In a multitude of places, Lonnie’s house, his house was kind of like a senate because he had his wife Brenda, he had a sister here named Patti and a cousin Chuck. He had other relatives, other cousins, he had several cousins. His place became the place—please he had little children—where you would go and sit and talk for hours on end. I spent a lot of time at Lonnie’s house on Courville Street.
WW: What was your reaction to the National Guard coming in, and later the federal troops?
DA: Well, like everyone else, I was afraid of them because once again, they had tanks and huge military weapons, and you had some idea of the kind of damage they can do. So, yes. Most interesting about that is that James Boggs, who I knew later on, told me that one of the soldiers in the National Guard who was on his front lawn was Mickey Lolich, who pitched for the Tiger’s. He was posted on Jimmy’s front lawn. Everyone was afraid. First the National Guard, because you knew they were untrained, so you got all the young guys, white guys in a predominantly black city who were scared and frightened. I would say we were probably much more frightened of them than we were of the traditional army who we thought was disciplined. A lot of the young National Guard guys were scared, and you could see they were scared. You want a frightened guy with an M-16 bayonet, you know? The younger soldiers from the 82nd division—I don’t know where they were from, 101st—a lot more discipline. The National Guard were frightening because they were young guys, mostly about our age.
WW: I do believe I know the answer to this, but how do you interpret the events in ’67? Do you see them as a rebellion? Do you see them as a riot?
DA: Oh, I’m going to define it as a rebellion. I think because it came from authentic grievances that people had, which had been long-standing in terms of their mistreatment by the police. I get from some people, I tend to not see rebellion as positively as others do because I think that there’s no real benefit when you tear up and burn up the place where you live, the place where you shop, so I think that misguided expression was not good. Certain parts of Detroit still haven’t been done yet. It provoked a certain fear in certain white people, and people left their homes and making irrational decisions about what was going on. A lot of times, people weren’t against individual white people, they were against conditions. But once again, if you’re a white person, I don’t know to what extent you’re able to discern all that. You’re looking at yourself, you’re not looking to make something out of analysis. I understand it as a rebellion, an authentic cry. Like most of those things, they’re misguided. People wind up tearing up their own places, where they live, where they shop, where they work. That was not good and has not been remedied to this day.
WW: Where were you when you first heard about what was going on at the Algiers Motel?
DA: Well, by that time, Dorothy Duberry and I had married, and she was Dorothy Duberry-Aldridge. She worked at 903 West Grand Boulevard. [unintelligible]. I forget where I was working. I might have been teaching. I taught at Wayne State University, I taught at U of D, and I taught at Wayne County Community College. So I might have been teaching somewhere. She had the phone call because through marriage, one of the boys that got killed, Carl Cooper, was her cousin. So Carl’s mother called, Margaret, and said, “My son has been killed by the police at the Algiers Motel. I need some help.” So I called Lonnie Peek and Kenny Cockrel and we went over and met with the family. I got Kenny because Kenny was in law school, and he knew, in my mind, how to take proper notes. So we went down, we interviewed the family members of the boys who got killed. That’s how I got involved. But I first was informed by Margaret, who was Carl Cooper’s mother.
WW: How did you proceed from there?
DA: What we tried to do is we went down, we tried to interview witnesses. We also knew some of the boys in the Algiers Motel with Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard, and the third boy’s name was Temple. One of the boys was named James Thorpe, he was the one who got away. They beat him up, the police did, and they didn’t kill him. So he and one of the other boys who I don’t’ remember right now told Kenny, Lonnie, and I what the experience was. We got involved then, trying to put together a case of trying to say that the police had murdered these boys. This whole notion there was supposed to be some fake gun wasn’t part. Then I learned, Carl Cooper may have had a cap pistol, he was playing with. They’re in a hotel, they don’t understand all that’s going on outside of there. They’re playing. The police, I understand, hear the gun, “Oh, they’re shooting at us!” They were in there playing with each other. They were not shooting at any police.
WW: That’s when the three of you planned the mock trial?
DA: Basically, the mock trial was my idea. Well, sort of. What happened, during that time, Dorothy and I brought Rap Brown to town. He spoke at the Dexter Theatre on top of the roof. We complained that these boys had been killed by the police. So Rap says to me, “Hey, man, why don’t you have a tribunal? Educate the community.” We brought Rap Brown to speak at the Dexter theatre. We had no idea that he was going to have the crowd we did. Rap and I are walking side-by-side, talking like two guys talking. We turn the corner, and we’re totally overwhelmed by the crowd. We knew we couldn’t have it there, plus the theatre was owned by the great Harper’s Dorothy Ashby, and her husband, the playwright John Ashby. They won’t let us have that place. So I said let’s take it to Cleage. Let’s go to the reverend Cleage and ask if we can put on the mock trial there.
WW: When did you bring Rap Brown to Detroit?
DA: I don’t exactly know, but that can be looked up. I don’t know. It was in between—
WW: And the trial. Okay.
DA: So, Reverend Cleage said yes. It was basically my idea to develop the thing, though Lonnie Peek came with me. He and I probably put it together. I picked the people who would be involved. For example, I wanted to make sure that white people were involved. Justin Ravitz was the judge. Judge Justin Ravitz.
WW: I thought Kenneth Cockrel was the judge.
DA: No. Justin Ravitz was the judge. Kenny was one of the attorneys. There were four attorneys involved: Kenneth Cockrel, Milton Henry, Andrew [unintelligible name], and Lee Mollett. Justin Ravitz was the judge. He and Kenny were law partners. Had to pull together a jury, so I picked Rosa Parks, who I knew because she was close friends with my wife, Dorothy, at the time. Ed Vaughan, he owned a bookstore and was active in the community; Frank Joyce, I wanted to make sure the jury was integrated with people against racism. The writer John O. Killens, who was in town to speak for some other reason. I asked him would he be open to being on the jury, he said, “Yes.” There were other people on the jury, but that’s who I remember.
WW: What made you want to go through with the entire tribunal? What was your driving force?
DA: The driving force was the police were not doing anything. We had been to the trial, and we had been thoroughly shamed by the police. At that time, you come into a trial, and the whole front section of the courthouse was nothing but police in uniform. Thoroughly intimidating. Plus with me, they would do things like this [draws finger across throat], make the sign of wanting to kill you. They had some record of having done this, so, you know, it should be taken seriously. We were young, we said they’re not going to make us back down at all. Then we had also some people who said if you’re holding a trial, and you find them guilty, we will execute them. That’s what they said. Never happened. Nothing. It was just talk. Our job was to hold the tribunal and to expose them. We wanted to bring out the total truth because we thought that the truth did not come out in the first trial. We wanted to bring out all the facts and the truth about what actually happened. That was our primary motivation.
WW: How did the tribunal end?
DA: It was interesting. Before that, Kenny Cockrel knew a lot of people in Detroit. He was born and raised here—I don’t know if he was born here, but he was certainly raised here. He was a magnetic personality. People were just drawn to him. He knew all kinds of people. He was friends with William Saren [??], who later became head of the Free Press. And he said, “Dan, if you do this, give us unrestricted access. We’ll make it a big story.” That’s another reason I wanted to do it, because I was promised by the head of the Free Press to make it a big story. We let the Free Press in, Michigan Chronicle, Detroit News. Free Press had full staff there to cover the story. We saw the newspaper, and it wasn’t there. I was so angry, I charged down to Free Press and got in Bill’s face and he told me, he said, “Dan, the editors would not let us put it out there. I got the full story, had my full staff, and the editor said that they were going to squash the story,” and they did. There was nothing I could do about it.” He told me he was awfully embarrassed and gave me his word. I gave him access and it didn’t happen. I was very upset by that. The other thing that happened regarding that later is that John Hershey, who wrote the book, I was writing an article on the tribunal for the Michigan Chronicle. John Hershey came by Dorothy’s office and stole my manuscript and published it in the book as his own. Subsequent to that, I went to the Random House in New York and complained at him, they didn’t know anything about it. But later, Daniel Maguire, in doing a story, she got ahold of his archives at Young University. When I told people I wrote it, I wrote the one chapter in that book, they told me, “John, the only thing he put in there was ‘Dan Aldridge said…’” I never met John Hershey. Most of the people didn’t believe me. Or they didn’t believe strongly. Because [unintelligible name] went down to Yale and saw Random House had been with Hershey about me coming up there and protesting. They said, “John, what is this?” She said, “Dan, I was stunned.” Yeah, I said, I’ll tell you what happened. He stole the thing off of Dorothy’s desk and went and wrote it. If you read that chapter, I think it’s chapter 41, it’s called Fuel for the Fire Next Time, you’ll see for yourself it says, “And Dan Aldridge said…” It’s nothing of his in that entire chapter but me. I never met John Hershey. Random House offered me, they wanted to give me three books as compensation, but I refused to accept it. At the end of the tribunal, I would say that people felt good and people felt joy. There was celebration. There was ecstasy. Because they heard the truth. About three thousand people there. The church was packed. Not only was the church packed, it was packed in the street, the sidewalk outside of the church. It was packed on the other side of the sidewalk. Packed with people. Cleage said, “Well, we’ll maybe get three hundred people here.” And about three thousand people there, I’m told, people who estimated those kinds of things. So the community felt, they were proud that something like that went on. They were also proud in that I didn’t take any cheap shots. I hired good attorneys on both sides and said, “Let’s just hear the evidence.”
WW: What was the verdict?
DA: Guilty, because there was no question. Before they had a testimony of James [unintelligible] who talked about how they made those boys, shot them up against the wall, how they put them across the bed and beat them. The other thing is while we were getting ready for the trial, the police were trying to find the witnesses to keep them from testifying at the tribunal. They caught Lonnie Peek and I out on Euclid one night, and tried to shoot us, but we were young and fast. Also funny about it, I was on the track team. We’re walking down Euclid, near Grand River, and I see four white men sitting in a car with suits on at about three in the morning. We had to hide the witnesses. They’d take various messages to try to get rid of them, to find them. I said, “Lonnie, I think those police out to get us.” He said, “Man, you just so paranoid.” I said, “I’m just going to take off in a light jog, see you later.” As soon as they saw me start running, we heard the car doors open. Pow! Pow! Lonnie, we’re laughing, I told him I turned on Grand River, he said, “I was so low to the ground, I had to scoop sand out of my pocket to keep my balance. I was striding, full stride.” He said, “Danny, Danny, wait up!” I said, “No, no, I told you to come before.” It’s part of interplay, laughing between us. We’ve always had the ability to kid with each other, we tease each other. We do the same thing now, tease each other back and forth. I think the community was proud because it was done professionally, it was done well. They were proud that there were white people involved, which at that time was like, you know what I mean? I said, “Look, everybody, let’s just get all the facts that we know and see where it goes.” We did that. It was a proud moment. The community was very proud. Everybody was nothing but proud. I had some people now, Caroline Cheeks’ sister, Caroline Cheeks, Kwame Kilpatrick’s mother. Today, she said when she thinks about it, she just cries, it was just so beautiful. First time I’ve ever seen justice. Just listening to the facts, that’s all. That’s how it went.
WW: Wow. After the rebellion, as you’re organizing the mock trial and bringing H. Rap Brown to town, how did you see the city? Did you see it in a new light?
DA: Oh, yes, in a new light. Things changed rapidly. First of all more white people now wanted to become involved. People like Joseph Hudson. They wanted to move to form the New Detroit, what became the New Detroit had another name earlier. I was invited to be one of the early members of the New Detroit Committee. I was the only person at the time—this is not recorded in any kind of history, but it’s definitely true—who refused to be on the committee. Lonnie Peek was on it, Orville Harrington, Frank Ditto. My position was I could not see the difference between the new Detroit and the old Detroit. We’re the same people all messed up before. The same people again! Why aren’t we calling them in to help solve the problems? I never worked with the New Detroit community as a consequence. These other guys did and got funding for their projects. I was sort of punished for not following suit. I don’t have any regrets about that. Then I got involved with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I had a group called the All African People’s Union around the shooting of New Bethel. I organized the Black United Front, which all the black lawyers came together to try to deal with what happened as a consequence of the police shooting up New Bethel Baptist Church. I was in the church that night, by the way. People were acting so crazy. There was a couple of them. One guy stepped inside, Rafael Vera, stepped inside of an M-16, he fell on the floor. I saw and thought, “I gotta get out here,” and I left. By the time I got home, my wife said, “Dan, you gotta get back, you gotta get back.” I said, “Why?” “The police are shooting up New Bethel!” And Mark Bethune, who later was the Mark Bethune who was involved in Bethune and Boyd, who got killed down in Atlanta—it was a major, major case.
WW: How do you spell that last name?
DA: Bethune. B-E-T-H-U-N-E. First name is Mark. His nickname was Ibo, after the African tribe. But he spelled it wrong, E-I-B-O, but you know young people, man. E-I-B-O. Me and a friend named [unintelligible], we went down to see what was happening. They had the place surrounded. They took all those folks to the jail. There was excellent coverage of that. You can check the archives at South End Press. Wayne State University.
WW: Who was the judge that released all the—
DA: Judge Crocker.
WW: Did you see the state of the Black National movement in Detroit growing or shrinking after the rebellion?
DA: Growing. I mean, there were more—for example, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers became more active. Everybody who had a black consciousness began to spread, to energize. There were lots of new groups and lots of people began to have various expressions of Black Nationalism. Reverend Cleage’s church, they were very active. The Shrine of the Black Madonna developed after the painting of the Madonna in the sanctuary. There were lots of movements, all over, probably hundreds of them all over. Then there were a lot of white groups that wanted to—you know, like Focus: HOPE came into existence. Father Cunningham, Eleanor Josaitis. Father Cunningham was trying to bring everybody together across racial lines. I would say it energized the community, those who wanted to be. But you also had white reactionary forces too, like Don Lobsinger, I don’t know if you know that name. I knew Donald. Don and I both worked for the city. He would have demonstrations at lunch time.
WW: Oh, yeah, I know Mr. Lobsinger. Before we move past ’67 too much, is there anything else you’d like to add?
DA: No.
WW: Okay. Going like to the ‘70s and ‘80s, do you think that those decades were directly affected by what happened in ’67?
DA: I think everything, I think Detroit has totally been affected by what has happened. First of all, the population changed. White people left and you had a high percentage of black population. Schools changed. Whites went to Denby, Osbourne, Finney, trying to hold on to a majority white. At some point, they passed a tipping point, they just left. Young whites left the schools, young whites who want to have children moved out. Young blacks—I don’t know if we had a big migration, but because the whites left, you had a different balance in the numbers. So it changed the city. The city began to be seen as a black city. The white corporations disinvested in the city. [unintelligible]. For example, this rail line we see here. This is Coleman Young’s idea. But it doesn’t come to fruition until Mike Duggan become mayor. A lot of the things in the city could’ve been done when there was black leadership, but those white people in power with money refused to do it until they feel more comfortable with Duggan. So there’s things being done now that could’ve been done decades ago. These same buildings that people are renovating? They could’ve been renovated years ago. All the rail way? It could have been done years ago. The Cass Corridor could have been midtown years ago. You’ve also got just blacks and a broad base of white Appalachians and wanted to clear some them out of here too.
WW: How do you see the city of Detroit today? Do you still believe we’re still affected by ’67?
DA: I think we’re still affected by ’67, yes, because a lot of the development has not taken place. We have vast edges of the city that are just wastelands. We have the city being made without understanding the consequences for black people. We have all these young white people coming into the city now, getting the best jobs, having the best housing, and you have to wonder what that feels like to other people who’ve been here all their lives and they’re watching these things take place. I don’t have any issue with young white people coming in the city and doing as well as they can. My issue is that we’ve got to figure out a way for the resources and the benefits to be shared. That’s healthy for everybody. We’ve got to find ways that have cross-racial, intersectional collaboration. There’s no reason why—they have these coding classes downtown. There’s no reason why we couldn’t have higher percentages of blacks in the coding classes, that you find ways, you have to orchestrate ways for people to come together in ways that everybody can benefit. It’s going to be 100%, it’s going to be 50/50, no. But you’re also talking about good faith efforts. Detroit’s a great city. It’s a big city. It’s an international city. We don’t have fires, floods, hurricanes, or earthquakes. We do have some terribly inconvenient weather on occasion. But I don’t see enough effort being made to have us share in the benefits. We don’t pay attention to our Latino community, which I think is a vibrant community. I think Detroit ought to move to become bilingual because we are a city that’s a border city, and we’re also near water. It’d be wonderful if we took Spanish seriously and we became a bilingual city. We had a lot of young women moving to the city. I would like us to take up the issue of male violence against women and girls and rape and become the first city to make this a real program for the city. You see this organized group called Black Men’s Coalition to Eradicate Rape. I think male violence against women is a serious national crisis, and nowhere have we taken that seriously. In terms of the whole gay issue, Detroit was always seen as homophobic, and I suspect class-wise, that may be so. But I have not seen the expressions of violence. People talk, they say nasty things, obviously, that’s inappropriate. But Detroit’s way ahead of a lot of other places on that issue. People either ignore it, or it’s not a problem, or there’s a lot of things about Detroit. Detroit’s working class, Detroit’s bad, but we don’t have that kind of violence in Detroit. We have very little black and white violence. Very little. I’ve seen none since I’ve been here. Not like Chicago. So Detroit’s a great city. I think it has an enormous future. My issue is that particularly the white leadership don’t understand they failed one of the crucial lessons of ’67, and that is that they do not enough to deal with the issue of income inequality. You’ve got to find ways to do that, because people are forever going to be envious of other people’s joy. They want some joy themselves. And you don’t attend to that, and somebody’s going to act nasty. It’s amazing that we’re talking about foreign countries. They say, “What do you want to do about Syria? What do you want to do about—” No! You’ve got to give the young men jobs! But no one sees that. You go overseas, and the very same thing they describe overseas will be a thing working here. You’ve also got to find ways to get the kinds of jobs, people who work with their hands, because this is a working class town. We have lots of people who have working class consciousness. We can model ourselves after a place like Germany, where they give enormous education for the skilled trades. There are a lot of things we can do. Detroit can be a great city. But I don’t think it really isn’t attaining some of what I would call crucial issues that I would do if I were the person who was responsible. We have a little growing now, and we’ve got enough land in Detroit to have a whole farm. Not like [unintelligible name]’s farm, not like what he’s doing. What he’s doing with all his trees. He’s got all these trees on the east side where I live. How’s the city going to develop? Where’s new housing going to be? Where’s the new schools going to be? Where’s the new stores going to be? Nothing there on these trees. I don’t see that kind of forward thinking. I don’t see that. But I’m optimistic about the city. I like the city very much. A lot of the people are upset about gentrification. I don’t think gentrification is good, but on the other hand, I’m excited by some of the young whites I see coming in now from other places who, I don’t think, are part of gentrification in their minds. They’re coming, those in the occupy movement, those here supporting Bernie Sanders, many of them are coming to try and contribute and to work with people to make Detroit a better place. We just haven’t figured out a way to facilitate that. There’s no need for these groups to be off each other. We have too many needs. People who need to learn Spanish, people need to learn mathematics, and we’ve got a whole group of people who know how to do all those things. Technical literacy (computer literacy). We’ve got people who know how to do all these things. Why don’t we bring them together, get them to collaborate together, make this a better place for everybody. I think we’ve lost since—the group of white people coming in now, they’re not the same folk from the ‘50s and ‘60s. They don’t have the same consciousness. They don’t have the same goals and intentions, in general. I don’t see the kind of creative thinking that can do that and make that happen, and bring people together. If they don’t, all people are going to do, we’re just going to recreate the income inequality and [unintelligible] somewhere down the line. And say, “What happened?”
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
DA: No, that’s it.
WW: Thank you very much for sitting down with me today, we greatly appreciate it.
DA: My pleasure.
**Publisher’s note: This is the edited version of an interview with Dr. Karl Gregory by Tobi Voigt for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit ’67 Oral History Project.
Interviewer: TV
Interviewee: KG
TV: Today is Tuesday September 1st, 2015. My Name is Tobi Voigt. I’m with the Detroit Historical Society and I’m the Interviewer today and my interviewee is…
KG: Karl D. Gregory, Karl with a K.
TV: Great. Welcome, thank you Karl. Can you let me know a little about yourself? When and where you were born and a little but about your family?
KG: I was born in Detroit. I’m a Detroiter although I have lived many other places throughout my life, Even though I’ve left Detroit a lot of times, I’ve always come back. I have a spouse and three children. I worked as a professor of Economics at Wayne State University during the Civil Uprising in 1967. At that time, I lived on Appoline Street in Northwest Detroit and was very active in several community organizations - an activist professor. In fact, there were three professors at Wayne State at the time who were very active in the Detroit community. They were Mel Ravitz, a City Council person and Marian Mahaffey, another City Council person. I was the third active professor. There’s a great difference… I was a distant third [chuckles], but nonetheless quite active in the community, particularly the year before 1967 when I was involved in a major incident in Detroit that could have led to an uprising at that time, had that incident been handled differently, say in an Alabama Mayor Bull Connor fashion.
TV: Are you referring to the school walkout?
KG: Yes. I was the volunteer principal of the Northern High Freedom School trying to help the students there receive responsible attention in place of an initial hostility from the school board to their walkout. I recognized that it was a highly combustible boycott that could have led to circumstances beyond anyone’s control. My supporting the students was important because they were being abused by the Detroit school system, as were many students in the predominantly black central city schools at the time. The active seeking by students of a hoped-for higher quality education could be, I thought, the cutting edge for reinvigorated better performance in a new non-racialized school system.
TV: Would you tell me a little more about that?
KG: The Northern High School student body walked out in rebellion against a repressive school where very little learning and much student harassment took place, complete with an aggressive policeman within the school overly exerting his authority, according to the students. The building was badly maintained. Several senior teachers who were there many years ago when the school had mostly white students were not comfortable with a virtually all black student body. Students regarded younger teachers as having more positive attitudes about black students, but they tended to be rotated out due to seniority provisions in labor contracts.
This was a troubled school on the verge of becoming a none-too-subtle institution of incarceration pretending to be a school. It was a place of declining learning requiring a change agent to turn it around. The students became the change agent. I and my volunteer assistants at the Freedom School were administrative non-policy making volunteers, without pay or assets for operating the freedom school other than what could be scrounged from the community.
There were three major leaders of the student walkout. The relationships each had with significant parts of the student body explain the marvelous coordination the students had. One was an intellectual named Charles Colding. He was the editor of the student newspaper. His article describing the school’s deteriorating condition and strife led to the principal stopping the publication. It was too penetrating and too complete a description and could perhaps have led to embarrassment for the principal. That action was the trigger, piled on many other grievances, that subsequently initiated the school boycott and the formation of the Freedom School. This in turn could have led to an inner city-wide conflagration more than a year before July, 1967, were it not for a well-led strategy by students with some responsiveness ultimately by community leaders and the Detroit School Board chaired by Remus Robinson, the first black school board member and board chairman.
Judy Walker was the second student leader. She is now a well-known real estate broker and owner who has bought buildings for her own account. At the time of the walk-out, she lived east of Oakland Street, at that time, the dividing line between the black middle class and the families in her neighborhood who were not as well off. She was looked up to by all of the students east of Oakland and some on the west, the more affluent side.
Another student leader, Michael Bachelor, became a prominent attorney in Detroit. He is now dead, I understand. He was a football player and was respected by the athletes at Northern High. Many of the athletes supported his leadership.
These three student leaders, with connections to, and loyalty from, several different and influential student groups, brought cohesion to and loyalty from the student body. Efforts to divide them by police, employees of the school board, an initially misunderstanding daily press, and others, were unavailing. Together with other supporting student leadership, the student body became organized to carry out their strategies for their negotiation with the school board and to confront factors that led to a decreased quality of education in inner-city high schools.
The students of Northern believed that they could not compete equally with graduates from other better-resourced schools in the suburbs and the virtually all-white outlying districts within the city of Detroit. This was one of many interlocking issues of racism. If one looks closely enough at that period, one cannot avoid seeing that efforts having the impact of maintaining white supremacy citywide precipitated that school walkout and also, for that matter, the subsequent 1967 civil uprising. Fortunately, this walkout did not result in any violence, but it could have been different without a Freedom School to challenge the students, contribute to their learning and provide the time and leadership sustenance for successful negotiations with the initially hostile Detroit School board .
TV: This was Northern High School…
KG: Right, on Clairmount and Woodward. Incidentally, Clairmount is the same street at which the Rebellion in ’67 started. It is about 12 blocks west of Northern High.
TV: Yes. I understand, from what you’re saying, the students were boycotting because they were not getting an equal education.
KG: Exactly.
TV: And I understand correctly, the administration (the principal, the vice-principal and most of the teachers) were white [and] it was a majority African-American school and there was blatant mistreatment.
KG: Yes. And under resourced unlike many mostly white schools in the city. The basketball floor had nails protruding from the floor. If one was playing a basketball game there, one would have to know where to run or else the nails would pierce one’s gym floor shoes.
There were three floors in the school. Railings on some of the stairways (from first to second, second to third) were off. One couldn’t hold on to them, increasing the possibilities of falls. Academic standards were very poor such that the students felt that they were handicapped and they couldn’t compete with students from other schools who had better supervision, more caring instruction, more books and other resources.
Needless to say, the Board of Education did not treat all high schools equally. Historically there had been a flight of middle class whites out of Detroit and to a lesser extent a flight of whites from central city to outer city Detroit. This had been going on for years at that point, but it was beginning to pick up. The school board was faced with the situation that the inner-city schools were predominantly black because of rigid racism in housing patterns, including the segregation that public policy condoned and in fact subsidized. This left African Americans with a limited residential area permitted by segregated patterns enforced by real estate agents. By that time, the black population had grown out of Black Bottom westward, across Grand River, from being heretofore densely within the Boulevard and largely on Detroit’s east side. It had by then expanded to many adjacent areas of the city to heretofore primarily white and often Jewish areas as they, in turn, moved out of Detroit to Southfield and beyond increasingly as the years passed. The outer areas of Detroit were predominantly white and remained white for several years, as did the schools their children attended.
The school board was concerned with the departure of whites predetermining a mostly black school district. Whites generally had higher incomes and higher valued homes, which meant they usually paid more taxes than inner city dwellers who were increasingly black. The school board wanted to maintain an interracial population and the tax yield. It seemed to give priority to resources for the white schools. At that time, the schools were financed primarily by property taxes. There was not then an allocation per student such as the State has now. The interest was in maintaining revenues for the school system by giving preference to those most likely to flee, who were mostly white. Consequently, more resources were placed into the schools that were in outer Detroit. Less money was spent for the schools in lower income communities in the central city. Race was undoubtedly not a neutral factor in these decisions.
The central city students understood this disparity. They felt underserved and they were really angry because their whole lives were at stake just at a technological time that a college education was becoming more important for viability in later life. If one did not go beyond high school, and the students recognized this, one would be handicapped for the rest of their life.
A tragedy of that situation in the late 1960s is that the state and city are today in the third millennium still under investing in schools, and with a heavily disproportional impact on African American youngsters in communities like Detroit and elsewhere. That this area of the city has a large African American population is not coincidental. Sensitivity and understanding by public officials in the state continues to be lacking to this day.
TV: I understand that the students came to you and asked you to be a principal for a new school that they were creating. Can you tell me a more about that and your role?
KG: Let me give a little back story before addressing the role of the volunteers of whom I was just one. When the students walked out, they were being harassed by the police and truant agents. The students decided that they needed to do something to stop this harassment and to get the Detroit School Board to change its policies. The media was playing the walkout negatively. The impression that followers of the media received – and that some of the public school leaders including the then principal was that these were “hooligans”. They didn’t really appreciate an education. They were just “acting up” as “these” kids – (silently understood to mean black kids) are inclined to do.
The first days of the walkout, there seemed not to be much belief that students were really fighting for a higher quality education. Hence, the students understood that something had to be done to get this pressure off of them, because, among other forces, their parents were reading the newspapers and pressing them to return to school. Parents did not realize how badly operated and racist Northern High was until the evening meeting at the Freedom School when parents were invited to hear from the students collectively why they walked out. These students explained their reasons. They became heroes to their parents and to the Freedom School staff. Most of the parents then came to understand support their children more than before.
Regarding how I became involved, on my way to teach at Wayne State University, I heard about the walk-out on the radio. I stopped by the high school, parked my car and went up to the picketing students and enquired what was happening. I was introduced to Charles Colding and identified myself as a WSU professor who had graduated from Northern years before and went on to my class at the university. He called me later in the afternoon and said, “Most of the student body has walked out. The police are after us as well as the school agents that deal with truancy. We would like to establish an alternate school and we were wondering if you’d be the volunteer principal.” I was at my Wayne State University office in the Department of Economics. I asked a few questions and responded “OK. When do you want to start?” He replied, “Tomorrow.” [Chuckles]
I went home after my day at the university and made many phone calls for the rest of the evening; I knew many faculty from and around Detroit and found diverse professors who didn’t have all-day classes at their universities who could come and meet me at the school a few hours the next afternoon and at various times during the following days.
I knew that it would take the first morning to form a curriculum, prepare teaching schedules, find nearby churches in addition to near-by St. Matthews St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church on Holbrook and Woodward, a Freedom School Site that the students had already arranged with Father David Gracie, the Rector and a community conscious priest. He knew many of the students because their parents were members of the church. The volunteers including Frank Joyce, my Deputy Principal, and I knew that we had to plan something for the students that first morning while the organizing took place. Frank and I along with other volunteers would plan in another part of the church while the students met in a large group with spillover room arrangements. We arranged to have an initial program featuring local civil rights activists who had worked in the south with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other organizations to lead in freedom songs and talk about their experiences until formal classes started that first afternoon.
We did not have any financing. At least 1,000 students ultimately came to the school, although not that many came the first day. The public high school had an enrollment of about 2200. The principal placed pressure on some students not to walk out. The balance of students either didn’t show up for us, stayed home and/or returned to Northern. We had to find added space, so we recruited churches that were nearby to cooperate.
The leading church to volunteer was St. Mathew’s/St. Joseph’s.
Students came early in the morning and stayed throughout the day except for lunch. The school subsequently expanded to other churches.
Much of the night time was spent recruiting faculty and revising the curriculum based on the strengths of the volunteer teachers, largely college professors. We had no food or any other supplies for the students. I was very active in the Civil Rights Movement and there were a lot of Detroiters who had been active active in Freedom Summer and the voting rights movement in the South who were back in Detroit. I called a few of them and said, “Hey, we’re going to need you in the morning to conduct a session in the large chapel and a few of you to work out a curriculum on the afternoon of the Freedom School. Can you come and lead them in freedom songs, talk about what’s going on in the south, about Freedom Summer, and so on?” They came and we had a mass assembly in the church – where the congregation would sit.
In one of the side rooms, volunteers planned who was going to be there in the afternoon, who’s going to take what classes, where and so on, and how we’re going to structure things henceforward. We completed a tentative curriculum. There’s a lot to say about this, but we could use up the whole time talking about that.
TV: I know, but it’s so interesting!
KG: The story was in the papers daily during the walk-out. It was also the subject of a play given two consecutive weekends by the Mosaic Youth Theatre, headed by Rick Sperling of Detroit, in May 2011 at the Detroit Institute of Arts Theater. Each presentation was sold out or almost so. Mosaic youth teenagers played all the roles: the principal, students, school board, police, etc. I thought it was an outstanding presentation.
A point the play made clear was that the Freedom School bought the students time to negotiate with the Detroit school board which did not want to negotiate with them. The school board said, “We do not negotiate with students. We’ll negotiate with your parents.” But, some of the parents had not reached high school themselves. The students felt better off negotiating for themselves. They knew the circumstances of the schools since they lived them, but school board policy was “we don’t negotiate with the students.”
The students had to create a crisis so they would receive attention and they did that beautifully. They were at risk because they never knew when the police or the truancy officer would crack down physically. Other volunteers and I were also at risk for helping the students while they confronted the school system. In fact, I heard statements from people who knew legislators in Lansing who reported to me that “legislators were discussing passing legislation criminalizing activities of volunteers like you!”
That students could conceive such a strategy as they did and carry [it] out so well was unbelievable to them. They probably thought outside adults were misleading them. It’s like in the South during the fifties and sixties; it was never the system or authorities at fault. They would also say, “we know our local Nigras, they wouldn’t do this by themselves. [Thumps fist on table as he talks]. It’s the outsiders that are agitating!” The volunteers were seen in the role of the outsiders here with much of its risk, but it turned out beautifully and I’m so glad.
I just loved that experience and the accomplishment. I played a similar but less visible role in the aftermath in the Rebellion of 1967. We shall come to that later.
TV: Yeah, that’s great. That was a good story to hear because the detail help us understand the kind of role you play generally and I know you had a long career in Washington and the Civil Rights Movement before even that incident. Sometime I would love to sit down and learn about that [laughter], but I just realized we could be here for a week and I really want to hear it all, but let’s talk a little bit about that.
KG: Regarding a particular role in Washington D.C., I worked for the Kennedy and the Johnson Administrations in the Executive Office of the President, in the height of the Civil Right Movement in 1961 to ’64, while on leave from Wayne State University. Just to mention one of many experiences, following when Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner , civil rights workers, were murdered in Mississippi, I was the Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality in District of Columbia, a U. S. colony without complete self-government, a colony somewhat like Detroit during the recent bankruptcy and the Detroit Public Schools for a much longer period. CORE wanted to make sure that the murders of these three civil rights workers was not given low priority at the presidential level. I had extreme personal challenges because I was an economist working the Office of the President of the U. S. and heading up D. C. CORE in my non-working hours, while trying to encourage federal actions to help secure justice regarding the Mississippi murders. Somehow I had to find a way to heighten the consideration of this while I stayed in the background in order to avoid a conflict of interest. I finally decided to let others lead the way and remain personally uninvolved.
TV: That’s amazing. Now was your group instrumental in preparing Johnson and the administration for the signing of the Civil Rights Act?
KG: No, no, no, no, no. I can’t claim that [laughter]. CORE at the local level was trying to make sure that there was the understanding locally of the role racism played, opening up job opportunities in D. C., desegregating housing and supporting national efforts across the board there. The national office of CORE had the dominant role in dealing with the White House on national issues.
For example, in July 1963, our chapter of CORE helped many other organizations prepare D. C. for the March on Washington and worked as marshals for the March. We operated rest stations, etc. for the 250,000 marchers according to the understated official count.
For another activity, among several, in July of 1964, the protest of highest priority for the Civil Rights Movement nationally at that time was the seating of Mississippi Freedom Democratic delegation at the Democratic National Convention for the nomination of the President held in Atlantic City, where Johnson was to be nominated following his first partial term after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Mississippi delegation was then, and had been historically, all white. The 1960 U. S. Census reported blacks were 42 percent of the population of Mississippi. But, they couldn’t have even any members [slams fist] of the Mississippi delegation.
A well-organized black political group with Fannie Lou Hamer as the head went to Atlantic City in full strength insisting that they be seated as the authorized delegation, pointing to the racism in the selection of the delegates in Mississippi. Actually, there were similar circumstances in lots of other states, but in Mississippi, it was worse than most other places.
How to handle this gave the Democratic Party a colossal problem. The party didn’t want these circumstances to reflect on their choice of President and his re-election, for Johnson had to win a national vote that included African American citizens in some states where they could vote.
Civil rights groups urged the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation, as they were called, to be seated as a group in place of the regular all-white delegation. CORE chapters and other civil rights groups all over the U.S. converged in Atlantic City and protested on the boardwalk for almost the entire convention, sleeping at night on the Boardwalk just outside of the Convention Center. I led a delegation consisting of members from Washington D.C. CORE, nearby Northern Virginia CORE and Baltimore CORE, all in that Northeast section of the U. S. We had two busloads and stayed on the boardwalk in Atlantic City for almost the entire convention until the Mississippi Freedom Party delegation incident was resolved.
It was resolved much to our dissatisfaction. Lyndon Johnson, with V.P. designate Hubert Humphrey being his point person, devised a so-called compromise. The Rules Committee decided the Democrats could not reject the Mississippi delegation in its entirety. Johnson’s negotiators offered a compromise to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation. They were to have a token of one delegate to join the regular delegation. It may have been that they could have compromised for two or three. Who knows? But, it would have been extremely difficult. Fannie Lou Hamer and the delegation rejected that compromise on obvious grounds. One delegate is like being a little bit pregnant.
The matter ended with continued racism in the Mississippi delegation, even though the state had a large number of African-Americans. It remained an all-white supremacist delegation from Mississippi. That same kind of attitude made it possible for the murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner to occur with an attempted cover up with the involvement of local law enforcement.
It should be noted how strongly white supremacy mattered in voter representation. Johnson realized this. To his credit he pushed through the Voting Rights Act afterwards knowing fully that white southerners would shift their allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans where they and their views would be more welcome and to change the latter party to representing the southern Democrats.
TV: That is a lot of history.
KG: Circumstances like those in Mississippi made racial problems worse and helped lead to situations like the 1967 Rebellion.
TV: Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about that. I know that we’ll get into it more a little bit later. You know Detroit being the quote, unquote “Model City” and the kind of feeling that the North is racist based on…
KG: There were slaves in New York and elsewhere!
TV: There were slaves in Michigan [chuckles].
KG: Yeah, that’s true, that’s true.
TV: Yeah, there were… Anyway, let’s scale back and go back to the events of ’67.
KG: Right.
TV: Particularly, what was your familiarity with the scenes of the uprising and the rebellion?
KG: I lived on Hague Street in Detroit between John R and Brush. That’s about eight blocks south of where the Rebellion started on Clairmount and Twelfth Street and about 14 blocks east of it. I lived there with my parents most of my youth and college years. My brother and I went to Northern High School that was on the same street (Clairmount) where the Rebellion occurred. I was very familiar with Twelfth Street also because my father owned a tailoring, cleaning and pressing shop on Twelfth Street and Delaware just a few blocks south of where large police arrests precipitated the Rebellion to break out. My father’s business was subsequently broken into, all the clothes taken and the building set of fire as the Rebellion turned into a riot.
On the second or third day I believe, I went into the 12th Street area in the early stages of the Rebellion with Chuck Colding, who was one of the leaders of the Northern High School boycott a year and a few months earlier. Together, we saw a group of fifteen [or] twenty adults in a close circle and we looked in the center. At the bottom was a cadaver who had a wound. I was told it was a police-inflicted bayonet wound. What struck me –and I’m always looking at symbols that are passed on to future generations – is that there was a little boy (no more than four) who stood beside I guess his father, holding his hand. The child was looking between the legs of the adults to see the cadaver. To me this represented the hostility and the violence of the current generation being passed to future generations, through the eyes of this kid. So I took a picture of it, with Chuck Colding there by me. I gave the picture to an editor of the Michigan Chronicle – whom I knew well. His name was Al Dunmore, who turned out to be one of the leading spokespersons for the Michigan Chronicle and the African-American community in Detroit for interpreting to the entire community what was transpiring during the uprising. He was very objective. He liked that picture so much he published it as a space filler in several individual issues later on in the Michigan Chronicle.
When I told that story of the photo to Sidney Fine, author of the Violence In The Model City (which is reputed to be the definitive discussion about what occurred then, next to the Kerner Commission report), his response was he researched all the deaths and did not find any death that corresponds to that one. Recently, I checked with Charles Colding. His recollection is the same as mine. I wonder how many other deaths official records did not count at all or counted incorrectly by location.
KG: The impression given by Fine was [that] I was mistaken, that this was not real. I elaborate on that because I think there’s a real need for this project that the Detroit Historical Museum is undertaking, because there is probably a lot of that the public does not know now. I also believe they will never know about some incidents that actually occurred. Yet, the more the public knows the better.
In fact, one of the major incidents that happened concurrent with the Rebellion --we only found out about it afterwards– was a truly heinous event. It happened five blocks from where my parents lived. The public only found out about it because a black reporter for a daily newspaper, one of a few reporters of color then to be sure, did not give up in trying to get further information on a rumor he heard. He heard police killed people in a motel on Woodward and Virginia Park named the Algiers Motel Annex. He heard … and he investigated with persistence despite initial resistance. He was like a bulldog. I happened to know him and noticed those bulldog characteristics.
He may have died because of that determined attribute, because he went to Boston afterwards and was, I have been told, investigating drugs and was killed there [under] unknown circumstances. This is unconfirmed. But, this reporter did the investigation and what he discovered has now been documented as the Algiers Motel Incident:
Three African–American males were killed and two reported white streetwalkers were involved. How that story could have escaped recognition and exposure instantly, except for the determination of one bulldog black reporter, is something the police and the daily press needs to understand and correct. Just imagine how many other similar circumstances may have happened.
Another of several things with which I experienced: I was also involved in an incident where I could have been killed during the 1967 rebellion. I received a call from a community organizer named Alvin Harrison. He worked with black youth on the east side Detroit in a very needy area. Those youth had an altercation with the police department during what’s known as the Kercheval Street Incident in the mid-1960s. I won’t go into this in detail because there are too many other things to talk about that are more related to 1967. Al called me. He was deeply involved in the community activity on the east side and he said, “Look, I just heard the National Guard is coming to the east side. There are lots of people on the street who do not know anything about this and I’m afraid [of] people getting killed.” He asked, “Can you come out with me to inform as many people as we can? And we’ll try get people off the street.” I said, “OK.” So we went over on the east side in my car and patrolled as much area as we could telling people ”the National Guard is coming, we do not know how well trained they are or if they are integrated. You have got to get off the street.” We got a lot off the street. But, I recall we drove around Mack and McClellan, Kercheval – some places like that and near where Northeastern High School used to be.
We continued until late that evening during a curfew. The National Guard stopped us. There was a young white guardsman who dismounted from his vehicle, approached and told me, “Pull your window down.” I was driving. [He] pointed his gun at me. I was concerned, but I wasn’t afraid then. His hand was shaking… on the trigger. And I said, “look, I’m a college professor, I am just trying to get the people off the street.” And he looked like he was trying to determine whether or not I was a rioter (or what have you) and a sergeant came by and said something like, “cool it.” But, this guardsman [the kid] was more afraid of me than I was of him. I don’t know how many black persons, if any, that youth had been in contact with before in his entire life.
Other incidents like that one have come to my attention subsequently from friends and students. The first military who arrived were National Guards personnel. They were fairly untrained, those I saw were white, volunteer National Guard. I presume they had little or no experience with African Americans. It wasn’t until later that the Army sent in the regular military. They were more diverse and were better trained and they weren’t as unfamiliar with black folks and didn’t feel challenged because they were dealing with a section of the population that very few of them had any connection with before and were frightened by.
With that experience, I don’t really believe that we, the public, have heard everything important that happened. That further makes me wonder how much we really know about matters in depth.
I have a friend named Paul Lee, who was a kid at that time, but he has researched 1967 widely. He has written several articles for the Michigan Citizen that go into the depth on the things that occurred which I did not know about before. For example, the authorities arrested so many folks in July 1967 that they didn’t have any place to put most of them. They took some of them out on buses to Belle Isle and kept them on the buses for days. They had no lavatory, no food, not anything but buses. If there is any violation of civil liberties, this is it! And they converted a bath house and perhaps other structures into incarceration facilities. I have not seen discussion of this in any media prior to seeing it in the Michigan Citizen years afterwards and I read voraciously. Again, I wonder, how many other incidents like this were, if not covered up, not relayed to the public, apart from the revelations of the Kerner Commission Report. A disturbing thought is: how much would the public know if there had not been a Kerner Commission report and Sidney Fine’s study. One wonders how complete were they.
An enlightened democracy needs more factual information conveyed to the public on what is really transpiring about which they should know to be informed citizens. I am glad to see the Michigan Historical Society bringing these stories through our interviews and other planned programs.
My major discretionary activity during that week was taking 35 mm slides and 8 mm movies of various uprising scenes. I took hundreds of slides, and several 8mm films. For example, I have film showing early during the Rebellion on Grand River in mid-town and north of there going up in flames. One wonders, why on Grand River between ten or so blocks north and south of the west Grand Boulevard and elsewhere, businesses were in flames at the outset of the Rebellion. One has to ask “Why there?” Of all the other places… and if you knew Detroit you knew then that on Grand River there were a lot of businesses that were really exploitative of the poor and the black community. Furniture and appliance stores would charge very high prices, accept a down payment and layaway goods. Customers could reserve furniture, put five dollars down and sign an “I owe you.” They couldn’t get the furniture until they paid the entire remaining balance.
It was well known that many people who purchase such items, largely overpriced to begin with, on layaway will never come back, or if they do come back, they will not pay off the entire bill and thereby lose their partial payments. These items could be sold over and over again. All sorts of businesses operated like that, just exploiting the community, particularly those who were poor and could not pay the entire price and hoped for better income allowing them to pay off their debt.
The day of the month that welfare checks were issued was well known. It was called “Mother’s Day”. Some commercial establishments would raise the prices of some goods temporarily on Mother’s Day on which the poor spent more.
One of my students while I was teaching courses in economics did a project where he compared prices of a basket of goods in suburban grocery stores with those in Detroit ghetto grocery stores and commented on the contrast in the price and quality of sample goods he observed. He discovered higher prices and lower quality in lower income neighborhoods in central Detroit. The quality was often much lower in the latter. Bread that was stale or older would be more frequently found in the inner city. There are stories like this of which the total population may be unaware. There is a huge foundation for many forms of alienation that would explain the dissatisfaction culminating in a rebellion. (I will not speak to a leading factor, police brutality, for it has been covered elsewhere.)
All this exploitation and lack of services and few food stores in very low income areas, falls with huge force on the people least able to afford it who also need the nutrients from fresh food, vegetables, and so on. Prior to the early 1950s when the Detroit population was just below 2.0 million, there were many services and commercial establishments which left the city after the Rebellion with the continued process of deindustrialization, globalization, disinvestment in the city and white flight followed by some black flight ramped up. Many more grocery stores and other service establishments existed then which thinned subsequently with the loss of businesses and population. That is when parts of Detroit continued to become commercial and food deserts.
TV: Wow… Those are pretty significant experiences. I know we wanted to talk a little bit about your involvement after the rebellion and post the uprising. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
KG: Right after the rebellion, before Thanksgiving, 1967 there was a huge concern among black community leaders about “what do we do now?” Forty-three persons or some such number officially dead, dozens of buildings burned down, economic activity brought to a standstill for several days, people not having services that they depend on, what do African Americans do about all of that, it was asked. Charles Diggs, a well-known Congressperson at that time, called a group of business and other activist leaders in the African-American community to meet to begin to answer this question. They were businessmen, preachers, and professionals (doctors, lawyers, teachers, business persons) and a cross section of the black leadership community, focusing on doers and not spotlight seekers or newspaper headline hunters.
The Congressman and others made an introductory statement expressing that we really have to do some creative strategizing beginning quickly. We have to think about rebuilding local institutions for African Americans in their interest so that events similar to the Rebellion would not recur and to eliminate the oppressive circumstances leading to such a Rebellion. Attendees discussed what happened and why it happened, in addition to offering ideas for redevelopment covering some of the points made in this interview.
Out of that group came several messages, but one was that people who owned and managed property tend to protect it. If one wants to increase interest in property value preservation and enhancement in our neighborhoods, one has to create service institutions and to organize businesses for generating jobs, fuller employment, and more residential ownership. Most importantly, however, one also has to address the exploitation that generates the motivation for Rebellion in the first place, such as, but not limited to, particularly police brutality, under education, huge income and wealth inequality, extensive residential segregation, racism and various forms of other repression and overall lack of opportunity.
TV: Now is this because just thinking back to the little bit I know about demographics in Detroit, but especially I know in the neighborhood of Twelfth and Clairmount in that neighborhood [there were] very few African-American homeowners and most were renters? Is that kind of the powerlessness behind it?
KG: That’s partly true. Many apartment buildings had absentee landlords who subdivided units to maximize rents. Many houses were sold on land contract. Some homes that were said to be owned were really bought on land contract, since mortgages were hard to get from white-owned banks. Houses bought on land contract were not really owned. The seller kept the title until the last installment payment was made. Many buyers paid for years but never built up any equity, so that when they missed a few payments, the seller reclaimed the property to repeat the cycle with other prospective purchasers. Please realize the bitterness when one pays for years for a house and then misses a few months and loses the house, particularly after many improvements one has paid for, to see it sold again to another of the exploited.
With regard to apartments, the Diggs-convened group talked about landlord exploitation. Investors would buy large buildings. They’d subdivide them into much smaller units, sometimes sharing bath rooms while the government code enforcers looked the other way. There were all sorts of building codes on the books. The code violations were enforced in the white communities to preserve conditions there. (The reader should realize that the fairly recent significant degree of desegregation of city government management jobs, particularly in middle and upper level decision making ranks, did not really begin to develop until under Mayor Cavanagh and picked up substantially after 1974 with the advent of the Coleman Young administration. Much of the disgust some white leaders had for the latter Mayor was due in part because he changed Detroit from being ruled primarily by whites and that he desegregated employment and particularly the police department.)
The mass media did not cover much such stories about landlord abuse and the failure of code enforcement in the central city. The larger community was somewhat unaware of this extreme oppression, or if they were aware, they often ignored it if they were not victims. The prevailing philosophy seemed to be, “let sleeping dogs lie.”
Landlords and businessmen often charge high prices because they know people don’t have alternatives. Consumers are only protected in markets when there is adequate information, good transportation, fair competition, and the absence of racism, among other requirements for markets to work well. We mentioned the welfare checks that came out at the beginning of the month. Right at that time some commercial prices went up in ghetto stores. A few days after the welfare check had been distributed, prices went back to normal. But, normal in the ghetto is usually higher than elsewhere, sometimes much higher. There is a for- profit system with devastatingly weak provisions for avoiding consumer exploitation. Some business persons believe that consumer exploitation is consistent with the often overused term “free markets.” Such heresy creates distrust of capitalism and the real meaning of free markets as Adam Smith used the term.
TV: I didn’t mean to get you off track. You were talking about one of the things was, you know, encouraging ownership of property.
KG: Right, right, right. You did not get me off of track. I wandered off myself. We were talking about the group that Charles Diggs brought together. Another major conclusion of the group was that a self-determined economic development thrust had to be developed. An organization to plan for and is committed to that purpose had to be founded. It must be focused on developing businesses, housing and jobs. In short, it must be about community economic development. A checklist of deliverables to which priority is to be assigned should be created and new agents chosen to implement those priorities.
Out of this meeting a group of leaders decided to organize this economic development thrust. That organization was subsequently was called ICBIF (the Inner City Business Improvement Forum).
Another recommendation dealt with the fact that the community did not have a self-determined political organization representing African American priorities and enabling independent leaders to strategize together and share ideas so that the black community speaks with one voice. Everyone would know that if it came through that political organization, the recommendations would be authentically in the interest of all, and that the positions advocated would not be beholden to any external interests. The paramount focus should be, it was said, on community self-determination. It was thought that if Detroit’s African Americans have a group that everybody knows speaks for all of its members, they could act in a more coordinated and forceful way and resist the influence of captive gatekeepers.
Such an organization was established subsequently. It was called CCAC (the Citywide Citizens Action Committee). Revered Albert Cleage, who later became known by his African name, Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, was elected as Chairman. It had a wider and more militant and lay membership than ICBIF and supervised the negotiation of a planning grant proposal with New Detroit in formation.
In summary, the two major organizations were CCAC (which was political, focused on community cohesion, voice of the community) and ICBIF ( focused on inner city economic development, housing, business formation and economic opportunity including job creation).
Both organizations came into being and developed agendas that were put into operation. ICBIF then developed a governing body, raised money from the Ford Foundation, from New Detroit (when it was organized, that was later). ICBIF was chaired initially by Revered Charles Morton, a Morehouse College man. Graduates of Morehouse, a prime historical college for black men in Atlanta, played a big role in our community. Lawrence Doss, the unpaid President, was relocated from outside of Detroit, was not a Morehouse man but also played a major leadership role. He was formerly a top administrator in Detroit for the IRS. The IRS began a data center in the city and he came to head it and brought with him Walter Douglas as the Deputy Administrator; African Americans, both were talented administrators and became very active in ICBIF and lent professional management.
I was elected Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors. The Board had businessmen, attorneys, clergy, educators, architects and other professionals. It hired trained business persons led by a black Bank of the Commonwealth banker named Walter McMurtry.
ICBIF refined a strategy that involved large sums to start it and a complex associated economic firms. The strategy was initially prepared in an outline form by another organization to be discussed shortly, called the Federation For Self -Determination (FSD). ICBIF needed funding to make it operational and to put it into a posture where the officers could raise money. They approached New Detroit, which was then being organized.
At that time Joe Hudson of the J. L. Hudson Department store family and former Chairman of the HudsonWebber Foundation was a central leader in trying to find strategies for the white business leadership beginning to respond to the crisis in Detroit. This led after a while to the founding of New Detroit. The major auto CEOs and the CEOs of the large utilities and some of the banks became involved in providing top community leadership and themselves (not staff) forming one part of the proposed Board of New Detroit at that time.
Henry Ford II became personally involved as a key participant; he had a large self-interest, as did the other corporate leaders. During the Rebellion, production came to a halt in the auto industry. Plants and department stores were closed. These large plants operated with huge investments having high fixed costs. When the plants and some retail outlets shut down operations for several days, no product was produced. Cars could be sold out of inventory temporarily, but losses could be substantial. Even if the losses were small, the UNCERTAINTY created by the Rebellion would diminish added investments, particularly if a longer disruption of production were possibly to take place. The business sector had a big vested interest initially in what could be done from a profit preservation among other perspectives.
Business leaders became genuinely involved. Henry Ford II in particular visited the low income community and met some of us. In fact, I think the January ’69 issue of Fortune magazine has a photograph of Henry Ford with his trusted administrator who dealt with Detroit issues, named William Schoen. Sitting at the same table in the Shrine of the Black Madonna and right across from them (in full face view) is Reverend Albert Cleage, the leader of CCAC, the political arm to negotiate with New Detroit. Right beside him was this author. We had an in-depth conversation.
Henry Ford wanted to know how Rev. Cleage perceived the Detroit post-uprising scene and possibilities. He asked about Cleage’s thoughts to turn the city around, how Detroit could get back to the status where most people were working, there were more jobs and there was a community that’s progressing? He asked some very general questions. Rev. Cleage would answer some and he would turn to me particularly for detail on the economic programming. Rev. Cleage and I laid out brief elements of a strategy. Bill Schoen took copious notes.
I asked Schoen subsequently about Ford’s reaction; he answered by stating that his boss was impressed by the constructive proposals and wanted to hear more about them.
Bill Schoen and others spent many hours, in addition, talking to Detroit grass roots community organizers. He would have Lorenzo Freeman (Renny), who was head of West/Central Organization at that time go around with him to places in the community. He talked to Kenneth Cockrel, Sr., a much admired figure among the young black community leaders – an attorney and subsequent Detroit City Councilperson, and according to some a likely prospect for mayor had he not died early. Schoen would pry him with many questions. Don Roberts was very active in the Congress for Racial Equality and was involved in the Northern High School Boycott. He spent time with Schoen also as Schoen gathered intelligence from many grass roots leaders.
Henry Ford also brought a sociologist from one of the major universities to consult with him on urban issues and strategies applied by other municipalities nationally. The sociologist met with me to ask a lot of questions. Ford probably felt there was information other activists and I had that an academic professional could gather which Ford and his staff could not obtain directly. We had lunch together. The professor posed many questions. I subsequently saw a partial report on the meeting which noted that the professor was reporting to Henry Ford, and that he regarded me as “testy” on some of his questions. I gather that Henry Ford had other persons become involved in order to help arrive at independent solutions and to test CCAC’s and ICBIF’s ideas for reasonableness.
I suppose that out of those and other discussions the decision to form and fund New Detroit, Inc. was made firm. The corporate community needed an organization seemingly independent of it that was keeping in touch with the community on racial tensions and other matters with persons representing the grass roots, including the militants in the community. Henry Ford had been known to have said that he had previously been talking to the wrong people. The CEOs then wanted to establish and keep communications particularly with the activist leaders, it seemed to me, for keeping up with developments, particularly for early warnings if developments were to go badly. They hoped to find out at an early stage and be able to do something about it, if all else failed. The fundamental hope however seemed to be improving communications of leadership with the grass roots to observe better how conditions could be improved and better community relationships be established.
The corporate leaders forming New Detroit, Inc. started off by appointing Kent Mathewson, a former head of a metropolitan Fund, an issues- oriented organization before he was made something like a coordinator and transitions manager in the post-uprising discussions and the corporate reaction to it.
If I remember correctly, Mathewson was originally from Texas and spoke with a southern accent. He worked with Joe Hudson, the critical guider of the post-Rebellion organization of New Detroit, working closely with Henry Ford and other top CEOs. Hudson seemed to be the vigorous point person in the beginning with Mathewson as the official temporary administrator.
After a while, I think the CEOs observed – I believe, this may be a conjecture - that this white guy from Texas was probably not the guy to bring the black and white community together. But, be that as it may, they decided they needed to have an interim manager to lead the transfer out of the preorganization to New Detroit into operating status. The corporate CEOs wanted, I believe, someone they could talk to, someone they were comfortable with, and with whom they could establish an amenable and productive track record. They didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances at this, it seemed to me.
William T. Patrick was appointed temporarily. He was a player in the community. I had known him since I was a pre-teenager, though he was much older than I was. My father was a Black Elk (IBPOEW, Independent Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World). The Elks had annually an oratorical contest in which students could debate an issue. The winner would give an award as the outstanding debater. Patrick was one of the debaters. He performed magnificently, so I, just a little boy then, was really impressed. He became later the first black council person in Detroit. I think he was before Erma Henderson and Rev. Nicholas Hood Sr. Patrick moved upward from that position to become a corporate attorney for Michigan Bell, then the major telephone company locally before AT&T bought it.
Patrick became titled something like interim coordinator of New Detroit. My impression was the decision makers wanted to have someone who was on comfortable speaking terms with the entire community, including militant leadership, and was respected by them. Patrick was not believed to be such a person. They knew the head of New Detroit would be a critical person for the credibility of that power structure organized group.
A search for the president was organized. I only knew of three candidates identified in that search. All three of them were African-American. I will comment on only two. These two communicated well, had good leadership skills and had not burned any bridges with any sector of the community. One was a professor in political science at a major university in this state. He published a lot, was a very positive and effective spokesperson, and was analytical, resourceful, and also respected by all groups who knew him and his objectivity.
The second candidate was very much like the first but was a consultant not a professor. He had been a public school teacher, attended law school but decided against that career, received a graduate degree and became an organizational development consultant for large corporations and had several clients and a good track record. He had close friendships among the leaders of the activist community.
The third candidate I shall not characterize for he is myself. We were all interviewed.
KG: … All three declined. I don’t know why the others did so because they had a lot to offer, including being seen by the black community as professional and independent on their own terms, which was important. I cannot speak for the other two candidates on why they rejected being considered for the position. I was not interested because I investigated various items like the expected budget for the organization. The apparent commitment was not consistent with my understanding of the massive problems that I realized existed. Further, I wondered how strong the corporate support would be when and if conditions in Detroit became more normal. Would the CEOs remain engaged or would their interest wane? Plus, I was reading reports of what the city government was doing defensively; tooling up militarily. I guessed that corporations were very supportive of such militarization. So, it seemed to me like an effort…an attempt to give the appearance of really dealing with the problems but not putting enough resources in to really make a significant difference. Better communications without adequate resources are helpful but insufficient, I thought.
Also, I preferred to stay in a professorial tenure track. At a professorial level one has more independence and self-determination.
Without a successful search result, Patrick became the President. New Detroit subsequently selected some excellent initial leaders, given the limitations, like Lawrence Doss and Walter Douglas, who did as much as they could, but the constraints were great.
More recently, New Detroit’s focus has shifted from race relations, communications and racial equity to a new goal: diversity. This multiplies by a factor the beneficiary group members with little increase in resources, thereby decreasing, I believe, the resources per affected member of the target population. A much stronger commitment of resources would be required for the much larger target population given the new wider focus to be pursued effectively.
Also and more importantly to me, there is a question of priorities. Many of the forefathers of African Americans were brought to this country involuntarily in chains as slaves, merely chattel or personal property, who were deliberately encouraged to have children, for their offspring increased the assets of their owners, just like cattle. These slaves produced with their unpaid labor large parts of the U. S. gross domestic product and tax base annually for over more than two centuries. Taxes were then largely derived from levies on exports of the crops the slaves tended.
Shifting the focus of New Detroit from the descendants of slaves to voluntary immigrants and their descendants does not seem to me to be progress. I am not demeaning diversity as an important cultural value to be sought. Diversity is very important. It just does not seem to me to be on the same high moral ground as repairing for the impact of slavery and its legacy for which reparations have never been paid, as with the Japanese after World War II when they were interned for the war period, as contrasted to slavery for over two centuries, followed by periods of Jim Crow, segregation, and disproportionate incarceration, etc.. It puts voluntary immigrants and their offspring at the same moral level as slaves and their descendants, despite the involuntary nature of their status.
This topic becomes a significant part of this discussion, for New Detroit was an integral reaction to the Rebellion, a racial incident growing out of the legacy of slavery. When its focus was changed from improving race relations to diversity, New Detroit denied its birthright and diluted its effectiveness, it seems to me.
TV. Can we turn now to developments in 1968 as a result of 1967?
KG. The major innovative redevelopment thrust from the African American community involved CCAC and ICBIF. When CCAC was first organized, it had a meeting at the Detroit City Council chamber – the officers of CCAC all sat on the 13th floor of the City County building at the big curved table where the city Council sits in the large auditorium. CCAC had that meeting there shortly after the 1967 uprising began. I recall they billed themselves as the “New Black Establishment.” Rev. Cleage had the center seat and some other members of the group were seated on both sides in an arc with many other members in the audience. (I was not at the table because I was a volunteer advisor to CCAC, along with Grace Boggs of the Boggs Center and Nadine Brown of the UAW. In addition, I was a consultant to Rev. Cleage.) CCAC held those hearings there and other meetings elsewhere.
The speakers reviewed their interpretation of the events that had occurred, why they happened, and the urgency of developing a program to achieve more self-determination for the residential community and to negotiate a transfer of power. Rev. Cleage frequently stressed the desirability for a transfer of power. Many leaders of the more militant African American organizations were in attendance and were influential members of a diverse CCAC membership. A promise was made to develop programs for a transfer of power to Detroit residents and away from corporations and nonresidents and to move toward ending racism in Detroit. Some persons spoke to types of programs which were needed for greater self-determination and to deal with the many problems confronting the community. Ending police brutality and desegregating housing and employment were the focus of many comments, along with suggestions for doing so.
An interesting and revealing incident occurred at that meeting which helps to explain why the Detroit community at large knew so little about the anger felt by the local grass roots leadership that led to the Rebellion. The CCAC meeting was attended by a stranger to the local activist members of the audience. A short stocky dark skinned person attended with a large Afro hair-do, a thick beard and a white tee shirt with a dominant black power symbol on it. The press photographers and journalists seemed to ignore the speakers and were around this newcomer taking many pictures of him. It was almost as if a very important national leader was in attendance. The press gathered around him at the end of the meeting firing questions at him. He responded by giving the standard militant answers as if he had been a long time resident of Detroit, had a constituency here and was accustomed to speaking for Detroiters. He seemed to relish his new found notoriety.
I asked other long time activists who this stranger was and was told he just arrived in town from out of town. He was quoted a lot in the newspapers the following day. Overnight, he became a black leader in Detroit because of the mass media treatment.
Largely not observed were the leaders who had been very active for years, some for decades, and did not seek ostentation or wear a symbolic uniform, but who just provided, selflessly, service to the community steadfastly. The white newsmen did not know to photograph and pose questions to these real leaders and therefore could not write about them. A predominantly white media staff then, including few, if any, editors with a history and direct knowledge of black leadership in Detroit, at the time did not help bring insightful understanding of local conditions and leadership to the citizenry at large.
CCAC’s major responsibility in the self-determined scheme was to help raise funds for financing the outlined list of projects that had been prepared for it by the Federation for Self –Determination (FSD). I don’t remember the exact amount. I think it was about $5 million, some amount like that, to get many of the activities begun, including completing the planning, some seed capital funds for the several planned corporations, including a bank, MESBICS, housing corporation, business consulting center, etc.
CCAC could not raise funds for all these activities since they were starting from scratch and therefore without operating experience. FSD had the idea of approaching the large church denominations in New York. Most of them had in New York a central or regional administrative unit and at least one African-American executive on staff who was involved in budgetary decisions. We researched them and arranged a meeting in New York. Attending from Detroit and representing CCAC and the FSD were Rev. Albert Cleage, Don Roberts, Lorenzo Freeman, and myself. I may have forgotten someone. The representatives of the assembled denominations were eager to learn of our plans. Rev. Cleage had been developing a national reputation. The news of the attempted recovery in Detroit from one of the larger of several U.S. rebellions in that time period enlivened their interest. Their attendance was 100 per cent. They wanted to participate and saw this as an example of what could be done in other communities like Watts in California, Newark, in New Jersey and elsewhere, if they could help make Detroit rebuilding successful. They were so interested in it that it was easy to establish the meeting in a short time frame.
FSD was led by Rev. Cleage and smooth Lorenzo Freeman. When we described the content of the outlined plans, the discussion was enthusiastic. Then we turned to the millions of dollars sought, even in part. The decline in enthusiasm was palpable. Before then, they were really into the presentation. We used an overhead projector with transparencies. The last thing we did was discuss money and that made the difference. After having preliminary discussion of the overall plan and getting to the money required, one church representative looked at us, and said, “if you put all the parts of budgets – we here combined can influence- from all these church denominations, this amount you are seeking vastly exceeds it.” They were prepared for small grant requests.
The Detroiters left and decided they would have to look elsewhere or be less comprehensive and more incremental in the plans at the outset.
CCAC decided to disband after a few of years when it came into conflict during the approval discussions of a proposal to New Detroit in organization for funding. ICBIF continued in operation and grew stronger.
The background of the decision to disband is interesting and instructive. CCAC through the FSD made an application to New Detroit in organization for seed funds to help further develop an economic plan for ICBIF to implement. It was attempting to help get the planning funds. ICBIF had a board that was strictly economic/business development and not political in the partisan sense of that term; it was also seeking tax exempt status. CCAC was political and community leadership focused.
I made a presentation to New Detroit in organization similar to the one made in New York to the religious denominations but revised somewhat. William Patrick, and Kent Mathewson, I believe, were present. The feedback I received was that they were impressed. They wanted to see the programmatic elements completed so years from then they could either point to the progress made or learn from the effort. That presentation set off conflicting and unanticipated dynamics.
I was informed that the proposal for seed funding for a fuller proposal and some other elements would be funded, I recall, for $300,000 subject to a contract. In the interim, another group of black leaders, after reading about the proposed contract in the press with CCAC, decided, “that group is getting money, why can’t we get funded also?” They put together a quick plan to submit to New Detroit in organization. Staff from New Detroit told me point blank that the quality of the newer proposal was not competitive in the least.
New Detroit was then put in the position they regarded as untenable, of choosing between two black leadership groups; they did not want to do so, regardless of the differences in the quality of the proposals.
The people I was representing did not sympathize with New Detroit’s dilemma. CCAC, with a commitment for self-determination, saw the contract providing funds with a string attached, such that it could be jerked back at any time the grantors were displeased with the community efforts. New Detroit decided that since it had two black groups –committed to various redevelopment plans – two different plans all together, but one very detailed one, one not, New Detroit decided, it would just split the money between the two groups.
I took the New Detroit decision to split the funds and copies summarizing the proposed contract with the reduced award back to a CCAC assembly. They were, to say the least, very displeased. (This CCAC meeting incidentally took place at the old Fischer YMCA building, which is on West Grand Boulevard at its intersection with Grand River, and Dexter, right across from the old Northwestern High School. At that meeting, in a greatly spirited gathering, a large consensus developed not to surrender self-determination by signing the contract. “We would subject ourselves to being evaluated, critiqued, money drawn back because we didn’t do what they wanted us to do? We’d be puppets on a string! We cannot represent our constituents and put ourselves in such a noose…”
I offered the comment, “If you’re going to get resources, there are somethings you’ll have to submit to. So tell me – I am a liaison. What sort of change do you want me to propose?” There was none suggested. A motion was made, seconded and passed to disband CCAC rather than continue to participate.
I communicated with New Detroit in organization that CCAC would not accept those terms and rejected participation. I must give Joe Hudson credit; he called me promptly thereafter and asked me to meet him at a place convenient for both of us. He said, “How about meeting me at Northland?” I said fine and we met and talked. He thought CCAC made a mistake in rejecting the funds and wanted to know if it would reconsider. I explained the decision and indicated the group would not change.
New Detroit went ahead and committed half of the proposed initial grant to the other group, the Detroit Council of Organizations (DCO), consisting largely of black moderate leaders, mostly of ministers, black labor union officials and traditional organizational heads; I have not heard of anything that came out of grant. Sidney Fine’s book states that DCO could not raise the matching funds and therefore could not finance their proposed programs.
In contrast, community development activities continued despite the setback. The organizers of the Inner City Business Improvement Forum (ICBIF) completed a study, starting with the outline prepared by the Federation of Self-Determination, which listed important projects to establish a stronger economic base in support of more self-determination in the city’s black community. One of many completed projects was to establish a black owned and operated bank.
If one reviews the structure of banking in Detroit at that time, one saw a few, very few white-owned and operated banks, with many dozen branches, some in the virtually all the various city Detroit neighborhoods in the 1950s when Detroit’s population was at its peak, with declining numbers thereafter. Afterwards, an outflow of population and a trend of bank closings was apparent. Each of these branches would draw money through attracting demand (checking), savings and time deposits from households and businesses in the neighborhood and beyond. A study of how these deposits were invested showed them primarily supporting new housing and other development in Florida and Arizona and other places plus other out-state and foreign placements and very little re-invested back in Detroit at that time. When there was investment remaining in Detroit, it was largely to provide funds for white-owned businesses. Rejection rates for black businesses were very high.
The large banks denied vigorously any discrimination in lending to minorities. One of the daily newspapers imported reputable objective researchers from outside of the state to study bank lending. They documented the large racial bias long denied by the banks in articles published in a daily Detroit newspaper.
The huge siphoning of the deposits from local black and local white communities went to financially empower others. This drainage of purchasing power from the black and lower income community is exactly the opposite of a view held by some whites. That view holds that funds from outstate are drained into poor Detroit black areas and squandered there. The truth is greatly different and complex as indicated in a conclusion of the Kerner Commission report: “White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White society created it. White institutions maintain it and white society condones it.”
ICBIF drew from the analysis that Detroit needed to have a bank which hopefully would take deposits from blacks and whites in Detroit and elsewhere but which would be more open to making loans to African-American and white households and businesses doing business in Detroit. Such a bank was therefore a high priority for ICBIF. It was created and opened for business on May 17, 1970. It was one of several goals in the FSD outline of an economic development plan that that was completed despite the early problems in seeking funds and CCAC’s dissolution.
Supporting black businesses with a larger variety of financing options was another priority. Banks can make loans providing that there is the ability to repay and a significant cushion of equity to offset risk. Providing equity funds beyond savings of the owner and the family and friends required other kinds of capital institutions. One source of equity capital was a Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) which is chartered and supported by the U. S. Small Business Association. The FSD outline called for two of these. Through ICBIF’s efforts at least two SBICs were established to provide financing to minority businesses. The two MESBICs (Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Corporations) were called Independence Capital Formation (ICF) and Pooled Resources Invested in Minority Enterprises (PRIME).
ICF and PRIME lasted several years but only the Bank is in operation today; it is currently under other black ownership and management. Originally called the First Independence National Bank of Detroit (FINB), it is now called the First Independence Bank (FIB).
After New Detroit was finally organized, ICBIF received some help financially from New Detroit over several years, and also from the Ford Foundation, as well as several other sources. I would not be surprised if there were some invisible sources of support from white Detroit business leaders involved in the funds raised from out-of-state. Members of the Ford family and perhaps a few others of the power structure did buy modest stock in First Independence National Bank. The Commonwealth Bank top leaders and Fred Matthaei invested in Accord Inc., the housing operation. A few local banks, particularly Commonwealth, Manufacturers National and National Bank of Detroit (NBD), gave a helping hand in initial staff training and start-up bank issues. NBD lent FINB for a short time a young black star employee, Walter Watkins, who later became a local president for NBD. Esther Gordy Edwards convinced her father, Berry Gordy, Sr. to become a board member of the bank and otherwise supported ICBIF. The name, Gordy, meant a lot with its Motown significance.
As stated elsewhere, Congressman Charles Diggs’ assistance to the bank was quite consequential. He monitored the approval of the application for a national bank charter to the Controller of the Currency in Washington, D. C. Without his frequent monitoring the application for a national bank charter for a Black organized bank, it would probably have died. That bank in 2016 is in its 46th year. In four years it will have existed for half a century.
TV: Really?
KG: Another service called for by the FSD and organized by ICBIF was a small business consulting service. When people typically launch a business, they usually do not have all of the complex and myriad skills required to put a business plan together. Without a good business plan failure is most often the result for a new start-up or a major expansion of an existing business. It is helpful for one to know strategic planning, management, marketing, fund raising and capital structuring, inventory control, budgeting, site selection, personnel and risk management, record keeping, accounting and other specialties.
ICBIF hired and trained staff to help clients to secure and/or execute such services and recruit specialists to help clients. It did a lot of initial business planning and almost hand holding, as it were, during the launching of a new business and expansion of an existing one. Staff often went to the bank or to city offices with the client. Numerous businesses were assisted, existed businesses expanded, and hundreds of jobs created.
After the Rebellion, access to affordable low cost housing for African Americans was even more of a challenge that before. ICBIF decided its portfolio of functions was large enough without the housing being added to it. An independent organization named Accord, Inc. was established. An interracial board of directors was selected including, among others, Rev. Albert Cleage; Don Parsons and Steve Miller of Bank of the Commonwealth; Edgar Brazelton, a local florist and Chairman of the Booker T. Washington Business Association; Howard Sims, a local architect whose firm was to significantly help determine the Detroit’s skyline; Fred Matthaei, a U of M regent and owner of local businesses; Reverend Charles Butler, a prominent pastor, a Morehouse graduate, and the pastor of Mayor Coleman Young; Alan E. Schwartz, a prominent young attorney; and several other community leaders. Another board member, yours truly, was elected Board Chair, CEO and President.
The contextual setting was important for the strategy FSD had developed that ICBIF and ACCORD inherited. White absentee apartment owners were fleeing the city after the Rebellion. They wanted to sell and get out, because they didn’t like the uncertainty, while the getting out was possible. ACCORD wanted to help them get out and to transfer ownership to community persons.
ACCORD could, for example, buy a twenty-unit apartment building for 1,000 to 1,500 dollars a unit soon after the Rebellion, that would sell for much more during good times after some rehabilitation costing $5,000 to $10,000 per unit. The strategy however was not to sell it as such, but to organize tenants into cooperatives so that they would own it much upgraded. Over time, the previous rents paid would transition to management fees and capital gains, if and when the entire cooperative was subsequently sold; the occupants could sell their ownership in the coop as a whole.
The housing corporation, called Accord Inc., wasn’t organized until late 1969. It failed afterwards a couple of years. It bought a few structures and was in the process of rehabilitating them. Prior to completing rehabilitation and to organize them into coops, there was a major change in the national economy. Inflation went up and unemployment rose. The prime interest rate which impacted Accord’s borrowing rate rose unanticipatedly. The banks added several points to the prime rate for Accord and other companies of similar risk. Accord’s ability to finance its rehabilitation completely on the private market with its small capital base became decimated. Accord went bankrupt. It was a good idea at a bad time.
As an aside, this was during Nixon’s term of office when he was involved in the Watergate scandal. Despite this catastrophe, Nixon did some very good things about which Detroiters should know. He advocated for “black capitalism”, a term with which many black activists had problems but took advantage of anyway. ICBIF’s programs benefited from it. The concept helped legitimized and make popular white business support for black business development.
It is difficult to resist, when mentioning President Nixon in the context of black business development in Detroit following 1967, stating how he personally interceded to make sure that a black Detroiter, Rev. Dr. William V. Banks, received a TV license. This is a digression for ICBIF was not involved with this business. The founder of the TV station, Rev. Dr. Banks, was a great entrepreneur, a prominent lawyer and an organizer of a national black fraternal order, the International Masons and Order of the Eastern Star headquartered in Detroit.
TV: And you’re talking about WGPR-TV founded in 1975, first black owned television station?
KG: That’s right, first black owned television station in the United States.
TV: I had no idea of the Nixon connection to that.
KG: Oh yes. As Rev. Dr. Banks told me, it was virtually impossible then for an African-American to get a license for a TV station. It had never been done in the U. S. and was not likely to be done without support from the highest level. It also was consistent with Nixon’s black capitalism initiative.
At this point, to partially summarize the major projects ICBIF had helped organize: the First Independence National Bank, two MESBICs, the business consulting operation with many independent businesses being serviced with varying results, and Accord Inc., the latter to establish and promote housing development to transfer ownership of apartment buildings to a cooperative. However, these were only part of ICBIF’s accomplishments.
The FSD’s strategic outline had called for establishing for the first time in Detroit a black operated and managed charitable organization somewhat like a foundation. The rationale grew from the observation that while several large foundations did support activities benefitting African Americans in Detroit, there were smaller African American, nonprofit (by design) organizations with potential for growth in size and effectiveness, who served the community that were not likely to be supported by the large foundations. A local black charitable fund also would have a better knowledge of the black community and had advantages in assessing of risks, reputation, personal commitment, local history and community acceptance.
FSD saw a need to have a local Black United Fund and ICBIF concurred, for it believed it knew the community better than the large foundations; but, it did not proceed directly to establish such an organization. An impressive person, Brenda Rayford, visited ICBIF seeking help. She had heard of Black United Funds (BUF) in other states and planned to begin one in Detroit. She had the idea with few resources other than her commitment, high energy and dedication and sweat equity. She approached Larry Doss and Walter McMurtry who gave her free office space in ICBIF’s offices, supplies, use of its typewriters, mailing and duplicating room, desk, etc asking nothing in return but dedication to her goals. ICBIF’s offices first on East Grand Blvd. and then on Fourteenth Street became her free address for the first two or three years while she launched BUF. ICBIF also helped her get some initial external funding and helped to develop her business plan. She was able to move out on her own to serve independently.
The Black United Fund is still in existence today. Its office is on West Grand Blvd across the street and just east of current location of Northwestern High School. It is near its 50th year.
TV: You are still in the 1970s?
KG: Yes, early 1970 to 1995, ICBIF had a staff of about 20 people. Several have gone on from there to work for banks, operate their own companies, join the staffs of companies they assisted, enter the music business and do lots of other things. Several of our board members made large contributions to the community. Walter Douglas moved on to buy and expand a company, Avis Ford, and to be involved in several other businesses. Lawrence Doss had lots of business involvements on his own (communications, transportation, including helping others through his employer, Coopers Lybrand, etc). ICBIF was just a wellspring of ripples that gave rise to waves, some of which became bigger as they spread. Some vanished.
KG. ICBIF stayed in business for about 19 years, but it closed when funding dried up. It did not charge for its services. New Detroit stopped finding ICBIF which had leveraged its resources maximally; however, when the basic bottom line funding was removed, the source of leveraging was gone. ICBIF decided to close after almost two decades of operations.
Much was accomplished: there were hundreds of businesses assisted, many hundreds of jobs from companies for which ICBIF had provided financing and helped with their business plans. Some of the businesses assisted failed. Some went on to do better.
The cyclical nature of the Detroit economy with its concentration then in the durable goods industry with its ups and downs was not a force for stability. When the auto industry laid off workers and sales dropped every so many years in the Detroit area, it was hard for businesses, particularly underfinanced ones, to survive. ICBIF was caught in that cyclical behavior.
Reverend Cleage, the titular leader of CCAC and who was really the only person who could hold all of those diverse groups together, deserves applause for his efforts during the short period of his leadership. He had the foresight, the analysis, and the commitment to self-determination. He became inactive outside of his church and its related programs. I don’t know why, I never asked him. I suspected that he wanted to give his wholehearted effort to expanding his Pan-African Orthodox Church denomination. He had begun to establish churches in other states and he wanted to give that priority, I suspect. I also think that he gave up on the possibility of there being any receptiveness to a transfer of power. When he pulled out of the combined leadership, there was a vacuum without someone with the charisma and the deep understanding of the complex situation and selflessness who could get and keep the attention of very diverse group of activist community leaders and the power structure.
When CCAC ended, Reverend Cleage concentrated on growing the Shrine of the Black Madonna and sister churches. Members of his church organized the Black Slate which was an effort to get approval for preferred candidates so that they would be elected. This has been a very successful thrust and has intensively influenced the Detroit political landscape producing an increased number of black elected officials chosen by the community and not imposed upon it.
Again, I would encourage the Detroit Historical Society to review and make available, if possible, a copy of Cleage’s sermon on the Sunday morning the Rebellion began. Much of his analysis of it is in that very early sermon that was prepared almost instantaneously with the sermon’s delivery.
TV: That’s Amazing.
PART TWO
TV: Hello, My name is Tobi Voigt and I am with the Detroit Historical Society. Today is Thursday, September 3, 2015 and I’m here with Dr. Karl D. Gregory for part two of our oral history. Well alright, we were talking a little bit on Tuesday about the Rev. Cleage’s sermon on the morning the uprising began. I want to talk little bit about that first?
KG: Yes. I just wanted to encourage you, in particular for preparing for the 1967 Exhibit to be launched in 2017, to get a copy of and read the text of Rev. Albert Cleage’s sermon. He preached about it a few hours after the Rebellion began and was taking place for days afterwards. Following that Saturday evening where there was a gathering on 12th and Clairmount and the police entered. You know that story. It’s been well documented. The results of the police action and the version of it that was circulating in the community made people angry. That’s very morning, Rev. Albert Cleage gave an explanatory sermon and termed the reaction a Rebellion. He was the pastor of what subsequently became named, The Shrine of the Black Madonna. He explained it the first morning, just a few hours after it began; he gave an in-depth analysis of what occurred and why he thought it occurred. I think you need to highlight his view for it represented much of the black activist community. There is a book of his sermons including that one. I know that historian Paul Lee has a copy. He is one of our able local historians, or perhaps you could get it through the church.
TV: Great, thank you. OK. When we left off on Tuesday, you were giving a great background on the post-uprising involvement and activities, and the self-determination movement, and we were just starting to get more philosophical about it. One of the concepts that has come up is that Detroit was considered ‘the model city’ because it had leveraged a lot of federal funds to work on issues of equity and racism during the Cavanagh administration. Several folks were therefore surprised when the uprising happened. My question for you is what do you think about Detroit being the ‘model city’? And your thoughts on if the uprising was predictable or not.
KG: Let me take the last part first, I think the civil disorder, as it was called in the title of the Advisory Commission On Civil Disorders or the Kerner Commission report, was predictable by persons who were aware of the intensive reaction of many of Detroit’s black residents to racism and white supremacy in their various local forms and the numerous impacts of racism on the lives of African Americans in the city. To them the only surprise was the scale of it and the specific incident that would set it. If one were to happen, police involvement as an initial spark would surprise very few informed persons
I doubt that the federal funds received by the City during the Cavanagh administration were ever used to truly address racism. Through the anti-poverty and other programs Cavanagh did support modest measures to achieve greater equity, and undoubtedly more so than by former mayors. There was indeed the leveraging of sums from the federal government for social programs that influenced opportunities.
However, the Rebellion was indeed predictable from the several other prior uprisings elsewhere in black communities across the country in overcrowded central cities. Racism is not isolated in one area of the country but is widely spread. Detroit itself had other similar circumstances of different scales in its history. Further, there were several very recent events that could have led to local uprisings to give guidance, not to mention many additional instances of alleged police misconduct in racial incidents.
Looking back within two or three years before July 23rd, 1967, a few incidents could have expanded into a significant uprising. For example, in the Kercheval Street Incident, a group of youths on the east side were organized to participate in various kinds of youth activities, in terms of community building and creating good experiences for young folks. The police were said to have clamped down on them with unnecessary force. That led to what could have exploded into a large-scale racial incident.
There was the Northern High School boycott in 1966 that we talked about in the first session at some length. That school had what the students regarded as a racist principal with police inside the school and an inferior education being provided. If the incident had been handled differently, a conflagration could have occurred there. Students from other schools had planned to join in by supporting the walkout in their schools thereby spreading it widely. It was that likelihood that the chairman of the school board, Remus Robinson, understood, that motivated the school board to finally agree with the demands of the students, indeed to go beyond them. Resolution was accomplished by constructive black student behavior and leadership in organizing a freedom school; that freedom school enabled their leaders to concentrate on negotiating with the Board of Education for relief and for getting then-current policy changed after a citywide review of schools to examine the unequal circumstances of inner city schools and what could be done about them, ending in a set of recommendations that were adopted.
The students were focused on changing their inferior education and what they could do to initiate change. If they had not left the school to establish a school of their own, while they negotiated with the school board, or if it had not been handled in some other satisfactory way, a strong negative reaction could have occurred.
Too, it was interesting that Northern High school is so close to where the Rebellion first began. The same neighborhood, the same sociological and psychological forces were operating there. Yes, I do think it was predictable.
If a story I was told is true, not only was the possibility of an uprising predictable, but it was predicted. Conrad Mallett Sr. (who coincidentally is the father of Conrad Mallett Jr., a former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and Chief Administrative Officer in Detroit Medical Center and the brother of two sisters who are well placed in senior positions in the corporate world) was a Black appointee in the office of Mayor Cavanagh around that time. As the Director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Cavanagh, he had read about rebellions in other cities that occurred before Detroit’s. He approached the Mayor and said, and I paraphrase, look: an uprising could happen here, and if we really want to be on top of something like that if it happens here, we have to train our department heads. I recommend Mr. Mayor that you have a meeting, a retreat for the department heads, to discuss what’s transpired elsewhere, what went wrong, and what went right, so we have guidance of what to do if something like that happens here. The Mayor had that “model city” super confidence and rejected the proposal. Mallet, Sr. persisted. Cavanagh finally decided to approve Mallet’s recommendation. So they held it!
Planning for it, they had to describe a likely precipitating incident or scenario. I know the following is incredible but believe it: Conrad Mallett Sr. suggested: let’s assume there is a car accident on 12th St. and Clairmount (sic) (which was exactly where the actual rebellion began). He said, let’s assume two cars. One car had a black couple in it, and the other car had whites. I forgot the exact nature of the collision that was described to me, but it involved police who were seen by bystanders as being more supportive of the white couple and rough on the African Americans. I was not told which car was at fault in this scenario. People gathered to watch and rumors circulated in the community about police treating African Americans roughly and not treating the whites similarly or something like that.
That’s the incident that was hypothesized as spreading in the community resulting in inciting a vigorously hostile reaction. People started gathering, the story spread. A brick was thrown at a window. One reaction led to another and so on.
The training session for the department heads was completed. If the story is true, the answer to your question is that the possibility of a rebellion in Detroit or something resembling it was perceived. This story became known to me by someone who was a friend of Conrad Mallet, Sr.
The next logical question is why was it generally believed not to be reasonably predictable. It is very important to answer that question honestly, because the circumstances that existed then, could exist now. Then, the city had a mass media, business leaders, and those in the local community who really wanted to see the “good side” of current events. They tended to downplay the “bad side” of current circumstances and to ignore or at least overlook or play down extensive racism, white supremacy and segregation, huge inequalities in wealth and income (then and more so now now), as well as issues like extensive neglect of circumstances impacting the poor, inadequate mental health care, extensive over-incarceration particularly of black males (the latter a more recent phenomenon), underinvestment in schools and huge inequalities in many areas by income level, wealth and health care, etc.
The more a society looks the other way and refuses to address such issues, the more likely it is for them to result in compiled grievances that accumulate and fester, and subsequent reactions to break out in costly ways. These issues have to be addressed directly and resolved or the problems compound or are pushed elsewhere were they can subsequently erupt, the latter as seems to be a likely current policy outcome.
Regarding officials not perceiving the real climate of the city, effort was put into painting Detroit as a model city, as a place to which everybody should look and admire. It was one thing to advertise an exaggerated bright side in order to get investment dollars and federal grants coming in, and to attract residents, including hopefully those with needed skills. But, it was another thing to self-delude so one doesn’t see the festering impact of racism, concentration and isolation of the underserviced poor and insensitive public policies, particularly for disadvantaged households. Some of us have a predilection to see the city, then and now, with rose colored glasses that screen out the reality for many of our deprived current citizens.
You know the popular vision today. There are huge investments being made in the city, particularly the downtown and the Midtown, and more recently beginning in a few neighborhoods. The city of Detroit has come out of bankruptcy. The city now knows what to do, how to do it, how to become fiscally secure. In time this growth will encompass most neighborhoods. While a beautiful future is not securely established, the outlook is very promising in a reasonable time period. Progress is being made and Michigan will become a top 10 state. Could this vision be the counterpart now of the “Model City” image in the mid-1960s? Could it discourage the comprehensive analyses and actions, including regional equitable policies, a proportional statewide combined tax structure (i.e. progressive enough at the state and/or local level to offset all of the other regressive state and local taxes) and other changes necessary to really make such a popular vision achievable?
For example, it seems to be overlooked (except for persons like Professor Peter Hammer of Wayne State University’s Law School in a paper he wrote and submitted to the bankruptcy judge in Detroit without any reaction of which I am aware), that the bankruptcy expert’s analysis, presented to the judge to undergird his decision, focused narrowly upon what could be done within and despite the considerable limits of bankruptcy law. There was no analysis, much less corrective action solutions that were based upon a complete study of the major reasons why Detroit became so fiscally depleted, built up much of that cumulative debt and had such a poor level of public services.
A complete analysis of the circumstances that would have to be changed, including areas beyond the limits of current law, needed to be explored to craft a comprehensive conclusion and to understand how incomplete the proposed legal solutions were. A total analysis of the fundamental causes of Detroit’s decline was and is still necessary. What really, if there were no legal or other limits, would have to happen to turn Detroit once again into a viable, much less a leading, central city in a cooperating metropolitan area and state? There was no consideration, for example, of the racism in the metropolitan area and in the state that impacts Detroit and other central cities severely, of the biases in state public policy and how this short-changes central cities across throughout the state, the failure of fiscal systems to fund infrastructure needs and education adequately, etc.
These issues are destined to be made much worse by the recent Michigan Legislature’s gross distortion of legislative districts through gerrymandering after the 2010 Census count and the rejection of voting on issues by party probably in the creation of long lines at voting districts, discouraging voters without maids or a stay-at home-parent to look after the children while another voter votes. The state in this respect is moving backwards away from democracy and equality, not forwards towards it.
Some important regional issues were also not explored comprehensively in the bankruptcy. There are issues that can only be resolved with dialogue between and within state government jurisdictions that impact both central cities and other areas. Many relevant issues were not Detroit’s alone. All of these dynamics play into required changes in state legislation for optimal positive results.
There are dysfunctions and inefficiencies caused by overlapping functions among jurisdictions, fractional jurisdictions in the state, areas without needed public services, excessive numbers of districts like those for schools, all of which waste and continue to waste valuable resources and cause an inadequate and unequal distribution of public services.
Just a fiscal approach alone within legal limits to which the bankruptcy process recommendations and discussion restricted itself is not adequate for visualizing, much less addressing, the most important causal factors. I am not saying that the Judge should have gone beyond what the law required in his written decision, just that a more complete analysis particularly by his chosen expert would have been appropriate in forming his decision to maximize the effectiveness of his recommendations within the law. Partial analysis often leads to insufficient analysis. The force of excluded factors, such as has been addressed above, can defeat those of included factors.
TV: Have we applied the lessons learned from 1967?
KG: I don’t think the understanding of the information that came out of 1967 has been processed enough to point to corrective actions not taken before that should be taken now, or that should have been prescribed and taken then within and beyond the recommendations of the Kerner Commission. Also, the motivation and the will to address better and more comprehensive corrective action must be created. I do not think they exist now. The inclination in the State house of Representatives now may be punitive in the opposite direction of a real solution.
I also don’t think we have learned the right lessons from 1967 and there are lots of lessons that should have been learned. One of them is that decision-makers have to see what’s really going on in the community, be involved with the citizens to get input and have a commitment to democracy. Current Emergency Manager laws are in conflict with this and provide a foundation for continuing catastrophes, as in the water crisis in Flint and Detroit School issues. This dysfunction has to be corrected and that is a statewide task.
Another lesson that should’ve been learned is that one has to deal with the huge inequalities in public services and the lack of opportunity in some areas. Human potential outcomes should not be decided by the zip code in which one is born. Kids born in some low-income areas in Detroit probably have the worst objectively predictable futures in the state and perhaps in the country. They just did not and do not have the opportunities in several areas, or the access to the mechanisms for becoming involved positively in the future and taking care of their families and so on that many other others have. Decision-makers really have never given adequate consideration to that. They fail to determine and effectuate policies to remove the huge inequalities that exist.
A lesson we should have learned then is that communities have to invest in their children and protect them equally and make sure that they have many opportunities for reaching their potential. Policy has to be made as if people are the most important resource in this state; that is, policy impact should be person-centered while treating all persons equitably. Instead, Policy appears to be centered on land use, businesses and private profits. These are important but people should come first.
There have to be opportunities created to first educate people, and secondly, to make sure that there are equal opportunities to advance and to achieve one’s potential. That is far from being applied across the geographic areas in this state, much less equally among jurisdictions and for minority groups. In many ways the situation is probably worse now than it was in ‘67, given the concentrated impacts of deindustrialization and globalization over the last half-century and the factors pointed to by Thomas Sugrue in The Origins of The urban Crisis, Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, (published in 1996).
Many middle- income families have left the city, some the state, along with numerous businesses particularly from the neighborhoods. These gave much more of a sense of stability then than has existed recently.
Nationally, the middle class is a much smaller proportion of the total population then before and the decline appears to be continuing. In the last 30 years, the middle class has greatly narrowed, and the degree of inequality in income and wealth has increased immensely. I presume the same has been happening in Detroit and much more so, particularly with regard towealth ownership in downtown and midtown Detroit.
KG: What was the other part of that question?
TV: I think that was good, but I did want to ask, going back a little bit, about not even learning the lessons and not being able to apply them. I was kind of thinking about the different government reports that Kerner commissioned, the inquiries done by government officials, and other non-profit groups --so it seems like there was data collected that could have been used for analysis. So what didn’t happen for the city to not learn the lessons, when there was a lot of raw data and evidence right there in front of our face? Does that make sense?
KG: Yes, that makes sense. Analysts and researchers do the studies. They may not explore all the needed issues. Decision-makers may or may not review the analyses and understand them. Even with the best data they may not view it realistically. They are confronted with limited resources and have other real or imagined priorities and political constraints such as getting re-elected or reappointed by persons with clear and strong biases. However, to answer this question much beyond my previous statements, as I would like to do, I would have to review again the various reports you mentioned. Their content in the detail I would need is not fresh in my recollection, for it has been over 35 years since I studied them.
Yet, some of my prior discussion herein is relevant, particularly the reluctance to deal frontally with racism, regional issues, extending our democracy to all groups with equal opportunities and narrowing the huge disparities in wealth, health and income. There is also a reluctance to invest adequately and nonracially in education, training, health care and other public and private services with special emphasis on the poor and the disadvantaged. Facilities for mental health care are a disaster; prisons are not the solution.
Local citizens should be able to give input and be heard. Currently, it almost seems as though decision makers have decided what Detroit’s future is and the current residents of low-income by and large are being written off. The model now is to create an image that will attract outside investors and people with high skills. The prevailing thought seems to be that there is no need to concentrate on adequate education and training of the existing population, apart from the Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation, etc., and instead to rely on the processes of gentrification, rising property values and low appraisals of current residential property that will force out from the central city the existing low-income and primarily black and Hispanic population such that they will be some other jurisdiction’s challenge. Then there will be more land in the city for persons with great wealth to acquire further concentrating wealth and income in this area and state.
A few of the policies needed now include, but are not limited to: every child is made ready for school before kindergarten, ensure that all children can read by the third grade; that youth obtain a high quality of education and training, including preparation for blue collar careers, at least to replace persons retiring, and boost training in STEM and other skills required by current and future technologies, and for continuous learning throughout one’s lifetime. Since technology is changing so rapidly, persons learning how to learn and gain new skills is more important that mastering a specific skill that might become outdated.
Such schooling for all current residents in Detroit is not of priority, much less high priority. Further, charter public schools in Detroit and other urban school districts under the present system are centrally unregulated and uncoordinated. Current policy decisions, or the absence thereof, suggest that the best approaches are not in the current policy mindset for meaningful implementation. Visitors from Mars reviewing such issues in Michigan, might wonder how such mismanagement and misinformation could prevail in one of the world’s wealthiest countries? How much is spent and how little is achieved, relative to the achievements of other advanced countries on this planet, would baffle them.
There are several positive measures underway in the Detroit area, for example with the mass transit, other transportation and public lighting, blight removal, police administration, etc. There are still other positive things being done. I don’t want to paint with a red brush across the entire board. However, to really reinvigorate Detroit in a manner to benefit in significant part the existing citizenry, a lot of person-centered issues that have to confronted that are not being addressed adequately, if at all. Racism is one such issue, along with other conflicts between geographical areas, as we have discussed above. Policy is now land and building centered.
Looking at this from another perspective, a most fundamental challenge is to make opportunities available to individuals fairly throughout the region without regard to the citizen’s area of residence.
TV: That makes a lot of sense, and that speaks to equity. It’s not just equality, it’s equity, equity of access, equity of resources. One thing that we should talk about was your using the term Rebellion when referring to the events of ’67. Why do you use that word, when you discuss 1967?
KG: I think that how an issue is framed is very critical for understanding the causes and problem solving. A given set of circumstances framed one way may make assumptions and bias the inquiry and lead to one set of solutions. Framed in another way, they will raise other issues, the answering of which will help close in on fundamental causes and point to questions the answers to which suggest basic solutions resulting from an objective analysis.
If one frames what happened in 1967 as a riot, there is very little attention likely to be paid to why that conflict happened. It is categorized as violence and the implication is that everything was going well; a group of irresponsible law breakers, violent people caused a riot without provocation. The assumption can be made that justice prevailed before. The initial causative acts had no long standing or immediate justification. Hence, the solutions of that mindset are frequently repression focused. There is little reason to explore for a deeper understanding to prevent similar events from recurring. Just kill or incarcerate subjects hopefully in privatized prisons for greater profits, increase investment in the military and perform other repressive acts, just like was done in the South during voter registration drives in Selma and elsewhere. Such framing is loved by racists and some conservatives, for it gives the appearance that there is no responsibility for the ruling public to take. There is official blamelessness and harsh reprisals are warranted for all the rioters with little caring for true justice. Such thinking often results in state governments spending more on prisons that on higher education.
Some in the mass media find that framing attractive, for it makes some decision-makers (read advertisers) look uninvolved and innocent of the conditions leading up to the uprising. Their hands are entirely clean.
Those relying on the mass media for their information repeat the “riot” terminology without thinking of its implications. All instances of uprising are regarded as riots without distinction. The terminology can have dire implications for the “rioter” particularly if the charging and conviction of all the participants is understood to follow automatically. All without due process, guilt often tends to be assumed.
In contrast, if the framing is as a ”rebellion,” this suggests a question: why did the people rebel? Were there circumstances that lead to it? Not that you are justifying it, but in order to have effective public policy, one has to understand things as they are. One has to ask questions that deal with causation, because one can not avoid in the future a similar set of circumstances that result in violence without analyzing those prior circumstances. They may or may not have been criminal actions. They may just have been lawful protest to which needless police provocation incited a reaction. They may have broken laws under attenuating circumstances for the judge and/or jury to assess. Or, they may not have broken any laws or they may have. It is for the justice system to decide in objective non-biased deliberations.
In short, the word “riot” provides little or no incentive to look for the back story. It is not that a violent reaction is justified, not in a nation led by laws.
There is also the companion issue of how fair are the laws? Do they apply to everybody equally? When they’re applied, are alleged law breakers of different races equally likely to be arrested, have equal opportunities for the same quality of defense counsel, jailed across the board with the same set of penalties for the same crimes, etc.? Is the term of each class of the incarcerated uniformly consistent with the crimes it was reported to have committed? Are the terms for similar crimes the same without regard to race?
One is not given comfort to the answer to some of these questions by the findings of the Innocence Project and other interventions by neutral parties reviewing legal judgements, convictions and sentences which have found that many innocent parties have been convicted, jailed and some executed as a result of erroneous judgements.
I am not denying that some people were violent, broke the law, destroyed property and that the term riot might be appropriate for some stages in the totality of all that happened. Marauding robbers who take advantage of the resistance of rebels and destroy property are in one category. The resistance of rebels seeking change and exercising their legal rights is in another category. The initial and early stage resisters are often in the latter category. I would hate to see a world in which peaceful law abiding resisters to injustice are penalized. The use of the word rebellion would be better for such rebels.
I don’t think violence has any peacetime justification in a just society except for self-defense. But, I like to see used the nomenclature about uprisings that focuses upon what happened, why did it happen, what do we need to do to correct what happened, so that that won’t happen again, that promotes equality of opportunity without regard to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender and whom one loves, all within the terms of Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and still to provide for justice in a larger sense.
TV: Great, thanks. Well, I think we made it through our initial questions but is there anything else that you want to talk about for this recording? You had just mentioned that you were around 1943 when there was a riot, if you will, of 1943. Could you talk a little bit about that?
KG: Well I can talk a little about my experiences there. I returned to Detroit in 1941 where I was born but had left for seven years. That was two years before the uprising of 1943.
TV: How old were you in 41?
KG: I was 10 years old. At the time of that uprising, I also lived at 287 Hague, between John R and Brush. I heard on the news rumors about someone being thrown off the Belle Isle Bridge and the ransacking of stores along several thoroughfares, including Oakland Avenue near where I lived.
I was told white people were crossing Woodward from the west going east where African Americans lived committing violent acts, but my understanding was that they were coming across Woodward further south below the West Grand Boulevard. I did not actually see them.
I went three blocks east from my home to Oakland Avenue and saw commercial establishments that had been ransacked, goods taken. I did not understand a lot of the occurrences at that age but personally watched people going in stores and helping themselves to merchandise. There was chaos.
Shortly before that time my parents bought our home in that area. The residents at the time were changing from being predominantly white and with many being Jewish. Most persons of my color were in Black Bottom, the east side and south of the Grand Boulevard. There had also been the opening of some residential areas in the northwest area around Tireman where there had been efforts to stop blacks from moving into those areas. The Orsel McGhee Case on the legality of restrictive covenants barring sales of housing to African Americans went to the U.S. Supreme Court which overruled the use of such covenants in land titles.
Blacks were moving steadily north of the boulevard, with a few higher income blacks that leap-frogged north towards Boston and Chicago Boulevard, but there were still lots of whites there. In fact, Northern High School had a lot of white student when I moved in the area. But, still there were enough Black residents to support a few black-owned stores on Oakland Avenue.
I remember hearing that people south of where my family were in more densely occupied African American areas had been targets of white physical aggression.
At that time the police department was, as I recall, almost 100 percent white, very few, maybe 2% were not white, very much unlike the racial make-up of the population. According to the 1970 Census 43 % of Detroit’s population was black.
I can remember more rumors of how the riot of 1943 started, but I’d rather not talk much about that for I did not observe such personally. I visited Hastings Street where my father had a business but do not remember much of what I saw there. I heard all sorts of stories about injustices, violence against blacks, and so on. As a young boy at the time my recollections are not as focused or as well-defined as my memory of the 1967 Rebellion, where I observed it and was very much involved during and after it.
TV: Do you recall ever talking about what happened in 1943 with your parents at all? Did they have any reaction to it?
KG: They were very fearful that this would continue and that their business would be destroyed, as it actually was in 1967 and that whites would come into our residential area and be violent as we were told they had been in the heavily segregated mid-town area, south of where we lived then. My impression was that some police were involved in the black areas offensively rather than defending the community. I understand that a lot of the aggressiveness there was not all from whites, but I don’t know from personal observation. My parents did not let their children get too far from home then in those circumstances.
I didn’t study that ‘43 time period and several uprisings before then, but it is clear that uprisings were far from being unprecedented. Kevin Boyle wrote a book on the “Arc of Justice” about another circumstance in 1925, when a white mob attacked the house of a black doctor who had moved into an all-white area.
TV: Ossian Sweet?
KG: Yes, Ossian Sweet was the doctor. His house is still there on Crane Street on the east side of Detroit with a state historical marker. After several years that became an all-black neighborhood. Given then the rigorously enforced practice of racial segregation and block busting by real estate agents, integrated housing was defined as the short period of time between the entrance of the first black family in an area and the departure of the last white family. I think that is a cynical definition, but it fit the behavior then. Research has shown that when African Americans move into an area and are accepted without whites panicking, there can be continuously stable and integrated areas. It is the panic caused by the whites and some African Americans, and most importantly, it is the aggressiveness of real estate agents who will not sell to blacks in previously all-white areas, but who will select one area at a time, panic whites to get them to move out and steer blacks into that selected area. The panicked whites will sell cheaply, and the housing sold to African Americans who pay high prices to get out of the over-crowded and underserviced ghetto. Real estate agents historically would open one area at a time for exploitative profit maximization through discriminatory racial housing turnover.
That’s what I remember, but I know my parents were fearful and so were my brother and myself in 1943. Fear plays extensively in impacting behavior in these turbulent circumstances.
In contrast, in 1967, I remember that I was apprehensive when my father’s tailoring and cleaning establishment got broken into. Also there were rumors of whites coming into black areas and doing damage. I felt, if attacked, I could not defend my family for I did not have an effective weapon. I had a wife and kids and so went out and bought a gun and ammunition. I felt like my major responsibility was to defend my family, if people were going to come and attack my area.
All the weapon stores that I knew were white-owned. The owners were fearful and reluctant to sell to me. They were experiencing heavy traffic. Weapons were flying off the shelves, just one after another. They didn’t seem anxious to sell to someone of my color, but I imagine they did not feel like they could deny me. I do not know that they would react the same way if a white person came in to buy a gun, but I sincerely doubt it as confirmed by looking at the sales persons serving whites, and observing the difference in how they reacted hospitably to them in contrast to the sourness with me. This is what fear does. They insisted that the gun not be loaded within the store and watched my departure. To be clear, that was in ‘67, not ‘43.
There is a major difference between both 1943 and 1967 and currently. Racism had a major role in all three periods. Now, it is accompanied by income and wealth systems transferring from the poor (and in the last three decades, the middle class also) to the highest income groups. This transfer has been institutionalized to a much greater extent, and has become automatic the way current systems operate. Only deeply systemic change can bring about equality of opportunity and the stopping of these automatically built in harmful transfers of income and wealth. The recent Great Recession was extremely impactful in transferring home equity from the poor to the rich and particularly for African Americans who were often the target of pressure to take out ultimately overpriced subprime mortgages for amounts they did not understand they could not afford and did not qualify for under normal, responsible bank standards.
These systems transferring wealth and income are complex, multi-faceted, and numerous. They include, to mention just a few, regressive tax systems at the state and local level and on the surface a progressive tax system at the national level with huge loopholes for the wealthy, high income persons and corporations with high nominal (but low effective) rates that few of the wealthy actually pay. Huge tax loopholes exist that the U.S. Congress has passed to please its large contributors. Tax havens abroad help the rich and corporations shelter income. Investing abroad and keeping income there helps high income groups avoid U. S. taxes. Relocating U. S. corporate ownership abroad can not only relocate income abroad but also jobs that were formerly stateside. And so on.
All of this and more are part of the processes to which I referred earlier that redistributes income and wealth from the poor and the middle class to the highest income groups and produces much dissatisfaction among the non-rich. This is the dissatisfaction that a few candidates are appealing to in 2016 political races and that will sow the seeds for conflicts in the future unless they are addressed well in a reasonable time frame.
As stated by the Kerner Commission, the only way to break the frequent cycle of black revolt and white repression is to address the underlying problems of racial injustice and to remove the barriers to equal opportunity. The U. S. is not much closer to doing that now than it was in 1967.
Some earlier anti-racism gains are being lost again. With regard to a most fundamental right, voting, past progress is being reversed, not only without opposition by the Supreme Court of the U. S. at the point of time this document was prepared, September, 2015, but with its assistance by its interpreting corporations as individuals with the right of free speech in their use of campaign contributions. Policy appears to be going in the wrong direction.
WW: Hello my name is William Winkel and I am with the Detroit Historical Society. And it is December 22, and we are in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s 1967 Oral History Project and I am here with Mike Hamlin.
Thank you very much for sitting down with me today.
MH: I’m delighted.
WW: Can you tell me where and when you were born?
MH: I was born 1935, October 17, in a rural area on a plantation near Canton, Mississippi. My father and his family—my family were sharecroppers on that plantation. They worked farms and divided the products for the production of cotton with the owners. And it was a very exploitive kind of situation. My father was the youngest of three. And he had been abandoned, his family, he and my grandmother, and my aunt and uncle had been abandoned by his father when they were teenagers and they had to scrape through to adulthood under very dire circumstances. My mother was a product of a plantation owner’s son. And her mother died when she was 33 and left her as an orphan. And she couldn’t stay on the plantation where she was born with her father and his family so she was kind of shunted around from one black relative to another because, you know, they were rural folks and if you understand about the thinking of peasants, agricultural workers. You could say that in my view they were seen as peasants. They — it makes you selfish, working like that, working like that. So she had a very difficult time, and I think she – at 15 she married my father who was a real bad guy. Irresponsible, reckless, and could be brutal. And I was born — she married him when she was 16. So she and I kind of grew up together, I tried – I did the best I could to protect her but he was very abusive and all of this is shaping my thinking as I'm growing up. On the place that we lived, there was a — you know, we lived in a shack. No running water, an outhouse. On the farm we made vegetables, he hunted, we raised vegetables, they would hunt rabbits, possums and squirrels and birds and fish. So we had enough to sustain us but, you know, at the same time, my father started bootlegging whiskey, he started making whiskey and he made a lot of money but he blew it all. He was very — I said he was reckless and irresponsible so [laughter]. He would — He was just a wild man. And so this had to do with my shape, I mean, this shaped my view. I was always trying to make my mom’s life better, so I used to go with her when she would go to work at the plantation owner's house and the plantation owner tried her — tried to get my mother to give me to her. And she wouldn’t do it. But she did that because I could do a lot of things even though I was a child. At some point my father, who enjoyed police protection from the sheriff, who supposedly protected him from — his operation — from the IRS or whatever its equivalent was at that time, raided his still and destroyed it all. So the sheriff came. (I don't know if you want all this kind of information.) But the sheriff came to the house to collect his monthly, a $75 payment. My father told him we didn’t have any money. He told him — this was in 1944, he told him, “I’ll be back here tonight and you better have it.” Now we — I have seen two mobs riding through our place watering their horses and dogs and themselves at the pump that we had, on their way into the forest looking for blacks they were going to lynch. They caught one, the other one got away. So after my dad had the encounter with the sheriff he took off and he made it to Kansas City where I had an aunt. My aunt had moved. And shortly thereafter my mother moved to Kansas City with him. And my grandmother and I and my sister moved — my younger sister — moved into Canton, the town. And I think I was nine years old and I got a job in the store.
By the way in terms of school, I did not go to start school until two years after when I was old enough. Because I was babysitting my sister as my mother worked in the cotton field. I’d be sitting on a blanket on the edge of the field and she’d be out there picking cotton and I’d be entertaining my little sister. So when I - we ended up - I started school about the third grade and I had a lot of catching up to do but, I handled that. We went to town, we moved to Canton and lived in a house there that my aunt had lived in and I went to school there for two years, I got this job in a liquor store. Almost got killed, because the owners, a young white couple, had me doing all kinds of things. You know, I could do any job in the store including cash register, meat counter, stock, whatever. And they enjoyed watching me. They were just amused. I was big for my age, 10 years old. And they had a nephew about your size, 17 years old, he was a high school football player. He didn’t like me, because they liked me and so he worked there during the summer when he was out of school so one day I went back to the back of the store [laughter], to get something out of the meat cooler. And he was standing there in the door with a sharp knife, a butcher's knife. And he was coming at me with it, and it slipped out of his hands [laughter] and stuck into his foot. [Laughter] And he howled, and of course I didn’t laugh, but that probably saved my life because, he could have killed me and they would have been nothing said about it. But anyway, eventually my father, he had gotten run out of Mississippi, but then he got ran out of Kansas City, Missouri, because he was — he got in some argument with a guy in a bar, probably over a woman or something, and he opened fire on this man point blank and shot him once in the leg [laughter]. So he had to flee from Kansas City and came here. And after he came here, he — this was in 1946. In ’47, he brought me and my sister here. And my mother and grandmother went to Kansas City. That brought me to Detroit. That was in August of 1947 and we started the school in September.
WW: Where did you move to in the city?
MH: Ecorse.
WW: Ecorse?
MH: Yeah, in Ecorse, which was an industrial town with a lot of people from the South, a lot of people from Mississippi – people that my folks knew. And – and it was divided by railroad tracks, and there were blacks on one side and whites on the other, but we all went to the same high school. We went to segregated elementary schools. And the junior high school was attached to the high school, so beginning in the seventh grade, we were in, we begin integrated school. Interestingly enough, we didn't have any problems. Now – I had a very interesting experience my first – I don't know whether this is relevant to what you're —
WW: It all is. [laughter] Keep going.
MH: The – I can't – my first – I remember, I said, we came here in August of '47. Took the train in to Grand Central Station. I think that's what it was called at the time?
WW: Michigan Central?
MH: Michigan Central, yeah. And took a cab to Ecorse. And in September, which was the next month, school started. I went to school, and my first day of school the teacher and the whole class laughed at me because [laughter] of my accent. So you know, one other thing about being born in Mississippi, is you develop deep feeling of humility. So rather than being crushed, you know, I just felt that I was behind and I had to catch up. And so boy, did I catch up. This was an interracial experience from seventh grade on up, and by the time I was a sophomore, I was – for the next two years – a leading athlete in my school. Basketball and football. Tennis. And – because I had never played tennis, had no idea, but I had a friend who was a year younger than me, but he was kind of – he was like a mentor. And I studied him. His father, interestingly enough, he was a graduate of Colgate. He had a mechanical engineering degree, and the first job he got was as the principal of a high school in South Carolina. But when Ford started paying $5 an hour – or $5 a day – he moved here, and moved his wife here. And he worked at the Rouge in the foundry for 43 years, and became an under – a part-time undertaker.
So anyway, I used to spend a lot of time at his house. And I learned from them, you know. I became — So by high school – I didn't – I mean – nobody in my house had even gone past eighth grade, much less going to college. As I was approaching graduation, most of my friends were going into factories. Great Lakes Steel – Are you from here?
WW: I'm from downriver.
MH: Great Lakes Steel, and Ford. And my father told me - I was working. I started working when I got here, ten years part-time at a liquor store – at a grocery store. And then later a liquor store. And my father told me, don't go to college, you know. Stay where you are with that liquor store. So, I usually did the opposite of whatever he told me. [laughter] I thought that was a good rule. So I – Gunnar, my friend, my mentor, was going to U of M [University of Michigan]. He had a full scholarship, was going to be a doctor. So I had – I was probably in the top five, academically, by then. Thought I may try playing basketball. So I decided to go to U of M with him. That summer, the basketball coach, Mr. Rilly, got me a scholarship – not a scholarship, got me a job, rehabbing a school in Ecorse that was, you know, needed work. So I worked with that and got — made pretty good money. So I paid for my first year. Second year I got a job at Ford during the summer, and I worked there for 89 days and they laid me off, but I did have enough to go back and finish two more years.
And the summer after that – this was in 1956 – I couldn't get a job. That was the – during the Eisenhower recession. I couldn't get a job so I – you know, I didn't go back to school in September, but I continued to look for a job, and the only job I got was in February, I – doing the – on days when it snowed – my aunt comes back, got a job in Wyandotte in a car wash. I spent one day in that job. [laughter] And I told my uncle the next day I wasn't going back. And I left home, coming to the federal building, looking for the Marines, and got conned into going into the Army.
Now all this time, I'm trying to make up my deficit of knowledge and I really went and learned. I studied the classics, I was the teacher's pet. You know, the teachers that everybody was afraid of, I found out they had a sense of humor and I could relate – a person like me [laughter] has to have a sense of humor. A person who has certain [unintelligible]. So I did quite well. But I – learned – I took Spanish in high school. And Latin. And at U of M – at U of M it was interesting. I passed – I got As in Latin, you know, Bs – but I was almost failing English. So – and one of the professors told me that I was wasting my time, I should go back down south to one of the Black colleges. So I mean – I wasn't – you know, if you're in a position where you've been through what I've been – you couldn't hardly hurt my feelings and insult me with something like that.
WW: Was the teacher that – was that your English teacher who said that?
MH: Yep, at U of M. Professor Huntley was his name. But – I'm telling you, I was learning the world. I did not know what – and I knew it. And I knew that I – so I was a reading fiend. I read – I loved Macbeth. I read all Shakespeare, Eugene O'Neill, et cetera, et cetera. Matter of fact, when I was in the army, me and this buddy of mine, we used to quote long passages from Macbeth, Hamlet. I knew the soliloquies from Hamlet and Macbeth and the poetry and stuff like that. So I was learning, because I was filling an empty tank.
WW: Did you – after you graduated high school did you start exploring the metro area? You said you started going to U of M – did you go to U of M-Ann Arbor?
MH: U of M-Dearborn didn't exist at that time.
WW: Oh, okay. Was there a difference between the Ecorse neighborhood you grew up in and spending time in Ann Arbor?
MH: Oh yeah, oh yeah. There were 33,000 students there, 300 of them were black. They were a different class. I'm a sharecropper, and these are doctor’s, lawyer’s, teacher’s kids, there amongst the blacks. I got along with them all but I knew I was different. Again, when we were with the whites. Matter of fact, in high school, a very interesting thing happened. I didn't know anything about sports, but we played street football. And so one day on the playground, the professor – not the professor – the coach saw me throw a football, and he saw how far I could throw it and how my side, he called me over, told me he wanted me to come out and play football for him. He wanted me to play quarterback. And because the quarterback he had could not see over the linemen. He wasn't tall enough. And so I agreed. And I did well for – my two years in high school I was the quarterback for the football team and the captain of the basketball team. Which, you know, I'm just going through – I was kind of like Forest Gump. I was just doing things. I was learning, and appreciating, but I didn't have much ego at that time. I don't think.
But anyway, at U of M I was there among the middle class folks. And you know, they treated me nice, like we were all in the same boat, except that I – like I said, I was different. But they were good. My roommate was my mentor, he was a year younger than me, which – we're still the best of friends, all those years. He has more infirmities than I do. But after that car wash day, I entered the Army. I went -
WW: What year was that?
MH: That was 1957. And I went to Missouri, to a military base there, where I was – I began my training, but then they shipped me to Ft. Lewis, Washington – state of Washington – where I spent 13 months. And I had a first sergeant who abused me terribly. I have no – this day, I don't understand why this man didn't like me. And if you know about the military, the punishment that they mete out is KP – kitchen police. So he would frequently put me on KP for some excuse. Which meant I'd have to get up at four o'clock in the morning, peel potatoes, and wash pots and pans. And you know – very frequently.
But we were in a special class – our unit – experimental unit. Testing equipment, testing men, to determine who got – who had the best – what region of the country the best soldiers came from. And the people who make best soldiers – and that was Midwest, south, and southeast. And so we went through a number of experimental things. I learned – we had to learn to ski, with a backpack, wearing 90 pounds, pulling like – two-men, three-men teams. Two pulling a sled and one guiding it – that had 250 pounds of equipment on it. Plus weapons. You had a tent, you know, supplies and different things. And we had to ski through – we went to – we left for three months and went through the mountains, and had to maneuver out there.
My enemy – Sergeant Vargas – I – one night – I mean, one morning, we start climbing in this mountain, on skis with the backpack and the sled and the weapons, and at midnight we got to the top. It was pitch black up there. And the first thing out of his mouth was “Hamlin, you got the first watch.” Now it's pitch black and you're on the mountain, and you could fall off and it would probably take you ten minutes to hit the ground. But I had the first watch – had to go around the perimeter. Plus the first night, I mean – we got there, there was – they had hired a hunter because there were bear tracks through the area. But he got me.
So when we spent that three months testing equipment, we were testing the equipment – both the motorized equipment and what we wore, and the weapons and so forth. Then we left there and came back and that was three months. Then we spent three months in the desert. And – which basically consisted of sitting out on top of a mountain. And – I don't know if you know the state of Washington – there's a desert called Yakima, in eastern Washington, near Spokane. And we were sitting in this – we'd sit down on this mountain for three months, in foxholes. You know, that heat. There's rattlesnakes. And they supposedly fired an atomic bomb in the area, in proximity to us, and when we came back from each one of these exercises, they interviewed us all individually. A psychologist from Columbia and somewhere else. They interviewed us and that was the end of that, fortunately after that. I got shipped to Korea, which took me away from Sergeant Vargas, and I excelled over there, and I became a sergeant. But Korea was kind of what made – what awakened me. You know, I began – we're over there, and Emmett Till happened, Little Rock, SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], Montgomery. A lot of that happened. And our first night over there we had a racial fight. There were three of us and there was nine whites, most of them from the South: Louisiana and Oklahoma and so forth. And we were in a 12-man quonset hut divided into three parts. We were placed alphabetically. There were three blacks – me, Hightower, and Hawkins. Hawkins was from Benton Harbor, I forget where Hightower was from. So the first night there, we were – This is probably not what you wanted, right?
WW: Oh yeah, this is all good.
MH: First night there, we were – me, and Hawkins and Hightower were sitting in the middle room, which is where we were, and all of the whites are gathered in the room next to us. And they were talking, and we were talking, and we kept hearing the word “nigger” thrown around. So finally one of us – I guess it was me, “Man, you guys hear what I just heard?” Said, “Yeah, man, we heard it.” I said, “We got to put a stop to that.”
So the three of us marched over there. They were all sitting around, you know, on their bunks and chairs and so forth, and we say, "Hey man, you guys – we been sitting over here listening, hearing that word 'nigger' being thrown around. You're not going to be able to do that around us." And this big guy who was about six-two, about 230, Harlan, from New Orleans, said, “Well I don't know what I'm going to call you because that's all I've ever known.” And we said, “No, you ain't going to call – you're not going to use that word here.” So he said, “Well, maybe we better take this outside.” And they, Yeah, yeah!
So Hawkins, who was about six feet, about 170 pounds, said, “Well man, I'll fight you.” And so they decided that the two of them would go at it. Harlan weighing 240 pounds. [laughter] I'm worried to death about Harlan. So we go out there, they get on one side, and three of us on the other side, and Harlan stepped forward. And Hawkins stepped forward. And so Harlan lunged at him, and Hawkins hit him with a left hook and then hit him with the right and staggered him, knocked him back, and Harlan made a bull rush and Hawkins grabbed him in a headlock and rammed his head into a car – the grill – and he was bleeding all over the place. Said, “Hey, next time, we got to stop, this got to stop now.” So they stopped it and we went back and never had that incident again.
So, that – you know – but – and aside from that, see, I maintain that all Americans, since they're so warlike, they like wars – they ought to do two things – enlist, and number two, before they do they need to go to France, to Normandy, and see that graveyard, with ten thousand crosses in it. It's eerie. We have a son who lives in Paris and we were visiting him quite regularly. Now he comes here all the time. But we went – the first time we went, we went over and stood at the – out there amongst those crosses. There's ten thousand of them. Names on them – name unknown – and they go on and on; you can't see the end. And you can't see – and that way. If you stand on one side, you can't see. You stand here, you can't see the end. And it's the most eerie feeling. It's a very spiritual thing. So I think all these warmongering people need to, you know, put up or shut up.
But anyway, that is what – see, I was angry. This was the era of the black man. Angry black man. And when I came back – well, a couple other things. You could see, in Korea, the effect of that war. Which we didn't win – but we killed a whole lot of people. In North Korea, they destroyed every building that existed. People were living in caves. They were – I can – they drove – they fly a B-52 over a rice paddy, see a guy down there with an ox and a plow and drop one on him. Because a lot of times they come back – like right now, they go on bombing runs in the Middle East and they come back with their bombs. But there you see somebody down there, a peasant – so it kind of effected me, plus what was going on here. There was a lot of, lot of racial hostility building. George Wallace hadn't started, but he was on his way.
So when I came back I was —
WW: What year did you come back?
MH: In '60. In March of '60. And got a job – that's when I got the job at the Detroit News. I had U of M credits and I had military, so they hired me. I worked there ten years. Teamsters claim that I was one year short of a pension. I think they probably cheated me out of it. But that's water under the dam. But anyway, I worked there and I got married. Married an upper middle class girl from St. Louis, and it didn't work. You know, because I was beginning to move left, and she was from – she was a society girl, and her friends – they used to have parties all the time. We all – you know, and the party was usually at our place. I lived on Boston and Lawton, which is right over there near Central High School, where the National Guard was located.
But anyway, she was from St. Louis and her family – it was a Boston Episcopalian family her mother came from. And, you know, I was born in the low classes. We gave it a go but it didn't – it lasted about four years. And we got a divorce, and it was very crushing for two weeks, and then I became a counselor, ultimately. I always tell people who divorce, who are coming through the week, well you can grieve for two weeks, but – and the other party is going on to a better life for themselves. You better take care of number one! Two weeks. That's a good rule of thumb. If you ever decide to get divorced, you can grieve. I was sitting up in my house with a fifth of Jim Beam Red – scotch – a fifth of it – and then a pint of Martin BPO scotch. Listening to Ray Charles, Country and Western album, in which he had “Born to Lose” on there, and “I Can't Stop Loving You,” and I did that for two weeks. But then one day a light bulb went on. Up here, like a fool, she went and took everything out of the house while I was at work. I worked a double shift on Saturday. She got a van and took all that, took all the money, including money we had invested in a bank out in – a black bank in Los Angeles, that my brother-in-law was a vice president, and left me there.
I start – you know, I started having a good time. I started dating. Every single teacher in the school – my friend who went to U of M, who was derailed in his drive to be a doctor because his girlfriend got pregnant – more than likely tricked him – and so he had to switch and go into teaching. But anyway, she was his cousin. He moved in with me, because he had got divorced. He was teaching in this school, and he was introducing me to all these women.
WW: So he was working at Central High School, or —
MH: No, this was in Inkster.
WW: Oh, Inkster.
MH: Yeah, he worked at – he became principal – superintendent of schools, ultimately, in Inkster. But you know, I was just having a good time. Like a fool, I – with all the women – one of them I got pregnant. She was a teacher, and she was crazy. She would have killed me. So I had to leave, running. This is during the movement, because my politics involved me – had me around a lot of women. But I didn't cheat when I was married. But my politics were – these women were not prepared for this. They were into being successful, middle-class, blacks. And I was angry.
You know, that's what drove – that's what drove '67. That's what drove Black Power. That's what drove the movement. The urban black, you know – the working class black reached a point where he could not take it anymore. I told people many a time, then, and since then, that during that period I didn't care whether I lived or died, but I was going to live or die with some feeling of freedom. And you know – in my mind. And I understood oppression - our oppression. I understood our exploitation. I had not only seen it, I experienced it. And I saw the family, how they were abused, in the community, the neighborhood. You know, I was – I used to do income tax for the older people in the neighborhood. I used to help them negotiate with some of these crooked furniture companies, like I forget his name – one down in Wyandotte, I think it was called Muskins or something. Where – downriver were you?
WW: I'm from Lincoln Park.
MH: Oh, you're right around the corner! Yeah, yeah. We used to play you guys in football.
WW: You probably won. Really quick, before we get to 1967, what did you do at the Detroit—
MH: News?
WW: Yeah, Detroit News.
MH: I started off as a jumper, which was assisting the drivers. We'd take papers to stations and unload them, where the newsboys were, or we were the guy who drove around downtown and put papers in the – and shortly after we – after I got hired there, which was 1960, they bought the Detroit Times. And all of us had seniority over all these people from the Detroit Times.
So I got to be a driver, and I drove for a while. And I took over a station, over on Cass, the Cass corridor. And I ran that for a while. And then I started going back to school at Wayne State, so I went back to the truck driving job because that was more compatible with – I had the GI Bill, so I started going to Wayne, and that's when I got involved. I had gotten involved with Ken and John at the Detroit News. I would drive Ken to work – I mean, to law school, on my way to work. And he would join me later – you know, part time, when he'd come to work. Some time he'd ride with me when we delivered papers. And John was working there, and going to school, and together, you know, we engaged in – on the dock, in repartee with all – we dominated the docks with the kids – with all the other guys that were there. Tossing their intellect and their capacity – their analytical capacity. Ken was like a machine gun, if you heard him talk, he sounded like a machine gun. And John would bring it. They both were geniuses. It's a rare case, where they were both geniuses, and I was very privileged and honored to work with them. But they were good friends, you know.
John, who graduated from Cass at 17, was the one who introduced me to Marxist analysis, and I introduced Ken, and we studied together, and we had good times together, and we analyzed the society, you know, and grew angrier and angrier, and had to do something, which brings us to – well – the Civil Rights movement started. And first of all, I had already seen enough outrages while I was in the Army and overseas, at that - but what – we wanted to do something. John went down, attended Nashville, to see if he could participate in with SNCC [Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee] but he couldn't take those ass-whoopings, he wouldn't do it, so he came back. I didn't even go, and neither would Ken. We wouldn't even consider that, because Ken and I had been in the military – he was in the Air Force, I was in the Army, and John had not – he was too young, he wouldn't go, in general.
But anyway, we were angry. And we were, you know, by that time, in that period, there was – we had gone through a flowering of the art in the black – among the black artists. Cultural people, individuals. And there were books, key books that came out that affected us. James Baldwin's writing, or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Richard Wright. Leroy Jones, etc. We were studying, we were rapping, we were talking. We were pretty profuse debaters. And we also realized we had to do something. So we started working with some people. We raised money and goods for people in the South who had been – like in Tennessee, there was a place called Fayetteville, I think, that had, where all the farmers had been kicked off the land. All the sharecroppers had been kicked off the land, and they set up a tent down there, called Tent City. So we worked with the Clagues and the Boggs and SNCC raised money and goods and shipped them down there to the people that lost their homes. All these things were making us further – right, by the way – at the time, in 1960 there was a Time magazine cover – I guess, something like the Man of the Year was the Angry Black Man, and they had a picture of a black guy with bandoleers, you know, across his chest, and a rifle. So this thing was building, these – it was building up to Watts, '67 Detroit, Newark, and so forth. And in, within us, something was going to explode one way or another. I mean, I had some very nefarious ideas at the time. But anyway, you know, our folks had endured humiliation and abuse and so on that, you know, there was rage within the young black man. The older people were prepared to keep going, you know, waiting – as Malcolm said, waiting patiently. But we begin — they begin to say we do now, matter of fact, in Detroit, in the early Sixties, there was a party founded by Clagues and the Boggs and the Henry Brothers called Freedom Now Party. John Watson was part of it. But you know, we emerged as a more militaristic approach.
WW: Who is “we”?
MH: The group that eventually came together to form DRUM [Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement] and the League, well, the Inner City Voice was the beginning.
WW: Okay.
MH: You know, we wanted a pound of flesh, because the humiliation – I mean, we had worn a uniform, we had been good citizens, and the police brutality – they think it's bad now, they should have been here in the Sixties, in Detroit, it was really bad. And other places too. And it's fundamentally the catalyst for all of these rebellions and riots in the city. It was the overreach of the police, and this is going to happen again, based on what's being done right now. The rage – there's a book called Black Rage that you ought to check out some time. I think it's by Grier and Price. [William Grier and Price Cobbs] Like two psychiatrists, two black psychiatrists. And you can get a feeling of the pain that we experienced. You know, people who had some intellectual capacity. Because if you understand the true nature of this country, you have to – you deal – you either become angry or you're in denial. Or you deny it.
And so if you bought the idea that it was – it was okay for U.S. to invade Vietnam, based on the false premise of the Gulf of Tonkin by LBJ [President Lyndon Johnson], that there was justification for going to kill millions of Vietnamese. Or if you are presented with the proposition that somebody as dumb as George Bush has the right to order shock and awe and the killing of millions of Muslims – and still killing them, still going on – if you believe that that is right and just – or as they say in the church, mete and just – then you're in denial. And that's where we are. It's not a question of – you know, I don't feel good with that. I don't wake up every morning feeling good about shock and awe, because you know that they – these fools – well, or if you think it was all right, it was a great thing that we dropped the atomic bombs on Japan – [laughter] you got a different kind of thinking. But that's the way we are. And so we go along, with things. I mean, if you're smart, you're strong, and sometime if you're without morals, you can succeed. Look at Donald Trump. You know, you could – you could fly high. Whenever I had a political – a polemic against somebody, I'd quote Cyrano – he says, “he flew high and fell back again.” [laughter]
WW: Going into 1967, did you feel that this rage was also felt outside your core group of colleagues?
MH: Oh yeah.
WW: Did you feel that this rage was across the city? Across the nation?
MH: Across the nation. As Bill Wilderman, but you see there's a lot of things that came together. There's the war experience, and if you study history, every time something cataclysmic happens, the outcomes are usually different. For example, World War II ended colonialism in the form that it was, where you had these superpowers dominating colonies, going way back to World War I and Two, where they divided up the colonies between the British Empire, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Italians, the French, et cetera. They divided, you know, and Britain had most of Africa. Had control of China. French had Vietnam, who defeated them, actually, on the battlefield. But the fact of World War II – One and Two – where they were fighting over the issue of who was going to control those colonies, get the resources and the market – weakened those countries. And the thing about it is that the U.S. came out as number one, along with Russia.
So all of a sudden, England and – which had been the dinosaur, the giant on the world stage – had to begin falling back. And then after World War II, Mao was able to free China. The Soviet Union had been invaded a number of times by several countries, including the U.S., three times, they invaded the Soviet Union after 1917, but they didn't win. It's such a big country, it's complex, the temperature is — it makes it difficult and the mountains make it difficult to fight there. So those – for a reason the Soviet Union by a lot of countries, after the revolution in Russia all failed. So, it gave rise, after World War I and World War II, gave rise to the independence movement. And we used to quote the slogans, you know, like: The people want revolution. “Countries want independence, the people want revolution.” I forget what the other parts of it were. And that happened.
Like I said, Vietnam defeated the French and drove them out. Mao led the Chinese in '49. Imagine a country that big being controlled by British – by British governors. And the rationalization for it was they were civilizing these – bringing them to God. You know, South Africa ultimately brought down in the aftermath of a breakup of colonialism. The Africans begin to fight. Are you running out of battery?
WW: Just double-checking.
MH: Okay. If you want to speed up, we can —
WW: Let's get to 1967, that week. Where were – where did you first hear about what was going on? What did you first see?
MH: I was coming from my mother's house, about ten o'clock in the morning. And – on Fourth – coming up Fourth Street. I lived on Boston and Lawton at the time. And I – like I told you — I was talking to somebody, anyway – I first begin to see – I didn't have a radio on, so I begin to see a lot of frantic activity in terms of people driving. And as I came forward, I begin to see smoke and I knew something was wrong. I turned the radio on to WWJ and they were talking about it. And so I knew – this had happened before in these other cities. I knew the nature of it, and I knew that there were certain people that were going to be under scrutiny during this time, amongst who included me.
So I figured that I had to find a scurrilous way of getting home from Fourth Street all the way down to Linwood and Boston. And so I – since I drove a truck throughout the city – throughout the whole region – I'd done this for ten years – I knew all the ways to get around. So I started cutting through streets so I didn't go on main roads that were blocked. And finally I made it home. Well, when the National Guard came in, which was at Central High School, which was about a quarter mile from my house – I mean, my apartment – all of a sudden, I'm at home, shades pulled, but keeping an eye out – and across the – Boston has an island in the middle there – and out there, sitting in the island, the berm, was the jeep with a machine gun pointed at my apartment. And so I didn't know – I mean, I knew what was happening – so I stayed, and I went down in the basement, I called different people. Called General and he was in the same kind of situation. And they stayed there for that day and night, so I was pinned down during that time.
I couldn't go anywhere, because they were all – the National Guard was right there. In the midst of our area. We were occupied. And General lived on Gladstone, I lived on Boston so we weren't that far from each other. And I knew for sure that he was going to be one of the ones that was being watched, and I lived close to the Algiers Hotel, so, you know, there was a lot of action in our area. I was anticipating it. I knew there were people getting fed up, and I knew it was going to happen eventually. I didn't know what – you know, it was going to be – you know, it's always a thing letting off steam, but it also destroys the community. It's destructive to the community. And – lives were lost. You know, a lot of people were killed.
WW: Were you afraid of being arrested, as General Baker was?
MH: You know I was kind of fatalistic. I – you know, I could think – I know it's hard for you to realize this, but – I could think that my life – I mean there are some things better than living that way, living in fear, living, you know, afraid and especially out of the Army. A man – [laughter] the military experience is really, really educational. I mean, they – they can order you in a minute to kill somebody, or you can get killed, and some other guy, your equivalent on the other side, opens fire on you, kills you. So I – I've never been afraid of death. But what's happened to me – only thing that kept me from doing a monumental destructive thing was that I thought I'd found a way that I could make a difference. And that was through politics, Marxist politics. That's through organizing. John and I believed that we could start something. John had been involved in a lot of start-ups, but they did not have the maturity, in my mind — this is my belief – to keep it together. They were always vulnerable to an attack, for example. One of the key people who was part of the group – you know, there was group loyalty – but every time this, they would form an organization, basically based around Wayne State, there was this black woman who's part of the group, who would raise the issue that John Williams had a white wife, so they could not keep going with this organization as long as John Williams was in it. So they break up. [laughter]
WW: Before we get into your political activities afterwards, what would you consider – what term best describes, for you, what happened in 1967 in Detroit? Would you consider it a rebellion, or a riot, because you talked about that it ultimately failed.
MH: It was clearly a rebellion. It was rebellion against oppression and exploitation, but more so against – it was a police state, you know, and that's what happened in police states. Looks like the way things are happening now between cops and blacks, we might be headed toward that kind of – I mean, I felt – I knew I was in a police state, you know, growing up in Ecorse. The police used to mess with us, you know, used to try to provoke us and things. Plus they was raiding peoples' houses, that kind of thing. So there was rage and rebellion, in my mind. There were – obviously there were elements who rioted. But it was an expression of that rage, and they – and it was a fight. It was demand for change. Change or die. And I understand that, I mean, you can get to that place. It's very dangerous, what's going on now. Trump is going to get what he's asking for if he keeps going on with stuff, because I – you know, I know some Muslims, and they're not going to, you know – they're not going to let folks mess over with them. I know a number of Muslim men in the community down here, and like – that crazy preacher? Was going to burn the Quran? He best not do that. [laughter]
WW: End of part one.
WW: This is William Winkel. This is part two of my interview with Mike Hamlin. How did the events of 1967 impact your political activities?
MH: Well, prior to 1967, we had, John Watson and I, had begun to discuss and build – go through the process of starting a newspaper, based on a theoretical concept. And so what it meant was, that we had to get the money, and we had to get training. So John, who was a genius, who could sit down with a very complex machine, take it apart, and put it right back together, approached Peter Werbe, who was publishing the Fifth Estate, and asked him to show him how to produce a newspaper. And Peter showed him how to do it, and what he needed in terms of equipment.
I borrowed money from the Communications Workers Credit Union to buy the machine – it's called a justifier, which is, you know, sets type. I mean, which is what you type, you know, it justifies the copy. And we rented a place over on Warren and right behind St. Paul's Church. And we started a newspaper called Inner City Voice. And it was not difficult to attract people. The first thing that happened, though, we published – we published a first edition, and we had a lot of nationalists – what do you call it – cultural nationalists. Poets, artists, dancers, actors, who hung around. We had rented a house that the newspaper was housed in and some students – high school students – and they would help. For example, like there was an artist, and I would give him an idea, and he would make a cartoon. Very sarcastic, more than likely attacking Uncle Toms. And we had poetry – poets, and we published their poetry. But after the first edition, you know, John and I did most of the work. John did most of the typing, I did a lot of the writing, in fact the first article – front page articles – one on the migrant farm workers down in the Monroe area where they were raising cucumbers and tomatoes and stuff like lettuce. And that was the first front page headline. And you know, we, you know, published something by Ho Chi Minh and by Che Guevara. Well, after we produced it, and started distributing it, the artists told us that, “Well listen, fellas, you can't have nothing but black writers in this newspaper. We can't have Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, et cetera.” We said, well, you know – [laughter], you know, that's bullshit, we're not going for that. Well, we had a meeting to decide, well, you know, we know who owns this place and bought this stuff, and after they left I said, “John, John, what are we going to do?” He said, “Well, I'm going to go get General and he'll chase them away.” So [phone rings in background] the next day, the next time, I mean the next day that I came in the office – they were gone, and General was there. And he and I bonded immediately, and he began to work on – you know, like me and John, on the paper. And John could work all night, because he couldn't sleep anyway. You know, he would – he'd get up in the morning, smoke a joint, drink wine throughout the day, ten o'clock, around ten o'clock, he'd start drinking hard liquor. And by three, he may take a pill. But, you know, he worked – he wouldn't do it by himself. I had to stay there with him.
So, now, interestingly, before we got to the first edition, we were organizing, and we thought we would set up a fund-raiser. Now this is after '67 – this was in '67. The rebellion happened in July. In September, we – I – see, the cry for black power had activated us, had caused us – we joined the movement, you know, in a sense. And we – it seemed like something we had been waiting for. The idea of self-defense. And so I begin a correspondence with Jim Foreman, and I asked him if we could get Rap Brown – this is right after '67 – to come to Detroit and speak. And he was a fiery orator who was going around saying, “If Detroit don't come around, we're going to burn Detroit down.” And he was delivering that message all over the country. So Foreman said yeah. They came. Rap came with another guy, and we had him at there was an abandoned theater - I don't know if it was abandoned or what – over on Dexter. But we held a rally there, and it was an overflow crowd. So after he spoke, and they took up a substantial collection, we had to go – took him up on the roof and he, with a megaphone he spoke to the crowd down there on the – standing around out there. And all of a sudden some reporters started coming in. “Here come the reporters! The reporters are our enemy!” And he – the mob started chasing them. [laughter] Chasing them down Dexter. Man, were they fleeing! It was a very inflammatory thing.
And that was before the first edition. Shortly after that, we published the first edition, and it drew more and more people, especially young people, to the newspaper. Because it was hard-hitting, didn't pull any punches, was extreme, but it – you know, spoke the truth. And the people – things people wanted to say, and had not said.
WW: Were you a member of DRUM in 1968?
MH: Yep. I was a founding member. Yeah. General had been fired from Chrysler and he – one of the guys who was out there – would come by to visit General and tell him about the outrages going on in the plant, and how black workers were treated differently, and you know, how there was, you know, public abuse. Now, remember, a lot of these workers had come from the South, and they would tend to be deferential to whites. But these were young workers, this was a new generation. But the Kennedy economic program had brought more into the plants, and so they were talking, you know, I think once a week, Ron would come by there – Ron March – and so soon, I started joining. And Ron and General pulled together, I think there were nine of them, and we would interview them. I interviewed them separately and write down the incidents that had taken place at a plant, and put it in the paper.
And then we would distribute the paper at Dodge Main and into the store. But we started a newsletter for DRUM, and it was hard-hitting and you know, spoke to what was going on in the plant, and it had – you know, newsletter is even easier than a newspaper to do. It had enormous impact; it began to rouse these young workers. And you know, it was attacking not only the company but the union too. And you know, and really hitting the union hard, and they felt it. But we – you know – we were young, we were angry, and so neither union nor the company wanted to mess with us. Plus we had about thirty lawyers supporting us. We had interesting relationship with the young lawyers. A lot of young lawyers came here, to neighborhood legal services, and I did the orientation for them when they came to town. I oriented them to Detroit, to the community. And Ken, you know, met a lot of them, so his – he and Justin's work influenced them. So when we, for example, struck Dodge Main, we had thirty lawyers willing to take depositions, to do whatever needed to be done. It was a different time, you know. We weren't – the blacks were not the only people who were angry and motivated. A lot of, as you know, a lot of young professionals came here to work with us. But anyway, it took – the newsletter took off like wildfire and then we started doing them in other plants. At Eldon Plant, you know, at Cadillac, Ford. You know, we had some outrageous stories. The woman that Chrysler forced to come back to work in a wheelchair and they told her she had better come back to work. She said, “I'm on sick leave; I'm in a wheelchair.” “So we'll meet you at the gate, somebody will push you in.” So they did that. And I think – I'm not sure, but – I don't know whether she died or not. I think she might have. But there were outrages.
So anyway, it attracted more and more, and then I got involved with these students. We had so many kids in these high schools, and they had their own issues, and helped them get organized. I was their advisor, and helped them get organized, and they began to – they had already struck, on their own, at Northern High School. Chuck Cole. And so we – we incorporated them and gave them the support – a place to meet, newsletters, they did a newsletter, the group was called the Black United Front – the Black Student United Front. But it was a good time for organizing.
WW: Can you talk about the transformation of DRUM into the League of Revolutionary Black Workers?
MH: Well, we had all these components that developed. There was the newspaper, there were the read – we printed, published pamphlets and books – there was – we were involved with the fight over the decentralization of schools with Coleman Young. We had the Black Student United Front. We had groups at Chrysler Eldon, Dodge Main, we had a group at Ford, and I personally was involved in helping organize the welfare workers organization. Welfare workers were not in a union, and we formed the welfare workers organization. They eventually ended up in AFSCME [American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees] but we got them organized. I personally was involved in organizing the secretaries at Wayne State. And we did a lot of that kind of stuff. Helped unions – groups trying to get organized. We were involved in an attempt to organize Ford Hospital, but it failed. It failed every time, because the ethnic makeup over there. Filipinos, I'm told, Filipinos are not interested in unions. Have no history. I guess Ford terrorizes them.
But you know, we had all these components – publishing, film-making. And so we had to find a way to link them together. And we did. That was the League, and we had a central staff and an executive committee. And we had great success. But you know, ideology – you see, people don't talk about American ideology, or even know what it is – but it's capitalism, which is individualism. Hm?
WW: That'll pick up on the recording.
MH: What will, that noise? Oh, okay. You know, and – it's a funny phenomenon, understanding – see, in my view, America is a fraud. And if you do understand it, and – you have two choices. One, you try to expose it and fight it, or two, you go into denial. And so what happens is that there's a constant striving for, you know, for success, for glory, for power, in the individual. And you know, you can be engaged in a great cause, and people might end up looking at you as a hero, or as some powerful figure, and that can easily go to your head. [laughter]
Or if, for example, you're part of the effort, and you don't feel that you're getting the glory that the other people are. You know, we tried to downplay individual plaudits. In fact, we understood that enough in the beginning to state that. But at a certain point, I mean, people want to enjoy their successes. You know, you haven't accomplished a whole lot but, you know, people think you – I mean, people appreciate what you've done. So that's the problem with putting together an organization like the League. It was undeveloped politically, and so, people come in, didn't take the educational process serious – we had an education unit – they thought the class – some of them thought the classes were boring. They wanted action.
So, you know, that was the beginning of the League. We expanded as a result of our successes. Foreman came here because he had – SNCC had shut down, based on the Black Power – the students had got tired of taking whippings. And he had gone out, and couldn't make it with the Panthers. And he opted to come here. Some people had told me in advance, you know, Foreman is the kind of guy who wants to control or destroy.
Well so he came here and lived with us for a year and a half. That didn't work too well. But a part of it – you know, I don't want to blow my horn, but one of the roles I played was keeping it together. Because I had some very powerful egos around me. And brilliant people – John Watson, Kenny Cockrel, General – General had humility. You know, he never lost his focus. You know, John Williams, Luke Trip, these were all smart folks. And they – like I said, they kind of understood what I was talking to you about, in these kind of organizations. But anyway, we put it together and immediately there was clashes of egos. There were all kind – you remember, we had relationships – I had helped organize the Motor City Labor League. I asked these young and these whites to come together, and overcome some of their differences in forming this organization. And because it could do – I could see a lot of potential for it. And they agreed. You know, I think I had about six or seven of them there, and people who had influence and had practice, were good people and that took off, and, you know, we could work together. They could give us support, you know, we – because I didn't want us to be isolated. We were having some internal shenanigans that caused me to worry – that trouble – you know – we were playing dangerous – with some dangerous things – some people were – and becoming irresponsible. And so, I organized the Motor City Labor League, I organized an organization called the Alliance, which was a group of religious figures – men and women – good people. And you know, we got involved with the Black Workers Congress, which was an attempt to force the churches to face their history – their history of exploitation, and role in slavery, and Jim Crow, and all of the other evils of the country – and they responded – a lot of them.
WW: And that's when the Black Manifesto was written?
MH: Mm hm. And that was the basis. We issued it – we would walk in the church during the service, and pass them out, and read them. And that was happening all across the country. We did it in about nine churches in this area, including one black church. Of course the pastor was in on it, and part of it. But that's where the BWC came about, and you know, we were getting – we had all this growth, but it – the consciousness and the understanding did not keep up with the development. So if I would say – if you would ask me, what brought about the demise of the League and the BWC - and I do believe there have been some false narratives put out – but it had to do with two things.
People's ideological weaknesses that made them want – first of all, they argued for being part of leadership - there's a problem with that. The problem is that there are secrets that the organization has that you cannot share with everybody. So they – they're offended you're withholding information from them. But rationally – now they should tell you, that in an atmosphere like that, the police is not far away, that's number one. But people wanted to be part of the decision making process, and wanted to know everything that was going on. This is a dangerous game. Okay, the other thing about it – that's called relative democracy, by the way. The other thing about it was that there's a class thing involved. Because Americans don't understand a class analysis. Each class has certain characteristics. There's the upper class, capitalist class, bourgeoisie, whatever you want to call them. There's the middle class, which has, I would say, three strata. The upper [middle] class, the middle class, and the lower middle class. And the poor, and in an agricultural society there would be peasants, farmers, individual farmers.
And then there's what Marxists called “de-classed” elements. And that would be – well, he's much harsher than – he talks about “scum of the earth.” But you talk about – you know, itinerant people who don't have employment – perhaps can't have employment – in a country like this, if you have a handicap, you know, homeless, you're born into terrible circumstances, you get abused as a child – that's a difficult thing for people.
And those – anyway – what that's called is “de-classed” folks. Now, what does that mean, concretely? Well, I tried my best to establish a moral standard within the organization, because we were attracting people's kids – people's teenage kids – including teenage girls, on the one hand. On the other hand, we were attracting this “de-classed” group that I was talking about. In some cases, thugs, in some cases, maybe people who were a little mentally unstable, where it's not apparent – thugs. Not — we didn't knowingly have any addicts, but I'm sure we had drunks. And they engage in reckless behavior as a result.
One teenager was killed at a high school dance. Two – one sixteen year old girl, who was a very high honor student – may have been tops in her class – got pregnant by – you know, a guy with very little going for him. Three, there were a couple of rapes that took place in the office. So those were things that brought about the disintegration of our organization. Now the particular splits – the split with General was over those issues. The split with Ken was they wanted to go into electoral politics and we always had a policy against that. But that's where [unintelligible]. It – it's a difficult thing to do, to hold something like that together. You know, these guys – if I hadn't have been in between all these guys, they would never have hung together that long. You know, their egos were too big. And if we approached it differently, they wouldn't have – that would have come to the fore.
WW: So after – and John Watson left the league with you?
MH: Yeah. John just walked away because he told me – I only saw him once after that – he told me that the FBI had told him that he better get out of town. You know, before it was too late, or something to that effect. So he disappeared. And as I recall – as I understand it – he went to work at IBM, out in Pontiac or somewhere. Remember, I told you, he was a genius, so he was very – one of the very earliest understanding computers.
WW: And after you left the League, what did you – did you continue your activism in the early Seventies?
MH: No. What I told the group that left with me – we had meetings, I said look guys, the movement has come to an end. You don't want to go where these other guys are going. Because they were going into rote Marxism and you know, really heavy authoritarian – what you need to do, and what I'm going to do, is find something where I can help people and I can feel like I'm helping mankind. Even if I have to do it one at a time. And from then, I went on to a glorious career. I have awards. I have all kind of plaques and rewards from UAW [United Auto Workers]. I'm a retired member – honorary retired member of two UAW locals. Local 600 sponsored my retirement. I continue to have a relationship – a great relationship with UAW – and this is after we had gone through a period where we shouted at UAW meetings, “You ain't white,” but I had – I became – what I did was I went back to school, got a masters in social work. Became a clinical social worker. Worked with troubled workers at Ford, GM, and Chrysler, but mainly with Ford. I probably had face-to-face meetings with 10,000 auto workers, face-to-face over a sixteen-year period, where my job was to diagnose them and find a program that would rehab them, and go back to work. The company had accepted the idea that it's better to rehab a good worker who has, you know, succumbed to alcohol or drugs – than to hire somebody off the street. And there is really a generational work ethic difference, and I see it very clearly. [laughter]
I had a glorious job, so did all of the people who worked with me. They loved it. I became the manager of this group of clinicians who served the workers, mostly in this region, but I did work out of state – I became a crisis manager – the shootings at Ford, I managed – I had the workers, to get them back to stability after the shooting. The one at Wixom, the same thing. There were others. Ford Sheldon Road. Even at some 7/11s and banks. So I had a glorious career. I feel good about it. About a month ago I had – on the 17 of October I had my 80th birthday. There were 112 people there, and they were all the people that I had been involved with – plus my family – in the movement. Black and white. Labor, lawyers, doctors, you know, all the progressive – not all of them – but all of the progressives that were close to and available to me. And we had a great time. We had it at this restaurant down on Jefferson – off of Jefferson – called They Say. We had a good time.
I said at that time, that it was time for us to have a collective hug of appreciation for what we all had done together. And that – I tried to get them to stay off of my birthday, and focus on us – what we had come through because a lot of people, you know, when they got involved in the movement, their parents were very much opposed to it. Family – angry, isolated sometimes, for a while. Paid the price. We all paid the price. Some people went to jail. But we did good, you know. I'm very proud of the two watches I got from Local 900, which is the Wayne Assembly, the big plant, and Local 723, which was [my most happy ?] plant, and 600 – which I'm like a member there. So it's been a glorious life.
WW: Just a couple wrap-up questions. How do you feel '67 affects the metro Detroit community? Do you think it still does?
MH: Hm mm. Oh yeah. First of all blacks have always been – there's a couple historians – what's your discipline, by the way?
WW: History.
MH: Okay. —Named J.A. Rogers – J.A. Rogers and James Baldwin – who's not a historian but he does cover history – who says that blacks are a despised people. And that's true, because the – if you know – since you know the history of this country – when they found it, with all these resources, and all this land – the ideal land for raising cotton – they needed a labor source. Couldn't make the Indians do it – eventually committed genocide on the Indian. They had – they had emptied all the prisons in Europe to populate here and Australia. And so when they found the African, they found what they needed, and what they wanted. And so as they began commerce, selling cotton to the world market, other countries had ended slavery, including Britain, and they would say to the Americans, “How in the world are you – why do you treat these slaves so bad? Nobody in history has ever treated slaves like you do.” They said, “Well these slaves are not human. We think they're somewhere between a man and an ape.” And from 1850 – I mean from 1800 to 1850, leading researchers, led by the great Samuel Morton of Harvard, were trying to prove this hypothesis. Are you familiar with it? They collected these skulls – a thousand skulls – a thousand black skulls, a thousand ape skulls, and a thousand white skulls – and tried to prove the size of the black brain was in between the two. And Morton gave up, and said it's not true. He was an honest researcher. The South refused to accept that. They continued to propound that idea and still do. So I forget what the original question was.
WW: How do you believe – if you do – how does 1967 continue to affect the metro Detroit area?
MH: Okay. So what happened in this area was – the rage, which you see now among white males – because, and remember – we all came from the South. Guess what? There were a lot of whites who came from the South. We brought out culture with us. Guess what? They brought their culture with them. So there are a lot of people with a Southern background in this area. And one of the things that they do, they have great contempt and hatred for us. And it's not just them. If you know – you're a historian. Brooks Patterson, for example, has been – you know, Coleman Young like to drove him crazy. He hated Coleman Young, and he hated – and in fact, it's in writing, where he said he don't give a damn about Detroit – he hopes it burns down. It's in this book by this Israeli called Zeb Shepherds or something like that.
And he's – they also have a quote from Rolling Stone, from Brooks, and interview with him, where he lets Detroit have it. And so the movement to the suburbs had begun before '67. Part of it was they're making more money, wanted more space. But part of it was to separate. And there are areas like Macomb County where a lot of racists – Patterson, I was saying – that they're also, you know the history of the Irish in this country, and how they were treated when they first came. It's also true of Poles – I have a lot of friends who are Polish, including one that I see all the time downstairs, my buddy – we talk – because I used to work with him at the Detroit News. So they have to separate themselves, so there's been a lot of hostility between the blacks and Irish, and to a degree, with Poles. And it comes from both sides.
So Detroit – that escalated the flight. And I'll let you in on a little phenomenon. I was just telling my Polish friend the other day, because he brought up his – I asked him if he was proud of his Polish heritage, he said yes, and he's one of – you know – I worked with guys at the Detroit News – three brothers, two of them changed their name, and the other one kept the name, and the one who kept the name, the father disinherited the others and gave him everything– but anyway, so what you do is – you want to join the majority culture. So for example, the white worker was turning against the slave who should have been his ally, because he was made white, and therefore was not on a level with these animals, with these sub-humans.
So anyway, what happened was '67 accelerated the flight, and intensified the hostilities, and it not only just created hostility that's there, politicians continue to use it and they're beginning to escalate it at this point. Notice Charleston, South Carolina. Can you imagine something like that? That's where the nine people got killed in the church, in a Bible study. And the man – 20-year-old man who was doing it, was trying to bring about a race war. So anyway, '67 accelerated white flight and widened the gap between the races in this area. Even though the young people have not bought into that, you know, and come back – oh, the thing I was going to tell you about – funny thing about that period – I worked for an organization called Geriatric Screening for five years.
WW: Who?
MH: Geriatric Screening. And what our role was, we had to go into these elderly people's homes who had dementia or Alzheimer's and were slipping – like, for example, these women, old Polish women – all kind of ethnic women – living on the east side. Their kids move away to Macomb County or somewhere, left mama there. Dad's dead, or he's working in the plant – and these elderly ladies are in those houses and they begin to deteriorate. And they drive out to Eastland, and then they don't know how to get back home. Eastland police would pick them up and call us to come see them. I'd go out and see them, get the family together, we'd work out a plan to get them into an assisted living facility of good quality. But there's a bunch of them on the east side, because the kids had just walked away. I don't think they understood what they were doing to mama, because, like I said – the women outlive the men.
WW: Thank you very much for sitting down with me today. I greatly appreciate it.
MH: I appreciate your – what do you call it – willingness to listen.
**