WW: Hello my name is William Winkel. Today is March 19, 2016. We are in Detroit, MI. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s 1967 Oral History Project. This is the interview of Adam Shakoor. Thank you very much for sitting down with me today.
AS: My pleasure.
WW: Can you please tell me when and where were you born?
AS: I was born in Detroit, Michigan, August 6, 1947.
WW: Where did you grow up?
AS: I grew up in the Northeast Side of Detroit. An area in public housing known as Sojourner Truth. Public housing, Nevada, Ryan Road, Mound area of Northeast Detroit. Also near an area called Conant Gardens, which was a very middle class stable area, and at that time very working-class area that had some of the historical connections with a struggle that occurred in that period because in the public housing in Northeast Detroit known as Sojourner Truth, it was the first low-rise brick public housing in America. It was something that Mrs. Roosevelt—Eleanor Roosevelt—had been very instrumental in making it happen. As a matter of the beginnings of that particular time period, there was some concern by white Detroiters that they wanted the housing, which had been set aside for the African Americans during that period, and so there were, not riots as such but there were marauding whites that would come in and intimidate the people in the evenings and shoot into the homes and, of course, the men there stood guard and make sure their families were protected. Folk like Paul Robison and many of the historical figures of the struggle of that era—George Crockett, another gentleman that was a lawyer during that time, was very active—Coleman Young was actively engaged during that time period, and LeBaron Simmons was actively engaged—you may have some knowledge of his family in terms of Larry Simmons, who was a part of the Coleman Young administration, and a current retired person from the staff of the county. He worked for the country executive, Ed McNamara. His son by the way is often on MSNBC as a democratic commentator, he’s a political consultant. I can’t think of his son’s name at the moment but the Simmons family was very, very actively engaged over the past 70 or so years in Detroit. So it was—well there were marches and various other kinds of things so you might say that the area that I was born in was an area which was a part of some of the civil rights history of Detroit, and of course Sojourner Truth historically was a person who had led many of the slaves out of slavery in the Underground Railroad. She was a very accomplished person in terms of her efforts of freeing African people who were enslaved.
WW: And the action your talking about—whites shooting into the homes and other antagonizing actions—was that going on while you were growing up still or just in the wake of 1942?
AS: No that was before my birth. That was the history of it. My father was, I think, he told me the third family that moved into Sojourner Truth after it was built. And so he and other of the early inhabitants of the public housing there were organized in ways of essentially keeping watch to ensure that there were none. My older sister was alive at that time, she’s now deceased. And of course growing up I heard all the stories as the men would get together and they’d talk about some of the things that went on. There is a bailiff by the name of Thornton Jackson who was around during that time. The Jackson family—Thornton Jackson’s dad Thornton Senior and my dad very closely in friendship—well Thornton can talk about that in greater detail having experienced it as a young man growing up during that time period that these things were going on. In fact, Wayne State University did a book on Sojourner Truth, public housing and some of the histories as a part of that.
WW: What was your childhood like growing up there?
AS: My childhood was unremarkable. It was just a childhood where I was very well-secured by my family. It was childhood that, as young people, we engaged with other children and the activities of youth. You know, playing baseball, riding our bikes, and enjoying growing up in Detroit. Across Nevada where the fields were, we’d go over there and we would play in the fields. Now it’s developed and I think the Eleventh Precinct is built in that area now, and the prisons—the state made prisons over in that area—but it was a good childhood. You didn’t have any real concerns, just having fun, doing your chores, and growing up.
WW: What was it like to grow up during the ‘50s and the early ‘60s then?
AS: Well in the ‘50s it was some difficulty because a recession took place. My dad had worked at Bohn Aluminum, which was a very large industrial plant. In fact, their UAW local was the largest that the UAW had here, and this is before, I guess, the Ford local 600 had grown to becoming the largest. Jobs were fairly plentiful. People were moving here from the South for some of the jobs. There were very good times but then around the middle part—’53, ’54, ’55—a recession hit and some of the plants shut down to move to—Bohn Aluminum moved to Indiana and jobs thus became less. Of course, my father was a tradesman, he was an active member of his local—in fact he had been the recording secretary of the Bohn Aluminum local, as a charter member he helped organize it, and so he was able to get a job elsewhere, but the fortunes of time were he turned down a job at Ford and decided to work at Packard Motor Car Company. And of course Packard closed in ’56. So he left Bohn, went to Packard, stayed there a couple years, and then they closed down. And after a couple years of doing various construction-type jobs—brick masonry, painting, carpentry, things of that nature, he was very skilled in his crafts—he got on with the Bohn Aluminum over in Iron Street and Jefferson—I think now they’ve got lofts in that plant facility. So it was a struggle during those mid to latter years of the ‘50s. The ‘60s were quite different. In the ‘60s, things had gotten back pretty good for the city. And at that time, my mom had worked as a lab technician. She had been successful in her efforts. She was a college graduate, my dad did not finish college. So she had taught school in the South and came to Detroit. Couldn’t teach school here initially because they required black college graduates to have to take classes at Wayne State or some other institution here before they would let them teach. So my mother, who had taught maybe eight years in Kentucky and West Virginia, had to work in the hospital. Since science was her foundation, that is what she did as a lab technician for several of the hospitals. I remember Brent Hospital, I remember a doctor, Dr. A.B Henderson, who was a very noted black doctor, she set up his lab for him and his private practice, and basically it was a pretty good time in terms of economically.
WW: Being so young did you understand any of the social movements that began to form during the ‘60s?
AS: Yes, because I don’t ever remember a time that there was not some discussion about social issues. My grandfather moved from West Virginia when he retired from the coal mines to live with us, and so we had a rich environment, generationally speaking. We had my grandfather and grandmother, and we had my mother and my father. So since both of them worked, and my grandmother never worked in terms of outside the home, and my grandfather was retired, there was an extended family that was connected that assisted each other in terms of what was needed. My grandfather had been an organizer for the coal miners’ union—United Coal Miners—and had been a person who was very, shall we say, opinionated, on issues, and he was a republican, a black republican. As having been born in 1892, he was a part of that generation of African Americans who identified with the party of Lincoln. My father had been born in 1912, and he became of age during Roosevelt’s time—he didn’t vote in ’32, but he voted in ’36—and in ’36, he voted for FDR. So there were always discussions, always debates about who was better in terms of the candidates, at the national level at least—was it Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson? And so they would go at it, and so I’m a part of that. Then of course the civil rights movement is happening, the issues involved with the end of the colonizing and getting the Europeans out of Africa is going on, so it was a very, very rich, intellectually, and open discussion about the issues of the day as they affected labor, as they affected black Americans, and I was there at the table and taking it all in. As a very young person, it was part of my growth as a person being aware of the events that were going on in and around America during that time.
WW: That’s amazing. Those must have been really great conversations.
AS: Yeah it was very rich. I enjoyed it, and I miss it. Because obviously, you know, after the death of my grandfather and subsequently the family moved back to West Virginia. I stayed here, I was an adult in college at the time, and of course I’d travel back and forth to West Virginia. But the conversations, and the debates especially, in terms of a more partisan flavor, because my grandfather was a dyed-in-the-wool republican, and my father was a dyed-in-the-wool democrat. But it was fine. That was my grandfather on my maternal side. Yeah.
WW: As the ‘60s progressed, did you notice any tensions rising in the city?
AS: Quite a few. Long before the riots happened, probably the latter part of the ‘50s, incidents of black people being shot or killed by police officers, police officers that drove around in our communities—we called them the big four—that often times would pull young people over and harass them some. I was never beaten by the police although my brother was. In those time periods it was a lot of tension that existed and some of the tension I attributed to overzealous policing, but also to neighborhoods as they were beginning to change. Of course, I mentioned about Sojourner Truth; the neighborhood over there in the Northeast Side of Detroit began to change in terms of more and more black folk moving into that area. A lot of the white occupants mostly moving north of Eight Mile and establishing the city of Warren, East Detroit and other places, so it began to be a lot of tension. I guess people made a lot of money during that time period in terms of the scare tactics—when a black family would move in and all of a sudden the homeowners that were living there would put their homes on the market and get out and other families were moving in. It was pretty racially divided. Going to school in that area was—as schools began to change their racial composition, you would get into, shall we say, racial incidents with some of the white children who may have been mimicking what their parents were discussing in their homes and name-calling racially and things of that nature. So, as those events were happening, I mean Detroit was a place—if we could maybe go into the early ‘60s—Dr. King came to Detroit. I mean they were, I guess marching down Woodward in ’63. That was the largest civil rights march in the north as of that time. I was told probably over 100,000 people were there, marching down Woodward Avenue. My father marched during that time period, but I was not in the marching group. I think my sister was a part of that, I know she marched in Washington in ’63. But my sister was away at college. She may not have marched there, but I know she was at the August ’63 march, which came after the Detroit march. So there was a lot of pent-up anger, and those in authority for the city wanted to listen, but they didn’t how to listen, I guess. Or they knew to listen to only certain elements of the community, because Cavanagh was the mayor then and he had been elected principally because blacks abandoned Miriani—Louis Miriani—and came on board with Jerome Canavagh, and he knew it. And of course, he opened his administration up, hiring some blacks into his administration or seeing that they got involved in the housing, police and other things in community relations. But it wasn’t enough. So it just maybe put a temporary lid on things, but it was still boiling under the lid.
WW: How do you refer to what happened in 1967? Do you refer to it as a riot or do you refer to it as a rebellion?
AS: Riot has a connotation of race as its mantra. I don’t see it in that way. I consider it a uprising type of incident—could be more rebellion—but the uprising was based upon some of that suppression that was existing in the community. To give you an example, I expected a riot in Detroit when it happened in ’67 because a year earlier, over in Kercheval and Cadillac, there was a beginning of a riot then. Except it wasn’t at night or in the early morning hours it was in the middle of the day. So I guess because it occurred at the time it occurred, that there was enough police response that was able to suppress it versus three or four o’clock in the morning, in terms of the incident in July of ’67. There were crowds of people, there were actions taken that could have germinated to being a upheaval in terms of property loss and other incidents, crowds gathering. In fact, a former colleague of mine on the bench at 36th District Court was a student at Wayne at the time, Rufus Griffin. Rufus, who is now deceased, Rufus was arrested at that time. I remember when he got out of jail he came back and he was talking about it. Think General Baker, these are all people that I had begun to basically have a political education from as a young student at Wayne, and of course they were my mentors. So as that incident happened, I’m listening to what all took place, and all that so I was of the impression that a riot may happen in Detroit because of the circumstances that were going on in America. In America, as it relates to police-community relations, as it relates to the Vietnam War, as it relates to a way in which people, who had grievances against government actions and decisions were not going to just sit idly by and allow things to go without a reaction from them. And with the manner in which the policing was done at that time, as to beating people to stop them or overreacting to people who had legitimate grievances, that it was kind of like a powder keg, no communication, one force against another force, and that it would at some point explode. So I wasn’t surprised by the riot or rebellion of ’67 because, as I said, I considered it a uprising, a containment that had been put on the community that, at some point, would eventually explode—actually exploded—so that was my take. But racially speaking, in that time period, there was more togetherness in the looting that was going on during the ’67 rebellion than you’d think would exist with the concept of a race riot, because blacks and whites were in the jewelry stores, or the television radio repair shops, and cleaners and everything else, grabbing whatever they could grab. And sometimes a white looter would go get something and a black looter saying, “Man, I was gonna get that.” And, “Oh, well alright you can have that I’ll get something else.” So there really wasn’t race connotations to it. The race had been more the attitude, I think, of the police in reference to the black rebellious folk, and how they surmised it in putting it, I guess, in the way in which they thought everything else that was happening in America was going on. But it was not motivated so much from that standpoint. In fact, my assessment is that most people say it was a surprise, which I disagree with, but most people attribute it to a group of people that are just crowding around at an after-hours club, and at some point just exploding. But as you analyze it, Twelfth Street was a center of black nightlife. People are going and coming all evening. The evening activities are going on. The pimps, prostitutes, the after-hours clubs are going strong, people are getting awful work that frequent those places, and they’re going from the bars closing down and they’re going on Twelfth Street. Wherever you are, you go to the club, you hear the entertainers. At the end of that, the clubs close at two so where do you go? You’re not ready to go home, you go on Twelfth Street. So people are walking. If you’ve been to New York on Times Square and you know Times Square, people never go to sleep. They’re all day, all night walking up and down Times Square. Well, imagine that on a smaller scale, as to Twelfth Street. That’s what Twelfth Street is happening at two, three, four o’clock in the morning. So, in that environment, you’re gonna have people. After-hours clubs are raided all the time. That’s a cost of doing business for those people running after-hour places. And sometimes they had relationships with police officers. So some got raided, some didn’t get raided. Or some were raided, and they knew they were gonna be raided as to their relationship that existed. I’m not saying that it was all from a point of corruption, but it was kind of—why risk officers’ lives unnecessarily? You raided a club with the same people who were police officers, going in as the guys that buy the alcohol to make the case. So, did the doorman know them? Who knows? They’ve been there before, they’ve raided all these clubs before. Did the people running the clubs know them? Yup. After-hours clubs were businesses that were tolerated by the police. I don’t know if the law prevented them from closing them as a nuisance, but if you raid a place three, four times, the law allows you to say it’s a nuisance—clamp it down, board it up. But they didn’t do that. They take’em in, give them a fine. Next week, they’re going again. So I kind of thought that that’s just a cost of doing business in that time period. In terms of the outlet it allowed, instead of changing the law to allow liquor to be sold after 2 o’clock, and changing the law to allow persons who didn’t have a license to distribute alcohol—maybe that would’ve been more difficult than just every two or three weeks raiding them and taking them in and putting some money into the city coffers, I don’t know. But, that evening, the underpinnings were that this was a celebration of some people who came back from Vietnam. That’s what it was. It was a party. It wasn’t even an after-hours normal activity. It’s a party for a couple guys who made it through Vietnam. We’re losing people all the time—“Hey did you hear about so-and-so? Man he got shot. Oh man he got killed. Man I went to high school with him. Went to junior high. What happened?”—you know. So we’re hearing this all the time. So two guys, they’re having a party. I’m assuming—I wasn’t there—that some of the other guys who made it back from Vietnam are gonna attend the party, their friends are gonna attend the party, so you’re gonna have a larger group of people, but you’re also gonna have a group of people who have experienced violence, danger, and an ability to shoot, an ability to retaliate when they see something that’s unjust as they see it. There’s been some development of their own sense of manhood or whatnot in their experience. So I think they kind of ran into a buzz saw. I think they kind of ran into people who were not going to accept a police department that disrespected them before they left. You add to that what has happened in the ensuing years with the anti-war effort, with the black power movement, with an enlightenment on other areas that are all happening converging together, and it’s 1967. So the attitude of these people is a little different than the attitude of what it may be a year or two earlier in terms of raids. And I think the convergence of those things, with what happened at the wee hours of the morning, overwhelmed the police and they just weren’t really ready for it. They didn’t know how to handle it. They didn’t know how to put the genie back in the bottle. It just was a little bit too much for them. And then as that boils over, it explodes and they can’t put it back. They don’t know how to deal with it. “What do we do? Where do we go?” “Well, let’s get the racial leaders that we have.” But the racial leaders don’t know how to put it back. They weren’t even aware of what was going on. So it was difficult to understand it because it was difficult to be able to put yourself in the place of those people who were experiencing every day what they were experiencing from the police department. It just hit them at the wrong time, with the wrong situation, and inability to address it in the typical way police address things, which is force greater than the opposition that you face, and they couldn’t put force greater than the opposition because the opposition kept growing and growing—“Hey what’s going on down here?” People aren’t asleep because Twelfth Street you aren’t asleep. The neighborhood in and around people get up, they walk around, they go on Twelfth Street just like Times Square. “What’s going on?” You know, and it just was a kind of incident that was predictable if you put the right analysis to what really was going on. If you put, “Oh, we got jobs here. We got homeowners here. It’s a good life.” Yeah for some. But so many others, it was, “Here come the big four man.” “Hey, we better get outta here.” “Hey boy, what you doing running? Get over here. Get up against this car.” That’s a different community and some of the people weren’t hearing that. We’ve got racial groups that meet and community block clubs working with the police and, “Oh, everything is fine. We can communicate.” Yeah with those that you’re communicating with. So, no it wasn’t a surprise—I thought it would’ve happened earlier—but it happened when it happened.
WW: Where were you living then?
AS: I was living on campus on Farnsworth—252 Farnsworth. It was an apartment building. The Science Center has taken that street out in that area. So it was an area that was a secondary area to Twelfth Street for activities—John R., Brush Street. The musicians known as The Funk Brothers that played with Motown, most of them played at the clubs and the bars that were along John R., Canfield, and Brush Street. There was a smaller group of pimps and prostitutes and after-hours clubs over in the area around Canfield-Saint Antoine and what had been once Hastings Street, which was now kind of the I-75. So the vestiges of what was once Hastings Street, along Forest, Canfield, John R., Brush, Saint Antoine, that area was still an area where activities were going on, and they had after-hours clubs, but they were a little bit longer in their being in operation and they didn’t get raided as much. They were pretty much stabilized. Some of the older hustlers in Detroit, they owned their own hotels and they didn’t have any things that would cause a greater concern. Of course, Detroit had different precincts that policed the areas, and I think there was a more tolerant attitude in that area. So the college campus was just kind of two blocks or so away from that neighborhood. And so if you wanted to get something to eat at twelve, one o’clock, you’d go to Stanley’s, which was over on Canfield, or the Chinese place, or you could go to one of the restaurants, Anne’s Bar, you know, 75 cents have your chicken and fries or whatever the heck it was. And so it was a area that had vibrancy activities but I guess when the bars close and the entertainers left, they went into a more cloistered environment or went home, versus on Twelfth Street when the bars close, they were on the street looking for more activity. Or maybe they got in their cars and left the East Side and went over to West Side, who knows.
WW: How did you first hear about what was going on that week?
AS: That Sunday, got a telephone call. And television, radio. I guess I got a call, maybe earlier that day, seven, eight o’clock in the morning. “Hey, man, did you hear? Man, they rioting over on Twelfth.” I said, “What?” And of course, you know, got some of the details. And then, you know, some of the coverage that was going on, and some of the reactions. I think after congressman Conyers got on the car to try to put out the emotions and have people get off the streets, that was played up on TV quite a lot. Of course that was a major thing because Conyers was one who we kind of thought was a young dynamic, individual, and, “Hey man, they’re not listening to Congressman Conyers? Whoa.” Cause he could cross the path between those who were more of the bourgeoisie, and those who were community, because he surprised a lot of people by becoming elected as a congressman. Everybody wanted that seat. That was, I think Richard Austin, maybe Conrad Mallett Sr., and you know, a lot of noted leaders in the community. And I don’t think he got a lot of great support from that group. “Well, he should wait his turn.” Or, you know, whatever else. So that surprised me. But then you know, understanding that pot boiling over kind of thing, you know it’s kind of hard to put it back, and he wasn’t successful. When that happened, then I had to make a tour, so I went in the direction of that area, by that time had gone to Twelfth Street, Linwood, and some other areas, Dexter, Davison and then it hit where I was living, over on Warren Avenue, you know, not two blocks from my apartment. So, it began to, you know, spread to Mack Avenue and other places. So wherever you’d go, you would see that. But of course you had to be very careful because by then, police were out looking to see if we’re a part of anything that’s happening to spread it—snipers and whatever else they were afraid were going to exploit it and create the revolution, because that was also a talk that was going on then: “The revolution has begun.”
WW: What was the feeling in the city as the National Guard and the army moved in?
AS: Disappointment that the governor could not deal with it other than with these young, white, inexperienced persons who had no real relationship with Detroit, couldn’t do anything other than perhaps create more problems. The National Guard came in and like soldiers that I’m sure were somewhat fearful. You know, Detroit was kind of a place that they knew very little about, they had their orders for what to do and so they didn’t know if this person was a minister or this person is a worker going to the plant for his shift. You know, plants were operating twenty four hours. You had a day shift, a afternoon shift, and the midnight shift. And you know, they were pulling people over so you had to be very, very cautious of those individuals. We felt somewhat intimidated in that regard because you were kind of guilty unless proven innocent. And these guys are perhaps quicker on the trigger than they are with any dialogue with anyone so that was a very scary period, in terms of that. Most of the people that were rioting or rebelling, however you wish to refer to it, they were just like having a lot of party, fun. “Hey, everything’s off, let’s go get this! Let’s go get that” You know, it wasn’t a sense of someone going to kill or someone going to burn. I mean a lot of the people were of course looting, breaking windows. They weren’t setting fires, I think some of the storeowners set their own fires. “Hey, this is an opportunity for me to get the hell out of Detroit. I don’t wanna try to rebuild this place so let me set it on fire.” I think that some of the homeowners, you know, set some fires or had some people set fires. And not saying that no one who did any rioting didn’t set fires, of course they did. But I think the manner in which it is hoisted and blamed upon all of the people is a misplacement because if it was that, then I would think there would have been some rebuilding. We had a loss of businesses up and down Linwood, Dexter, Twelfth Street. We had a loss of businesses in various areas—Trumbull, Mack. And if you have been operating your business for ten, twenty, thirty years, and you got your insurance money, and it’s provided a good income for you—the people haven’t moved from there, why wouldn’t you rebuild? My roommate’s grandfather—he was a dentist—he had a home on Atkinson. So when I was maybe around the second day, he went to go check on his uncle and his grandfather, and his grandfather had closed down his business. The building was fine, but he just decided to retire at that point. He wasn’t going back. But why wouldn’t a business, especially those buildings and businesses that are dependent on their income from the neighborhood, why wouldn’t they rebuild? And, as you go out, you go further west, it went to Livernois and Warren Avenue. Every area of Detroit had a commercial strip associated with it, where African American people lived. And most of those areas had a reliance upon the people in the community to further their business interest. After the riots, it was almost eighty five, ninety percent of those businesses failed to reopen—failed to rebuild. And that, to me, seemed as though perhaps they may have been looking for a way out in and around the time the riots happened. Maybe they didn’t understand, maybe they weren’t a part of it, but I just don’t blame all of the burnings on those people that were out on the streets. In fact, you see people taking a television or a radio and they’re running down the streets—“Hey, hey, you got that? Oh where you get that?” “Oh, I got it down here in such and such.” “Well I’mma go over there.” “Well you better not cause they’re over there now and they’re standing guard.” And say, “Okay.” So, that’s the way it was. So the way in which the rioting occurred should have been anticipated by police, should have been in some way able to have been suppressed enough with an appropriate response if they understood. Instead of getting perhaps the congressman out, maybe they should’ve gotten some of the indigenous community leaders—the Block Club, some of the labor leaders, some of the people where they worked at Ford or Chrysler or Dodge Main or wherever they worked. Maybe some of these people could have helped in that regard. But it would’ve had to have been within twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
WW: Aside from the economic devastation you talked about, how was the rest of the community reacting in the wake of the riots? Was there a sense of disunity, was there disillusionment?
AS: No I think there was disappointment. I was of the impression that most people were disappointed because the damage was done to the areas that the African American people lived in, and the harm was felt more by them and the restraints on the movement of African American people to do their day-to-day task, and to go about the business of maintaining their families was interrupted. So there was some disappointment in that regard, but I don’t get the sense that there was any way in which they felt that it had advanced anything in Detroit. And then of course as people were arrested and locked up and people were killed, it was even more disappointing because naturally, we thought that the police response and the National Guard response was somewhat overreacting and it allowed racists and those who had elimination of blacks, it allowed them the opportunity to do some things, like with what happened to some of the folk that I knew from my neighborhood at the Algiers motel, where they just lined up and shot you know, guys that were in the earlier group of The Dramatics—Larry Reed and Pollard and those guys. They were, you know, just partying. They were having fun. Had some young ladies that they had brought in from Canada and they were having fun, but they were white—the girls were—and so that incensed the security guard or the police department and so there were atrocities. So I think that it actually was—and these guys, they weren’t political people, they were entertainers. They were people having fun—good friends. They were. They weren’t trying to overthrow anybody at any office. Probably some of them couldn’t have named who were, you know, the leaders of the NAACP or the Police-Community Relations Board or anything of that nature because you know, this is the age of Motown. This is the age of The Temptations, they could tell you all The Temps and The Contours and you know, groups of prominence at that time. So it was kind of devastating to the community.
WW: In the years following, do you believe Detroit changed as a whole, or just segments of the community changed?
AS: Detroit changed in different ways. Obviously, people left Detroit. In terms of businesses, people left Detroit. In terms of neighborhoods, properties devalued. People had no sense of investing in the community. They had a saying that, “The last person out of Detroit, turn out the lights.” But there began to be a group of African American people that said, “No, we’re not going anywhere and we’re going to rebuild this city, and if we are going to survive, then we have to come together to do so.” And so there began to be a spirit of racial unity to begin to impact the political structure. I think—who did we have?—Nick Hood on City Council at the time. He was probably about the only African American, so—
WW: And Patrick.
AS: William Patrick, was he there at the same time as Nick? Maybe so.
WW: Mm-hmm.
AS: Okay. So Bill Patrick—he had been the first—so we had Bill Patrick and Nick Hood. And Bill Patrick didn’t stick around. He got a job with AT&T as their general council, so he may have left before the ’73 election, or the ’69 election, I don’t know which one. But in ’69, Dick Austin decides to run for mayor—before ’69, but his campaign goes in ’69. So there began to be—“We’re gonna get this city on the right track,” by some of the leadership during that time period, post-riot ’67. And so Richard Austin becomes the standard bearer to run. Cavanagh is devastated, his future in politics is basically shot because of the riot, and in the Democratic Party, there is the big divide on the Vietnam War that is a part of Johnson not running for president, a part of the split in the Democratic Party between McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, and McCarthy is kind of pushed to the side, and they pushed Hubert Humphrey out in front. And so he loses, so it’s kind of in an upheaval somewhat, and it impacts Detroit. And so we say, “It’s time for black leadership to come as the mayor,” so Dick Austin, who’s a CPA—I think he was the first black CPA in Michigan. So he gets a large segment of the community’s support, but I always thought he did the wrong thing because he went to campaign more in the white community—took the black community for granted—and he went to campaign in the white community to show that he was a good negro, he was a person who was not going to be a part of this militant group, but it’s time to turn leadership over to the good class of leadership, and I think in that vein, he roused in some of the white precincts, “Hey they may win,” so they got a larger voter turnout when we did the analysis after it. They got a larger voter turnout in some of the white precincts than they had before in the previous mayoral election. And of course, black voter turnout was about the same, so it didn’t increase anything. And of course, that was something that happened after it. But there was a urgent sense that we needed to rise to a leadership role and of course there was the aspect of the ’73 period, where people like Clyde Cleveland out of New Detroit, and Erma Henderson, Equal Justice Council—she was court watching in terms of the justice in Detroit—and of course Senator Coleman Young, and there was a guy on the West Side of Detroit working with youth, Larry Nevilles. They decided to run for city council and mayor and there began to be promotion by guys like Jim Ingram, Drumbeat on the radio, and Butterball, Jr., who was a station manager over at WCHB and talking about black pride, black participation and all of the other things. So they got a larger turnout in ’73 and were successful in getting—and of course the diminishing between ’68 and ’73 of more of the white population. Detroit was on a regular, steadily decline, had they not come in to, I think, some sense of leadership. And of course, from that point forward, it was staving the flow of negative decline to trying to just stabilize. And to stabilize, you had to do some things economically and politically, and then from that point going forward to try and grow it. And I think that was done as marginally as it may have been in terms of numbers. Nonetheless, the biggest task was to stabilize, to stop the flow of negativity that was happening. Otherwise, Detroit would have ceased to exist, because it was on a decline from that point on. The riots really tore economically, socially, and in many, many ways, the fabric of Detroit. Companies left, jobs left, corporations ceased to contribute, all kinds of things occurred in a negative fashion that were of such a magnitude that it could have made Detroit a part of a real negative history beyond the fact of it having this tumultuous event happen in Detroit. It could have just closed it down.
WW: How do you feel that Detroit has managed itself over the course of the last forty years?
AS: I think it managed itself fairly well in the last forty years, except unfortunately, it did not allow some of the more revolutionary ideas of impacting economically that it could have helped. It staved off some potential run into bankruptcy with increase in the ability of being able to have a income tax that voters could generate some income to deal with the loss of dollars from the revenue that was lost with people, you know, leaving Detroit and going elsewhere. It cut some of its work force and no department was sacred. All of them felt the cut that addressed some of the issues fiscally, but it still provided service. But it was still in a holding pattern, but every time it sought to grow, it ran into a lot of opposition, and I think it was a yeomen’s task that Coleman Young, as mayor did, to keep the corporations here, especially General Motors because General Motors was definitely on its way out with the old Clark plant, and they were gone if the deal hadn’t been done to establish the Hamtramck pole-town plant. That saved revenues from the income and the property taxes that were payable into Detroit, and of course, the workers that still stayed here and homeowners and contributed to jobs. I think the thing that failed was the inability of those in leadership to see that Detroit should’ve had gaming a long time ago when it was reposed by Young’s administration, before I became a part of it. In retrospect, that was the only gaming that would’ve been done outside of Las Vegas in America, before Mississippi, before Indiana, before, you know, various other areas, and could’ve kind of cornered the market. I think that there were some things that could’ve happened—I thought when Don Barton and Michael Jackson were gonna do their theme park there—every time I go down and take my grandkids to Orlando, I say, “If a mouse can build up this city like it has, and have such a revenue flow into a place like Orlando, what the heck could Detroit have benefitted, and how great would it have been for a Michael Jackson and a Don Barton to have had a similar impact with a Michael Jackson theme park here, who had fans all over the world.” I think this could have been a place. I think there been opportunities, some have been done well, I think there are opportunities that have been lost. I think now it’s on a level where it’s moving forward. I like some of the effort of inclusion in terms of the plans and growth of Detroit that are taking place now. I’d like to see more inclusion economically, in terms of Detroit so it doesn’t miss the opportunity that everybody becomes a participant in the process, and I think the political forces that are in place today are moving in that direction. So, I think Detroit has a fine future, I’m very happy to see the corporate community become participants, because a great city can’t be great just from a political standpoint, it has to have economic participation and partnership like Atlanta with Coca-Cola and other cities. Those are my hopes. I have not given up on the city by a long shot, I’m still here and will continue to be.
WW: Alright. Thank you very much. Is there anything else you would like to share?
AS: No, I think it’s just a great project that you guys are doing, and chronicling the various reactions to what was a pivotal event. But I also would just like to say that fifty years ago was a rebellion, riot, however you wish to refer to it, but fifty years ago also was the growth of beginning of a great institution that has helped so many lives and that is Wayne County Community College District, by Murray Jackson, who was the founder of it, and currently is its leader, courtesy of Ivory, that it has touched so many thousands and thousands of lives in Southeast Michigan by what it provides as a vehicle. I think that out of the ashes of the riot/ rebellion, the growth of New Detroit as an entity that has brought that partnership, that coalition between business and community, I think the kinds of things educationally, the kinds of things that bring about a forum for people to debate, discuss, share, and understand those voices that they didn’t hear before the riot, but now there begins to be a forum where they can hear helps to give the city a direction with all the information that it needs. So I don’t look at the fifty year period of the riot as so pivotal in impacting Detroit, I think it’s some other things that have occurred as a result, and certainly in reaction to the riot, that are very, very positive, that are very ongoing, and are political, economic, and socially significant.
WW: Thank you very much for sitting down with me today.
AS: Sure. All right. You’re very welcome. My pleasure.
WW: Hello, today is July 18, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is with –
AC: Al Calvert.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, Al.
AC: It’s my pleasure, Billy.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
AC: I was born in Brighton, Alabama on November 1, 1945 somewhere around 7:45 in the evening.
WW: Can you talk a little about growing up?
AC: Well, I grew up into Jim Crow in Brighton, Alabama. I grew up under the auspices of segregation, complete segregation, the water fountain said “colored,” that’s what we drank out of, because it was a way of life. The counter in the, I forget its name, it’s like a Kresge, a Walmart store, I forget the name of the store at that time, anyway, where we ate, if it said “colored,” that’s where we sit. We rode in the back of the bus. It’s the part that said “colored,” we’d walk to the back of the bus. “Boy!” was what you were called, and so we adjusted to that, because it was a way of life. When you’re born into something, you don’t really question it. You adjust to it, so that’s how I was raised in Brighton.
WW: Are there any memories you’d like to share from growing up down there?
AC: I have fond memories. School was everything. My teachers, I remember Mrs. Rancher, who was my dance instructor, who was my, I think, history teacher, she was everything to me. I go back to the first grade, Miss Austin. I was the May Day king, and my mother was very active at the PTA, they made me the cape and the satin knickerbocker pants, and I remember my little queen was Joyce [Lumboyd?], and we sat on the throne as the May Day – so that gave me a sense of leadership, I think, that I have obtained all of my life, but it began in Brighton, at Brighton Elementary School, where our teachers were our role models, and they were great people, very instrumental in a very positive upbringing. Ultimately, I veered from that, but it was internalized at a young age to be somebody in spite of the conditions, because at that time, our parents who were born before us under Jim Crow, they did not allow their conditions to control our lives. They controlled the conditions our lives were in.
WW: Growing up, did you see the civil rights movement firsthand?
AC: Yes. We were in Brighton High School, I think it was around 1963, I think it was, and Dr. Charles Allen Brown was the principal, ran a very tight ship, and of course we had the utmost respect for our instructors, our teachers at that time, so we were, you know, not perfect children, but, you know, we were disciplined, so to speak, and somebody ran down the hall and said, “Dr. King is in Birmingham!” They shouted it out, and I know now it was an act of God. It was a spiritual movement, because we would not have aberrated from the day’s course to run to Birmingham. Now, born under Jim Crow, now, fear of the Klansmen, bully policemen, racist policemen, we lived under that, but we ran from Brighton, took every mode of transportation we could, to get to Birmingham, where they say Dr. King was, and we ran into what people see now, the dogs and the hoses and Eugene “Bull” Connor, who was the ultimate racist at that time. And you’ve seen it on TV, the policemen, the dogs, the water hoses, et cetera, et cetera, we ran into that and confronted that without fear. It was just lifted off of us, and Dr. King was definitely sent from God, because when I went back home, I think around 1986, and I went to the mall and young white girls, I wore jewelry at the time, the young white girls, “Oh my God, look at his jewelry,” and when I left Alabama, you would get killed for that, you know [laughter]. But when I went back, the whole atmosphere of Alabama had changed. I went to a jazz club, I remember, and I saw a young white guy, kind of looked like you [laughter], he’s sitting with this black girl in the jazz club, hugged up, so oh my God! So, all of that happened as a result of that day that Dr. King came to Birmingham.
WW: After you graduated high school, is that when you began your way north?
AC: Yes, I had an aunt that lived in Detroit, Vera Patterson, who lived on Cloverlawn, and her husband, Pat Patterson, worked for Dodge, and I contacted them. Can I digress?
WW: Mm-hmm.
AC: What really necessitated me coming to Detroit, I found out when I was a child in the interim of growing up that I was born out of wedlock, and that my biological daddy, who I had no relationship with, was somewhere in Detroit, so I found out that he lived down the street from my Aunt Vera when I contacted her, so that was the motivating factor to me coming to Detroit. First to get a job at Dodge Main through Pat Patterson, who was a union guy in Dodge Main Hamtramck, in the foundry, and they said my biological dad was living down the street on Elmhurst and Cloverlawn, which was like literally a block down the street, so the combination of those two was the contributing factor to me moving to Detroit, and ultimately I did right after high school.
WW: And what year did you come to the city?
AC: I came in 1964.
WW: What was your first impression of Detroit?
AC: My first impression of Detroit was, coming out of the South, Brighton, Alabama, where there was one traffic light [laughter], you come to Detroit, you say, “wow!” You know, the city, and especially beginning to work in Dodge Main, in Hamtramck, in the foundry, I was making more money than I had ever seen in my life, so Detroit was everything to me. And then you have to understand that the Motown sound was just blossoming. I remember Marvin Gaye “Pride and Joy,” you know, and the Supremes and the Temptations, that whole genre of music has just began to burst into our soul, and so that was just exciting times to be able to make money and buy things for myself, and growing up, to look forward to being a productive man in my life. But then I went over on Twelfth Street one night with a guy I was riding to work with, and he went upstairs to buy some drugs, and so he said, “Hey man, come on up here with me.” You know, I’m a young buck out of Alabama, so I went upstairs with him, and it was a place where the prostitutes were, and ultimately I saw this pretty girl, and I found out what she was doing, so I, what they called at that time, “turned a trick” with her, and that changed my whole life. That changed my whole life in a moment of time. I saw the pimps parked downstairs in the Fleetwoods, the El Dorados, it was like fast things were going on on Twelfth Street at that time. You have prostitutes, you know, “ten and two baby, ten for me, two for the room,” you know, yada yada yada. Just things were moving, and I saw this, and I wanted to be one of those guys, and ultimately I did. My book is about Born a Bastard, Now Born Again, from pimp to poison, ultimately the poison, the drugs, which landed me in prison for five years and nine months federal prison, where God called me to preach. And I thank God that today my life has turned around, and I use all of these sordid parts of my life to help other people, especially young people, not to go where I have gone.
WW: Backtracking just a little bit, after you first went to Twelfth Street, so you continued operating out of Twelfth Street for the next few years then?
AC: Operating?
WW: Or interacting with.
AC: All over the city.
WW: Okay.
AC: Especially Twelfth Street. Wherever that the party was, that’s what we did.
WW: During your few years in Detroit before ’67, did you have any interactions with the Detroit Police Department?
AC: None, none. Never. I heard about the Big Four, but had never had any interactions with them. I knew one time, we were on Twelfth Street, and they drove up to the corner and said, “Now, we’re going to go around this block, and when we come back, you so-and-so-and-so better not be here.” And of course, everybody scattered, and I found out then that even the players at that time, the street guys at that time had the ultimate respect for the Big Four, but personally encountered, never.
WW: Going into ’67, did you anticipate any violence, or did you feel any tension going into it?
AC: Living in the underworld, personally I felt no tension. I knew that there was a problem, because black people were talking about and depressed about how they were being treated, even from merchants, because they were talked to any kind of way, they were being sold bad meat, and just being treated like, you know, third-class citizens. And, of course, contributing to the economic—let me digress a little bit. Money was flourishing in Detroit. The factories were paying good, the number game was popping at that time, the prostitutes, man, I mean, they were getting money, the pimps and the players were making money. There were no hard drugs, you know, just weed and a little cocaine, you know what I’m saying, but that stuff was mainly recreational. And it was just a party time, once again, the Motown sound, you know, the 20 Grand on Fourteenth and Warren, the Driftwood Lounge, the Gold Room, the bowling alley, I think it was owned by Bill Kabbus, and had the 20 Grand Motel behind with the Chit Chat Lounge. We had the Drome’s Show Bar, all the jazz musicians, I mean, the famous guys. I don’t care who, name one, they came to the Drome. You know, we had Esquire Corned Beef, you know, the Greenleaf Restaurant, I mean, it was just a good time in Detroit. Mr. Kelly’s on the east side, you know, it was just a good time in Detroit during those days. And so, living the fast life that I had entered into, we did not one-on-one feel the tension that was brewing in the city, but you know, through conversation, you know, you hear people talk about, you know, I’m sick of this, and so on. You know, deadbeat down here, they’d talk to me over there, gave me bad meat, et cetera, et cetera.
WW: Going into ’67, you were there that night?
AC: Absolutely.
WW: Can you take me through that night, how you got there, where you were?
AC: Well, during those days, being raided was not a big thing. Being in an after-hours club and being in a raid was no big thing, because the house man would tell you, “I might get raided tonight.” Okay, no problem. They would pull up in a paddy wagon, take the men downtown to 1300 Beaubien, we paid $27.50, get out, go back and party again. No big thing. Nobody was shoved around or talked about, you know. I’ve even seen the police come up in the after-hours club and get his payola. The barman would hand them an envelope, he’d stick it in his pocket, and go on about his business, plainclothes policeman, so no fear of being in a raid. But this night, after leaving, we would go to a club, whether it was the 20 Grand or the Chit Chat Lounge or wherever, you know, because the clubs stayed packed. It was like what you see now, the disco thing going on. Well, Detroit was like that, you know, with the clubs stayed crowded, with people just partying and having a good time, ub the black community especially, that we frequented, and so we left the club, and my buddy Westside, who passed a couple of years ago, he said, “Man, let’s go up to Billy O’Neal’s joint. There’s a little joint on Twelfth and Clairmount; let’s go. Let’s try this one tonight.” Because there were several after-hours clubs around Detroit. I mean, you know, Stokes had a joint, somebody else had a joint, you know, but let’s go to the new place that’s just opened up recently, so we went up there. You would go upstairs, I remember that. Went upstairs, and I took a seat, like you’d go upstairs, and the bar was here. And I sit right here at the corner of the bar with my buddy Westside. And when the police came up, they came up, you know, and so, no big thing, we’re thinking it’s, you know, the normal raid, you know. We expected if we don’t get away, they’re going to take us downtown in the white paddy wagon, sometimes guys would be smoking weed in the back of the paddy wagon, I mean, that’s how it was, that was the atmosphere. But this particular morning, the club closed at two. Three-something in the morning, it was a Sunday morning, July 23, these guys began to push people around.
WW: How many people were in the club that night?
AC: I can’t say numerically.
WW: Packed?
AC: Yes, it was packed, and people were constantly coming, but it was packed, and these guys came up, the police officers came up and they began to be irate. Well you know, hey, you’re not going to push a player around in front of his woman. That bird ain’t going to fly, and you’re certainly not going to push his woman around in front of him. That bird definitely ain’t going to fly, so it was a combination of, I would surmise to say, in my own perception, that the police officers could not take the fact that it was crowded with blacks, dressed well, guys with nice jewelry, beautiful cars outside, beautiful women on the inside, people drinking, partying, and having fun. Don’t get me wrong, that after-hours joint is illegal now, but they were getting paid over for this kind of thing, I mean, come on now. Detroit was just like that, it’s a plug-in town. But these guys came up and in my opinion, having witnessed racism all of my life, the racist attitude came up, because they began to push people around and call people names. The owner kept telling them, “Man, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this. If you’re going to take them out, let them walk out down through the back,” – got a back way, which I was unaware of – “let them walk out, and take them downtown, do whatever you’re going to do. You don’t have to do them like that. This is not that kind of place. It’s not a violent place. These people just here partying.” So, they began to get more irate, the policemen did, began to, man, grab people and twisting arms, and man, they’re going to lock you up and calling you names, and you know, and the n-word, and yada yada yada, and the mf-word, and you know. And so, the brothers began to challenge that. “You don’t push me around, man, you don’t have to do me like that, I’m up in here partying, I’m clean, I’m, you know, jeweled up, hair processed.” During those days, you know, it ain’t that kind of party. “Man, you don’t have to take me downtown. Everybody up here got $27.50 and more than that to get out.” But it got out of hand, I remember the owner kept yelling, “Man, don’t do that. You don’t have to do that.” Then he began to curse the policemen out, “You so-and-so, so-and-so, you know, you don’t have no business coming up in my place, treating people like that, you know, these are my people, yada yada yada.” And ultimately what sparked the whole thing into a flame, where the city was on fire, lit on that day. A young lady, sister, black girl, was pushed down the stairs, it was a banister there, and this stick from the banister went through her leg, and when the brother saw that, all hell broke loose. My buddy Westside, we managed to get out the back way, past all of the stuff, and on top of the car yelling to them, you know, just cussing them out, to be candid with you. And we went across the street, and we began to see people coming out breaking in windows. There was a couple of pawn shops on Twelfth Street, I remember that. They began to knock the windows out and taking the jewelry and stuff out of the pawn shop, and people starting coming out of their places, and it just, you know, it just spread. Just like that, and so my buddy Westside, “Man, we got to get out of this area, because this is really getting to be kind of rough over here.” I mean, we pimps, we don’t want no trouble, you know what I’m saying? And so, we began to go back to the west side, up on Northlawn where he stayed, and the Big Four stopped us. My first encounter with the Big Four. Three plain-clothed men and one uniformed officer driving this big Plymouth. They stopped us, doors opened, you know, they out with their guns, and the uniformed cop got the shotgun to my buddy Westside’s head. Well, he’s not afraid of any police, so he start cussing them out like crazy. And it happened so fast, I didn’t have time to fear, and I saw the Big Four take a pistol out of his pocket and lay it on the seat. After they got us out of my buddy’s ’66 green Oldsmobile convertable, he laid the gun on Westside’s seat. Now I believe today that they were going to kill us, because that’s why they put a gun on the seat, got a shotgun to my buddy’s head, they’ve got pistols drawn. When he put the pistol on the seat, all the doors are open on the car. Over the radio, they got a call, up by the console area, they got this little radio, little microphone thing, I remember that, and they got a call saying that that was a problem on Twelfth and Clairmount, where we had just left from, and they got a call to go there, like an emergency call. And the officer looked at me and said, “This is your lucky day, nigger.” And they got in the car and left, and I think that was the only thing that saved our lives and allowed me to be here with you today is that call, because I do believe they were going to hurt us. They were going to kill us.
WW: That night in the blind pig, did you see, like, any Vietnam vets? The story that’s often said is that there was a party that night for two Vietnam vets, which is why it was so crowded.
AC: That’s a possibility, but I am unaware of that. We had heard that there was a new place that was happening, you know, and, you know, players are going to go where the women are, so that’s a possibility. My buddy had got wind that something, you know, exciting was going on there on the party side, so that’s why we went up there, and it was crowded with the women and men. That’s a great possibility – but I hadn’t been there that long to get familiar with who was there. I’m just up in an after-hours place, after-hours joint as we call them in those days. I was just there to hang out, because that was, that was us, that’s what we did. We hung out until the crowd thinned out, we went somewhere and got something to eat, we’d go to somebody’s home after that, kept partying [laughter]. If someone would say, “Hey man, let’s go over to my house,” you know, it was like that. And you’d go to another player’s house and his woman would get up and cook breakfast, you know, we’d sit there, smoke weed, snort coke, you know, whatever. You know, talk crazy, you know, and that was just the atmosphere during those days.
WW: Where did you and your friend go after that encounter with the Big Four?
AC: Went to his home. I think it was on Northlawn. Went to his home and we turned on the TV, you know, and went to sleep, and we turned on the television later that day, and half of Detroit was on fire, and we just looked and said, “oh, my God.” Okay, I remember the state troopers coming to town. We get a call from our dope girl over on Blaine and Twelfth Street that told us there was a young lady over there, she had been a part of the looting, she had some diamonds, and she had some cases of whiskey that she had taken from somewhere. So, she said, if you guys want some jewelry, you know, get over here, because, you know, she has a lot of jewelry. So we weeded our way through the blocked areas in Detroit. They had most major areas blocked to get to certain routes. We weeded our way through, my buddy knew the neighborhoods real good, so we weeded our way through. We had to stop at one of our friend’s houses named Harry Cash, I remember that. We witnessed people peeking out of the window and the troopers would shoot the building. You know, I mean I guess their orders were to completely control the black neighborhoods in Detroit.
WW: The National Guardsmen?
AC: National Guard, yeah, I said state troopers, I’m thinking about the police I just saw on the way over here. Yeah, the National Guard, I’m sorry.
WW: No problem.
AC: And they were somewhat vicious people, little bit overbearing, I would say, but I guess that was their orders. You know, you’re in the military, you do what the military leader tells you to do. I mean, spending four years in the United States Navy, honorably discharged, okay, I know you follow the orders of the leader. So we weeded our way through the different blocked areas, we made one stop, I remember, over to Harry Cash’s house, where we witnessed they shot up the building and stuff, and made it over to our dope girl house. Matchbox of weed we called the deuce pack, you remember the little matchboxes that had the little wooden matches in it? Little box, that was a deuce pack in those days, two dollars would get you some weed, smoke a couple of joints, you know. And we made it over there, and the young lady who had the jewelry and the liquor, she wound up, in those days, it’s called a woman would “choose” a guy she wanted to be with a pimp. So she chose me, and I ultimately wound up having her as my woman for a while, and so that was my experience during those days. I was just a young pimp, 22 years old, had just turned out in the game, the fast life, and just following the lead of my buddy Westside, you know. And I remember his sister got with me, and she was my first real prostitute, you know, so that was my experience.
WW: Just really quick: what years did you serve in the Navy?
AC: I was in the Navy after the riots I went to the –
WW: Oh, it was after?
AC: Yeah, I went to the Navy May –
WW: Oh, we’ll get to that.
AC: Okay, okay.
WW: How did the rest of the week play out for you?
AC: After the riots?
WW: No, after you’d been to that house, where did you go from there? Did you just stay hunkered down in the house?
AC: From the drug house? No, we went back to, I was living with my buddy Westside at the time over on Northlawn, and so we went back to his house and began to monitor the situation on television, and then after that – and it was so insignificant it seems, at the time, because there was so much going on, but that was a killing at the Algiers Motel, and at the time, to be honest, to be very candid with you, I really didn't associate that with the National Guard or the police, because it was so vague, the reporting of it. It was just some kids that had gotten killed, and they were black, so that was a concern, at the Algiers Motel, and as the news began to progress, because it was somewhat under the National Guard auspices at that time, you know, you couldn’t just maneuver and get all the 411 on everything, but as the news progressed, it related to, as I recall, and I’m not very, very sure, but it related to the police or the National Guard or somebody having something to do with the incident that happened there that resulted in, I think, a few people being murdered. I think a young lady was involved, I think, I’m not sure.
WW: The police and the National Guard raided the Algiers Motel.
AC: Okay.
WW: And they were acquitted, but it’s heavily believed that the Detroit Police Department murdered three young men at the Algiers Motel.
AC: Yeah, right. That’s what it was. Yep, that’s what it was, and I think it was a girl there, that she got away.
WW: There were two women there.
AC: And they lived or something like that.
WW: Two women and seven men survived.
AC: And the rest of them were murdered.
WW: Yeah, three were murdered.
AC: Well, I can’t say, because I don’t have a definitive answer for that, but the atmosphere, in my opinion, and for what I witnessed just weeding through and being stopped by the Big Four during that morning, that killing was in the air, that violence was in the air, that fear was in the air. That was the atmosphere, and it all resulted from a few crazy cops pushing people around in an after-hours joint, where people were just having fun. Now, I was there, I saw that much. The after-hours joints in Detroit, nobody was violent, there was no fights, nobody getting killed, usually the joints would have, like, a bar and sell whiskey, they would have a kitchen, an older woman or whoever was back there frying fish and chicken, another room with a gambling table where guys could shoot craps if they wanted to, a drug boy might have been up in there, a couple of them, might have had some weed and some coke, because we’d snort a little coke to stay up cause we’re partying, we’re just partying, but it wasn't a violent atmosphere. When I went to the military and would get information from the streets, the violence only started after I left when the heroin moved into the city, because after the riots, the heroin moved in heavy, and that’s when violence broke out among everybody, especially blacks, in the city of Detroit.
WW: Did you leave the city because of ’67?
AC: I left the city because the FBI. I went to my Aunt Vera’s house, who I initially moved to Detroit to live with, after the riots I visited her, and she said that the feds came by here looking for you as a draft dodger, and they left a letter saying that I either report or pay a $10,000 fine and five years in Leavenworth Prison. So, I had an uncle, my uncle Arthur Calvert, who was already in the Navy, I went down somewhere in Michigan, Detroit, to take the test to go to the Army. Now watch this: I failed the Army test, which is easy, but I passed the Navy test. I believe had I gone into the Army, I would have come back in a body bag like many young blacks at that time, but fortunately I went into the Navy, worked in a very technical rate as a radio man, and was honorably discharged. From ’68. May ’68. May 28, 1968 to February 2nd, 1972.
WW: When you came back to the city, did Detroit look differently?
AC: You see, I anchored down in California when I got out of the Navy.
WW: Oh, okay.
AC: And I stayed in California for about 15 years before I came back to Detroit, and of course, the whole atmosphere had changed when I came back. Because people, you know, had moved on, doing different things, you know. It wasn’t as vibrant, I would say, as it was during those days, when I came back in ’86, I think.
WW: Are there any other ’67-specific stories or memories you’d like to share?
AC: I can’t think of anything significant, because things went downhill for me after the riots. Things went downhill to the point where I almost became homeless. That’s when I went to my Aunt Vera’s house, because I didn’t have anywhere to stay, I think. I thank God that my life was like that, because it pushed me into the United States Navy, where I had a chance to see the world under the expense of the government. I mean, I traveled: Australia, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, I mean, you name it, the Navy sent me there, and so that changed my life completely, but going overseas and witnessing prostitution was more prevalent overseas [laughter] than it was in the United States. Like in the Philippines, prostitution was a way of life, it was a way of life, and I said, “Oh, I’m not such a bad guy after all, they do this everywhere.” [laughter] So that helped my sordid life to continue, because hey, you know, this is the way of the world. I mean, the girls in different ports would be waiting on us. They would know when the ship is coming in before we did, and they’d be in the clubs waiting, and so this one girl in the Philippines, she took care of me, so Olongapo City was like home away from home. I mean, she took complete care of me, which I was used to from the streets of Detroit, so you know, it’s a lot of things that, wow, I could just go on and on [laughter]. I mean, I’m in Hong Kong, China, I’m walking across the street, and this beautiful girl, high pants on, I mean during those days, I’m just walking across the street in Hong Kong, and I said, “Hey, sweetie.” She say, “Sixty American.” That’s all she said. She didn’t say hello, how you doing, you know, she said, “Sixty American.” Now that was my whole pay for being in Vietnam for 30 days, to give her 60 American dollars, you know. I think at that time, it was like 360 yen to one American dollar. She said, “I want sixty American.” So prostitution, it’s everywhere. Somebody said it’s the oldest profession in the world. Not pimping, they say prostitution is the oldest, so women were doing this way before the pimps started pimping, so not casting all the aspersions on the pimps, because the women were doing it first, and they just chose the guys to be with, so let’s get that understood. [laughter]
WW: Just a couple quick wrap-up questions.
AC: Yes.
WW: What do you think about the state of the city today?
AC: The state of Detroit?
WW: Yeah.
AC: Obviously, downtown is coming back, and I think it’s going to rise far beyond and above all of our expectations, because of the venues that’s being constructed downtown, when you have all those sports venues, that’s going to bring about businesses, and Detroit is going to prosper again. The automobile factories are still putting out beautiful cars, so we got no problem there, but the stratification process of economics is going to be, I think, far beyond and above all that we have ever expected for a few. It’s not going to be for everybody, it’s not going to be for the common man, it’s going to be so expensive that the common man won’t be comfortable downtown. I’m hoping and I’m praying that the deterioration in other areas of the city will become affluent again, because I wept when I saw the blonde colored buildings off of Dexter and Livernois. I mean, the four-family flats that were so beautiful in our time, when I saw the destruction and the degradation, and of course the crime that goes along with it, which you can say what you want to say, but it’s all about the drugs. The only thing right now that will make a man lose everything right now, today, the only thing that will cause a man to lose everything is drugs. Drugs. So, somehow it was moved into our society, the crack, the heroin, the whatever, and it has caused the moral fabric, pardon me, of our society, not only in Detroit, but in all of our major cities, all across this country, all across this world, beyond human repair, and being a spiritual man now, being called to preach while in prison by God, under the inspiration of God’s spirit, I believe that since it has deteriorated beyond human repair, it has to be divinely repaired, and that’s what we really don’t want, for God to come back and say, hey, you know, here’s a famine, in the days of Noah it’s going to rain. There’s some countries now that don’t have food. I was watching a story on TV the other night that South Africa, and not trying to cast any aspersions on anyone, but the wealthy people of South Africa, not all of them, but the wealthy, wealthy, they are still behind gated areas and living lavishly, but the other wealthy people are living worse than animals, and now the blacks are living wealthy, and so I’ll say all that to say that if we don’t get it together, then God is going to have his way in aiding us to get it together. We can’t continue with wickedness, racism, killing, and just doing our thing on God’s green earth to God’s people. We can’t just continue that way, because he has a way of making the first last and the last first. I just saw it on TV the other night in South Africa. When there was apartheid, the black folks lived like dogs. Now, the whites are living like dogs, and the blacks are riding around in BMWs and Mercedes’ in the parks having fun, and you know, so we don’t want God to divinely repair this thing, and He’s able to come through and just level it all off and build it up again. You know, Rome tumbled [laughter], as powerful as Rome was, it’s no longer the Rome of old, because God got tired of the wickedness of Rome, and He destroyed it.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
AC: Man, it’s been a pleasure. This is one of the best interviews I’ve had in my life.
WW: I’m glad to hear it.
AC: Thank you.
WW: My pleasure.
WW: Hello. Today is January 31, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. I am sitting down with -
AC: Sister Ann Currier.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
AC: Thank you.
WW: Would you like to tell your story?
AC: I'm not sure what you want. First of all, I worked in Detroit. And my main reason for coming is because of the people I worked with. Trinity was always noted for the poor, and when the riot broke out, Father Curran opened up the church and the school for anyone that needed help. And they stayed there until they were - police cars were all over the place, and we went back and forth. The curfew was six o'clock for us, but we didn't abide by it. [laughter] We did as we pleased.
And we took care of them. We fed them. We did whatever we could for them. And I kind of think - I think the pastor at St. Agnes, Father Granger, must have called Father Curran - I think - and so people were ushered down that way, because we were noted for opening up our doors for anybody at any time.
We saw the fire, we saw the smoke, we saw the whole shooting batch, but the important things were the people. They came into the church, they came into the school, and we took care of them.
WW: About how many people?
AC: It's hard to say. Enough. They filled the place. But it was hard to say. We weren't thinking of numbers, we were just taking people as they came, and whatever their needs were, and helping them make telephone calls. If someone came for them, they went. Others came. That was it.
WW: What was the atmosphere like inside the church? Were the people in there afraid or anxious?
AC: Not at Trinity. Because it was called a port of entry. Trinity was a port of entry for people from all over the world. And people took care of Trinity, in the sense of the poor would not let anything happen to Trinity. I was there for 45 years, so I know.
WW: Did you expect any outbreak of violence in Detroit that summer, or did it surprise you?
AC: No. I didn't expect it, and I was probably surprised, because I think people should be peaceful.
WW: Did it change the way you look at Detroit?
AC: No. No. I stayed there. [laughter] After all that was over with, I stayed there. I was there until I came home - here. And that's only 10 years ago.
WW: Is there anything else you'd like to share? Any stories from that week?
AC: No. I think you've heard them all.
WW: All right. Thank you so much.
AC: You're welcome.
WW: Hello, today is August 4, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am in Detroit, Michigan and I am sitting down with –
AN: Arlene Niskar.
WW: Thank you for sitting down with me today.
AN: Thank you.
WW: Can you please tell me where and when you were born?
AN: I was born in Detroit. I lived on Dexter Boulevard until I was 14 years old and then we moved to Oak Park.
WW: What year were you born?
AN: I was born in 1944.
WW: What was your Dexter neighborhood like before you moved away?
AN: Oh, it was lovely. It was just beautiful. You could walk anywhere to buy anything. There was bakeries and fish markets and fresh poultry stores where you could go in and pick out a chicken and there was the Dexter Show and dime stores where they give away goldfish on Saturdays. Half-dead goldfish to the kids that would come in. Oh, that was a big deal. There was a lot of drug stores. There was a malt shop called Danny’s. We hung out there when I got a little older. It was a lovely neighborhood.
WW: Was the neighborhood all white?
AN: Yes. Mostly Jewish.
WW: While you were still living there, did it integrate at all?
AN: When the first black family moved in to my neighborhood, everybody was in a panic. My father was so mad at the man that sold his house to the first black family. And everybody put up their signs and started moving and the whole neighborhood just changed in a short time. My junior high school, because I was on the Broad Street side of Dexter was already integrated. There were kids from Grand River and Elmhurst and farther down so it was all kinds of kids that I went to junior high school with.
WW: Do you know why your father and the other neighbors were so upset?
AN: I hate to say it but my parents were terribly prejudiced. I never realized it. They never said it to me until I brought a black girl home from school one day and my mother said to me after, “Don’t you ever bring that girl back into this house again. We’re trying to stay away from them.” It was terrible. It was just terrible. We had a black cleaning lady and, oh, my mother used to put her sandwich and drink on separate dishes and it was like the book The Help. That’s what it was like. It was unbelievable then.
WW: Did you witness any other signs of racism across the city?
AN: Did I witness any other sign of racism? Yeah, when I moved to Oak Park and they were going to move and it was all white again and then they were going to move people from Eight Mile on Meyers and integrate them, the kids, into the Oak Park High School and oh, everybody was all upset about that. Then, must have been in the Sixties where integration started and, yeah, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to think because you heard the news and it was all negative about integration. And then we had horrible governors in the United States, Wallace and — that were saying “We’re never going to integrate.” And then we started seeing on the news these poor kids. The Sixties was horrible. That’s all I can say. It brings back a lot of very bad memories. I’m so glad that my kids don’t feel that way and they were never raised that way.
WW: Going into the Sixties in Detroit, from moving around so much, did you sense any growing tension in the city?
AN: We moved in 1959. We moved –
WW: To Oak Park?
AN: Yeah.
WW: So while you were living in Oak Park did you come to visit Detroit at all?
AN: Oh yeah, I used to come back and visit my friends that hadn’t moved yet that lived off of Twelfth Street and Linwood.
WW: How did your parents feel about you doing that?
AN: Well, I used to go on – I was about 14 and I got on the bus and came back here and stayed at my cousin’s house and we had all kinds of friends then.
WW: Going into 1967, were you still living in Oak Park then?
AN: Yes.
WW: And how did you interact with what was going on?
AN: You mean when I was downtown here?
WW: Yes.
AN: In shock. I mean, really, talking about the day of my wedding.
WW: You can tell the story of your wedding.
AN: Okay. I moved in 19 – I believe ‘58 or ‘59 to Oak Park and graduated from Oak Park High School in ‘62. People stopped going downtown. They just stopped going downtown and we always would go down to Hudson’s and it was wonderful. I maybe was too young in my teen years to realize what was going on but the city was getting more and more integrated because my uncle lived on Glendale and nobody could understand – he lived there until the day he died and that was years later after everybody else moved and he loved his neighbors. But everybody out in the suburbs thought he was crazy and that was the mindset at that time. Thank God, it’s changed, I hope.
WW: What were doing on that Sunday the first day?
AN: Oh, that’s the day I got married. We were at the Book Cadillac. I was married at noon and everybody got downtown just fine but about 2:30, after the ceremony and the lunch, I went up to change and I came back down with my bouquet to throw it out to people and there wasn’t anybody left there. [laughs] It was crazy because my brother-in-law was running around telling everybody, “You’ve got to go! The whole city is burning down.” And then when we were driving out to Chicago and we were driving past Grand River in the downtown area, everything was in flames. And we just couldn’t believe that it could possibly be happening. It was just a shock and then driving to Chicago there were all kinds of National Guard trucks coming, racing to Detroit with State Police and we kept saying to ourselves, “Oh, it can’t be. It just can’t be.” But we had a lot of Canadian relatives that were just terrified because some had to come back through the city to go across the tunnel and people were in such panic going across the tunnel, my sister said they were driving on the sidewalks and cutting each other off to get in front of other people to get out of Detroit and you could go over to Canada but you had to be born in the United States to get back. They heard gunshots. She said it was so loud, the noise level was so loud driving down to the tunnel that they couldn’t believe it. My cousins were all crying. There was fire everywhere and screaming. And she said it was like being in a war zone. That’s basically what she said. And then my other relatives they wouldn’t even let them through the tunnel. They had driven so they drove through the Blue Water Bridge up in Port Huron.
WW: How do you identify what happened in the city? What do you call it? Do you call it a riot, do you call it a rebellion?
AN: It was riots. It was riots because my husband’s grandparents lived on Seven Mile and Livernois in a small bungalow and they could not believe their neighbors that were looting and bringing all this stuff into their houses. They just kept saying to us, “They’re schlepping things into their homes.” And they loved their neighbors and couldn’t believe they were a part of this. Nobody had a mindset like this. We couldn’t believe it was happening in Detroit. But then I found out that there was a previous riot that was horrible in 1920s?
WW: ‘43.
AN: ‘43? Oh. Okay, yeah. So, I just hope it never happens again.
WW: Did this event change the way you look at the city of Detroit?
AN: We were all terrified to come back down here. And we didn’t come down for years.
WW: Did it make you want to move away?
AN: Well, I felt safe in Oak Park. And then they integrated the Oak Park schools from Meyers and Eight Mile there was a group of homes where the kids went to Detroit schools but then they brought them to the Oak Park schools.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to share today?
AN: I think that’s exciting enough for me.
WW: Then, final question, how do you see the city today?
AN: Oh, it’s fantastic. It’s fantastic and I just wish that people would learn to get along and I think eventually, hopefully, when the crime level starts to go down –it’s still frightening. It’s still frightening to think that if you’re not in the downtown area where you feel rather safe, that there’s still all these things happening with gangs. Like, I think of that little girl that was with her friends and just drove down near I think it was Eastern Market and somebody shot them. He was never caught. This was a couple years ago. She was supposed to go away with her brother and decided to come with her friend and these miscellaneous shootings, you hear about them all the time and it’s very scary. And until people get educated, I don’t think things are going to change that much until the schools become better and the economy becomes better.
WW: Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
AN: You’re very welcome.
WW: Hello, today is December 13, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit '67 Oral History Project and I am in Detroit, Michigan. I am sitting down with Mr. Arthur Bryant. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
AB: Thank you for having me.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when you were born?
AB: Yes. I was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1944, and I only lived there a short time.
WW: And when did you come to Detroit?
AB: Well actually, my folks always lived in Detroit, and I guess you could say I came here in 1944. But it was during the war, and my folks went out to Ames, Iowa, because my dad, who had gone back into the service in 1942, was assigned out there to the ROTC unit in Ames, Iowa, to be the yeoman for the captain who ran the ROTC branch. So I was born there, in 1944, and six months later my mother and I came back to Detroit. When my dad was— changed assignments and was shipped out to the Pacific, and he was on the USS New Orleans.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in, in Detroit?
AB: I grew up in the area— well, I'm not sure what they call it— today it's called English Village, I think, but I grew up at the corner of Drexel and Frankfort, on the Eastside of Detroit, which is, for purposes of identification, closer to Alter and Warren.
WW: What was that neighborhood like for you growing up?
AB: Well, we lived in half a duplex, so that's a very small home, when you look by today's standards. I once went back and looked and kind of estimated that the house size was probably about seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred square feet. That's really small. But as a kid I didn't really notice that at all. It was the house I lived in, and a fine size for me. The neighborhood was nice. There was kind of a lot of room around the homes, and our street, Frankfort, even thought it was a side street, was actually quite wide, and it was very nice. And down one direction was Chandler Park, so there was a lot of space there, although I didn't go there a lot, but a lot of space. Going the other direction there was a nice big park near Alter and Frankfort. So it was a nice place. Nice friends. It was a good way to grow up.
WW: Was the neighborhood integrated then?
AB: No. I'm very sure it wasn't. As a matter of fact, later on in my life I bought a home— a half a duplex— just about three or four blocks from that house I grew up in. And one of the things I noticed, at the closing, was that on this long list of deeds and old papers, there actually was a clause, very specifically, excluding people— well, I don't know how the words went, but excluding people of the Negro race from owning a home there. I mean, it was written right into the deed. Very interesting. Very disturbing.
WW: A restrictive covenant.
AB: Is that what it's called? Yeah. Okay.
WW: Growing up, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood, or did you venture around the city?
AB: No, I really stayed in my own neighborhood, and the elementary school that was there, until I moved at age ten, a little ways away, and between there and the fact that we went to St. Columba Episcopal Church, which was, I guess it would be about a mile and a half away, up at Jefferson and Alter, roughly— Jefferson and Manistique. And you know, it's kind of— my life revolved around those particular places. And you’ve probably heard this from people before, but there was another aspect of it and that is, you asked, did we move around or see other parts of the city. There was this, like, line that went up Woodward Avenue, and you were either an Eastsider or a Westsider and you didn't go to the other side. You had no need to go, and you didn't go. And I laugh about it today, and my friends do, because that's the way it was. We didn't go to the Westside. As a kid, the only times, for many years, the only thing that we ever went to the Westside for was to pass through it to head down south out of the state. My grandparents— my dad's folks— lived in Marion, Ohio. So other than passing through to go down into Ohio we never went to the Westside of Detroit. We did go to upper Michigan for vacations and stuff, but, you know. We just didn't go.
And I still remember that the people who lived next door to us, the Hopkins, and I still stay in touch with the woman now, at that time the kid who lived next door, Jan Hopkins, she was younger than my brother and I— but my folks were very good friends with Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins. And later they moved away, and they moved over to the Westside. And I still remember the street they lived on was Donald. And that is the only reason we went away from the Eastside of Detroit. At least in my mind, that's all I can remember going away for— away from the Eastside.
WW: What schools did you attend growing up?
AB: I went to Hamilton Elementary, named after Alexander Hamilton, and that was not more than about, I guess it would be five blocks away. It was at Lakewood and Southampton. And I went there 'til fifth grade, and then we moved to Buckingham— a block off of Mack. And that might have - I think that's probably three miles from there. And— a bigger home— and that was only a couple of blocks away from Clark School. Clark Elementary. And I went there for a couple years and then went on to Jackson Junior High School, which was near Alter and Waveney, and then from there, after junior high there, I went to Southeastern High School at Fairview and— Fairview and Mack, roughly. You want just the schools in Detroit? I mean, I went to college.
WW: Oh yeah. For now, yes. So when you're going to these schools, were any of the schools integrated?
AB: Yes. To be honest with you, I can't— first of all, Hamilton wasn't, and Clark was not. But Jackson, I honestly can't remember whether it was or wasn't. But Southeastern was. Probably about twenty-five percent black, seventy-five percent Caucasian. Pretty close to that.
WW: So growing up in the fifties, did you sense any tension, whether it be societal, or racial, or did the city seem to be—
AB: Honestly, it seemed okay to me. I did not sense that at all. And I had black friends as well as white friends at Southeastern. If there were any black kids going to Jackson, the junior high, I didn't realize it. Just didn't even think about it one way or the other. But I don't think there were— but I honestly don't know. I suppose if I could find a picture of a class from back then I could look through and see. But I don't remember that there were.
WW: Okay.
AB: And I don't— really, when I was going to school, if there were tensions amongst people at school, it sure didn't register with me. That's the word. It didn't register with me.
WW: Okay. So what year did you graduate? You graduated in?
AB: From Southeastern?
WW: Yeah.
AB: In sixty-two.
WW: Sixty-two?
AB: January, ‘62.
WW: And after that you joined the service?
AB: Well, no. I had a very unusual thing along that line, and let me cover the whole thing right now. I wanted to go to the Naval Academy and I wanted to go to the navy. There had been a lot of people— there had been people in our family that had been graduated from the Academy, and spent years in the navy— careers. My mother had two cousins who graduated in roughly— from the Naval Academy, in ‘33 and ‘34, or ‘32 and ‘33; I can't remember right now. And then one of them later became a captain and then a rear admiral when he retired. The other was a captain, very high ranking. So I wanted to go there, and knowing that it's hard to get in and you need, in most cases, you need a congressional or senatorial appointment, there was another way around that, and that was— which I knew about— if you joined the Naval Reserve, or the regular Navy, you could take a competitive exam, and if you scored high enough you could get an appointment without having to have the congressional appointment.
So although I tried those routes, and didn't get them— other people got those appointments— I did, when I was in the eleventh grade, about to go into the twelfth grade, I joined the Naval Reserve. And so I was actually in the Navy then, and I took the competitive exam, and passed, did very well— I think I was sixty-sixth in the nation, the way I remember. And so I got in. I got an appointment through the Naval Reserve, from belonging in the Naval Reserve.
Now what later happened was that I left, what I say, for some medical reasons, but the thing is, my girlfriend and I conceived a child and so I left. You can't be married and be at the Academy, and I felt it was right that I should get married. So I left the Academy to get married, and then just reverted back to my status in the Reserves. And also, when I left the Academy, I was told that the time I spent at the Academy, which was roughly two and a half years, counted for my active duty for my reserve obligation. So I went back home, rejoined my unit— my reserve unit— and spent the last years of my required time as a reservist going to Monday night meetings. And summer, two-week tours where I'd travel out.
WW: And when you left the Academy you came back to Detroit then?
AB: Yeah. Yeah, came right back to Detroit. Got married and got a job, which was with Chrysler, and started back at Wayne. And I say "back" because, being a January graduate from the Detroit system, where they had the half grades, when I graduated in January of ‘62 I wouldn't be leaving for the Academy until roughly July. You start in the summer— you have your plebe summer— so I wouldn't start until July, so I went to Wayne for half a year. For one semester.
WW: Gotcha.
AB: And so when I came back, when I came back here after my time at the Academy, I just came back down, re-enrolled at Wayne. Had already been accepted.
WW: And where did you live when you moved back to the city?
AB: For a very short period of time I lived on Wayburn in Grosse Pointe Park, but that's because my wife and I were living with her grandmother, just actually only long enough to find a place. And I think, it's hard for me to say, but maybe that was four months or maybe it was six months. I'm not even sure if it was that long.
And then we found a place and bought half a duplex, similar to the way I had grown up, in this half a duplex on Frankfort. And it was on Frankfort, but it was just about four blocks away from there. And a slightly larger duplex— the size of the individual unit.
So lived there fo— just to go over my history of where I lived— lived there for I believe it was two years, and then we moved from there to a home on a street called Lenmore, just outside of Belleville, Michigan. And at the time I had moved to Ford Motor Company, where I spent the rest of my career, actually. And it— I was as far from Ford on the East side of Detroit as I was eventually in Belleville, having to drive back.
But we spent about three years out there in the Belleville area, and then kind of realized that we just kept driving back to the Eastside of Detroit all the time 'cause both our families lived over here, and so why not be back here. So we moved back and moved into Grosse Pointe Park and lived there for about ten years, and then I moved to Grosse Pointe Woods. And that's where I live today.
WW: Grosse Pointe Park, if I have it right, was ‘67? You were there in ‘67?
AB: No no. In sixty-seven—
WW: Were you still in Belleville?
AB: Well, obviously in ‘67 I was in Detroit. I know that, because that's where all the— I lived here during the riots. So I guess it was maybe a year after— maybe somewhere around ’68— ‘69! I think, ‘68 or ‘69 I moved to Belleville.
WW: Oh, okay.
AB: Yeah, ’68 or ’69 I moved to Belleville. Was there maybe three years, and then we bought a home in Grosse Pointe Park.
WW: Okay. Got it. So in ‘67, then, you were living in English Village.
AB: Yeah. Yeah.
WW: Did you sense any— you said you didn't have any tension in high school, but did— going into ‘67, did you sense any growing tension in the city?
AB: No, I didn't. I may have heard of stuff, but other than hearing about it, I just didn't encounter it. I mean, I already was working in Dearborn, at Ford, and I had some black friends at that time, at work. I worked with people there. I can't remember how many, but I can remember some specific people. And I didn't— I didn't notice any tension.
WW: Do you have any memories of the Kercheval incident in ’66?
AB: Kercheval incident?
WW: Yeah.
AB: No, I honestly, I don't know— I have some memories, I guess, in ‘67, the big riot, but I don't know what the Kercheval incident was. I'm sorry.
WW: No worries.
AB: Consider myself— where— that was Kercheval and what? Kercheval and—
WW: Do you remember how you first heard about what was going on in ‘67?
AB: I don't remember, other than I have to assume that it was a combination of— I suppose hearing it on the radio, reading it in the newspaper, and I think, probably, seeing it on TV. Yeah. I don't remember a specific thing where it was, oh my god, this is happening, you know, and it sticks in my mind. I don't have that recollection.
WW: Okay. Are there any stories you'd like to share from that week? Were there any specific instances you'd like to share?
AB: Well, the one thing— no, two— I guess I have two or three recollections. The first one is that one day I went outside my house and there was a couple— one or two, I think it was two— army vehicles— National Guard— driving down Frankfort. I was surprised. I thought that what was going on was further downtown – and it was— but I didn't know it at the time, because, here were these vehicles out front, well, I wonder what's going on.
But I didn't realize at that point in time what I'm going to tell you now, and that is the National Guard was camped out at Chandler Park, which was at one end of Frankfort. Frankfort dead-ended into Chandler Park. And at the other end of— well, not the other end of Frankfort. Frankfort went on further. But at Frankfort and Alter there was this large park, and— surrounded by chain-link fence. Typical. But across the street from that park was a fire station. And at some point in time, they evacuated all the firetrucks from the inner city areas and they parked them. They tore down the fences and parked them in this park across the street from that fire station. And that was then used as the dispatching point for them to go fight fires, 'cause that's when the fire trucks were being shot at on occasion. And the firehouses were being shot at. So they said, Well, let's evacuate them all, and let's put a whole bunch of these things here and the National Guard's nearby and they can watch them. So the one thing I remember is, for a number of days, every now and then, every four hours or something, a couple vehicles going up and down the street, exchanging the guards at the park. And they would be coming from Chandler Park, where the National Guard was stationed.
So that was one thing. The other thing, and it was close— right close on this time when these vehicles were coming along occasionally, and going down and changing the guard down at that park— there was a night when we had been out, several neighbors and stuff had been out, we'd been walking around and we saw smoke on the horizon, so to speak. Looking down, in the direction from where I lived, towards Connor and Warren. And at the time, our judgment as we looked at it— we thought, Oh my god, that's right at Connor and Warren. Well, turned out it wasn't. It was further downtown. Not a lot, but I later found out it was like near St. Jean and Kercheval. Somewhere further down like that. It just was our perception was wrong on where it was coming from.
But, so we saw that that night, and there was a curfew— I believe it was a nine o'clock curfew— and we all left and went back to our houses. And, you know, with this thought that we'd seen this smoke and fire and that night the— we started hearing alarms. I mean, car sirens. And we thought it was the police, probably, going up and down Warren, which was only a block away, and I was really quite concerned that maybe things were on fire around us, but we couldn't— other than looking out the window, and it was already dark, couldn't tell for sure. But it was very scary. All these sirens. Well, we found out later that what it was, was all the fire trucks being dispatched to go fight fires in other areas. But they were going up and down Warren with these sirens going all the time and we just had this feeling like, oh my god, is it burning down around us? We didn't know.
At that point in time, my folks were living at the house I'd grown up at, on Buckingham near Mack. And so I called and talked to my folks. I said, “Look, before I go to work tomorrow—.“ I said, “I don't know what's going on. And before I go to work tomorrow, I want to bring my wife and daughter over and have them stay with you, because I'm afraid that we're being burned down around here.”
Well, it wasn't true, but you get the— with a lack of information, you wonder what's going on. And so in the morning, probably before it was even light out, because I needed time to get to work and everything, I packed up my wife and daughter, took them over to my folks' house, and then went on to work. That's another interesting thing— there was all that trouble going on, but there was never a problem getting from the Eastside to the Westside on the expressway. If you're driving on the expressway, it's like you didn't even know there was a problem. Traffic was freely moving.
I guess the— another example— I had another story of something that went on.
WW: How was your family reacting to what was going on? You talked about how you were nervous. Were your parents nervous as well?
AB: Yeah. Yeah. They were, and it's partly because they didn't know what was going on any more than I did. For instance, when I called over and said, “Hey, you know, sirens up and down the street all night, I don't know what's going on, and maybe they're burning the area down, I'm not sure—.” And they kind of had the same feeling. Yeah, you better bring Sheree and run over here before you go to work. But other than that, I don't want to say there was somewhat— well, maybe I should say it. We were somewhat detached from it. I mean, it wasn't happening right around us. And we just knew there was this stuff going on, from what we heard on the news. But we didn't really— we didn't have a tremendous amount of involvement.
WW: You referred to it as a riot a couple times.
AB: Yes.
WW: Is that how you interpret what happened in ‘67?
AB: That's just the word that got attached to it.
WW: Okay.
AB: I never saw it. So I can't really say what the proper description would be. But to us it was the ‘67 Riot.
WW: Okay. And did it play a role in your decision to move your family to Belleville?
AB: No, really not at all. No. It's funny, a minute ago when I was telling you something and it almost occurred to me for the first time, I thought, Is that why we moved? And I thought, No, that wasn't it at all. It was— the real impetus— I mean, just to show you how strange things can happen. I was doing some work on the genealogy of my family at the time, and among other things, I knew that part of my wife's family had come from the area of Belleville, and there's another city down there— well, Brownstown Township, in that area, and we had talked about, should we— let's move out, let's get out in the farm country, wouldn't it be nice to be out there? Get a place with a little bit of land, and stuff.
So one time when I was heading to Chicago for work, I pulled off at the Belleville exit, just to look at this town of Belleville, and it was a nice little town and everything. I stopped in and looked around at a real estate place, what was for sale, what were the prices, and went home and talked to my wife. We went back and looked and we thought, this is not a bad place to live. So we ended up finding what we thought was a really nice house, and moved. So it was really unrelated to the riots.
WW: Okay. After you had spent three years in Belleville and you came back to move into Grosse Pointe—
AB: Park.
WW: Park. Had you been— you said you'd been traveling to the city from Belleville during that time?
AB: Oh, through the city? Yeah.
WW: Did you notice any considerable changes in the city after ‘67?
AB: No, I really didn't. I mean, I hate to say that I was not involved, but I wasn't. And at the time, I was working, I was bringing up two kids, by that time, and involved in church stuff, and I just wasn't involved. I mean, we just— yeah, it went on, and there were repercussions, I guess, and you heard about this or that going on, but most of the time, was— this is our family and this is what we're doing and— there wasn't a lot going on on the Eastside, at least not— I'll call it the far Eastside.
WW: Are there any other memories you'd like to share?
AB: I guess I really don't have— well, the only thing that I can maybe comment on, and I don't know if this is what you want in there, but I continued to live in Grosse Pointe Park for about, I think it was nine years. Then I moved to Grosse Pointe Woods and I've been there forty— almost forty years, thirty-eight years. And I’ve continued to see the area that I grew up in diminish. For instance, that first home that I grew up in, on Frankfort at Drexel— it's gone. It was abandoned and then it was torn down. And I know that the other house I lived in is not in good shape. And the area doesn't look good. It's saddening. It's saddening. But I've come to terms with it, I guess. I think things are turning around in the city, and I'm happy about that. I think things will get better. We eventually had to close that church that I grew up in, just because the congregation moved away, and I was one of the last ones to be in charge there, and closed it down. I'm glad the building still exists, even though it's been bought by some people who are going to turn it into something else. But it's a beautiful building. For many, many years, up until 2004 when we closed it, it was the one constant, you might say, in my life, was the church— St. Columba Episcopal Church, because it was there, and I'd always gone there and such. I certainly hope, desperately, for the city to come back. I see good things on the horizon. Very happy with what's going on now.
WW: Those were my final two questions, actually.
AB: Oh, okay.
WW: That worked out very well. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, I really appreciate it.
AB: All right, thank you.
Track 1 ends; track 2 begins.
AB: I wanted to add, as far as the city coming back, I've always been tied in, of course, with Wayne State, and I do a lot of stuff down here and I'm so happy to see Wayne State be the anchor for this Midtown growth, I mean, along with the hospitals that are here. And the fact there's almost a shortage of apartments and housing space. Things are just— they're like starting from this area and the downtown, and starting to move out. You can almost see it exploding out in waves, and it'll eventually totally, I think, encompass the whole city.
WW: Thank you so much.
AA: So today is March 25, 2017, my name is Amina Ammar, this interview is for the Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am currently sitting with—
BA: Barbara Aswad.
AA: Okay. Ms. Aswad, where and when were you born?
BA: I was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1937.
AA: Okay. How did your family get to Detroit, or how did you get to Detroit?
BA: How did I get to Detroit—they didn’t. I actually—they moved to Philadelphia when I was seven years old, and we really lived in sort of an Italian community and I thought most Americans were Italian until I found out I wasn’t. But anyway, that was a wonderful experience, I’ll say, to Mediterranean people, and I think it to some degree helped me when I lived in villages in the Middle East and married an Arab from Damascus because I was used to big extended families.
AA: So where did you live in July of 1967?
BA: In ’67 we were in Ann Arbor, my husband and I. We were commuting—I was commuting to Wayne State and we’d both gotten our degrees from University of Michigan, our doctorates. And it was quite a volatile period, the sixties, as you know. I mean, civil rights and anti-Vietnam War period. And I had just started my teaching at Wayne State in 1966. I had just started—in fact, I hadn’t finished my dissertation but I had done my research in the Middle East, I’d studied Arabic and Turkish and lived and done research for a year in the villages on the Turkish-Syrian border inside—just inside Turkey near Antakya. The Hatay it’s called, near Aleppo. And it used to be Syria but the French gave it to Turkey to keep the Germans out of the Dardanelles in 1936, but most of the rural population were Arab speaking.
AA: So what do you remember about Detroit before 1967?
BA: Before ’67? I wasn’t really teaching here. I was more in Ann Arbor and doing research in the Middle East, so I didn’t know a lot about Detroit until I started my job in ’66.
AA: Okay.
BA: So I do remember it was ’67 and the uprisings in Detroit. I remember I had just started teaching and I looked outside my window and I saw armored guards coming down the streets with their guns and thought it was sort of back in the Middle East where I’d seen guards with guns on the streets, and it was very shocking in the uprising period. It was a period certainly of African American uprising, civil rights movements which we all felt in this area, and I was involved definitely in the anti-war, Vietnam war movement. Started when I started teaching. Started teach-ins against the war. I lived in peasant villages and taught peasant society at the university and I saw how much Agent Orange we were killing the Vietnamese populations with. And so we started teach-ins, which got us in some trouble. As I mentioned before, I ended up on the Red Squad list because, probably, of that. I don’t know, maybe other things. My associates, I’m not sure. But that was sort of a scary kind of thing, and we couldn’t find out for ten years until the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] won the case and opened those lists up, and then in those lists which I saw in about 1980 I guess, I found that there was nothing— it was all whited out and I couldn’t figure out what they had found. And the guy said, “Well”—the police department said, “Well, did you talk about anything foreign?” And I said, “Well, of course, I teach Middle East anthropology at Wayne State.” He said, “Well, that’s why it’s all crossed out.” But I did find that they had followed me to various people’s houses and my license plates—in those days we didn’t have the updated surveillance systems, but apparently they were following a number of us here in this area during the anti-war period, and that was pretty scary. And of course I remember ADC [Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee] being organized which was wonderful, in ’67 after the ’67 War. And my husband was the treasurer for a while. I had been married by that time to Adnan Aswad from Damascus, and he was doing his doctorate in engineering at University of Michigan and he was also my Arabic TA [laughs]. That’s how I met him.
AA: So how did you first hear about the uprising?
BA: Which uprisings? The Detroit?
AA: Oh, the ’67. Yeah, Detroit ’67.
BA: Like I said, I was teaching in the city when they happened. And of course, some of my co-professors wouldn’t come down to Detroit because they were scared. I came anyway. I sort of—maybe because I’d lived in the Middle East I wasn’t really afraid of things. And so I came in—at that time I was still living in Ann Arbor. And it was very obvious what was happening. I mean, I could see it happening in Detroit, and it was worse in Detroit. You have a high percentage of African American consciousness and everything. It was sort of a scary period in the uprisings here.
AA: So how did—you said you were teaching around that time. How did students react and what did you see in Detroit?
BA: They were scared too. I mean, it was a scary period. You had—like I said, the National Guard was called in so they were all over the place, all soldiers all over, which we’re not used to. And students were afraid; we were afraid. And we had been involved in demonstrations against the war, so they were also photographing—they had cameras on campus at the university, so they were photographing us. So it was sort of a very fearful period. And I kept teaching for some reason. I guess I’m not afraid of things. And so I kept teaching, but students were afraid. But I had many Arab American students too, some from Dearborn, some from Algeria and the Middle East, and I think some of them had been used to some conditions. But everyone was pretty much afraid during the period of the uprisings. They’re often called riots, but wrongly. They were uprisings.
AA: That was actually going to be one of my questions, was how do you refer to this event? Would you refer to it as a rebellion, an uprising, a riot?
BA: It’s a rebellion. And many of the people who were in it from what I remember had come back—they were African American soldiers who had come back from Vietnam and they didn’t like the way they were being treated in Detroit, so some of them who were spearheading this knew some military tactics. And that’s from what I remember, organizing, the early organizing of the rebellion. And I don’t know what else to say except, you know, driving in and out of Detroit and there was fear among many people, but most of my faculty and my department didn’t come in to teach. They were in the suburbs and they wouldn’t come in.
AA: Okay, let’s switch gears a little. Let’s actually talk about the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. So how did you first hear about those events that led up to the war?
BA: Well, I was finishing up my dissertation, which I finished in ’68, and we had our whole living room full of Arabs and Arab-Americans talking about the war, and I was trying to finish my dissertation at the same time. And I just remember all the conversations and all the discussions and, you know, the—what else—anger at the war, the results of the war. And, of course, I had been in the Middle East, I came back in ’65. So it was very close and very personal to me because I had traveled earlier in ’56 all throughout the Middle East. Five Arab countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and then Palestine and Israel, so I had been there and I knew the area. And so we were following it, of course, very closely, and were—you know, I think everyone was humiliated by the results of it. And my husband was Syrian and they had gone into Israel I guess. They were the one army that had sort of gone into the Golan Heights and that area, and they felt sort of proud that Israel didn’t get to Damascus. But it was—for the Egyptians, they were very angry, and one of the professors that I had helped hire at Wayne State, Doctor Rushdi, to teach Arabic, I know—later—but her husband at that time was a doctor in Gaza, and Israel had gone in and lined up all the doctors and nurses and shot them, and had shot her husband. She later married Hani Fakouri, an anthropologist, but—and she didn’t know about it for a year. I mean, I didn’t know her then, but later I met her and—so many of the experiences were pretty horrific that we were hearing about. And, you know, it was pretty horrible. The war was very terrible. And the fact that, you know, this was—okay, why it was also—that was earlier of course. When I was there in ’56 in Egypt, we had an appointment with Nasser—we were in villages and as a student group of eight of us, went around the Middle East, and we had been in villages and then we had an appointment with Nasser, and he had to cancel it. He said, “I’m sorry, I’m really busy,” and he nationalized the Suez Canal, so we sort of forgave him, if you will. He was busy. But by the time we got to Israel after going through the Arab countries, in ’56 this is—okay—we saw these French troops in Israel in ’56, and we wondered why the French were doing maneuvers with the Israelis. And then we had to leave, and shortly after we got back to America, Israel and Britain invaded—and France—invaded Egypt to take back the Suez Canal. That was in ’56. So that was an interesting experience right then. So I had been at a young age, when I as 19, I had been into the area and, you know, familiar with quite a few of the politics in the area, ever since I was 19. I am now 80 years old, okay [laughs]. So I have a long history of involvement in Middle East politics. Also I might say that because my husband is from Syria originally, Aleppo and then Damascus, we went back often to visit his family as well as doing my research in Turkey and Syria near Aleppo. We went back to Syria many times to visit his family over these years. So we loved Syria and we’re very, very upset over the tragedy that is hitting Syria now.
AA: So do you remember how the larger Arab community or the Detroit community reacted to the ’67 War?
BA: Well, there were different approaches depending what countries people came from I think. The ones that were involved directly and—probably the Yemeni, for example, weren’t as affected because it wasn’t in Yemen. But certainly the Palestinians, I mean, this had a huge effect on Palestinians. Because they were conquered and then of course the Golan Heights of Syria was conquered and Egypt was conquered. So it depended what countries they came from, but certainly I think the whole Palestinian issue got more and more dominant in it, and that really consolidated a lot of things which led to AAUG, Arab American University Graduates, which my husband was one of the founders of. And I had always sort of criticized them at the beginning. I, of course, wasn’t Arab American, but that wasn’t my point. My point was I thought they should let students in and they didn’t want to. I thought it was rather elitist to just have us academics as part of it. I became an associate, because now I’m Arab. But I always thought that was a little elitist. In some ways maybe they were right, because the students were also divided and they were very political and it may have disrupted AAUG. I don’t know. They did allow them to give papers if they weren’t members, and that bothered me. I was very happy that they—one of the reasons for AAUG though was that we who were trying to publish on the Middle East, especially on Palestine, found it very difficult in academic circles to get our publications at that time. And AAUG provided a publication and the first book, really, I published on Arab Americans and—on Arab Americans was co-published by AAUG. So it allowed us to get publications which allowed us to get tenure eventually. You had to have publications or you couldn’t get tenure. So an important part of it certainly, of the elitist, academic part of it was publications. And Ibrahim Abu-Lughod very definitely pushed that aspect of it, and he was right. He was the head of the publications for AAUG for a long time, so I appreciated that because it did help me. And I had much—I had many problems teaching on the Middle East. I changed the name of my course eventually from Middle East anthropology to Arab Society because I had trouble with the Jewish community—the Zionist community, I shouldn’t say Jewish. The Zionist community who really didn’t want me teaching on Palestine and Israel. And with Arab society, I could include Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza and not necessarily teach a whole lot on Israeli society or Jewish society. So, I changed the topic, because I had—I had resistance, but when I had been in Israel, when I was 19 at the end of our trip, we had talked to Ben-Gurion and we had talked to Martin Buber who was a wonderful philosopher in Israel, who said he was a Zionist but not a state Zionist. He didn’t believe in the state of Israel, and he’s very famous in Jewish circles, philosophical Jewish circles. And we had worked on a kibbutz for a couple weeks, so I would tell the rabbis who called up to get me out of my position at Wayne, I’d say, “Have you talked to Ben-Gurion? Have you worked on a kibbutz?” And of course none of them had. And I said, “Well, I have.” I had something. I was glad I had been to Israel myself and talked to some of the people there, because it—and we had been to Nazareth, talked to the Palestinians there, and we knew sort of what was going on. Saw the refugee camps. So at a young age I had some background that I could use to keep my position at Wayne. But I think also where I had worked was Turkey, and with Arabs in Turkey, but I said I worked in Turkey, and that’s how I kept my position for a couple years, because my chair was an ardent Zionist and did not want me teaching on that, and probably would not have hired me if he’d thought I’d studied Arabs. So I did study in Turkey, on Arabs. But I said—and my husband’s mother was Turkish, and I spoke Turkish to her, and he introduced himself to my chair as a Turk and it worked for a few years until I got tenure. Then we told him that no, he really was an Arab, because he saw himself—his father was Arab from Aleppo and—anyway, interesting history of the pressures of trying to teach on the Middle East at Wayne State. And by the way, my positions has not been fulfilled for the last ten years and I’m very upset about it. I did get—I’ve been retired for about 15 years, and I managed to get a very successful young man named Tom Abowd to fill my position in 2000, and he wrote a wonderful book just recently called Colonial Jerusalem, and he did his work in Jerusalem. And I told him to try to keep his head down a little while, which he couldn’t do. But there were a number of reasons I guess, but he didn’t get tenure, and since—then they hired somebody for a couple years, but since ’07 there has been no position on Middle East anthropology at Wayne State, which is very distressing considering the largest community in the United States in Dearborn and what’s going on in the Middle East today. I told the president that-- Wayne has gone down in population, he said the state was not—had reduced the funding. They have a new president who impresses me, I like him, but I said I didn’t see that as an excuse. But seven years without teaching Middle East culture or Arab culture I think is inexcusable. I’m so glad that U[niversity] of M[ichigan] Dearborn here is starting Arab studies. I mean, they have had it and it’s good, but we have a graduate program and they don’t and it makes a difference of—in academics.
AA: So do you remember any particular moments about the war and its coverage in the United States?
BA: The ’67 War?
AA: Yeah. That you’d like to share?
BA: Well, it was pro-Israel. What can you say. We were supporting and have been and always have been supporting Israel in this country, with millions and billions of dollars. And our media was that way. There was not an objective view that I could find in our media then. I really couldn’t. It was very one-sided. And it always has been until today. One of the facts which a lot of Americans are not aware of is that you can get members of the Jewish community, typically also, many of them—give money to Israel and it’s tax exempt. It’s the only country in the world that you can give—only foreign country you can give money to and take it off your taxes. You may not have known that. A lot of people don’t know that. And it’s unbelievable. I mean, the power, the political power is incredible. I even worked down in Washington for a short time after my B.A. in anthropology. Couldn’t find really a job, so I worked for Senator Hart, Phil Hart from Michigan who was a wonderful man and had Senate Hart office buildings named after him because he had such a conscience and he read all his legislation, which many of them don’t. A wonderful man. But, you know, on Israel, he had worked in World War II—fought, and was pro-Israel. Wasn’t Jewish, but was pro-Israel, and we would have these discussions and I just couldn’t—at that time, ate with Kennedy before he was president—and, you know, it just seemed to go nowhere. And I was very glad to come back to academia, because the politics in Washington I didn’t like. And I was mistaken in not knowing the politics of universities, I thought that this would be merit—you know, a merit, and didn’t realize how political universities can become too. But that was a very short time actually that I worked in Washington. Came back, did a doctorate. But it was an experience and I didn’t like it. But just to show at that time the feelings, even of very sensitive, very liberal kinds of people were just pro-Israel. It was, you know, from World War II. Hangover, really, for many of the older people, and understandably because the Holocaust was so horrible. And then, of course, many of them got very rich and they could put their money into supporting Israel, and it just got worse and worse until we have today, with Palestinians getting, what, 23 percent of the land or something that they had in ’48. I went back to Israel and Palestine about seven years ago with a group of older people from California, and the director was—he’d been head of the YMCA in Jerusalem for 40 years, he was Palestinian Christian, and of course knew Hebrew and Arabic and everything, and about thirty of us went from a retirement center out in California. And, you know, having been there earlier and then coming back, showing the differences. We were driving on Jewish-only roads, all these apartheid situations that separated Arab towns and villages that used to intermarry and could hardly do that anymore. Went to Bethlehem and the Wall. I mean, it’s just outrageous what I saw, and that was seven years ago and it’s gotten worse, much worse, even since seven years ago. And I had a very hard time getting out of the airport because of my name Aswad. And the lady didn’t want to let me out. She said, “Where did you get your name?” I said, “My husband.” She jumps up, looks around, goes, “Where is he?” I said, “He’s in Los Angeles.” “Well, where was he born?” And I said Turkey, which was true. It was Syria, and he was born in Antioch, but I said Turkey. “Well, what languages do you know?” I said Turkish. I wouldn’t say Arabic, I do know Turkish. “Why? Why do you know Turkish?” She knew my name’s Arab. I said, “Because I studied it in college.” She’s sitting there with her machine gun, she said, “I’ll take it to my commander,” and she runs off. And the rest of my airplane is getting on the plane and, oh boy, here I am, stuck in Israel. Finally she comes back and sort of throws it at me and says, “Go on.” But it’s just, you know, it’s the harassment, even for someone who’s Anglo like myself, with that name. I might mention my Anglo name was Black, which if you’re an Arab, Aswad means black. So Adnan said he married in the tribe [laughs]. Sort of an unusual combination. But it was a very scary period, and those of us who knew the Middle East, had lived there, it was scary and just horrifying the way America supported Israel. I was very happy in ’56 when Israel invaded Sinai with France and Britain, because—it was Eisenhower, I think, then, and he wouldn’t go along with it. America did not defend Israel on that, and he said they should get out. And they had to get out, primarily because we did not—Eisenhower would not support them, and they did have to leave the Suez Canal in ’56. But certainly in ’67 we supported them, with military—our military, what do we give? Six billion now? Something like that. Military the highest of any country in the world, and they don’t need it because they have the nuclear weapons, two or three hundred of them. When I was in Israel the first time too, we did go to Dimona which is their nuclear area with the Weizmann Institute. We went way down and saw the nuclear things. That was ’56, they were doing nuclear things then. And people here never talk about it, and they don’t talk about it today. You will not find in newspapers anything about Israel being a nuclear power, and that it hasn’t signed the nuclear proliferation treaty. And neither have we, and we’re forcing, of course, Iran to do that. And so much of our politics is still run by Israel. [President] Obama and much of the Democratic party, they gave in to this. Certainly Hillary [Clinton] did, she didn’t say a word about it. She’s highly funded by AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee]. Good thing for me, anyway, as an older person that’s seeing groups like JVP, Jewish Voices for Peace, which I belong to and support heavily. Just to see the young Jewish people coming and being on campuses, things like this, it’s wonderful. J Street, another Jewish sort of moderate organization had a meeting just recently. They still won’t let Jewish Voices of Peace come to their conferences, which I think is very interesting. So, obviously within the Jewish community there are a lot of different views, and certainly not—they’re not all Zionists. And in Israel they’re not all Zionists either. I mean, I was glad and still am I have relations with Israelis. Jeff Halper who has ICAHD, which is Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, takes Jewish and Palestinian young people out and they rebuild home after Israel has demolished them. He’s an anthropologist like myself and he’s a good friend and he’s been in jail 13 times. And of course they’ve only managed to rebuild one percent of all the homes that Israel has damaged, but it’s a wonderful effort to bring the two groups. And then the Women in Black, and I have friends in Israel who are Jews who are very progressive. So it’s a country like any country, where you have progressives and fundamentalists. But we are supporting their policies. They couldn’t do it without us. They couldn’t do what they’re doing now. They couldn’t be the threat, they couldn’t be the nuclear threat. We didn’t give them—France, I guess, they got their nuclear weapons from. But, well, we support them militarily. And now they’re having relations with Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, so things are changing. And not for the good, because those are very not progressive states.
AA: Is there anything you feel we haven’t discussed, or should be added to the interview?
BA: Well, I know you were wondering maybe where I get my radicalism, and I mentioned before my mother was very much part of this. She was a feminist which, in the twenties, was somewhat unusual for a woman, although not totally but that’s where it started. But it was—and she was a history teacher, and I always described her as a closet socialist because she would—I mentioned we were raised Baptist. Her mother had died when she was 23 and she went to the Baptist church. Before that had never been anywhere, but she needed help. Emotional help. And so I was raised, and she would take us to black Baptist churches in the forties which, believe me, no whites did this. And she’d take us out to farm workers who were picking pickles and all this to show us different classes, and my father went along with all this. And so I grew—I was very lucky in growing up, and she showed us models of Indira Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt when we were young girls to, you know, sort of say look what women can do. So that helped me, always gave me strength. She always—my family always supported me. And then as I said, I got into—went to a place called Bucknell University because I had a Baptist scholarship and I really wanted to play field hockey. That was my main interest in going to college, which doesn’t sound very good, but we had moved from Philadelphia to Michigan again and there were no girls’ sports and I’d played field hockey in Philadelphia and I loved it. And so I came back East to go to college, and I had some money as a Baptist, and Bucknell is a horrible school. It’s quite a good university, but they had sororities and fraternities, and my roommate was Chinese. I got invited to all the sororities, she got invited to none. So I started fighting the sororities and then—what am I doing at the university? I’m not supposed to – I came here to learn something. And I don’t know, some of us got in trouble, and a Soc[iology] prof then said, “Would you like to apply for this grant to go to the Middle East?” Which I knew nothing about except the Bible. And I said, “Sure.” And landed, of course, in Midan Tahrir in the villages of Egypt, and it was quite a tour. It changed my whole life, and I ended up—didn’t want to come back to Bucknell so I went to Edinburgh University, met a bunch of anthropologists there, some of whom have become very famous like Talal Asad, and thought, well, that’s a good profession. I can study the Middle East and do something interesting. And sort of became a Quaker in Ramallah I remember, gave up this Baptist business and became a Quaker, because Ramallah has a big school, big Quaker school, and that impressed me that they didn’t talk much but they did a lot of work. And—but then I have ADD and I couldn’t sit for an hour without people talking, so I sort of quit the Quakers too. Later became a Unitarian, who are often called noisy Quakers [laughs]. Unitarian, and then of course I married a Muslim, and they will take people of any faith in Unitarians, or no faith or whatever. But—so my background has been fairly progressive and had wonderful experiences abroad meeting different people, and that’s what anthropology’s all about. Studying other cultures and respecting most of them [laughs]. Not all of them, but having respect for them. So I consider myself lucky in many ways, even though it was a fight trying to teach objectively on the Middle East at Wayne State. But it worked. Had wonderful students, and now you can see all these wonderful papers being produced, which weren’t then—we didn’t have something like the Arab American Studies Association. I did join MESA, Middle East Studies Association, in ’92 I was president of Middle East Studies Association. And that was quite an experience. Initially we couldn’t—well, that’s why AAUG was founded really, because we tried to present papers at MESA and we couldn’t on Palestine, so that really is what pushed AAUG to get publications and everything and a place we could talk about Palestine. And I think that was the first paper I ever published—no, second one, that had to do with Palestine. And it was published in an AAUG book by Naseer Aruri who was one of the presidents, and it was really refreshing for Arab-Americans to be able to have their own organization where they could say what they wanted. So it’s always been a struggle with Zionism. I won’t say Judaism, but Zionism. And now in California where my husband and I are retired for the last 16 years, in a way because of the horrible bigotry and discrimination going on under the Trump administration, it’s very interesting because we now have—we are close to San Bernardino where there was a very bad tragedy. And there’s a lot of fear of Muslims, and the mosque in Clairmont was threatened. There are three mosques threatened with bombs in California, southern California. And what has been wonderfully amazing, it has brought the Jewish and Christian communities together with Muslim communities. A couple weeks ago, about a month ago we had rabbis at the Friday one o’clock sermon in the Islamic mosque. We’ve had Muslims going to the synagogue. This would never have happened before this administration that I know of. I mean, maybe it did, I don’t know. I’m on some interfaith committee, and maybe that did happen but not the way it is now. And we’ve had marches. And in 2012 – when the bombing in New York —and the mosques were again threatened, the Christian ministers formed a blockade around the mosque and said, “Any attacks on the mosque is an attack on our churches.” So in a way these crisis kinds of things do bring groups together, and there are marches, interfaith marches, and it’s wonderful to see. So there is some counter—counter Trump things going on. And Bannon, the push on white Christian nationalism that’s going on today, which is very scary. I don’t know what’s going to happen right now, but it’s a very fearful time to me. It’s a very dangerous time. Emphasis on militarism. As an anthropologist studying way back in many civilizations, all empires have ended. Maybe this is the beginning of ours. I don’t know. But I will say one thing: I have always been critical of much in this culture, especially the genocide among, I guess, Native Americans and of course the way we treat African-Americans and other minorities and now Muslim-Americans. But I have now after all these many years begun to realize we really have some really good things in our democracy, and the free press is so important. Not that it’s always free, but there is Rachel Maddow and some of these people who are still wonderful people, and we’re able to say these things. So I almost—it’s like, wow, we really do have wonderful things here we have to support. And unfortunately the contemporary budget has cut—seeming to cut all those good things. Evening affecting this museum we’re in here. NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities], NEA [National Endowment for the Arts], UN [United Nations], all these things that are, you know, being cut by our country, by our regime, or are trying to be cut. The health benefits. California’s a little more—it’s nice to be out there, because they’re trying to go for single-payer now, health [insurance], which I don’t know if they’ll get there but it’s been there before and it may go. They want to be a sanctuary state. I don’t know if that’ll happen, but the pushes there are very progressive. Very progressive Governor Pratt and the Senate and the House are all very strong in California against—they’re pushing back against the administration very strongly now. I don’t know the outcome, but it is good to see organizations like this, Arab American Studies Association, all these papers and all the real pushback against the current administration. That’s about all I have.
AA: Well, thank you Doctor Aswad for sitting with me today.
BA: You’re welcome, and thank you for the interview.
INITIALS OF INTERVIEWEE: BW
INTIALS OF INTERVIEWER: WW
WW: Hello. Today is August 11th, 2016. My name is William Winkel. I am in Macomb Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. And I’m sitting down with—
BW: Barbara J for Jean Williams.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
BW: [Laughs] You’re very welcome.
WW: Can you please tell me where and when were you born?
BW: I was born May 12th, 1950 in Detroit at Mount Caramel Hospital- Catholic Hospital. Not there anymore. And we lived in northwest Detroit first on Warwick which was bounded by Joy Road, West Chicago, Southfield and Evergreen. And then we moved in 1959 to be in the St. Mary of Redford Catholic Parish which had a high school which my parents wanted us to be educated affordably at the time all the way through high school and that was just south of Grand River between Greenfield and Southfield.
WW: Was the first neighborhood you grew up in integrated?
BW: Not at all.
WW: Would you like to share some stories from growing up in that neighborhood?
BW: It was a fun way to grow up. I have to say all of my little friends were white. I had one Jewish friend who was also white, but frankly there were black people but they were far, far away [Laughs]. Our parents had both grown up on the east side and I have to say… Definitely got a negative slant on black people from my father who was flat out—I called him a ranting racist. He was, I mean a good person, good man and good provider, surprisingly college educated, white collar worker, but oh boy was he prejudiced! And talk around the house out of the blue, I mean, there were no black people around, so What’s your problem? And it was a happy childhood I would say. There was tension between my parents, but as far as having a—provided for and nice kind of 50s childhood playing out on the streets, freeform without adult supervision just basically being called in. My mother didn’t work outside the home, so mom was always there and it was, I’d say, almost the cliché of a 50s [Laughs]. A 50s childhood.
WW: How many siblings did you have?
BW: I have five. An older sister, two older brothers, two younger sisters. I’m the second middle child.
WW: And what did your father do for a living?
BW: My father was an accountant at first, Nash-Kelvinator and then later that became American Motors on Plymouth Road in Detroit.
WW: And you mentioned that your move to your new neighborhood was prompted by a high school?
BW: Yes, it was the affordability of a Catholic school education all the way through 12th grade. And my sister, the first born, she’s eight years old, born in ’42, so my father just figured everybody would go public school. Cody High would have been where she went, where I should would have gone. She was a favorite of the nuns at St. Susan’s and they wouldn’t hear of it, so they kind of caged together a year scholarship to Rosary High which is, again, is not there—another Catholic Central school that’s gone. But it was a girl’s school, it was basically in that same neighborhood—the Joy Road area… I think Joy and Greenfield. And he realized my brother, the next one was three years younger, so he was not going to be able to afford a central school like Catholic Central or U of D, so the plan was to move us to St. Mary Redford Parish which was a real powerhouse at the time. It was a huge parish. It was so huge it had two satellite parishes, and each of those parishes had grades one through eight and so those graduates fed into the high school that we all went to—I graduated from, you know, my two brothers and my two younger sisters and I.
WW: Wow.
BW: Yep [Laughs].
WW: Was your new neighborhood the same as your old one?
BW: Yes.
WW: All white?
BW: Yep, all white and as far as my classmates go, I’d kind of jokingly say that probably the most exotic ethnic group would have been Italians. It was very much, you know, Irish, Polish, Italians- a few Chaldeans, but it was all white.
WW: What was your new neighborhood like for you growing up—was it a welcome change or was it the same old?
BW: No, it was definitely a step up in terms of—the house was much nicer. We didn’t have as nice a house as, say, a couple blocks to the west of us. There were subdivisions like Grandmont Subdivision and houses were very nice, it was right off Grand River so as a grew older I could use the bus line which was, at that time, very dependable to go to Greenfield and Grand River, go up to Northland to shop with my friends.
WW: As you were growing up, did you increasingly travel across the city?
BW: Yes, but was essentially downtown and back. As I think my mother first let me and a friend go downtown. At the time there were the great movie palaces and there was always some big deal at Christmas time, a Disney film. And so, I think I was maybe 13 or 14 and she let me and my friend—go with my friend on the bus downtown. It was fun. There was no worries. I would say that was probably the first time I was aware of black people being on a bus or being downtown. My first contact with black people would have been in downtown Detroit cause at the time there was Hudson’s. We’d go down there on the bus and interact with—not much—but be in contact with black people at least. You know, superficially.
WW: When you went to areas that had black people in it, did you feel uneasy…given your upbringing?
BW: Not really, not downtown because it was, I’d say, kind of neutral ground. People were there to shop or for recreation. But, for the most part, that area of northwest Detroit was very segregated. I think was a combination of both segregation and racial discrimination and the fact that heavily, heavily Catholic, and black people in general are Catholics and in big numbers, but obviously discrimination. I mean, the neighborhood was white.
WW: After you were 13, you were able to go downtown. Did you go anywhere else in the city?
BW: Well, other than Northland to shop, or as I got a little older I developed an interest in movies, I’d say 16 and 17. I used to hit some of the art theaters, there were a lot of them. There was one on Hamilton, but I got myself around on bus quite a bit and my parents let me. I think a lot of it was because with all those siblings, I could take care of myself whereas other parents might have forbidden that entirely. But I was on my own and I didn’t have a car like a lot of kids do as soon as they turn 16, but I got around pretty well. I was a very good student, good reader—precocious reader. When I got into high school at St. Mary’s we had the really early to mid-60s, or mid-60s to late 60s, and you had a lot of progressive social consciousness or movements, social justice movements. At the time, you had young lay teachers. Very progressive and they definitely exposed us to other points of view, if by nothing else through reading. I know I read James Baldwin at a fairly young age. I know I read Malcolm X’s autobiography. I don’t know if that was college, but I certainly was exposed-at least through reading-to the injustice towards black people.
WW: As you were reading about the injustice and the injustices that were going on, did you begin to see it more and more throughout the city?
BW: I would say, through reading the papers, police brutality or police incidents. I’m just trying to put this in, we’re talking, like- well, the riots were in ’67, and I was certainly aware of things going on at large political movements. In the city itself, no. I would’ve gotten my information from the papers. We got both papers and, of course, TV and radio.
WW: Did you begin to join or sympathize with any of the movements you were reading about?
BW: Well, I would say I was more curious about the black power movement I’m obviously a little frightened about. And then, of course, Dr. King was very inspiring. Of course I heard of things like the black girls being—the bombing of the church, so I was aware of awful things like that.
WW: Did you sense any growing tension in the City of Detroit?
BW: I can’t really say other than- I was thinking about the riots or rebellion of ’67 and, again, I first heard about it on TV or papers. I know at the time both papers were on strike and there was some kind of really bad rag that came out of- I forgot where it was, but we got our information and I guess I would have to say the riots came out of the blue for me. And I think it was from that, I started working backward to see the cause.
WW: When you said it came out of the blue for you, in general or in that particular time? When you heard about the bombing of the church in Birmingham, did you anticipate something like that could happen here?
BW: No. No, I think I still have kind of a, you know, That’s going on someplace else kind of a blind spot there.
WW: You were still living-
BW: I was living-’67- I would’ve just finished my junior year in high school, so I was living with my parents. We all got a little nervous although we knew it was far, far away. At one point there was a Grand River and Greenfield there was as shopping center somebody had broken into a jewelry store and for a moment we thought, Oh, it’s coming this way. Which was ridiculous, but that’s the kind of , I would say, insulated thinking that was going on there.
WW: Do you remember how your parents reacted to what was going on?
BW: I’m sure very negative. I don’t recall what my father said, but it was very, Bad black people. My mother never really expressed any prejudice, and I think part of it was she had grown up. Her family was very much affected by the depression, so everybody was poor and they lived around black people, you know, other poor people at that time so I can’t say she was pro-black people, but she never said anything negative. Like I said before, my father was just kind of a ranter and I would suspect a lot of white fathers at that time were.
WW: Do remember the mood of your neighborhood? Was there a certain amount of stress or apprehension?
BW: Yes, very much so. I think there was kind of like ridiculous expectation that it would come, come into our area, they would come in and that was not gonna happen. But, you know, the hysteria, of course.
WW: Did either you or any of your older siblings venture out and try to see what was going on or did all of you stay home?
BW: I think all of us stayed home. The only one I could see maybe doing that was my brother Dennis, the other middle child. We did not have access to the family cars, so I don’t think so.
WW: Did you see anything there firsthand?
BW: Did I? No.
WW: How do you interpret what happened?
BW: Well, the account was the police raided the blind pig and the people, the partiers were fed up with it and decided to strike back, they’d had enough. I mean, it was hot summertime. And it was much later, I found out, I didn’t realize until later that the party involved a couple of guys coming back or going to Vietnam and it was a party for them, which makes it very ironic at the least. I remember being pretty shocked when the National Guard came in. George Romney, the governor at the time, ordered them in. Of course pictures in the paper were shocking, the fires and the destruction. But my thought was that people got fed up. I guess a lot of people can’t understand destroying the area that you live in, but now it’s an act of desperation, I realize.
WW: You said you were shocked when the National Guard came in?
BW: M-hmm.
WW: Why were you shocked?
BW: Well, I’m pretty sure there were tanks. I mean, it was the military. That was extreme [laughter].
WW: How did you feel when the federal troops came in?
BW: Gee, I forgot about that. Maybe I’m conflating them with the National Guard. I just remember the tanks, the rifles.
WW: Did you have a National Guard presence in your neighborhood?
BW: No. Still at that time, it was a very segregated, very isolated, insulated. There was a sense of it being kind of far away, which was a little delusional in retrospect.
WW: And afterward, did your family ever speak about leaving?
BW: Oh yeah. They did not leave right away- I mean- people were growing older. My sister graduated college in ’64 and she moved away to Bay City where she got her teaching job, my brother- well, this is moving forward to ’68- my brother had to enlist in the Marines to avoid being drafted right after Nixon was elected, and then I graduated high school in ’68. Before I went to school in the fall, I got a job working retail at Crowley’s in downtown Detroit. And I took the bus, and it was a big adventure for me. And it was the first time, really, I interacted at all with black people and worked with them, and I mean, mind you, that was barely a year after the riots. I had read in the meantime, and again, precocious reader, I read the book The Algiers Motel by John Hersey which was a big deal at the time, and I knew I had it in paperback, and I did look it up and I found out it was released as a paperback at the same time as a hardback. I just wanted to clear that up with myself [laughs]. I had some contact with- what I would consider slightly militant- one of my coworkers, she had her hair unnatural and- I think I might have been trying to impress her with my copy of The Algiers Motel and so apparently I was developing a little social consciousness, or superficially, at least. And I left it by where we put our purses, I left my book there and she noticed, and she commented on it, so I was pleased, again, superficially. But I worked with older black people who thought I was a jerky little kid [laughs], but me as a fairly emerging young adult, that was my first contact with people other than myself. It was very interesting, very exciting. I can’t say I made friends or anything, but the exposure was good for me and it was very, well- it made in impact on me.
WW: So, after ’67, you didn’t feel any trepidation about venturing back into the city?
BW: Apparently not. I think sometimes, my father, racist as he was, he certainly didn’t forbid me from going down there and his first priority was Make yourself useful. Get a job. So I did, and that’s always struck me as a little ironic, for as anti-black as he was, he didn’t seem to have any problems with his daughter going downtown, so it worked out.
WW: Do you still believe the events of ’67 still affect the city today?
BW: Yes, yes. Definitely. It devastated the city, it led to white flight en masse. I didn’t leave until ’77 and I was earning money as- I started my career, and I really felt bad about leaving Detroit. At one time, while I was still living with my parents, I had put money down on an apartment in the Grand River and Lasser area, which was an area that I really liked, it was farther west than where we lived, and then I got talked out of it and lost my deposit, and I still feel kind of bad that I left the city. But, that’s the way it worked out. I’m single and on my own, so maybe being out in the ‘burbs was a little safer. But my parents didn’t leave their home- we were all out of the house by then- and they left, I think, later in ’77 or ’78. And they moved to Farmington, and lived in an apartment until my father died and my mother lived in the same apartment for a while, and naturally moved into a senior home in Berkley. She died in 2011. But, I do think Detroit is always a black-white clash, and I think white people leaving the city en masse left the city, economically a mess. And blacks tend to blame whites for moving out, and whites blame blacks for ruining the city, both of which are ridiculous. But if you wanted to put more blame, it would be was whites moving out, because that really upset the economics and people like to blame Coleman Young, but, I think it was time that there was a black mayor in there. I think he stayed on too long, but it had to become a city run by black people because the black majority. I sometimes think today, with all the young white people moving in, being entrepreneurial and all that, I’m getting this same impression that there’s this kind of blind spot. It’s great for us, so it must be great for everybody. My biggest concern about Detroit is the neighborhoods, because a lot of them are really a mess. I occasionally go once in a while if I’m in the area- I’ll drive down my old street. While the block is in nice shape, the surrounding area, not so much. I can’t imagine a kid my age, at the time, a black kid, running around like we did with our friends, and it feeling perfectly safe. I don’t think- what is it, 40 years later? 50, 50 years, that the same problems exist, and I’m not sure what can be done.
WW: Are you optimistic something can be done?
BW: Not so much, to be honest with you, because the odds are so stacked against- I mean, you need education, you need people to be trained to have jobs with livable incomes, incomes you can live on, raise families on. They’re just not there. I thought that after the perfect time to have done something like a WPA or a CCA was after the financial crash in 2008. I mean, I still think it would be great if you could come up with like a works progress administration. Give people jobs to repair the roads and clean up the neighborhoods, but it’s just that politics get in the way. It’s really a shame. I hope Detroit’s okay, I mean I still- I go into Detroit when I feel like it, ball games, concerts, et cetera, but I do feel like a bit of a- not exactly a carpet bagger, but a little bit of a deserter sometimes. I go down there, enjoy myself, and shoot back I-75 to the suburbs. But, I think I’m a little too old to be a pioneer, so to speak, like younger people are. I do hope something can happen, not sure what.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
BW: I don’t think so. There’s a lot more to say, I think I pretty much said- for my part. It remains a big mystery to me as to what will happen with the city and the area. You need- it’s just so sprawling, and you need, again, public transportation that goes tri-county. And there seems to be just so much opposition to that, with the racist undertone, of course. And something has to happen. Don’t know if the younger generation, millennials, getting empowered. Don’t know if that’ll happen. Still too many old people, their old ways. I’m sorry, I’m obviously looking at two young people [laughs].
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, I greatly appreciate it.
BW: You’re very welcome!
WW: Hello, my name is William Winkel. Today is April 21, 2016. This is the interview of Berl Falbaum for the 1967 Oral History Project. Thank you very much for sitting down with me today.
BF: My pleasure. Thank you for being here.
WW: Can you please tell me, where and when were you born?
BF: I was born in Berlin, Germany, in October 8, 1938.
WW: When did you come to the United States?
BF: Well, it was during the rise of Hitler – of course, he's already been in power – we escaped from Nazi Germany in August of '39, and escaped to Shanghai, China, where twenty thousand Jews escaped to. And I spent the first ten years of my life in Shanghai.
WW: What brought your family to Detroit?
BF: Well, after the war, different countries were starting to pick up refugees, and this country – the United States opened its borders, and we applied, and fortunately got accepted, and we came to Detroit, landing first in San Francisco, in August of '48.
WW: Who came to Detroit with you?
BF: Just my parents. I have no siblings.
WW: Okay. What was your first experience in Detroit? What was your first impression?
BF: Well, my first impression was the plentiful nature of the United States, given that we were poor – extremely poor – in Shanghai, war-torn, you know, and drug-infested, and war-torn – and so the plentiful nature of food was my first impression. And we moved into what is now called Rosa Parks Boulevard – it was Twelfth Street at the time – and I was enrolled in the fourth grade. But those were my impressions of – you know, first of all we had freedom, we could move around unlike in Shanghai, and we had, you know, enough food, and so forth.
WW: The time when you moved into Twelfth Street area – that was still predominantly Jewish, correct?
BF: No – not at the – well – yes and no. It was changing. There's a history in Detroit, as you know, probably maybe even better than I do, of movement of Jews from Hastings, way down south in Detroit, to Twelfth Street, then Dexter, then Seven Mile and Shafer, then Oak Park. And at the time we moved into Twelfth Street, that neighborhood was already dramatically changing.
WW: So how much time did you spend in the Twelfth Street area growing up?
BF: Fourth grade, I'm going to say, until the ninth or tenth grade, and we moved to Dexter. Dexter, roughly south of Davison – about a mile south of Davison – and I went to Central High School.
At Twelfth Street I went to Crossman Elementary, which is closed – it's boarded up, but it's still there – then I went to Hutchins Intermediate – we called it intermediate, which is middle school, and that's still there and active – and then I went to Central High School, which is still active – when I went – moved to Dexter.
WW: What were your experiences growing up in the city, especially in an interracial area?
BF: Well, I had, you know, very good experiences. I moved – always grew up in interracial atmosphere, which, of course, is very positive in terms of your education and interrelationships. So I had, you know, extremely good relationships growing up there. I wish it had stayed interracial, you know, again the white flight caused it to be almost predominantly, if not exclusively, a black community, and that's bad on the other side, so to speak. The interrelationship aspect would have been better, so – we already experienced the white flight from Twelfth Street, then Dexter and Seven Mile and Shafer.
WW: Growing up, what did your parents do for a living after they moved to the city?
BF: Well, my dad was a tailor. And he was a tailor in Germany, he was a tailor in Shanghai. He worked in a variety of shops. And my mother became a domestic to help out, because we were obviously extremely poor.
WW: How did growing up in a poor neighborhood affect you?
BF: Well, it affected me in a sense that I – I am not at all materialistic, and I raised my family on having what it needs – and I think that's good. One thing that I notice is the materialism of this country, you know – always see a new car – and one of the things that always – hasn't left me – is now we have cars which warm your seats. I mean, that's sort of indicative of my philosophy. You know, I wouldn't have thought of that in a million years. I'm a utilitarian kind of guy, you know, I have a – I never bought a new car – and I think that's because of my background. I've always bought a used car. I don't care the car it is, just gets me from A to B. So that's how my background impacted me, you know. I buy my clothes at thrifty stores – not because I don't want to spend the money – I don't see the point. And you know, I'd be glad – I like spending money for travel – so I think that's basically because of my background. You know, I use paper, I cut it in half, and use scraps of paper, and I think that's not because I'm cheap – I'm delighted to spend money, you know, on travel – but materialistically, I had a tremendous – that had a tremendous impact on me.
WW: Growing up in the 1950s, did you notice any tension growing in the city?
BF: Oh yes, yes, yeah. There was a lot of tension in the schools. I – you know – you could feel the tension between the blacks and whites – you know – there – again, discrimination they suffered, and the white flight caused a lot of problems, you know, and I understand that now, of course, and sympathetic to it. So there were a lot of tensions already in school, between the races, you know, and so to answer your question, yes. I noticed it. Yeah.
WW: Do you remember any particular instances where it was right in front of you?
BF: Yeah, yeah. I was a paper boy, and, you know, I'd be confronted with blacks who – I had good relationships, and I liked interrelationships, but – there were these confrontations from time to time, and especially with young kids, you know – so you'd have confrontations in school, on the streets. You know, I think they understood my view too, and so to answer your question, overall, yes. There were confrontations in school between blacks and whites. There were confrontations on the streets. I understood it, as much as a fifteen, sixteen year old, you know, understood. Of course I understood it better as I grew older.
WW: Moving into the 1960s, what year did you graduate from high school?
BF: From high school? January '57, and I went to Wayne State University, and I graduated from Wayne State in the summer of '61, because I was already hired by the News as a reporter full-time before I finished, and so I finished at night.
WW: What work did you do for the Detroit News?
BF: I started out as – where everybody starts out – you do a variety of beats. I went to the police beat, where you cover crime, and then you went to general assignment, meaning you do soup to nuts, you do a little of everything, and in '65 I was sent over to City Hall to cover politics.
WW: When you were covering the police, did you notice any – did you cover the Big Four at all?
BF: Big Four?
WW: The police tactic used in the early 1960s.
BF: I don't remember it by that name. What you do – what I did at the police beat is – there's – it's closed now, it closed many years ago – but there's an office that the press has in police headquarters. At the time it was manned by three – well, three newspapers – one died quickly – the News, Free Press, and the Times, and you covered murder from that desk. And you went to a different office in that building – you never left the building. And you'd call around to suburban bureaus to see what was going on every few hours. You had, you know, hundreds of phone calls to make. So when you say did you cover the Big Four, there was a very controversial program called STRESS [Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets.
WW: Yeah, that was later on.
BF: That was later on. So the answer is, I didn't cover it as such. I covered the crime, and so forth. I didn't really cover the politics of the crime – I covered the crime.
WW: Okay.
BF: I – you know, if there's a murder I'd go cover that. Don't go – you cover it from your office. And if there's a good story – meaning a terrible story – required a reporter on scene, that was done out of the office.
WW: Okay. Was moving from crime – the police department to City Hall a promotion, or -
BF: Yeah.
WW: Was it just a different assignment?
BF: Well, a different assignment. Those who stayed with the police would say it's a different – I know I didn't like doing that. It was a good learning process, but I don't – I love politics. So next I went on general assignment – there were people on police beat which have been there for thirty years. And so they would say that's heaven to them, but it wasn't my kind of – similarly, I didn't want to cover sports, but – I went to general assignment, which you cover everything, and I did that for about three-four years, and then I went over to City Hall.
WW: So you were covering City Hall in 1967, correct?
BF: I started in '65 at City Hall and yes, I was at City Hall in '67 when the riot broke out July 23, 1967.
WW: Where were you living in 1967?
BF: I was just inside the border of Detroit, on Schoolcraft and Telegraph – the other side of Telegraph. I was on the east side of Telegraph and the other side was where Redford Township. And we were on the Detroit border. Matter of fact Sunday I was sitting on my porch – well, we – a little step, it wasn't a porch – when I heard on the radio, the riot, and I said to my wife I've got to go downtown and go to work. She said, "You're not leaving the family for a riot.” I said yes I am.
WW: What was the atmosphere going in – driving through the city and then getting to City Hall?
BF: Well, at the time, I didn't encounter any police or military yet. It was just broke out. So I didn't go to City Hall, I went to the main office. We had an office in City Hall where you covered the politics, you never went to it, but I knew right away I'd go back to the city room and see what my assignment would be. But I didn't encounter anything on the streets. And I didn't see anything because I didn't go into the – driving down, I didn't pass the 12th Street – devastated area.
WW: Can you share some of your experiences you had during that week?
BF: Sure. In '65 I [unintelligible], by '67 I think I was head or chief of the bureau and my job was to cover the mayor. So what I did, was I just attached myself to the mayor, meaning wherever he went, I went. Whatever meetings and press conference I'd cover. And so, the answer is yes, one of the pictures I gave to – uh – what's his -
WW: Joel.
BF: Joel is, I have a picture of the mayor and Senator Philip Hart, democrat from – U.S. Senator, from Michigan. They were touring the area, and I have a picture – I'm behind them, and I gave him that photo, and we toured – he toured, I followed, and took notes – you know, what they were saying, and so forth. So that was my major assignment, and I covered the press conference between Mayor Cavanagh, Governor Romney, who came in of course, George Romney. Cyrus Vance, who was sent in from Lyndon Johnson, I think he was Secretary of State at the time was -
WW: Defense.
BF: Huh?
WW: He had stepped down as Secretary of Defense.
BF: Yeah, okay. He came in as the federal representative, and so I covered those. So I didn't really cover the riot itself, the violence, and so forth. I did go by myself once back to tour it – and a fellow I knew, who I covered as a community activist, his name was Joe Williams – I see him – who suggested I leave – he said it wasn't safe for me to be alone, walking, you know, in the streets. So I didn't cover the actual devastation, and the fighting, and the looting, and the violence. I covered the political side of it.
WW: Going – so you said you were part of the meetings and you were Mayor Cavanagh's shadow. Can you speak to the disagreements he had with Governor Romney, and especially President Johnson?
BF: Yes. I came across – and I gave it to Joel – by accident I came across an oral history that Cavanagh did for the Lyndon Johnson library in the 70's. They were doing oral histories for anybody that had a relationship with Lyndon Johnson. So they did Cavanagh. Now they weren't focused specifically on the riot, but as a result, about ten of those hundred pages deal with the riot. And he talks about the friction and the – yes, there was a lot of friction. One, you know, pure political, without egos – you know, Romney feeling that he's the governor of the state, and he perhaps should take the lead – Cavanagh feeling “this is my city, and I'm the chief executive officer.” And then you had political issues with, should you have the federal troops – is it too early to come in – what are the politics of it. So the federal government was, according to Cavanagh, and I tend to agree with him – is they were a little slow to react.
Some of it may have been based on waiting for a good assessment of the situation, or some of it may have been politics. I'm sure it was a combination of both.
So there's tremendous friction between Cavanagh and the powers to be, of when to send in the troops, and how, you know, and how quickly, and Cavanagh was of the opinion – send them right away. And that was the major disagreement. There were, you know, little ego issues between, that always happens, who conducts the press conference, and who's first, and all that.
WW: Can you speak to how Cavanagh himself handled the situation?
BF: I had covered Cavanagh, by that time, about four – three-four years. And what I noticed, is that this took a tremendous personal toll on Cavanagh. And the reason is, here was a mayor who was elected at, I think thirty-one or thirty-two years old, in '61 – the youngest mayor ever elected to the city until, I think, Kilpatrick came along – and he got national headlines. He was on the covers of major magazines for doing all the right things in Detroit. Integrating the police department, you know, being responsive to discrimination against blacks. He was doing everything right. He became president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the National League of Cities, at the same time. Unheard of. He was a national figure. Matter a fact, a lot of people already started talking to him as a presidential candidate somewhere along the line. [coughs] – excuse me.
This took a personal toll. Basically, I've done everything right, and he ended up having not just a riot, but the worst riot in the country. I think forty-three died. And he had the worst fatality record, and that was the irony of it. And I don't think I saw him at ease - and I don't mean at ease, sitting back and just relaxing – but just at ease, throughout those days, and I don't think I ever saw a smile on his face for anything. I remember him coming back to the office, about twelve, one o'clock in the morning, and our office – not just the News, but the Free Press – was right down the hall. But I was the only one there. So he walked into his office and I walked in – he let me come in – we sat down. It wasn't to do a story, just to talk. And I could feel the pain. I could feel the pain. You know, we had a drink – he had a little bar in the back – and I could feel the pain. I don't think I ever saw him smile after the – for a long time after that.
WW: Wow. Can you speak to the time following the riots? So, the gradual – with the Cyrus Vance taking over – General Throckmorton taking over the National Guard, and federalizing the troops?
BF: I don't remember a lot of that. Only because the years have gone by. But the next steps that I recall is, after everything calmed down again, Cavanagh was instrumental, if not the lead character in creating New Detroit, which was – the first president, if I recall, was Joe Watson, you know, from the Hudson department stores, and the – the insistence of New Detroit that members could only be the heads of organizations – you know, staff people couldn't come – which was the right thing, because these are people making the decisions, and you don't have to worry about staff. And I don't remember some of what you're referring to, I don't think I could speak to it, 'cause I don't recall that. Fifty years. [laughter]
And he started the so-called reconstruction. The problem was, for him, his political strength has been ebbed, dramatically. One, you had the riot. He, unfortunately, had a lot of other political issues which had sapped his strength. Some of his own making. He had – he challenged Soapy Williams for the primary nomination for U.S. Senate – which hurt him badly, because the democrats felt it was Soapy Williams' turn – he should wait - but the party was very angry at him for challenging Soapy Williams. And he – he lost. And that sapped his political capitol. And then he had a messy – it's not of his own making, it's just one of those things – he had a terrible, messy personal divorce that became highly public, and messy, and so that sapped him. So unfortunately, a lot of things I think he could have and would have achieved, he couldn't because of – you know, he had all these other issues to deal with.
WW: How long did you stay in the city after 1967?
BF: Well, I – he did not run again in 1970 - funny story, how I learned that – but that's not – too long for you to tape – it's a cute story but it's a long one.
WW: Feel free to tell it.
BF: Well he and I had a good relationship, so that when he would announce something major, like a budget, he'd give it to me three-four days in advance, so I could study it. I couldn't use it until he's ready – so come his announcement, whether he's going to run for a third term – it was on a Tuesday he was going to announce, so I asked him if I could have his decision on the weekend, so I could write all the stories. He said “no, I can't give you this one.” And I said don't you trust me? He said “It's not that, I just [unintelligible].”
So I negotiated with him, that if I came to the Manoogian mansion, say, at three in the morning, that day – just so I have time to write, 'cause we're on deadline. So he agreed to that. So I drove done to the Manoogian mansion at three in the morning, and security opened it up and said “there you are,” and I get ready to write, and I take out a piece of paper, and it said something like “I will run again.” And just before I start, I see another piece of paper, which says “I will not run again.” [laughter]
So I said which is it? They said “I don't know!” I said, wake him up! “Yeah, we're going to wake up the mayor at two in the morning, or three in the morning.” I had to wait. He came down about seven o'clock with a big smile on his face. “So how's it going?” But I couldn't write anything - [laughter] – it was his practical joke.
So he didn't run again, and I covered Roman Gribbs, who just passed away, about two weeks ago, at 92, I believe – or 90, 92, I think he was 90 – and Nick Hood, who I covered, died about a week later at 92. And I covered him for a year. Gribbs – and then I quit, and went into Bill Milliken's office as administrative aide to Lieutenant Governor James Brickley who has passed away. So, to answer your question, I left the News in '70.
WW: And when you left the News, did you move to Lansing?
BF: I didn't move, but -
WW: Oh.
BF: Basically, my job was – we should have moved – I commuted almost daily, and that was a terrible – how I did that for four years, I don't know. We knew it was a political appointment and we didn't want to buy a house there and come back – terrible mistake. It was awful. Especially in the winters, you know – the drive. And we didn't have the kind of full expressways we have now, and it was awful – but. So I worked in Lansing for four years.
WW: When did your family leave the city? When did they move out, I mean?
BF: I think I want to say – Phil? - I want to say – I know that we left before Gribbs was - Gribbs was elected – because he offered me to become press secretary, and I was living in Oak Park, so I couldn't take it then – so that's one reason I took the Milliken job. Phil?
Woman's voice: Yeah?
BF: When did we move to Oak Park?
Woman's voice: I can't hear you. What?
BF: When did we move to Oak Park?
Woman's voice: Oh, Julie was three. So, forty-eight years ago -
BF: So '67. So the year must have been -
Woman's voice: '67.
BF: So one month later, before the riot, so I didn't know that.
WW: So your – you moved out before the riot happened?
BF: I guess -
Woman's voice: Wait a minute, no no -
BF: You said June of '67?
Woman's voice: No – I said Julie was – no – I remember -
BF: '65?
Woman's voice: I remember, in the apartment in Detroit, you were called down – the riots broke out when we were in Detroit. We moved in October when Julie was past three and a half.
BF: So '65. Yeah. So we were out -
Woman's voice: She was born in '64. She was born in '64 -
WW: So October of 1967?
BF: That's when -
Woman's voice: She was born in June of '64 -
BF: So she was three. I said '67.
Woman's voice: But we were still living in – because we moved to Oak Park in June – in October of '67.
WW: Okay. Why did you move? Did you move – were you planning on moving ahead of time?
BF: Schools -
Woman's voice: We were ready to buy a house. [laughter]
BF: You mean, we – why we moved to Oak Park?
WW: Yeah.
BF: Primarily school system. Yeah.
WW: Okay.
BF: Primarily school system.
Woman's voice: At that time -
BF: Oak Park at the top school system in the country – in the state, I believe -
WW: Okay -
Woman's voice: Well -
BF: Close to it.
Woman's voice: It was a very, very good school system.
BF: It was one of the best in the state.
Woman's voice: And -
BF: Yeah, so -
Woman's voice: Yeah.
WW: What are your impressions going back to the city now? Like seeing how – how do you believe the riot has affected the city? You talked about how it sapped the strength of Mayor Cavanagh -
BF: It sapped the strength of Mayor Cavanagh, and if caused – first of all, it accelerated white flight. It already began, with the building of expressways and shopping centers in the suburbs, so that made it easier for – unfortunately, for whites to leave the city, but the riot accelerated it. And so it sapped its – not only bad for the integration process, but it sapped its economic strength. Businesses moving out and white residents moving out. So I think it had terribly detrimental impact from that standpoint.
Then along came Coleman Young. And I happen to be an admirer of Coleman Young. But I also understood the tension he was creating, and I think unfairly – he was unfairly judged, with his comment about Eight Mile Road, which you've probably come across in your research. I think it was a bum rap – I don't think he meant “go rob the white people in the suburbs.” I think he meant there was a new sheriff in town, you know – And I – I happen to be a big admirer of Coleman Young – read his – couple biographies and I think he was a great hero, frankly – political hero in this country – taking on the unAmerican committee in Washington, and his union activities, and his army activities. But he – but – the perception of white people was that he didn't like white people, and so they left – which, again, I think was wrong, and unfair to Coleman Young and the city.
So there were a lot of issues which accelerated – I don't know, I don't think the riot was the beginning of it – I think the expressways and the shopping centers, things, started – the Davison Expressway, I think was the first one in the country. That helped – they went east/west, not north/south – but once you went north/south, it made it even quicker.
So I think that – the riot, obviously, accelerated the white flight, then came up wrong Coleman – who, Mayor Young, who I think, like I say, got a bum rap from the white community, especially the conservatives out in the suburbs, and I thought that was terribly unfair to him, and the city.
WW: You spoke about – you spoke about earlier, how it was unfortunate that your neighborhood in 12th Street became - went from being integrated to all black. How do you see – well, do you see that hampering the metropolitan Detroit now, given that the suburbs are primarily white and the city is primarily black?
BF: Yeah, I think so. Again, I – I'm a supporter of integrated – you know, I understand the value of living in an integrated, you know, community. And I think it – the segregation, if you will, between the communities now, I don't think helps either side. I don't know if we'll ever see that again, you know -
WW: The integration?
BF: In the city – in the city. I don't know – I don't know if we'll see that again. I think we see it somewhat in Southfield, I'm not an expert on that – you're much more – and we have it here in this community, you know. My subdivision now, taking a census, it's wonderful. I don't know if we're fifty/fifty now – I don't know. But it's certainly much more integrated than when I moved here thirty-five years ago – which is good!
And my kids went to integrated schools, and I thought they, you know, they – a lot of value in that, and made them better people, but I don't think – I don't see Detroit becoming a vibrant, integrated city along those lines again. Matter of fact, there seem to be a lot of complaints – I heard it just the other day. I heard a speaker on - on Detroit. That as well as Detroit and Midtown is doing, there seem to be a lot of complaints that the entrepreneurs are all white, and that the population of downtown is white, and not integrated. That they're young people, yes, but they're all white people. By the way, I don't know that to be true, 'cause I don't study it. I've heard those complaints. So I don't think – to answer your question, yes, I think there's tremendous value in the comprehensive integrated community.
WW: Is there anything else you'd like to share?
BF: No, you've done a good job. You've worn me out!
WW: Thank you very much for sitting down with me today.
BF: My pleasure, my pleasure.
LW: Today is June 16, 2015. This is the interview of Bessie Williams Ernst by Lily Wilson. We are at the Detroit Historical Museum in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society and the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Bessie, can you tell me where and when you were born?
BW: Well I was born over eight decades ago in the city of Detroit, and I lived here most of my life. Educated schools here, Universities here and just done a lot of things and I love Detroit absolutely love it.
LW: What was your birthday?
BW: May 10, 1931.
LW: What neighborhood where you born in, in Detroit?
BW: I was born in the Cultural Center neighborhood, I was very fortunate in doing that because I was on a street called Medbury just east of Woodward about four, five blocks down. And I said I was lucky because I had in my backyard -- and visit every week with my father and my sister and brothers -- the art museum on the east side of Woodward and the Detroit Public Library on the west side of Woodward. And we went to story hours here and whatever we were studying in school my father would take us to the museum. He would find an area that dealt with that particular area or subject we would sit on the floor and he would tell us about everything that he would see; it’s a marvelous background.
LW: What did your dad do for a living?
BW: My dad worked at Ford Motor Company he came to Detroit one of those people, you know the job, so many dollars a day. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t educated, he was, through high school. That was his education that is what he does, my mother was a homemaker. I had lots of brothers and sisters to grow up with. I was the oldest and we had lots of fun. We loved Detroit.
LW: How many brothers and sisters?
BW: Um, I have four brothers and -- I have to figure this out -- four brothers and I had six sisters but in growing up in the early years, I was the oldest, seen a lot of things that some of my siblings never saw. They never saw the east side of Detroit or not remember it. And I remember very painfully when I graduated from college my mother could not attend my graduation because she was expecting my little brother. And she I guess she felt the ashamed because of her age and being pregnant. I never felt ashamed of her and my father, who worked at Ford, could not get the day off without losing pay. Nobody came and that was kind of painful for me, kindof painful for me, because I was the first one in my family to graduate. So I’ve made it a policy that with my children and my grandchildren. I will always and have always gone to their graduations. Because children remember things like that.
LW: Where did you go to college?
BW: Oh where didn’t I go? I got my first degree from Wayne University, my second degree from the University of Detroit, in between I took classes at the University of Michigan. I ended up doing some graduate work and studies at Harvard and was invited to speak at a forum at Oxford in England. So I’ve kind of been around awhile.
LW: What were your degrees in?
BW: My degrees are primarily in education. I started out in library sciences; my masters was in education and I worked for the board for many years. I ended up being assistant director of labor affairs negotiating contracts. I did teach and then once I left Detroit, once I retired from Detroit, I became a principal of a charter school which I dearly, dearly, dearly loved. I still write and do things. I go over to Wayne County Community College and take classes and trying to catch up with these young folks on the computer. I’m not doing too well on that but I’ll listen to some of them talk and I have to laugh and say if you only knew, if you only knew.
LW: Now you wrote the, this book of poetry that we have in front of us. In 1968 you published this, right?
BW: I published it in ‘67 because the riot was in ‘67 and that year instead of sending Christmas cards to my friends, I took all them and put them in a booklet like this and published it and that was their Christmas present. It was our memory of what we had seen, what we had done and what we had felt at that particular time because you really were confined, it was all over, it was all over the city. It was, you know, you could say your parents would sometimes say things like, “This is gonna hurt me more than it hurt you” and then they would give you a whipping. Well, the riots you can say, “Oh, I heard about that, oh I know about that,” but they didn’t live through it, they didn’t know the feeling. It’s a totally different kind of thing. When I think about it, when I talk about it, I become emotional, you heard me mention that I had a very large family, so when I got married, I moved away but I still had a brother and a sister, younger brother and sister who lived at home with my mother and they lived in a different neighborhood than I lived in with my family. And with everything that was going on there were certain streets that were blocked off, one of them being Grand River and you couldn't cross certain lines and my family, my mother, my sister and brother were in a quadrant where we could not cross that line to go where they were and my little brother called me to let me know. He said, “I just want you to know that we have to move because of the fire,” there was one about a block away from us. Where my mother lived on Grand River there was a furniture store and a few stores down from there was a gas station. That gas station was almost on the corner of my mother’s street. There was fear they would burn the furniture store and the gas flames would go over to the gasoline station and they would be burnt. And we had no way of contacting them so there were hours where we really didn’t know where they were or whatever. I had a sister that lived in a quadrant on the other side of Grand River. We were not allowed -- they were not allowed to cross that street because you had tanks and things and whatever. And so it was kind of a horrible feeling to know they are out there so there is a poem in here called “David” and every time I read “David” I think about the call I got from David telling me that they had to go and it was a period of uncertainty. In another neighborhood I had a friend whose sister’s son had to stay in their area and so he had a motorcycle and he would ride up and down the motorcycle. He was a young kid and the motorcycle hit a telephone poll. I was told he was killed on that particular day because he was in --he couldn’t go out. There are lots of things that happened, the looting and the burning and the calls that were made to, I believe it was President Johnson who was the president at that particular time when they called. The mayor called, it may have been [Jerome] Cavanagh, and he tried to get the president to send troops in but they didn’t do it. It was frightening because what started out on one street, which was Twelfth Street, sort of spread all the way, just spread all over the city. It happened so fast. Then all of a sudden it was there and we had to face it if you hadn’t done your grocery shopping. They were looting and burning and the people were just frustrated and the cause of it was supposed to have been related to these men that the police had picked up and mistreated more and more and that was a time when we had in our city mostly white police and a lot of our citizenry was black but you cannot have a government or police force consisting of one group and not be representing another. We see that all over this country, we see that in places all over the world where one group is dominant and unless you represent all the people; it’s a sad thing. The schools kids who were in summer school closed schools and that reminded me of 1943 because I was around in 1943 and enrolled in summer school and that riot was devastating. I read a little bit about it because the neighborhood I lived in, which was this cultural center. Here we didn’t have all these things happening that were happening in other parts of the city and you just, you would hear different things. I was so happy when they finally brought the police in or the army and where did they park them? Right there on Northwestern High School lot, right there on Gratiot and the Boulevard and there is a little poem in here and it’s kind of funny because it’s true. It’s true when they brought those troops in here you know what they forgot? That those men were supposed to eat, that they had not ordered food for them so that presented a kind of a problem yet it was kind of a welcome thing because we knew that some of it would be quelled. There used to be a helicopter that flew over at night and I really was so happy to hear that because I knew nothing was going to happen in the neighborhood I was in at that particular time because they could see it from that. There were other things like one night, it started to rain but you’ve got thunder and I just I woke up and I heard this noise and I could not distinguish it as thunder because of the other things that were going on around us. But then there were some things that happened that were just beautiful things. On Dexter Boulevard there was a black woman, Mrs. Hawkins, had a women’s clothing store and I was in a particular group that was going to have a big party that November and she would go to New York to buy things Because I was a customer I said, “Look you’re going to go to New York. I say such and such and such think you could find this for me?” and she said, “Yes.” You paid down on it at that particular time because she hadn’t bought it she was gonna look and see. Well, she brought that garment back to the store that was maybe Friday or Saturday the riots started Sunday and the store was looted. All I could think about at that time was my dress but the neighbors around her were protective of her and they went into the store and everything that she had on hangers that they could take out they took out and they saved those things for her, and they saved my dress.
LW: What did the dress look like?
BW: It was at that time it sort of came out, it was an A shape dress and it had a black underlining slip and the top was a sort of a [mock-cosette ?] but it had embroidery on it so you could see through it but, you know, the design --it was just a gorgeous dress, just a gorgeous dress and I just was so thankful for her. And then I saw after the riots you know we have over here Chicago and Linwood the big Catholic Sacred Heart and on the corner there was like a grotto and Christ was there with light and everything and I always pass by there and look at it and after the riots I passed by there and someone had painted the face and the hands black and I saw for the first time people going up those one or two steps getting down on their knees saying a prayer which made that statue more relevant to them and I thought that was just, just beautiful. People helped people, people shared things. Water was rationed, [noise interrupts in background] groceries were rationed and you could only get so much gas. If they let you have a lot people were learning how to make Molotov cocktails and things like that so you could only get a certain amount. My husband was a physician and he was in a medical building over on Joy Road and Grand River and I think it was the first time a group of black doctors had gotten together and had their own building. And the rioters came past there but the man who was like the watchman told them, “You better not come in here” and this and that and, “You just try it. He actually stood guard so they did not bother the building. There were difficult things like that that would pop up and it made you feel so good. But there was a terrible, terrible time, a terrible feeling. One of the little incidence with my son because everything was on TV all the time. The TV stayed on. My eldest son I guess it was, was about eight or nine at that time, we had one of those pools where you put the rubber thing, the kids were in the back yard whatever and I guess a helicopter went by and he jumped out of that little pool and ran and told me, turn on the television quick cause I think we are on TV and I had to laugh because they were showing everything and they got a picture of that. The family that lived next door, the husband had a birthday during that time, and we had taken down the fence between the two houses because we got along so well and we had like a little celebration for him but you couldn’t have a lot of people gathered at one time. It had to be early because there was still a curfew. So we stayed inside, you know, it was still a horrible feeling and when I talk about it I become emotional which you probably heard in my voice and I see certain pictures and it brings it back. It’s real, it’s real to me, but to my children who are grown now and to the younger people this is not an event. It’s like something happened a long time ago except when you see things like what happened in Baltimore, like what’s happening in Washington, like what’s happening in various places, Ferguson. When I wrote this book I sent a copy of it to Robert Kennedy because he was at that time a representative in government and I got a beautiful letter back from him. I sent a copy of this to the Mayor of Baltimore along with a letter because my thing was "Take a look at what is written down here because this is what happened, this is what is now happening in your neighborhoods and this is what can happen if you don’t put other things in place. Detroit was never, ever the same.” That was as far as I was concerned the real beginning of what we call “white flight.” We had a very integrated city but after that time some of the real estate people, I put it on them, say “You don’t want to live here, you want to move, we have this, they have that.” Like a fear tactic almost people in certain neighborhoods saying, “We’re not gonna stay here, we can’t stay here.” Houses that should have been repaired were not repaired. Some places, perhaps I don’t know if they didn’t have enough insurance but they just left them there, they just left them there and nobody tended to the sheep once the gate was open. So to me that was the beginning of urban blight as we know it, it was the beginning of our integrated, we did elect, eventually elect a black mayor, Coleman A. Young, who was there a long time. We change the police chief and we got a black police chief. I don’t remember, I don’t remember his name. I know Frank Blunt came after he did, I don’t remember his name but it made a difference; it made a difference in the way people were handled. Our school system changed and we got a young black administrator, Martha Jefferson, as far as I’m concerned was young, gifted and black. Our school system, you may not know it at that particular time, was one of the best in the country; people came to us. All that changed. Our city, which was beautiful, do you know when Edison invented the light bulb and we dealt with that, that in the world Paris was a city because Paris had lights, Edison lit up Detroit, did you know that? And it was called the Paris--
LW: of the West
BW: of the West, you’re absolutely correct. But you see, that’s history. It’s not anymore our city. I’m hoping it will be like a phoenix and rise but those were all the wonderful things about our city. Our schools, our police force changed and they kept saying insurrection and it wasn’t -- it was a form of insurrection but you know what it was it was a lack of representation, lack of understanding and you can’t just rule and control people if they don’t have representation.
LW: Where exactly where you living in July of 1967?
BW: In July of 1967, I was living in the area of southwest Detroit near Curtis and Wyoming and the year after that we moved.
LW: Where did you move?
BW: We moved into Sherwood Forest.
LW: Have you lived there since?
BW: We lived there until many years ago. When you get older you don’t need all of that.
LW: Now did your decision to move to Sherwood Forest, was that impacted by 1967 or not?
BW: In a way it was because we really needed, our kids were growing up and we wanted a bit more room and the area was open and our school at that particular time with our children was Jesu, so it gave us access to everything that we wanted. Plus we wanted our children to grow up in an integrated neighborhood, there’s just so much to be learned there.
LW: Now your husband was a physician.
BW: Yes.
LW: How many children did you guys have?
BW: Four.
LW: Four. You continued working after you had children?
BW: Sure. He had no problem with that and I certainly didn’t because I loved what I did. I was with the Detroit school system for about 43 years.
LW: Now I want to just back up to this: I think it’s interesting your communication with RFK, what year was that?
BW: 1967
LW: So that same year that you wrote the poems here in this book.
BW: I sent him a copy
LW: And he wrote you back?
BW: He wrote me back.
LW: What did his letter say do you remember?
BW: Yeah, it was a very basic kind of letter. He thanked me, he had an opportunity to read it and he enjoyed it and basically that was it. And at that particular time I think they were working on the Kerner report, or something like that, but he acknowledged it.
LW: In terms of what you mentioned about a lack of understanding, a lack of communication, you think that was the root of the uprising in ‘43 and in ‘67?
BW: In ‘43, from what I know because I was just going into intermediate school at that time, that was a true race riot and it was connected with jobs and things like that. When a lot of people came in from the South after World War One you had people blacks and whites, predominantly whites, who were in segregated areas had attitudes toward black people these are the people they were competing with for jobs you see and economics came in there so in ‘43 supposedly something happened on Belle Isle and supposedly someone threw a baby in the river or whatever you know and anyway the whites attacked the blacks, they pulled them off street cars and all that stuff you can look it up on the computers. It really was hate, it was hate. The neighborhood I lived in over here called the cultural center had Croatians and Serbians and Poles and Afro-Americans and Greeks and we were all in one big melting pot we were all, you know, same economic level everything all of us being taught in order for you to do anything or be anything you must go to school. Common values everything and it was absolutely great. That’s the area that I grew up in. There are some people who may have lived in that area because on one side of Warren we were really integrated down near the market we were, but on some streets it was like all black or all white and so those kids went to schools that were predominantly black schools did not have, I don’t think they had access to the kinds of things that we had growing up. I went to Balch I went to Garfield I went to Northeastern, very integrated community, very, very integrated community. And I take that working and being in that kind of environment made me the kind of person that I am.
LW: What street was your family living on?
BW: Medbury.
LW: Bedbury?
BW: Med, m-e-d, and you know what killed us? [Interstate] 94. 94 cut right through our neighborhood and it destroyed our community and our people went other places and then the Chrysler [Freeway] came through and that made a difference. Another thing which I always said was contributed by the government. When the men came home from the war in ‘48 you had the G.I. Bill and many of our men, and when I say "our" men I mean black community, who went to college, went on the G.I. Bill. They were going out here to Wayne University, which was one big building, and Quonset Huts. You remember Quonset Hut, signs those little rain kind of things, ok, but at that particular time they only, also at that time were dealing with housing and the people that came back that were white had access to those G.I. loans and they bought houses and moved out and began to establish little cities like, I think of Southfield, Farmington and whatever and they left us with Detroit. Many whites stayed, and we had an integrated community in certain sections but it became sort of racially divided in terms of the community.
LW: This was in the 1940s late-forties early-fifties?
BW: Late-forties, early-fifties.
LW: So you sort of see that as the first wave of what we call now call “white flight” or segregation.
BW: Do I see that now?
LW: Do you think that that in the late-forties, early-fifties was the first wave of “white flight,” segregation?
BW: Exactly!
LW: And then later in the sixties after July ‘67
BW: Yeah, then they begin to move out they had a chance to build up their streets, their schools the universities began to put out their little, what shall we call them? extensions. Ok because my first work for the University of Michigan, first job, first classes I took, were over here where the building on Fordham, the engineer society. The University of Michigan had a Rackham and you could take classes there, Wayne University set up -- maybe it was out in Livonia or near Southfield I don’t remember, which they had the little temporary buildings so people who lived there could go there and get their degrees. But the thing that more than anything else with the government loans for housing initially blacks could not get those and whites could. I have a book at home called The Mustard Tree that was given to me when we were getting rid of a lot of books over at the school center building and the library was right across from where my office was, and so we were invited to take a look at those books and I saw this one and it was the history of the credit union, and in there, in there, there is a whole story of the first black person to get a mortgage loan from the credit union.
LW: In Michigan?
BW: From Detroit Teachers Credit Union. The first one and I had to look at it and laugh because when that freeway came though people had to move and they couldn’t always find a place. With my family, because my grandparents lived upstairs, we lived downstairs, my family and father had to buy a home. They didn’t have finances. I went to Detroit Teachers Credit Union and they helped us and that’s when my family moved over on the northwest part of the Boulevard and Grand River, so that begins to get emotional kind of thing with me, just a lot of stories there. A lot of stories, a lot of love, a lot of pain but it was still a good life in Detroit. I love Detroit and I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it.
LW: What were some of your favorite things growing up in this cultural area near the Detroit Institute of Arts, near Wayne State, near the various museums and libraries right down here? You said Medbury is off of Warren?
BW: No, Medbury is -- we're on Kirby, do you know where Our Lady of Rosary the Catholic Church down here with the statue on the top, that’s Medbury. You see all of the freeway in front of it? That’s Medbury, that’s Harper.
LW: So 94 really did cut right though that neighborhood then? That is where 94 is.
BW: That is where 94 is, and let me tell you what they did some of the things that they did they came though and they offered you a certain price for your home. It's like a public domain kind of thing and you accepted or you had to wait and go to court. I had a friend whose husband had a wonderful, wonderful cleaning business. They offered him a certain amount of money and apparently he didn’t accept it and he stayed and he stayed So, what they did --I say "they" I mean the government or whatever you want to call it -- they bought all the property around him the houses, when you buy the houses and the people leave, what are you going to do with the business? They kind of put him out of business, but he came though and they did fine. I belonged to a group with Northwestern, I mean Northeastern, a group composed of Northeastern graduates, okay? and the east side, we called the east side Detroiters who wrote a history of what things were like when we were here the wonderful things that we had we loved the area so much, so much. Near east side, near east side extended from the Boulevard almost down to the beginning what they called Black Bottom and you know Black Bottom doesn’t mean black people. I saw where a writer once wrote, “How can they say that name because of the soil if you know how rocky the soil was?" Well, in 1701, when Cadillac came here, there wasn’t anything down there, it was down the river. You know it was good soil and that is how we extended our streets out this way like the spokes and these were ribbon farms all around here because the soil was so good. So no, now it’s not the rich soil all the buildings and things but it was not named because black people lived there.
LW: I’d like you to read one of your poems but I was gonna ask you before that to talk a little bit about growing up in the thirties and forties here, what were some of your favorite things to do in addition.
BW: Let me tell you what we did every now and then, we’d go to a show on a Sunday. If we did, we went over to the Fisher because the Fisher Theater was a theater at that particular time and the styling on the inside was like being in an Aztec temple. Maybe once every two weeks or so our mother would take us to the show at night because certain nights if the adults came you could get a glass plate, have you ever heard about that? They had special nights and this might be they had well, ruby china, ruby glass, so the show might be featuring that so along with the ticket the adult got a ruby glass. Next week it may have been the saucer for a cup so you could get your dishes. So that was one thing, so we would go there. We would go, went to the Art Institute we would go into the library and we played games, we played games at night. It was warm outside, nobody had air conditioning so you would sit on the steps and you would play all kind of old games. We played hopscotch in the backyard we would play baseball, that’s the kind of things that we did. And we did go that one day a week to the library. Get our books and we read our books, we read our books. There was one book called I Hear America Singing, I loved that book. It was a book of poetry so I would check it out this week and then my brother or sister would take it out the next week so we kept going until we had a chance to go through all the -- We did a lot of reading we did a lot of reading, we didn’t -- and on Saturday if you were lucky you could go to the theater then because it was inexpensive. They had they chapter pictures, you heard of the chapter pictures?
LW: No.
BW: Oh, on Saturday they had matinees and it might be a series of 16 chapters all with Roy Rodgers or Tim McCoy or whoever the hero was and there was a chapter here and you would go back because it would continue the next week so we would go to things like that. We visited and we had work to do inside the house, too, you know, and we had chores that we had to do. People had gardens in the back and certainly during World War Two they had victory gardens things like that. There were lots of things to do, lots of things to do. It was a great time, it was a great time.
LW: So you really go to see Detroit when it was thriving.
BW: Right, Right, Right. Christmas time everybody went to Hudson’s. The twelfth floor was magic land because it was toy land, just beautiful. Then they had a Thanksgiving Day parade, they had Santa Claus at Christmas time, just people were concerned about people and our teachers were just wonderful, teachers were just wonderful. I could go back and name so many of my elementary, not so many junior high, some high school teachers. You know they say things to us like, you've got to do this and you've got to do that and it was like, yes, I've got to do that because the teacher said I've got to do that. And in the summer time we would play school because if it was the end of the year and the books were kinda messed up and the teacher would give you a book and you would take that little book home. My fifth grade math teacher Mrs. Eschmann, I loved math because I loved that teacher, and we’d play school and I would be the teacher and I had, I had, I had the book and I could check their papers and things like that, but they were inspirational to us. We had a music teacher Mrs. Filler, she lived over here at the park shelter. She was magnificent. We learned all the songs. We learned the hymns of all of the armed forces, we knew the Christmas songs, Thanksgiving songs and we were just happy. And then when we got to intermediate school I had a teacher who said lined us all up listening to us sing I didn’t have a voice so she said, “Louise, you don’t sing you hum, I’m humming” she come past me and she says “Louise, you don’t hum, you just mouth it,” and it crushed me and I said “Mrs. Fillers said I could sing.” I sing all the time and I don’t care and it’s just such a different time.
LW: But you had a good childhood here?
BW: Oh I had a wonderful childhood, I had a wonderful childhood. I hope my children did. Children today, that is another story, because they don’t respect their parents. I mean mama said it, you did it, that kind of thing. Teachers, don’t let the teacher, nobody called you because you didn’t have telephones, you know, like that, send a note home. Parents always would do parent meetings, just a wonderful time. But the riots changed that. You see some of the people never had a chance to know what Detroit was. It’s sad.
LW: Do you think, as you say, the riots changed things, did you sense anything else leading up to that time did it seem to come out of nowhere to you?
BW: Um, you know there was things that you would hear about, some people were more involved in it because they lived in other parts of the city, but we knew there were prejudices and things like that because there used to be a -- downtown there used to be a -- there was a series of restaurants, I can’t think of the name of them anyway and black people would have a -- "colored people" they called us -- couldn’t go into any of those. But I guess my parents never took us to any of those you know, but we lived over here, over here where I lived we could go and do anything but I know in other parts of the city it was not like that. When I started teaching, my first semester I taught was in a school that was on the lower east side. We had to put up bulletin boards. I’d go looking for colored paper: I had brown, I had grey, I had purple, black. So I had to buy my materials. When I got pregnant, of course, I had to leave. When I came back from maternity leave they sent me to a school in another neighborhood. I had red, green, yellow, orange, light blue, but, you know, what I didn’t have, I didn’t have black, brown, purple and it seemed to me like you don’t give these children the bright colors they need and the kids over here who don’t need all of this, you give them all the bright colors and the dark colors I have to go out and buy. So there were, yes, there were things that I saw as I grow older that were inequities but coming up younger you don’t see, you don’t really see all of this. I guess a very prejudiced kind of environment for some. The police they were something else, they really were. I can remember one night going home from a meeting. I was on the board for Marygrove, just about 8:30, 9:00. A police car stopped me going down Seven Mile wanting to know, "Why was I over here?" "I live over here." "Where are you coming from?" "I’m coming from Marygrove." He didn’t want to believe I said Marygrove. He said, "Marygrove?" "Yes," I said," I’m on the board over there." "On the board over there?" anyway I ended up getting a ticket from him. He said I had done something, I don’t remember what it was, but I went to court on it, I went to court on it and they dismissed the ticket, the only reason he stopped me is because I was black in a neighborhood that as far as he was concerned was white and I should not have been there and I had every right to be there because I lived there. So there were things yes, there were things.
LW: And this is when you lived in Sherwood Forest?
BW: That was before I moved to Sherwood Forest because when I lived in the area over there on Curtis near Wyoming right there on Seven Mile right down near Woodward, what was I doing there you know.
LW: So you did sense as a teacher as an educator some --
BW: Yeah, inequities, yes and I never had in all my elementary school days I never had a black teacher. When I got to my junior high, yes I had a number, when I got to high school this was the first time that something really hit me. I had -- you heard me say earlier that I love math. I love math. I had my algebra teacher. She always ask, “And what intermediate school did you come from?” and I kept wondering, why is she asking that, why is so important that she knows what schools? And then you would say something like, maybe Garfield “mhm” what does “mhm” mean, you know. You say Griswold, oh Griswold; that was one of the white schools. That teacher in my mind had just categorized kids and as much as I love math, I passed that class with a D. I’d never gotten a D. My mother said to me, “You’re going to summer school. You’re going to take that class over because you are going to college.” I went to summer school and I met a young bright teacher by the name of Mrs. [Makula ?]. She was, I learned algebra up and down, she was so wonderful, she was so wonderful, she was so different in her presentations. So yeah it was there, it was there not always overt but there are other kids that have other kind of memories because you know many of the students that were on the other side of Warren went to Miller and Miller has a great name and it was prominently black, it had a wonderful name with sports and whatever, you knew that students that were white went to Denby or they went to Cooley to learn, places like that. Northeastern was my school and I loved it, I loved the teachers I just had a wonderful time. You know, everybody can’t say the same.
LW: I want you to read one of your poems before we run out of time.
BW: I would love to I read this one before.
LW: So this one is called--
BW: “Ode to Twelfth Street” because supposedly the riots started on Twelfth Street, and there was an interesting street so it’s called “An Ode to Twelfth Street.”
Everything’s calm now so peaceful and quiet, but you should have seen what they did to Twelfth Street during the riot. It was a street of prostitutes, pimps and deceivers, Black Nationalists, Muslims, and non-believers, churches, nuns, entertainers and ministers, mamas and papas and even old spinsters, dirty children, stray dogs and cats, loan shops and markets and people of wealth made of the sight of the street called Twelfth. With barbeque joints and soul food tins, delicatessens, bars, night clubs and pig pens. A Chinese restaurant on one corner [did stand ?] and yes, don’t forget the old chestnut man. Lawyers, optometrists, dentists and physicians shared offices along with the soul save missions. And whether you loved it, liked it, or viewed it with fear, it thrived with life and it was held dear. One main artery through that Negro ghetto, a life giving artery but destruction it lead to. A street you could stop on during the day but come night fall, you better get out the way, for all kinds of vile crimes that would endanger one’s health was available to anyone after dark on Twelfth. But it’s all gone now. In its place devastation, burnt out frames as viewed by all of the nation, but the people who lived near the heart of this city cried unabashed and think, “what a pity." For, in spite of its grimness everyone you would meet knew about Detroit’s infamous Twelfth Street. But it’s all gone now all buried in disgrace and with it many dreams of the negro race. It was synonymous with our struggle, its destruction our pain, it was our street now but nothing remains. It’s gone, just gone, nothing to see but the tear streaked faces of the people you meet, wondering what really happened to our Twelfth Street.
LW: Thank you, that’s beautiful. I’m wondering what specifically inspired that were you driving through the neighborhood, walking?
BW: It was things that I could, things that I could see, we used to live one of the places when my husband and I first got married we lived on a street called Pingree which was right off of Twelfth it was right around the corner from Twelfth, the apartment building we lived in. So we had restaurants like [Cream de Michigan ?]. You know, nightclubs everything was right there. I knew the street, you know when we moved it was still there and there were things that we could go back for, the delicatessen, just things like that, so it was something I knew. I could see the people. I lived there several years; no one ever bothered me or anything like that. At one time I heard that one of the restaurants there -- which I will not name -- was supposedly that restaurant that the Purple Gang came to because they were supposedly on Collingwood but, um, you learn your neighborhood, you walked around in it things like that so that’s how I knew that street. All these things in here are things that I -- that happened to me that I saw or that I read about or something that someone else told me about that they saw. There’s a cute little one you didn’t ask me for this but I like this one because it's humor. This one is called “The Portable Bar” because you could go right in when they break the glass and go in stores and take out whatever was there and stuff was left and people were just walking around inside and pick up things.
LW: During the looting?
BW: During the looting. This is called “A Portable Bar” and I kinda like it.
Whiskey, Whiskey ten cents a shot, yeah I know this whiskey's hot but the bars are closed, you know and one monkey don’t stop the show. My bars portable can’t you see picked it up yesterday and the liquor was free. No overhead expenses,no bills to pay free and clear man just take home the pay. Whiskey, whiskey, stop where you are and have a drink at my portable bar. Page 23.
LW: So what that was inspired by people walking around inside the store?
BW: Yes, and people walking around and take things and someone saw this person who had this portable bar and hey the liquor stores were closed and everything was closed so hey you had people selling things on the street, a lot of it stolen. You know and afterward police were busy picking up stuff and people had a period in time where if they had anything you could turn it back in, you know, and it was all right. But if they caught you with anything after that you know it was time to pay the piper, that kind of thing.
LW: So you think in the sort of aftermath which you wrote about in “Ode to Twelfth Street” in particular, in all the aftermath, who were you and the people around sort of most upset with most angry at, where did you sort of place the blame for what happened?
BW: They put in on the police. They would riot through the neighborhoods, not as much my neighborhood where I lived on Seven Mile, but where I lived before. They would stop you on the street and ask you what you’re doing. They had a group called the Big Four: four policemen sitting in cars just driving down the streets. There was a place called Hunt Street Station and that was infamous in terms of the way people were treated. There was a place over here on Vernon, the Vernon Street station, where we would hear about certain things that were going on plus we had our black newspapers, we had The Chronicle, we had The Tribune, we had the Pittsburgh Courier. There was another one but they were like black newspapers and we could once a week get the newspaper so we could see what was going on in our city and things like that. The Polish people had their Dziennik Polski I think it was called or something like that and La Princea was part of the newspaper that you could get. The Mexican or Spanish speaking, all the foreign newspapers would come into the Detroit Public Library and I worked while I was in high school and I worked when I was in college at the library. I told you my major was essentially library sciences and it was my high school librarian that got me a job with the Detroit Public Library and I worked one day a week on Saturday. You could only work certain hours. I worked at the library and they sent me to the downtown library in the foreign language department. So all these newspapers you see them coming in, and people came in and they would read their ethnic newspapers people kept up with things that were going on.
LW: So you felt that you saw this sort of trend about police with racial profiling and things like that. And did that exist in the Polish and Spanish speaking newspapers?
BW: I cannot speak to that because I did not live there but the neighborhood I lived in right over there we had the Polish people and the Serbian people. We even had some Armenian people lived around the corner from where we lived, we had Yugoslavs, so you know. But in certain neighborhoods you hear about things that might go on. But it was still a good city and you hear things and you hear people that go to other parts going to the South and things like that where they couldn’t stop along the roads and go to a restaurant where they had to go around the corner and drink water and stuff like that. I didn’t run into a lot of that here, I didn’t, I really didn’t. But you might run into somebody who’s my age living in another part of the city, totally different story, and when I talk to my sisters and brothers --my brother that I told you about that was born in the time right after my graduation, he didn’t live through this. My younger sister, my youngest sister whom I talk to almost daily, it was almost like I raised her she was 363 days older than my baby brother so I almost like raised her, so we talked all the time but they didn’t bother, so by the time they had grown up we had moved from Detroit’s east side over to the west side of Detroit and they went to Angell School and from Angell they started --the schools I guess were crowded then so I can’t think of where they had to go out near Eight Mile and Greenfield -- but totally different environment, totally different group of people, totally different teachers and I was in a school system by that time and I was down over here in the area that they were calling Black Bottom and I had some southern whites, I had some black students and a few Mexican students. When I moved out here, I was sent out here to Atkinson school. I had a lot of white students because that area was like that at that particular time. I remember when the area started to change and I remember one little youngster, I can’t remember his name right now, I loved the kids I worked with, I loved the kids I worked with, and he came up to me one day and he had tears in his eyes and I said “Well, what’s the matter?” He said, “Oh, Miss Williams, were going to move because the niggers are moving in” and I said, “Oh, don’t you worry about it my dear.” He didn’t see me, he saw me, I was his teacher, no idea of what he had been hearing. That’s the innocence of children, the innocence of children and I think about them and I see many children and I call them the children with the black coal eyes because they can look at you and their eyes are just dancing and you know this child’s really got it going on in here.
LW: When did you retire?
BW: I retired almost 20 years ago and that’s when I went into the charter schools.
LW: Which charter school did you?
BW: Hope of Detroit.
LW: Where is that located?
BW: It’s off of Buchanan near Livernois and I loved that school I loved that school. Our ethnic groups we had a mixture we had Hispanics, we had blacks and we had whites and we did lots of things. Tried to brush up on my Spanish and have people there who could serve the needs. I loved it, I just loved it.
LW: When did you leave there?
BW: About five years later and I came home. I had a good life and I love Detroit and I still go to church. Sacred Heart is still my church. We celebrate our hundred and fortieth anniversary this last Friday. Our pastor, Father Thomas, has been there for 60 years. I was baptized there, my children were baptized there, my daughters were married there, married by the priest, but they weren’t married at Sacred Heart, they were married at Jesu because we lived over there at that time but Father Thomas was still our minister so we did things like that.
LW: I appreciate you talking with me and sharing your stories and poetry with me.
BW: I hope I didn’t talk too much.
LW: No, I loved it. And I liked that you read your poems for us so other people can hear them, too. Thank you so much.
BW: You are quite welcome and I appreciate your taking the time with me.
LW: My pleasure.
BW: I hope people remember everybody has to be conscious of what they want and what other people want. I still think in our country there are people fighting, the Civil War is over so and when they talk about slavery sometime I remind people there isn’t one nationality group in this world that wasn’t sometime in their history slaves of some other group and you can not maintain a slave mentality. You remember the past but you build a future. That’s it but I thank you for inviting me.
LW: Thank you for coming, we appreciate it.
BW: I love this place, my pleasure.
LW: Thank you so much.
**WW: Hello, my name is William Winkel and I am here with Katie Kennedy. We are interviewing—Bev, what’s your last name?
BSJ: Beverly St. John.
WW: —for the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Thank you for sitting down with us today.
BSJ: It’s my pleasure.
WW: Could you start by telling us where and when you were born?
BSJ: I was born in Detroit, March 23rd, 1943. That makes me 72 years old.
WW: Did you grow up in the city?
BSJ: I grew up in the city. I did not go to Detroit Public Schools, however; I went to Parochial schools all my life.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?
BSJ: I grew up in what they call now the inner city. I grew up in the Michigan and Junction area. Actually, it was closer to Scotten because my mother worked at Cadillac Motor on Clark Street and Michigan, so that’s basically where I grew up. I remember when they had street cars—this is why this is somewhat of a fiasco to me—because they had street cars on Michigan Avenue, they had streetcars on Woodward Avenue, then they tore all the tracks out. Now they’re putting them back in because they were kind of cool to ride.
WW: What schools did you go to?
BSJ: I went to Assumption Grade School, which was on Warren just a little bit west of West Grand Boulevard, which is now a church. They tore it down. They had a rectory and a grade school and a church. From there I went to Rosary High School, which I understand is now gone. It was on Greenfield and Joy Road. It was an all-girls school that Henry Ford had bequeathed to the archdiocese of Detroit. When they bequeathed the property to the archdiocese, they also gave property to Detroit Lutheran High West. I don’t know what it is now. Rosary eventually became Wayne County Community College. That closed and they, I understand, demolished the property. But Henry Ford is buried at, I think it’s St. Elizabeth’s Church. It’s an Episcopalian church on the corner there, just a little bit west on Joy Road, and he’s buried there. That was part of his family farm.
KK: Could you describe your neighborhood and your family growing up?
BSJ: We lived with my grandmother, actually. She had like a three-bedroom home. It was just a tiny bungalow. My grandmother was widowed at a very early age and she raised six children in that house. One bathroom. My mother wanted to pay cash for everything, so we stayed with my grandmother, which was next to a living nightmare. I slept in the same bedroom with my mother and my dad and my brothers slept in another room. We lived like that until about 1957 when I went to high school. Going back, I can remember the neighborhood was mixed, but we had a lot of Polish people and they had a nice shopping center on Michigan and Junction. That was the place to go. It was kind of like a big shopping area. A lot of ladies’ shops. We had three dime shops: Nisener’s, Woolworth’s, and Kresge’s. We had Cunningham drugstores, Kinsel drugstores. We had a place where we could buy 45s and I can remember buying my first 45rpm was Bill Haley, “Rock Around the Clock.” It was just kind of neat. Along Michigan Avenue between 31st and 28th Streets, there were a lot of furniture stores, so people used to come to buy their furniture there. I can remember we had Lockman Jewelers, which was nice. Now it’s some kind of warming center or clinic, I’m not really sure. We had bakeries, Paris and Warsaw. A number of places to eat, of course. Not too far on Junction we’d walk to St. Hedwig Church. I remember, in 1957 I started Rosary High School and my family at that point moved to Dearborn. We lived in east Dearborn on Wisconsin Street. I took the bus. I graduated in 1961, then I went to Western Michigan University. Graduated in ’65. Taught for a while in Detroit. Got my Master’s Degree from Wayne State, and here I am. As far as this museum is concerned, as a kid, I would take the bus down here at least two or three times a month because I absolutely loved this place. I was so taken in with the whole Streets of Detroit, so even today when I get visitors that say, “Where should we start?” I’ll say, “Go down to the Streets of Old Detroit. It’s really the best place to start.” And of course, I’ll go to the DIA because I like those circular staircases, but I enjoyed this very much. Hopefully I didn’t talk too much.
WW: No worries. What schools did you teach at in Detroit?
BSJ: I taught at Mackenzie High School. I started at Kettering High School, which is now closed, but that was a riot, literally. Kids were just totally out of control. I couldn’t handle them, and I was a young woman. I taught high school biology and it was just—a lot of the faculty left, too. I think one of the counsel people or somebody from—I don’t know, some big organization in Detroit. His name was Lonny Peaks, I guess. I see his name in the paper periodically. He was another biology teacher, and I said, “Hey, get me out of here,” and I went to Mackenzie. I enjoyed it there, I didn’t have any problems. The kids seemed to be a little more amenable, plus it was close to my home because I lived on Wisconsin Street which was fairly close to Mackenzie, which was on Wyoming. Wisconsin is three blocks east of Wyoming. It would be up about a mile and a half, it was close. I was there off and on for about three years. I went to Livonia for a year and taught. I got married in ’68, and then at the time you couldn’t teach if you were pregnant, so I quit. Then, when the kids started getting older, it was kind of a rocky marriage so I did some substitute work. I taught part-time conservation in Dearborn Heights, and then I did a lot of substitute teaching. Did I say I taught a year in Livonia? Emerson Junior High. I eventually got onto Schoolcraft College and I taught there for 38 years as a part-time instructor. I taught biology, nutrition, and health education in the police academy. During the day, I worked in financial services. I spent 21 years in financial services. It was a year at Harvard Town, but I worked a year for the Chief Executive Officer of Roney & Company, which was a firm at the time, you know, kind of a fancy regional firm. From there I spent almost 10 years at Merrill Lynch. I did have a lot of licenses, I mean talk about a strange background. But I guess we’re here to talk about the ’67. When I was teaching in Detroit, during the summers and during the football seasons, I got a job with the C.A. Muer Corporation, which at the time owned the top of the Pontch, the restaurant over here on Washington and Jefferson, across the street from Cobo Hall. I did that for a couple of summers, and I really had a good time there, too, because I was the day manager/hostess type thing.
KK: What year is this?
BSJ: 19—let’s see, I graduated from college in ’65, so I went down there I think in ’66 or ’67. I was there both summers. When I was going to be going back, Chuck Muer, who was lost at sea I guess, you’re not familiar with that. He said as a going away gift, he would let me eat in the restaurant. They had a fancy restaurant called La Mediterinae, which was a fancy, fancy French restaurant. He said, “I’ll give you a room on the pool side and you can bring a friend and just relax,” blah blah blah. So I can remember it was a Sunday night, in August, I think that’s when it started. My friend and I—it was a guy, but we weren’t doing anything either. We were a little more inhibited back then. We were going upstairs to the top of the Pontch which I’m not sure if it’s the 25th or 30th floor, I’m not sure what floor it was. They had glass all the way around, and I looked out there and saw all these fires. In the city, there was a whole line, which I later learned was Grand River Avenue, and it was just one big fire. He looks at me, and he looks at me, and he says, “We better get out of here.” So we went downstairs to the main floor of the Pontchartrain Hotel and they had these enormous ropes. I mean these ropes were yea thick, like they would have to anchor a cruise ship or something. They were wrapped around the doors. We thought, well, what’s up with that? Still not figuring what was going on, and eventually I got home. The parts that I remember the most was the fact that I worked during the day as like the day manager or whatever, and I even have a picture someplace at home of my waitresses and me. I can remember they had the headquarters for the ’67—they called them the riots or the civil disturbance, I don’t know how they referred to them euphemistically, but anyway, the headquarters for all the big shots that were involved with trying to contain this thing was at the old fire station, which was at Larned and Washington Boulevard. There’s an old fire station, I think it’s closed now. Every day, they would come up for breakfast or for lunch, and they would discuss whatever because just as you come into the Hotel Pontchartrain, there was this huge circular table on the right hand side, and they’d all sit around it over there and visit. I do remember meeting Cyrus Vance, who was sent out from Washington D.C. to kind of organize whatever they were trying to do to halt this thing. I do remember a number of our people were working, and they were concerned. They lived in the city, especially the black individuals, because it was scary. I remember writing them notes to allow them to pass through because they had guards all over the place, you know, letting people in and out of Detroit. They were scared, and so was I. Living in Dearborn, I can remember seeing tanks, right at the city limits on Tireman/Wyoming area in front of, they used to have a place called American Blower. I think they changed the name to American Standard or something now, but I remember that, and I do remember very vividly seeing the National Guard here in downtown Detroit. It was sad. They said it started someplace in the Dexter/Linwood area, or whatever, I don’t recall. But that’s mostly the memory I have of that thing. It was sad because I know a year later when Martin Luther King was shot, that just created another minor disturbance. But this was sad. My understanding is it was over something stupid, that the whole thing erupted. But I do recall it was extremely hot. It was very humid, and you had a lot of kids that particularly lived in the inner city, the black youngsters, that didn’t have anything really worthwhile to do. No jobs, no places to really, you know, work out some of this frustration. I guess I heard they killed a guy with a brick or something or they stopped—I don’t know. A lot of it was hearsay at the time, too. You talk to one person and you’ve got a different set of stories, that type of thing. That’s really about all I remember. I feel like I’m talking too much. They said there were a lot of bodies that washed up into the Detroit sewer system. As far as the actual count, I don’t know. I think the newspapers at the time had the tendency to under-report because they didn’t want to get people totally panicked. From what I could gather, there were a lot more casualties than were reported. I don’t know.
KK: How were you affected after?
BSJ: I don’t know. I don’t really remember how I was feeling. I never had a problem going back into the city or working in Detroit or anything of that sort. I think I remember at the time that it was a sad event, that so much of the damage was done in the black neighborhoods and things like that, and I felt bad for them. Even to this day, if I drive down Grand River, there are a lot of areas that were burned out that were never restored. I kind of felt like that was kind of too bad. I guess a parallel I can take is when they bombed during the 9/11, I was working at Merrill Lynch and I saw it live on TV until the cameras went “Pfft.” That was the end of it. But now I look at the aftermath of the thing, and I thought, well, now we go to the airports and we take our shoes off, and, you know, some people get frisked and all this kind of stuff because of the actions of a few. I think it set the city back socially and economically because of the actions of a minority of people that created this problem. It seemed like we had a tremendous white flight after that. People moved to the suburbs and they didn’t want to come downtown. I felt sorry for the people that were left behind in the aftermath of this type of thing, but it did create quite a social impact. Now my family was already living in Dearborn, so it wasn’t like we up and took off as a result of it, but I think you saw a lot of people selling homes and getting the heck out of dodge, so to speak. It’s bad, you know, it was bad. I don’t know. I think even today, people are afraid to come into downtown Detroit, but I don’t know if I gave you anything of any value.
KK: Absolutely.
WW: Were you still teaching in Detroit?
BSJ: Yeah.
WW: Even after what happened in 1967?
BSJ: Yep. I did, I did. I remember we had a minor disturbance in the schools, too, and they had to bring in the police. It had to have been around that time, too. At Mackenzie they were trying to integrate the school by bringing in students from the city, they were bussing them in, and then I don’t know what the heck happened, but there was a minor riot in the school. I remember some of the kids came and said, “Don’t you worry—” My name was Spizak at the time. They said, “Don’t you worry Miss Spizak, we’re going to protect you, don’t you worry.” But I did teach. Yeah, I never had a problem with the kids. I like kids, I like young people.
WW: All right, thank you very much.
BSJ: You’re welcome.
WW: Anything else? Any other comments or anything?
BSJ: I don’t have any souvenirs or anything for you, either. I just didn’t keep anything, but I know it was tough. It was tough. It was a real black eye on the city at that time because it created quite a few, it’s kind of like a ripple effect. It created problems that they didn’t even anticipate. But you’ve got a lot there to transcribe, so hopefully it will add to your repertoire. I just spoke with a lady, I transferred her to Tobi. She said she’s an old lady and she says, “I remember the civil disturbance, I want to add to it.” I say, okay, you can talk to her. I love this museum. But I’ll tell you one thing—it probably doesn’t have anything to do with that—but the last ten years I said, the city is never going to come back, not the way I remember it. And you know what? I’m wrong because it’s happening in my lifetime, and that’s a good thing. But I do remember Detroit in its heyday. I remember clubbing and all that.
WW: Well thank you very much.
WW: Hello, my name is William Winkel, today is September 21, 2016. I am in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is the for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am sitting down with Mr. Bob Hynes. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
BH: Pleasure to be with you William, thank you.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
BH: Yes. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts–Brighton, Massachusetts, part of Boston–in 1932, July 11, 1932.
WW: What year did you come to Detroit?
BH: I came here after a long military career in college. I ended up here in 1966.
WW: What brought you to Detroit?
BH: I had been here a couple times and interviewed and auditioned for a position as host of the Morning Show on Channel 7, and I won the audition. And then I came here on Labor Day, we premiered the show on Labor Day 1966, an hour and a half every day, Monday through Friday on Channel 7.
WW: What was the name of your show?
BH: Bob Hynes Morning Show.
WW: You said you came here a couple times before you settled down here, what was your first impression of the city?
BH: I liked it. I drove into town, I visited some friends down in Southfield and stayed in that area, and I thought it would look pretty good. I had no angst at all about coming here. At that time, there was some minor problems, but there were everyplace around.
WW: Uh-hm.
BH: So I didn’t have any quandaries. I just spent four years in Germany before that in the military, and saw things coming out of World War II, after the fifties–’45 and the rest of the time. It seemed fine to me, I didn’t see any big problems.
WW: When you came here for the final time, where did you settle down?
BH: We settled into Bloomfield Hills, we rented for a year off of Telegraph Road in Bingham Farms. Then I bought a house in Bloomfield Hills.
WW: What made you choose Bloomfield Hills?
BH: I went to ask somebody, I said, ‘If I’m coming into town, I’m going to buy a place, where should I go?’ This fella looked at me, and he says, ‘There’s two places to live. Either Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hills, if you really want to be comfortable.’ I said, ‘What’s the difference between the two?’ He says, ‘Well the people in Bloomfield Hills think they have money, but the people in Grosse Pointe have the money.’ So I broke up and said, ‘Okay.’ But it was a little far to drive, so I didn’t even consider the commute. So my wife started looking and then we found this house.
WW: As you’re settling yourself into the city, do you notice any tensions throughout the city?
BH: If there were any, I saw them a little bit around Northland. Northland was the shopping place in 1966. It was very close to Channel 7. Before my family joined me, I lived in quarters on the campus at Channel 7; they had a cafeteria with a couple of bedrooms up above, and I stayed there for a while. I would go into Northland, and that was one of the few places where it seemed to be–we’d get some news out of it, and it would pop up, but I thought it was a great shopping center, it was a shame that this happened.
There was a hotel there, I remember when my wife first came to visit me, during my time hosting the shows, we stayed there at the Northland Inn which was a fine Inn. Then later, things started to get a little rougher and what have you.
You’ve got to remember I’m doing a 90-minute daily talk show, and I’m talking to everybody in the city. I’ve got the mayor coming in, I’ve got the governor at that time, he comes in and he’s talking to me at different times. Bob Talbert was one of the leading people for the Free Press and he would come in and we would talk. So you’re getting feelings from them too as you get conversation going. Talked to the Police Chief, I talked to anybody that we would interview. Sometimes authors and actors would come through and all of this in promoting TV, movies or TV shows. It was a lot of fun. Musicians, that came into visit from other places. Popular place in Detroit was the Playboy Club, which was downtown on Jefferson, and it brought in a lot of fine acts. I met a lot of the people and my music director on the show, and we usually had music three days a week, anyway, was Matt Michaels, and Matt worked at that show also, so he would book and help book some of the talent for that. And these people come in and stay and enjoy what Detroit had to offer.
I have a feeling we’re building up toward the Detroit Riots and in all honesty, I am not going to say I would suspect at all that something would happen. In fact, that day, when we received word, it was a Saturday if I remember correctly, and–
WW: Sunday.
BH: Sunday, yes. Well Saturday we had company and we had been out in the backyard and having a cookout–you know, a regular thing you do on a weekend.
WW: Uh-hm.
BH: And then we woke up Sunday and it had happened overnight, as I recall, in a blind pig. This was the events of the next were really into the news, everything we can hear, and watching the news, which brings me to my small part in this, and that was as the host of the show, we decided on Monday, my show was on in the morning, so we decided after the show, which ended around 9-9:30, you have a cup of coffee with your guests and all, and then you start to look to the next day to get busy. So we decided to see if we could get a film crew and go down 12th Street, the area where this had happened. And I had a very knowledgeable crewmember, a producer, I remember there were three of us in the car, anyway, and it was like one of the original SUVs, but small, like a big, oversized station wagon. We decided to go down and see what had happened. So I’ll bring you to my story if I may.
WW: Uh-hm.
BH: We got down there, we’re on 12th Street, and we thought this whole thing was over. Even at the end of my show on that Monday morning, I had said, ‘Well thank God something like this without getting too [unintelligible]’ I said, ‘Thank goodness things are returning to normal,’ or something like that. Now, I go downtown, and I got a microphone in my hand, and I’m doing a feature for the next morning. With all the bravado in the world, I’m there, and I have the microphone, and I say, ‘Well here we are at 12th Street.’ And over behind the camera crews, we’ll pan around in a second, we have the back hose moving debris apart, clearing up the roads again, and as you look around in this area, this is 12th Street, and this is where there were problems last night, but we think it’s all cleaning up now and it’s coming to the end, and I’m happy to be here, and just about that time, shots rang out. I looked around and I didn’t even know what it was, I’m looking at my crew, and they’re looking in all directions, and one of the fellas that was there had come back from Korea, and he was our driver and the chief cameraman. He said, ‘Let’s go!’ In other words, we can come back here anytime, let’s get out of here. So we ran for the vehicle and everybody cleared the streets, we were just, we didn’t know what was going on. Then you hear the sirens, the automobile sirens, the police car sirens going. I didn’t know if we were going to come back that day or not. This fella that was driving called to the rest of us, he says, ‘Down on the floor! Down on the floor!’ Well, ‘Wait a minute, I’m the host of the show, do I have to get down on the floor?’ ‘Get down on the floor!’ Then he says, ‘Wind those windows down!’ This was back in the old days when you had to wind it down, we didn’t have too many power windows then. And we’re winding, and I’m shouting, ‘What am I doing this for?’ And I’d had some military experience, but not as much as he, or in the places that he had. He says, ‘So we don’t get glass in our face’: he was concerned about bullets hitting the windows and ricocheting around and getting us, so that tells you we were not in immediate danger.
He took off, and we decided to chase a couple of the police cars to see where they were going. Incidentally, just back for a minute, no bullets hit our car or anything, but we did have a feeling they hit a couple of the buildings over behind us. So we’re getting our courage back now, we’re chasing the police cars, and all of the sudden he looks up and he says, ‘Up there, there’s some guys with rifles on the roof,’ and they were a couple of blocks away, and there were a couple of fellas up there with rifles of some sort. The police cars had come to a stop and they were waving us away, and now came the decision for him, which had nothing to do with me, I was just going to interview and stop some people on the street and do a few things. This is now he’s covering news. Do you get your camera out with bullets flying through the air? How far have we come? I think he felt, ‘Wait a minute, we better get away from here.’ And one of the police officers suggested we move on. So we moved on and we were going to come back to that area, and decided it would probably be more prudent–we had some silent film that we brought back to the newsroom and head back–we said for the type of feature that I wanted to do, was ‘this is where it happened and now peace has taken over, Detroit is returning to its senses and the bad guys are wherever,’ of course who knows who are the bad guys. So anyway, I was shook up for the rest of that day, and it was my memory of that.
I apologize for not remembering–I didn’t see too much of the guys from the newsroom, because I worked on the morning show and we had our own staff and what have you. We worked in the studios mostly. But I think- I was pleased for his leadership, whoever it was. I think he was very cautious and at the same time intelligent in what he was suggesting that the rest of us do.
I thought maybe I’d share this with you, that this was there, but we looked down in that 12th Street, just back to that for a moment, to see all the buildings broken up, and the damage that was done, and the trucks that were pulling up underneath this back hoe, which was the shovel that was dumping stuff on the back of them, and it looked like things were getting back to normal, William. I was sorry that it took a little bit longer to happen. We continued after that if I could just give a plug for the show and for Channel 7 and for ABC and what our records were, we would book after that time the leaders of Detroit and get them in there, and give them progress reports on how things were going, people cared very much what was going on. One of the foremost I think was Father William Cunningham, who became a very close friend of mine, and gave sacraments to a couple of my kids. I had great respect for him. He and Eleanor Josaitis started Focus: HOPE, and there were a lot of good things that came out of that time. But I’m happy to share that experience with you.
WW: Wow. Thank you for sharing that. Just a couple quick questions. How did the studio react when you told them that you wanted to go down to 12th Street?
BH: What’re you gonna do? … go down and see what’s going on, they say it’s clearing up. You know, ‘Okay, we’ll take a look at it when you get back and let’s see what we can do with it,’ which is usually how we do something, see what the product was when we returned.
WW: Uh-hm.
BH: A producer asked for a couple of things, and when you’ve got two or three people working on a little production like that, usually come up with some pretty good ideas, put one or two together, and you say, ‘Oh yeah, well this might work, this might work.’ So, they laughed at me the next day, when I said, ‘We had a few bullets bouncing around down there.’ ‘Yeah, sure, Hynes, yeah’ [skeptical tone]. But I knew, and we knew, what had gone on there. And thank God as I said before Detroit came to its senses after that.
WW: Uh-hm. Did you still do a feature? Because you spoke about how your feature was going to be along the lines of–
BH: No, we never really did go back down there. One of the reasons was mine was going to be spontaneous as a personality. I wasn’t working for the news department, I was working for the program department doing a show for programming. So news kind of took over and they did that, and they covered it very, very well. In fact, Channel 7 I was proud of but all the stations in Detroit covered it very, very effectively. It was good, the coverage that we got on that.
WW: How do you refer to what happened in ’67? You said earlier, you called it a riot. Is that how you interpret the events of July 1967?
BH: Well I think when we first heard the reports on Sunday, I probably got it from the radio because I tuned in–later I worked for WJR for 20 years–and they were very progressive on it, as were other stations in Detroit. When you were plucking the dial around to find out what was going on, on Sunday, I think that already some of the news people had started to pick it up and refer to it as riots, revolt, uprising. People were in a blind pig and things went wrong and it brought down a city for a little while.
WW: Did you see the city any differently after everything calmed down?
BH: Oh it was obvious it was fearful to go down there for a little while. It took a lot, an awful lot to get people to–Jerry Cavanagh was Mayor and he did his best. Governor Romney, he was doing his best from Lansing to get people to settle down. And also the leaders of the town, there were some wonderful leaders, we would get the police chiefs in there and talk with them and they were very good about giving you updates to keep people as calm as possible. But like anything I think it kind of faded out a little bit; I don’t mean to put it down, what I’m saying is, it became a little bit of history and it was part of what we had to do to make Detroit a better place.
Then, you know, crazy things happened. The Detroit Tigers had a great year in 1968. We were all down there at the ballpark if we could get tickets. The Norm Cash’s of the world, and the Jimmy Northrop’s, and the rest of them that were Tiger players, they were out there doing interviews, I talked with almost everyone of the guys from the 1968 Tigers. They were down there everyday at old Tiger Stadium to go to work. Then our hockey teams were doing well. Sports was … all of those teams, all of those things that were a part of Detroit, I think they helped to make it a stronger place again. That was my personal opinion.
WW: Uh-hm.
BH: Yes, because they were pulling for the right direction. You know what? Unlike today, I did not consider it as much of a Black/White situation, I did not think of it as a prejudice–it did happen because of some prejudice, but we had a lot of white guys, a lot of Black guys, we all worked together, this is what you do, you know? So I didn’t feel it was a big prejudicial thing down there. I think prejudice is probably stronger today that I felt it was at that time. That’s my opinion again.
WW: Uh-hm. You spoke about having Detroit leaders on your show and giving progress reports about the city. When speaking with these leaders like Romney and Cavanagh, did they seem optimistic for the city moving forward?
BH: Oh yes, oh yes. Oh I thought so. Absolutely. If they didn’t feel that in their hearts, they certainly didn’t show it. You have to convey, I think, as a leader like that, you have to convey that to get things back and rolling again. That was my feeling, yes. We were always excited to see them back in there, and we knew we were probably going to get some type of a positive report. My job, I think, as the interviewer, was to dig at it a little bit and ask the same type of things you’re asking right now: ‘Why, why do you feel this way? What are we doing, what are the progress? Making progress how?’ and what have you. And they would usually map a few of the things that they were doing. Some good organizations such as Focus: HOPE that were getting behind the people and behind the times.
WW: For you and your wife who just moved to the city, at any point during this were you like, ‘Well, we made a terrible mistake’? [Laughter.]
BH: We had my brother-in-law and his wife from Pennsylvania visiting with us. And I have to say that they were going home on Monday, and they couldn’t wait for that Sunday and Monday to pass, and they wanted to get home. They were concerned about driving away. There wasn’t a lot at that particular moment that I could say to them. I had an advantage, and it wasn’t bravery that took us down there, it was curiosity and I think some care or feeling for the city of Detroit. I had an advantage to go downtown and see what was going on that other people did not. I walked 12th Street that day.
WW: Uh-hm.
BH: I was scared, but the thing that scared me was the firing of bullets–I didn’t want to stop one of ’em. My feeling was we’re going in the right direction, now it’s a couple of days late.
WW: Uh-hm.
BH: It wasn’t the best of times right then, but I think it started us back toward better times.
WW: Are you optimistic for the city moving forward today?
BH: I am. You and I watched M-1, we watched the rail being built, and there’s always something there and I say, ‘Wait a minute,’ I was in a conversation with someone: will the M-Rail build us up or whatever? I wasn’t trying to be facetious, but I said, ‘I’m more concerned about cars running into the thing than anything else,’ you know? Because we’re not used to having these static – usually you aim toward something and it moves, this trolley isn’t going to move. So I think we’re going to see a lot of bumps and bruises in those things [laughter] just because it is--
WW: Uh-hm.
BH: --it’s not stationary but it’s certainly a solid thing going on the North or South as I’m looking at it right now.
Anyway, I think our city is coming back. Gosh! Look at what they’ve done–I’m back to sports again, but I do think there’s a lot in that, in the homes that these places, where the Lions and the Tigers play and now the Red Wings. Everyday reading about a new restaurant opening in the city of Detroit. I’m trying to get to some of them, and visit them; there are some real fines ones and I haven’t been too disappointed yet. And the young people moving into downtown Detroit–holy mackerel, that is so great! They can’t build lofts fast enough. It’s vibrant. It’s getting better all the time. Detroit’s a great place to live.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
BH: No. I think we just said it in the fact that, yeah, I think Detroit’s going in the right direction. When I came here in 1966, I took a deep breath and I said, ‘Oh.’ Because the reports of Detroit that went around the country were not that great, and people would say to me a very simple little thing: ‘You’re going where?’ Or, ‘You’re going to Detroit?’ In my business, it was usually a contract of a couple of years or something like that, and then you’d move on or you’d go someplace else; I never knew what the future was going to bring when you come from another town. I always pictured myself maybe going back to Boston, I did host AM New York for a short time, and I’ve been out on the West Coast and I did some projects out there. I went to Houston, Texas with Dom DeLuise and we did a show down there. So, yeah, we got a few of these things around, but I always ended up coming back to Detroit–partly because some of those things didn’t work out too good, but the other reason is, I mean, it’s great. It’s got more shoreline than any state, it’s got more boats, it’s a great place.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, greatly appreciate it.
BH: Alright, William, good to be with you. Thank you very much.
WW: Thank you.
TIME STAMP END OF INTERVIEW: 23:41
End of Track 1
WW: Hello, my name is William Winkel. Today is March 19, 2016. We are in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's 1967 Oral History Project, and this is the interview of Brenda Perryman. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
BP: Pleased to be here.
WW: All right. Can you tell me first where and when you were born?
BP: Okay, I was born in Kingstree, South Carolina, and I was just there for six weeks, because my grandfather was sick and my mother was living in Detroit – my parents were – and so that's how I ended up in South Carolina. But basically I'm a native Detroiter and I was born in 1948.
WW: Can you tell me about your childhood growing up in the city during the Fifties?
BP: Well, it was very interesting because I grew up over near Dexter and the Boulevard — West Grand Boulevard — and I started kindergarten over there at public school – at Marr — and at five – it was a little different in the city because, you know, we lived in a duplex, and we felt pretty safe, even – it was an interracial neighborhood at the time. And going to Marr, I was about four blocks from it, and we felt so secure, I guess. I think about my mom and dad, they felt so secure. There was a furniture store named Charles Furniture that was up on Grand River near the Boulevard, and my mother would send me up there to pay bills at five years old. I always had a key to the house.
WW: You said the neighborhood was interracial. Was it that way the whole time, or did it get increasingly more interracial as you were growing up?
BP: Well, more – one race. Well, I was only there until about the fifth grade. And yes, people started moving out and so forth, but it still had some white people there. White and black, everybody kind of lived harmoniously for the most part. The one incident I remember – well, two incidences, really – it was across Dexter, we'd walk up, if we walked up across Dexter for another block or so, we were at Grand River. And if I walked – Hogarth, I lived on a street named Hogarth – and there was this one white man who kept on calling me to his porch. And I went over, I said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and it just didn't seem right because he bent down like he was trying to kiss me and I ran home, seriously, and my mother called the police.
Another thing that happened in that neighborhood: I was pushing a wagon down Dexter — I had a friend in a wagon – and this man came. He was a white man, and he knocked against me, and I fell on the ground, and the wagon was going and it dragged me, and I still have that mark on my thigh. And then I found out later on, because I was doing research on Dr. Ossian Sweet, for a play that I was commissioned to write, and found out that in that particular neighborhood, there over near Tireman and other streets, there were – there was like a Tireman Improvement Association. And they were running like – black doctors who used to move over there, I guess it was a decent neighborhood. They would go in and start moving the doctor's furniture out and everything and make the doctor sign over the house to them. So they – blacks weren't really – they didn't really want them to live in that neighborhood. But anyway, I went to Marr School until third grade, and then transferred to St. Theresa's, which was right on Pingree area. I'm Catholic, and so I started going to that Catholic school I went there fourth and fifth grade, and then we moved further down Dexter, and maybe that's a little bit of dealing with that flight, we moved to a street named Clemens, and I went to St. Gregory's, for up until the tenth grade, and then eleventh grade we ended up moving back over near St. Theresa's and I graduated from St. Theresa High School in 1966. Which at that time, more than half our class was white, so it was still in the neighborhood so people were still coming. It was an interesting dynamic that was going on at the time, I think.
WW: What did your parents do for a living?
BP: My mother was a licensed practical nurse, and my father worked at Ford Motor Company until he was fired for running numbers. And my mother – the interesting thing, too, was my mother could always go over to Ford and ask him – ask could they give him his job back. She did that three times, and they did.
WW: What was it like growing up and going to a private school in Detroit at that time?
BP: Well, at that time it was – we had a good time because we didn't notice certain things. But you have to understand, I ended up graduating from college with a degree in speech and dramatic arts and dealing with theater and stuff like that, and in – at the Catholic school – which I enjoyed it – but when there was a little play, we just got little roles. And a nice girl, Mary Zukowski she would always be the Virgin Mary in the play, she would always – you know, they'd always pick – well my mother told me something very interesting yesterday, and something I had never heard. But – it makes sense now. In 1965, I think it was, I went down to Hudson's. My mother is darker-skinned than I am, and she went to get a part-time job because she was already a nurse at Henry Ford Hospital. And another friend of mine, she was darker-skinned, she went, and I was the only one who got the job, and my mother said, because I was light enough to work at Hudson's. And I never thought about – I never put it together that way. And my mother was one, my mother – she's never a person to play the race card. For her to say that —;
But then, too, she had an experience. She came up in South Carolina. She went to college at South Carolina State.
[background: Sorry.]
She took a – she took a test – a civil service test to work at the post office, and she got the highest – they sent her a letter, she had the highest grade on this test. So she got her suitcase, and everybody said goodbye to her so she could go to Charleston for the job. She got there and she told them her name, showed her paperwork, and they said, “You’re Pearlie Burgess?” She said. “Yes.” “Oh, it's another Pearlie Burgess.” So she had to get on to that bus and go back home. It was – you know. It – but she never carried that with her. That's what I noticed about my mother. Because up here, she had white friends and black friends, and so I kind of grew up like that also.
And so, I wasn't looking for racism, you know. Oh yeah, that's going to happen. First - my first idea of what racism could be was watching the Little Rock [Nine]. I was – it was on television. My mother was watching that, and I said, “What's going on?” She said, “They don't want the colored kids to go to school with the white kids.” I said wow. I thought that was strange, because I went to school with white kids. You know, I said it's not like this?
So, growing up, the — what was so good about growing up in Detroit was the fact that you could – we felt free to go anywhere. And when I come over this way, I think of the fact that I used to take, as a grade schooler, I'd take the Dexter bus down to Cass and I guess it's Putnam or whatever this next two – second – next street after Kirby, just before you get to Warren. I think it's Putnam or something. I'd take the bus and then I'd walk down here and right next to the Maccabees was the Detroit Conservatory of Music and I took piano lessons there. Mind you, I said, I would get on the bus, I was like eight, nine years old. And I'd come down here and I'd – and I'd go back with my music book. And I don't know why – you know, like I said, I always had the key to the house and my mother – my parents would be home but – that's what they raised me, to be pretty independent and navigate pretty well.
WW: So you said your first experience with racism was watching the Little Rock —
BP: It was noticing that there was supposed to be a difference, yeah, that's right.
WW: Did you begin to see racial problems in the city after that, or –
BP: Not initially, because — my best friend's name was Andrea Sarkisian, you know we went to St. Theresa's, and we were just best friends. She was white, I was black, and we just kind of never talked – noticed – well, talked about it. And our role models were people on television, and there were very few people on television of color. There was a show called Beulah with a black maid, at that time, when I was a little girl, but most other shows, like the Life of Riley and all these shows, they didn't show a black family, it was always a white family, and kind of getting into the drama piece – Disney. Disney was like a salvation to everybody. As far as growing up in Detroit, we had the Thanksgiving parade, everybody wanted to go to Hudson's to see Santa. I mean, things just seemed sanitized in a child's eye.
WW: Throughout the 1960s, being a teenager then, how did you experience social movements that were going through the city?
BP: Well, my first initial social movement was my love of Motown. I've got to be honest. I have to be honest. I'm like an aficionado, and just hearing – well, I need to talk about radio, because it was really important to hear music and all this and then, as a grade schooler, American Bandstand was on, so that was a cultural phenomenon, watching kids dance and all of that. But then as the Sixties went on and progressed, the music was beautiful, we weren't feeling really in it – we were teenagers having fun, that's basically it, and going to Belle Isle and Tanglewood Drive, which was down there at Belle Isle.
But we never – I'll never forget going out to Sterling Heights, though. Bunch of us jumped – we went out to Sterling Heights to this park and we were all just sitting in the cars, and all of a sudden, we heard, “Let's get 'em!” It was a group of white men, they started chasing us. We had to crank up the cars and go.
But as far as the movement, we heard – started hearing about Martin Luther King and all that, and he was in town, but didn't – still didn't know much about it. But I did – one day, I was walking from – to the bus stop – a different bus stop, I was downtown, went to Baker Shoes to buy some shoes. And there was a crowd from around the Book Cadillac, and I asked a man, I said what's going on here? He said, “President Lyndon Johnson is here. Would you like to meet him?” I said, well why not. I went up there, and I said, “I'm Brenda,” and you know, he said “Pleased to meet you,” and he shook my hand. He had the biggest hands! And I have large hands, for a lady, but he had the biggest hands, and he was so bow-legged, it was like you could put a basketball through his legs, and just very friendly, very, very friendly, and that was just a weird thing. I said I'm the humbug – here's the president of the United States.
Another thing, in the Sixties, I worked in the Ford hospital in the summers, because my mother worked there so I got a job. One day I heard Governor Romney was up there, in the hospital, I said, “Hm, I'd like to meet him,” and I remember having a little white bag with some gumdrops in it. So I went and knocked on the door, said Governor Romney. My name's Brenda, I work here, but can I come in? He said, “Yes.” So I came in, I sat down, and he asked me, “What school do you go to?” We were talking, I was eating my gumdrops, and I spent my lunch hour with him, just talking. Isn't that something, though? When I think about it in these terms, I say wow, how did that happen? But I was just talking, and then he asked, “Can I have some of those gumdrops?” Sure. Next day I got a call, down to where I was working, saying, “You gave the governor gumdrops!” I said, he asked for them. “It messed up his barium test,” she said. I said, Oh my god. I – but I don't – what do I know of barium? All I know is the governor of the state of Michigan asked me, could he have some gumdrops.
But as far as movements, I wasn't in any movement until I got to college. And when I went to college, well, I guess I had a little something to – to prove to myself because I remember telling, Sister John Damian, a nun, I said, “I'm going to Eastern Michigan University,” and she said, “You won't make it a year.” I – you know, I taught for 39 years, and I never told a student they won't make it. But I guess – so I went up there, and when I went to Eastern, and I guess I’ll get into the activism. I went to Eastern, and was up there three weeks – I couldn't believe a community of kids, and no parents. You know, the freedom I felt, even though we had to be back in the dorm by a certain time. But there were not – not a whole bunch of black people on campus, but it was enough of us to party, and sit in the union, and do all those good things.
But after three weeks, I went to a dance, and my boyfriend, who was here, he'd gone to St. Cecilia which was another Catholic school in the area – and he said, “Listen, if you get a ride –“ because people would come up from Detroit to go to the parties – he said, “If you get a ride down here, to Detroit – I'll give you a ride back to Eastern.” I said, “Oh, that sounds like a plan.”
So these people would come up – they were going back – I asked, can I get a ride. They said sure, so I got in the backseat of the car. It was an Oldsmobile Spitfire or Starfire – it was a nice car, but it was a convertible, but the top was up, and I got in the backseat and when I was in – they got lost getting out of Ypsilanti, so they said Brenda, get in the front because you probably know the way. I didn't know the way, but I said oh, a little more leg room. Got in, and so there were three people in back, two in the front, and we were going down I-94, and when we got towards Rawsonville Road, all I remember, because I was looking out the window – I remember the car kind of going off the road and then I looked to the driver. I think the driver fell asleep. And he woke up and he took the wheel over to the left, and we went across the road, turned over three times on – in the embankment in the middle. And after – I remember that so vividly because as we turned over, I said to myself, well, this is it. And then when we landed, when the car stopped, I couldn't believe I was still alive. I heard the other people in the back moaning, the driver was kind of moaning, and I remember feeling my tooth. I said, well, god, all I have is a chipped tooth, I feel pretty good, but I was on the floor between the glove compartment and the seat. And as tall as I am, my knees had hit the glove compartment and everything in my back backed up there. And I was on the floor, as tall as I am, I'm in this area, and I said get me out of here!
And they got me out, and you know people pulled over to the side of the road, too. They got me out, and as I laid there, I said, lay my legs down. They said, “Your legs are laying flat.” I said no they're not, because I felt like I was laying on the ground in a sitting position. And they kind of lifted my head a little bit so I could see and I saw my legs and my knees bloody – both knees, bloody. And I said oh my god. So what – a guy came over to the side of the road. He said, “Look, you live across the hall from my girlfriend at Eastern. What's your mother's number, I'll go to a phone and I'll call her.” Do you know I actually thought twice about calling my mother because I was sneaking home! And I said – so I finally gave him the number, and they took me to Wayne County General, and then, after a while my mother came. And I remember saying, “Mother,” she said, “Shut up.”
She told me to shut up because she was getting me out of that hospital and having me sent to Ford where, once I got to Ford they gave me the Last Rites. And I was kind of messed up – I was really messed up. Because it felt like I was laying on big boulder, and anyway – I ended up having an eight-hour operation, and when I woke up I saw my family, and I also saw – I remember saying, I'll teach you to dance. And so, anyway, time went on in the hospital, and after a few weeks, I had surgery – surgery all down my back, because my spinal cord was compressed and wrapped around several vertebrae that were knocked out of whack, and all this caused for the paralysis, and so during the operation they had to pick everything out around the cord and let the cord slither back into place. What an operation, isn’t it? So they didn't think I was going to walk again.
One doctor came out of the room with his fingers crossed, another one said all we can do is wait, and another one said, “Do you have somebody who could push her around in a wheelchair until she gets familiar with it?” So, I was kind of halfway given up, gone. But, as time went by my cord started to heal, I guess, or something started to heal, because I moved my big toe. The doctors started jumping around, and they started the therapy.
And I would say that accident happened like October 1, I was able to get out of the hospital Christmas Eve, so I went to midnight Mass and I could barely walk. I had a steel neck and back brace on. I remember going to Communion and I could hear people crying in the church, because I guess they thought I was never going to come back, and I did. I knew it was time to take things a little more seriously, that's why I told that story, that little piece of story, because I lived for the day. I didn't live for the future, I didn't live for the past. I had an excitement about life, but I needed to put it somewhere. And so, I – in fact, I recorded everything about that accident, the person I became in a book that I finished called She Who Limps is Still Walking. And anyway, so, while I was on campus, okay – the riots started – okay, to make up that time, of missing school, I had to go to summer school, summer of '67, and I happened to be home a weekend. My activism really started the next year, with Martin Luther King's death. But that accident helped me to be at Eastern summer of '67 but be home the weekend of the riot. So I mean, is there another question about -
WW: Oh yeah. Where were your parents living then?
BP: Well, my parents had separated. Both lived – living in Detroit. My mother lived on South Clarendon, over near Grand River and Joy Road area, which is funny because the Grande Ballroom was two blocks from us, and the Grande Ballroom, around '69 or so, Janis Joplin would be there, and all these people. Before that, we had - the Temptations would be there – we had to get fake ID, because we had to be 17 to get in. Fake ID was really easy – we were erasing stuff. It was a real – it wasn't real sophisticated, but – just to see the artists. And at the time, also, I remember St. Cecilia in the earlier Sixties, Dionne Warwick came to perform there at a sock hop and the white kids threw pennies at her. Yes.
WW: That's sad.
BP: And she became a star.
WW: How did you first hear about what was going on?
BP: As far as what – the riot?
WW: Yeah.
BP: Ironically, my boyfriend and I were at the Fox Theater that Saturday night, on a date. We always came back home, driving down Twelfth. Twelfth was the most interesting street in the world. You see the colorful individuals, the – the pimps were – we just – I mean, it's like living vicariously but safely in a car, and going down – we said look at this. You know, you could kind of slow down but it was – it seemed like it was 95 degrees that night. It was so hot. That's what I remember, it was hot and muggy. And he said, “God, if a riot ever started, it'll start over here.” I said, “Yeah, I guess you're right about that.”
So we went on home. Six o'clock in the morning, the next morning, the man who was supposed to take me back to college – because I was home for the weekend – a friend of my mom, who lived on Twelfth, above Dr. Perkin’s office, he said, “I don't know if I can get over there because there's a little riot going on over here.” Now this is like six o'clock in the morning. Six or so hours after we had just driven down there. And so I kind of waited around – my mother told me – until about eight so I could call my boyfriend, you know, I said – there's a riot on Twelfth. He said, “You're kidding.” I said no. He said, “I'll be over to get you.”
So he came over. And as we got closer, we had to park a few blocks away. Wow, this is something, so I remember the dress, and everything I had on that day too. Just a little sundress. But we walked up to Twelfth, and we started walking down the street, and as we walked down the street, they had already broken some windows out, and all of this, and I remember passing a record shop. And you know, we had the 45 records. And I picked up a record, wow, this is my jam, you know. I said, I better put it down.
And so we keep on going, walking down, and then the National Guard was standing at Virginia Park, they were standing straight across Twelfth like that, so we were coming this way, this side of the street. And, see, I'm using this – so imagine yourself coming down – and – from where you are sitting. Anyway, the National Guard was – so we said we'd better stand around. So we just standing around watching people – some people still, they're breaking windows out and all, and I couldn't get over this, and then milling around. I said, the cops are out here, the National Guard is out here. Nobody's doing anything to anybody.
So I turned around and looked in the grocery store. I said, “God, look at all those cookies on that shelf. Sure would like to take some cookies back to school.” So anyway, kept looking. Next thing I know, some guy I did not know came up to me. “Here are your cookies!” Look at those Fizzies. Fizzies were little – they were like the size of Alka Seltzer tablets. And you drop them in a glass of water, and they create a little fizzy pop. You know, soda. I said, well I could have gotten some Fizzies. Next thing I know, somebody else came - “Here's some Fizzies.” Then everybody starts running in this store, but I didn't run in. I said oh my god, even my boyfriend ran in. I said, “Gee, what's happening? They're going to get it. They are going to get it.” They didn't get it. And we ended up with four grocery bags full of stuff. He said, “Come on, let's go.”
So we had to walk, and I remember the helicopters above, and it was such a thing, and people just wave – we waved to the helicopters. It was – it was something so surreal, I can't even – I really can't. What was this we were doing? So he took me home and he took the stuff to his house. I don't think I got anything I took up there. I don't even know if I took the cookies. But some man told me, said, “Look what you started.” I said, “I didn't start anything. I was just saying it.”
But anyway, that was – so, he took me back to school, and it was hard being back to school knowing what was going on down here, because my brother, who – he worked at – he had a little part-time job, he's two years younger than me – he took his car – he and a friend of his went out to Inkster. He asked my mom, “I'm going out to Inkster.” He goes out to Inkster, so the next day I get a phone call in my dorm room. My brother hadn't returned home. I said oh my god, what is going on? Because he went to Inkster. So my mother called my father, and everything. My mother started looking, trying to call people, see if they’d seen him. “No, no way.”
And I remember, too, another thing, the tanks were going down Davison. I mean, they were all over – it was just so surreal, do you get – it was like a war zone, in a way, in the summer. And you know what amazed me too? I don't think it rained that entire week. I know it didn't rain at Eastern and Eastern was only thirty miles from here, but I don't remember any rain. Every day seemed sunny. The police got serious about it I guess by that Sunday night, they got serious. People had to stop this, and because my boyfriend – he and his brothers went back over there and one of his brothers got hurt. He was trying to loot and put his hand through a window or something.
But anyway, I was away from all that. My main concern was my brother. Where was he? They're out searching, searching, and then that Wednesday my mother – and I stopped going to school – I told the teachers, I cannot come in here. I've got to wait to hear from my mother, about my brother. And my mother called, and she said – oh, and another thing, she was still working at Ford Hospital, and one day there was a sniper on one of the roofs of Ford Hospital or something like that. I remember hearing that on the news, and as far as media is concerned, Bill Bonds was the one who kind of – we were – we could be voyeurs, kind of listening to him, or we thought, so we'd watch him every day. It seemed like he was on all day, all night. All day, all night he was on, talking about the riot and showing and say, “Oh look what's happening.” He started kind of editorializing. “Look what's happening.” But he was the face of the riot.
So, my mother called. I said, “Mother, what's up?’ She said “I just came from the morgue.” I said oh god, I just fell on the floor, I was – I just – oh – and so my girlfriend who was there, she picked up the phone, she said, “Miss Louie what? And oh, okay, Brenda, he wasn't there.” You know. I – [laughter] I totally fell apart, I fell apart. And, as I said, they were searching. Finally, that Friday, now remember this was Sunday night he went missing – that Friday, my mother was on the steps. She and father – I think it was Father Moran, the priest – just passed away within the last two years – they were sitting on the steps of 1300 Beaubien, where the police department was, and she heard a big mouth coming out of there saying, “I sure am hungry,” and it was my brother.
She beat him down the street. She just went – and they said the prisoners on the bus were just laughing, they were just having a – what – oh, in the middle of this, just before all this happened, and she discovered him – my dad – I think it was that Wednesday evening or something – he found the car. Just the car. Right, right. And that scared them too. Because you find the car and not the occupants. And he was picked up for curfew. But the bad thing about that is how you going to pick someone up and not let them call? He and his friend were in a cell with about twelve other people, twelve or fourteen other people. Not only black people – white people too, and they were about to get into it at different things, and they were given bologna sandwiches. I mean, it was real cramped quarters, and everything- they had so many people. Now some people got locked up for serious – more serious offenses, but yeah. He was really hungry. My mother said, “I got your food for you.”
So that – that was – I'll never forget. I'll never forget that. And the city – you watched the difference in the city right after that. And then, when Martin Luther King died in April of '68, I was in class at Eastern, was in an evening speech class, and somebody came to the door, asked if they could see me – and I said yes – I was the only black person in the class, and they said, “Martin Luther King just got assassinated, blah blah blah,” so I turned to the class and the teacher said, “Martin Luther King just got assassinated” and one white boy in the class said “That's just like someone getting hit by a car to me. I don't give a damn.” And I said what? The teacher said “Brenda, go on, go on.”
That night we kind of galvanized. Everybody just kind of marched around, and there was this one little guy we called Cricket and Cricket got up on the car, he said “Don't march! Don't do anything!” Somebody knocked Cricket off the car. But, so Eastern canceled classes for a couple of days. And I noticed another thing, when I was going back to Eastern that Sunday, the day of the riot, there were people coming from Ypsi or Chicago or whatever on I-94 and they had trailers hitched to their cars – empty trailers. And then there was someone down the street from my mother then – they burned their old furniture, they took it all out in the back, because we burned things in the alley then. The garbage was burned in the alley – our trash, paper trash. In Detroit, that's where it was. They had the garbage cans, but the paper trash, they had, you just burned it. And they burned their furniture, moved new furniture in, then the cops raided the house, took the furniture out. Yes. It just seemed like people from miles around saw what they called opportunity.
WW: We've heard a couple other stories like that.
BP: Huh?
WW: We've heard a couple other stories like that.
BP: Right. And so, from then on I became active. I even was kind of active in the SDS, I guess, the SDS – is that the Students?
WW: For a Democratic Society.
BP: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was. And because it was coming a time, when Richard Nixon started rearing his head, and they were talking about the silent majority. I said, what is this all about? I had a new discovery of what it was to be black. You know, I said, let me pay attention to this, something I hadn't really paid as much of attention to, and I got into Nina Simone real heavy. I was the first girl on campus to have an afro. And I'll never forget the day I wore that afro. Everybody was looking – looking at me. I mean, it's just – and I said I've got to dress cute every time I wear this afro – you know, I was real self-conscious of the afro, I said I don't want to look like a boy, you know, but I wore that afro and I remember my cousin – he was going to Harvard at the time – and he said, he said, “Are you militant?” I said, “I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not.” [laughter] I just said that.
But yeah, I started getting involved. That's when I started getting involved with things. And I was – it's funny now – and I was telling somebody this – or mentioning it on my show yesterday – that you would have thought I was – you know – if Bernie Sanders would have run at that time, I had the same philosophy. I had – I guess – a lot of socialist philosophies for a minute, and – but, you know, things evolved into something else as time went by. And my whole thing with all of this is injustice. I never quite knew, though, why I wasn't feeling that tension in Detroit, that people said was there, when the riots started. I think it just started – didn't they bust a blind pig or something?
WW: Mm hm.
BP: And I just thought that people just started fighting and protesting and it kind of evolved into something else. I don't think, initially, it was meant – see, people call it, and I have discussions with my friends, who say “Well, the rebellion —” I said, that wasn't a rebellion, that was a riot. It was a riot. I was there. I saw it. A lot of people – they weren't talking about injustice. I was talking to everybody on the street that day. I can't tell you about what they were talking about, but 40-something people got killed during that time. Mmhmm. I remember that so vividly, and my mother had to take the bus to work, I was so worried about her, too. And I mean, she would – she missed a day looking for my brother but still, you know, she had to go to work, and – Detroit was a city, too, that when she worked afternoons and get off at 11 at night, she could still take that bus home and walk home, and she did not – she never was robbed, she never was accosted. But the fear was in us, from the Big Four. You've heard about the Big Four? STRESS [Stop The Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets], all of a sudden, the – huh?
WW: STRESS was afterwards.
BP: After – yeah, it was after the Big Four. I'm just going on - just thinking – and the thing about it was, I had an encounter with the Big Four but my encounter was because in 1969, I got married, I was just 21. And we lived – my husband, he was in the Army Reserve, and we went to – so I lived in that part, with that flat – upstairs flat – of Dr. Perkin’s office. That's where my mother's friend lived who was on Twelfth. And we kind of rented it out from him, we kind of sublet it. And I'll never forget this – this – it seems like drugs started exploding. I mean, you heard more about drugs, and all of that. And I was taking the bus – I was still at Eastern – I was taking the bus from Twelfth, where I was – I had to take a couple of buses so I could get to Telegraph and Fenkell, and a girl would pick me up at Telegraph and Fenkell and all this, but one night – I think Johnny Carson was on, I'm pretty sure – and I heard at the – remember, I'm over a dentist's office – I heard boom! Boom! Against the back door downstairs of the dentist's office.
It was kind of winter time; it was icy. I said oh my god. I've got to call the police because the dentist's office had been robbed for drugs before. I called the police, I said somebody's trying to get in, and I gave them the address. And so I went downstairs to the front door so I could see the police when they came. Well, I don't know what happened. I didn't see the police, but all of a sudden I see these men coming down the same stairs to my living room, and it was the Big Four. I said, “Ahhhh!” They said, “We're the cops.” So they said, “We want you to go downstairs with us.”
Apparently the people had gotten the back door open, but then they ran. So I said okay, I will. So I went downstairs – we went downstairs. Took me through the dentist's office – how would I know what was missing? Anyway, as we came back out of the dentist's office to get ready to go back upstairs to my house, I heard what I felt was a little crackling of something. I said you didn't check the basement. And nobody was down there, but I – it was crazy. My - Oh! The sound I heard, I know what it was. When my girlfriend – she was my roommate at the time, because my husband was gone and I needed someone to help with the rent. The – I let the Big Four out the back door and there was a big thing to put over the back door and everything. So we were going upstairs I hear this crack – I said, they didn't check the basement, run! And I pushed her, and she said “damn, you didn't have to push me!” I said get upstairs, get upstairs, and we locked the door, and I ran to the window, and I remember going to the Big Four – they were out there and they jumped out the car, all four of them – I let them in the door. What I heard was really the crackling of the ice on the side of the house as they were walking. It was crazy.
But the tension – because at that time, also, so many people were getting killed around us. I mean, this – Detroit totally changed. It was totally changed. You could be at a place where – you could be an innocent bystander. Everything changed. Everything changed after the riot. And maybe reality was striking or something, but I was seeing a lot more than I ever knew. And then people – and so, at one point, I remember writing – well, I wrote a play that my students performed, it was called Sixties Girl, and in the play, I have a white young lady and a black young lady who had grown up together walking down the street, and she said “You're moving?” the black girl said. “Yeah,” and the white girl says “Yes, I'm moving to some place called Southfield.” And she says “Southfield, I've never heard of that.” And see, at that time, and it was interesting because the play I was doing was at Southfield High, because I taught 22 years at Southfield High – and I wanted to let people know what was going on in '68 Detroit and all. So – we were still – oh, and as far as socially, before all this we were having the waistline parties, all kind of parties in the basement. It wasn't shooting – just everything changed. Even the music changed. “War, What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing.” “What's Going On?” The music changed. Everything changed. Our so-called innocence was gone. We had to really look around.
WW: Thank you very much for sitting down with me. Do you have anything else you'd like to add?
BP: No. No, I don't think so. You know, if there wasn't a question, I'm good, I believe. I'm good, I believe. But it just – I hated how it changed. That I didn't feel the safety anymore. Because we used to go on bus dates, before – say the boyfriends had a car – the boy would walk over to our house, we'd get on the bus, come down here to the movies, then go back on the – get on the bus. I mean, it was – I never felt unsafe. It just changed.
WW: Thank you very much for sitting down with me.
BP: I'm sorry I made the story so long.
WW: No problem at all.
**HS: Hello, this is Hannah Sabal. The date is June 18, 2016. I’m here at the Detroit Historical Museum with Bruce Carr for an oral history interview for the Detroit 67 Oral History Project. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
BC: I’m glad to do so.
HS: Can you first start by telling me where and when you were born?
BC: I was born in Tennesee, where my father was born, Christmas day, 1938.
HS: Awesome.
BC: And then our parents moved us to Detroit when I was five years old. I grew up in the Livernois-Finkell area. We were there for nine years. All of my public schooling was through the Detroit Public Schools, from kindergarten through graduation from Cass Tech.
HS: Which elementary and middle schools did you go to?
BC: Clinton elementary, which is no longer in existence, and likewise Post, which is no longer there.
HS: I’m sorry, what was that?
BC: Post Middle School. At that time it was called Post Intermediate School. Then my parents moved us to Royal Oak when I was not quite sixteen, but I had already started at Cass Tech in the printing curriculum, and I told my parents I would like to stay at Cass instead of going to high school in Royal Oak. And the tuition was $256. I said to my parents, “If you’ll let me go to Cass Tech, I’ll pay my own tuition,” out of what I was making as a part time employee bagging groceries at one of the supermarkets. They said, “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, you can.” And so I completed my high school years at Cass Tech, came out in January of ’57.
HS: And why did your parents move from Tennessee to Detroit?
BC: It was the early 1940s, and pure and simple, people were almost on the edge of going broke. Detroit was known as the arsenal of democracy. People from all over Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta and other impoverished parts of the United States would come here, and I’m told it was much easier to get a job than it was to get a house in Detroit at the time, or even an apartment or whatever else. Fortunately, my dad had a friend who lived right behind the house that we bought, close to Livernois and Finkell, so that’s how we ended up being there.
HS: Okay. What did your parents do for a living?
BC: My mother taught in rural schools in Tennessee until they got married, my parents got married. My father was also a teacher in rural schools, and he had a farm of about 110 acres, but again it was just so much more difficult to support a family on their limited earnings, so they came here. Hundreds of thousands of other people did. And US 25, along with several other routes, became known as the Hillbilly Highway because of so many people who came from Appalachia up here. I was in Ypsilanti a few weeks ago, people from the church there were talking about how they had friends and family that came over from Paducah, Kentucky, over on the western side of Kentucky, and there was a bus that ran from Paducah to Detroit and back to Paducah, or vice versa every weekend. Rather common thing. Detroit was essentially a melting pot that brought together people from all different backgrounds, different nationalities. And one of the things that struck me as a five-year-old kid coming to Detroit was the extreme diversity, the nationality diversity. Living in the hills of Tennessee, I never met anybody who was of any recent European heritage. Nobody was Greek, nobody was Polish or anything else like that. There was a small number of people that were African American, but just very, very small. Then we moved to Livernois and Fenkell, I had my first experience of eating baklava because there was a Greek neighbor right behind us. I had the first experience of meeting a Jewish family because there was one right across the street with a youngster same age as me. One of the things that amused me a little bit was when they had parent teacher conferences, some of the parents would go, and they were not able to speak English, so the kids would go and be the interpreters for the parents. I thought they probably had a little inside advantage. They could probably tell the stories the way they wanted it told instead of maybe the way the parents want it told. I didn’t have that advantage.
HS: Now just out of curiosity, in Tennessee with your parents, was it a crop farm?
BC: It was a crop farm, mostly corn. It wasn’t anything big agricultural like they had today. Like almost everybody else around us, everybody did the same thing.
HS: And did your parents continue teaching when they came to Detroit?
BC: No, they did not. My father got a job in 2 or 3 different factories, and then he ended up going to a place called Shedbarsh Foods [6:16 sp??], which was on Dexter avenue, just north of Davison, and he stayed there for 34 years. He could have gotten some credits from Wayne State or some other place and got a certificate to teach, but he chose not to do that. And my mother only taught one day in her life when she got up here. She was a substitute teacher and then she decided she didn’t want to continue. She said it was too hard on her nerves.
HS: Can you tell me a little bit about the neighborhood that you grew up in?
BC: In Detroit?
HS: Yes.
BC: Like I was saying, it was quite multinational. At the time, there were almost zero African Americans. The closest African American community was about a mile, mile and half away. My parents had African American friends through their church, so oftentimes people from the churches that were predominately African American, churches that my parents belonged to, they would get together for social occasions. And there were a few African Americans from the town of Livingston Tennessee, which is the county seat of the county where I was born, and sometimes they would get together. But there were not any African Americans at Clinton or at Post when I was a student there. It was not until I got to Cass Tech that I had any experiences with African American teachers or any significant number of African American students. Some other things about memories of being in Detroit at that time, everything was really close together. The house we lived in was built in the early 1920s, standard 30-feet lots, so they’re all scrunched together. We had a retired Detroit police officer on one side of us, and then on the other side of us, there was a building, three floors, and two recent graduates from U of M, University of Michigan lived in the basement, and he was an architect, then there was a physician on the second floor and a dentist on the third floor. So if we had any medical or dental problems, we didn’t have to go very far. And then Livernois and Fenkell was the crossroads of two major streetcar lines, so they would go clanking and clanking all night long, and it took a little while to get used to that. Everything practically was in walking distance, so we had one car, we didn’t need another one. My mother would easily walk to get her shopping, there were what were called dime stores that would be similar to dollar stores today. Kresge’s was—course the same Kresge that later on became Kmart and the Kresge Foundation—and then Neisner, and Woolworth. Neisner is long gone. Woolworth became famous with the Woolworth Building in New York City. And Kresge’s, like I said, became Kmart. And incidentally, in case you want a little more history, the original Kmart is in Garden City, but there’s no historical marker in front of it.
HS: That’s unfortunate.
BC: I could easily walk to school, and one thing that’s a little bit humorous was that back then, there was a guy that delivered milk, and he had a horse-drawn wagon. And so sometimes I would get a ride to school on his horse-drawn wagon. [Laughter]
HS: That must have been fun.
BC: It was. I remember as a kid, when we would go out to the playground, it seemed like they had the tallest swing sets. Again, when you’re five, six, seven years old, everything looks big. Today, as I was reading, very, very few neighborhoods are walkable. Now there’s a big effort to try to get more walkability in Detroit, and other communities. At that time, you could go anywhere you wanted to go on the bus. Now, that’s another story. People, I thought, were a lot more friendly, they’d sit on their front porch, talk to each other. You don’t have that kind of connection nowadays that was true back then.
HS: All right, so we’re going to jump ahead to 1967. How did you first hear about the events of July of 1967?
BC: Well, first of all, I taught in Detroit Public Schools, starting in 1964. I began teaching at Mackenzie High—no, I’m sorry, ’63—I started teaching at Mackenzie High in ’64. I had a summer internship with the Detroit Urban League close by to here, over at the corner of Mack and John R. I was one of about four or five young teachers who were fortunate to get that. It was under the leadership of Dr. Francis Carnegie, PhD. Very fine gentleman. And then there was a man by the name of Roy Levi Williams, who was just a year or so older than I am. So we became good friends, and Roy lived over close to Clairmount, maybe a little south of Clairmount, and 12th or 14th, one of those. It was just south of the main disturbance area—well, I’ll call it “riot.” When I heard about that by the way of the news media, my first thought was, “How’s he doing?” I had his phone number so I called and he said, “Well, there’s flames all around here, but we’re okay on our block.” And we talked about how some of the neighbors had taken their garden hose and they were spraying water all over the house to try and protect it. That was like, maybe, half a mile south of where the main rioting started at the infamous blind pig. Okay. About half a mile north of there, at the corner of what is now Rosa Parks and 12th street and Webb, a place called World Medical Relief—and I’m wearing one of their shirts at the moment. It’s the largest building in the neighborhood. Seven floors, plus the basement, and it’s built like a fortress. Not intentionally like a fortress, but it was originally built as a storage warehouse for one of the automobile supply companies. Rock solid. National Guardsmen came in and they went up to the top of that building, and while the whole neighborhood was in flames, they were standing on top with their guns and essentially putting out any of the—what shall I call them?—any of the—shall I use the term “insurrectionists?” “Rioters?” Whatever would be most appropriate to say—again it was like the advantage of being on top of a fort when you’ve got other people who are rioting on the ground. I had a responsibility with the Detroit Urban League. They asked me to go take pictures. So that was with a standard 35mm camera. So I was walking all through the area without any weapons, without a police escort, and I was walking right down streets like Linwood; Rosa Parks, when it was 12th; 14th, all around there, taking pictures. And some of the memories that particularly strike me are so many of the people who had their individual businesses, most of whom were Jewish, Jewish shopkeepers, and they were just standing, heartbroken, as their buildings were still smoking from all of the damage. And there were firetrucks from everywhere. Obviously, Detroit Fire Department. All the suburban fire departments. They came from as far as Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Lansing. They came from Ontario. Certainly Windsor, and probably a few other communities not far away. They came from Toledo. Then the national guardsmen were all over the place, in addition to Detroit police. They came from all over the state. When things got worse, after the governor called out the National Guard, and president Johnson called out the 101st airborne from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Essentially, the responsibility of the 101st was to quell the disturbances on the east side, and the National Guard was to take care of the disturbance on the west side. It took about a week before—they were here for about a week, maybe slightly more than a week. I don’t recall the exact dates, I’m sure that’s something you could easily find out. I took these pictures, and I gave them all to the Detroit Urban League. I’m not sure what happened to them after. I don’t have them, I wish I did, otherwise I’d give them to you. But then, several other things happened, like for example, a lot of these guardsmen came in so quickly that they didn’t have a chance to pack socks and underwear. So one of the things I was asked to do was to go to J.L. Hudson’s downtown and I had a letter to authorize me to do this, pick up all the socks and underwear you can. They gave it to me, and I brought them back, and then the National Guardsmen were happy to get that. We were living just south of eight mile, one block south of 8 mile, between Southfield freeway and Evergreen, right next to the athletic field for Henry Ford High School. There was an electrical substation just slightly across the street from us, just barely across the street. They had National Guards there because it was part of the electrical feed, and they didn’t want anything to happen that would cause all the power to go out. So one of the things we’d do sometimes is we’d go over there and take them some sandwiches and other things, and the guardsmen really appreciated it. And I did meet some of the people that were victims. And what was also interesting was returning to teach at Mackenzie that following September and to say the least, there were a lot of stories. There were students who had, in some cases, lived in the area where major damage took place. Mackenzie was on the periphery. We did not have anything immediately in our neighborhood. Central High School, that’s another story. Central High was right in the middle of it, as was Northwestern and a few of the other schools, and of course the elementary and middle schools. Central neighborhood in particular. But many of the students had grandparents or aunts and uncles or they had other family, friends, church connections, people who they knew who were in the middle, where their houses were burned up or seriously damaged. And then I’ve got a friend I know through the rotary that I belong to in Farmington, and he’s a physician, retired physician, and he talked about how he was working at Henry Ford Hospital, and the Lodge freeway was shut down, and the National Guardsmen would come and put him and the other physicians into armored vehicles and they would take them down to Henry Ford Hospital and then they would bring them back at the end of an extended work shift because they didn’t want the physicians to be victimized. It had a major impact. There are some things that were for the good, especially the New Detroit, I’m happy for that. Detroit has in many ways gone through a renaissance for the better. You look out here and you see the new railroad track that’s under construction, and even in the neighborhood where we originally lived, over by Livernois and Finkell, although it’s an old neighborhood, many of the houses are vacant or torn down, there’s some new housing, thanks to a pastor on the same street where we lived, and he was somehow able to get some grant money to go around and buy vacant property, or property that was virtually ready for demolition, where they had been originally 30-foot lots, he combined them into 60-foot lots and get nice new houses with an attached garage and driveway. I’ve been through there several times and from what I can gather, no problems. I’ve got a friend who’s a pastor very, very close by there, and he says that that’s the case.
HS: That’s awesome.
BC: I wish the same thing were true in more places. People always hear about the negatives in Detroit. That’s an example of a success story.
HS: Do you have any other experiences that you wish to share with us about what you saw in 1967 or heard?
BC: I guess I’ve told you most of them, I’ll probably think of some more after I leave here. I know that my family was very concerned for my safety. My wife and I were only married for 2 years at the time, and we didn’t have any children yet. We tried to do what we could to help. I will say that teaching in Detroit did change somewhat, Mackenzie changed. There were a lot of families that moved out of the city following 1967. The Mackenzie neighborhood took a major hit, not because of the rioting itself, but people were just simply afraid. The school population went down, not just there, but all over. What else to say? Like I say, good things have happened. I’m happy about that. I salute everybody. In the words of the city motto, “We shall rise from the ashes.” I think if I didn’t say it exactly right, I came close to it. You’ve got it right out here in front. After the destruction in, 1803, something like that?
HS: 1805.
BC: 1805. Well, I was two years off. Do I get a pass for being that close? [Laughter]
HS: Yes. You mentioned that your family was worried about yours and your wife’s safety. Was your family no longer living in Detroit at that point?
BC: No, they had moved to Royal Oak. They were living in Royal Oak at that time. I also had family members in Tennessee and they were concerned when they heard. The whole country knew about it because it was all over the national media. There are people, unfortunately, who still believe you can’t do anything in Detroit, everything is shot, but I’ve had a lot of out-of-town guests who come and they say, “Well, tell me about Detroit.” And I say, “Okay, you tell me what you want to see and I can probably show you. You wanna see the good, bad, or ugly? I can show you some of each.” And I like to show them places like right here. I like to show them places like where I grew up. And I show them the new houses as well as the old. I show them places like over around Sherwood Forest and U of D. I had a man visiting me from Tanzania, a country in east Africa, last summer, and he wanted to get some medical supplies for medical relief, and he had a little extra time, so we were driving down the Southfield Freeway, and I said, “Let me show you another side of Detroit.” And so we got off and drove through the Rosedale Park neighborhood and he said, “Oh, I didn’t know there was anything like that in Detroit.” These kids were having their little street fair, and they had their own park, they were all having a great time. “Oh, you mean this is Detroit too?” Yes, this is as much Detroit as any other place is. Of course, Belle Isle—oh, the other thing! A story you’ve probably heard about how Belle Isle was closed off, and they were using Belle Isle as a place to hold inmates until their court dates came up. Am I right or wrong on the Belle Isle elephant house? I can’t remember if that’s true or that’s false.
HS: I’m not sure. I’ve heard people say that it was, and I’ve heard people say that it wasn’t.
BC: I can’t remember definitely one way or the other, you’d probably have to look it up on Google and determine. But certainly Belle Isle was closed. I also covered part of the east side for taking pictures with the Urban League. I just wish there were some way of getting those pictures. But you’d have to contact the Detroit Urban League and see if they have any records of them. Another thing that’s not related to 1967, but I had my master’s thesis in history from Wayne, and I wrote my thesis on a topic called, “Negroes in Detroit in the 1890s.” Before the ghetto in Detroit. At that time, the term “negro” was used much more commonly. That was right about the threshold when the term “negro” was fading out, and then “black” was coming in, and now, of course, I say “African American.” I was debating whether to say “negro” or “black,” but “negro” was the more commonly used term at the time, so that’s what I said. But it’s on file across the street at the Burton collection. It’s also on file across the street in the Walter Reuther Library. And I also had another interesting experience when I was writing that. I went over and interviewed a gentleman who had the responsibility of editing the Michigan Chronicle in the 1930s. He lived on the eastside, couple miles from here. I went over to his home, and he had back copies of the newspaper in these big binders and he said that when he was publishing the paper, he would, every week, send a copy to the Detroit Public Library, right there, and the Detroit Library always kept the news, always kept the Free Press, but they would throw away his papers after getting it because they didn’t think it had any historical value. So he was very happy when I got his several bound volumes, put them on a cart, and brought them over. So instead of getting them there, because they threw them away, I gave them to the Reuther collection. They were very glad to get them, so at least they’re in a safe place. I don’t know if they put them on microfilm since, but at least they got them. That’s my one little grudge against the Detroit Public Library.
HS: I want to backtrack just a little bit. You said your family moved out of Detroit into Royal Oak—
BC: In ’54.
HS: ’54. And why did they move out of the city?
BC: Why did they move out of the city? It was largely because of a church. They were particularly interested in a church in Royal Oak and felt it would be a nice place for my sister and I, who was four years younger than me, to grow up in, so I was part of that church until going off to college.
HS: And then you and your wife no longer live in Detroit, correct?
BC: We live in Farmington Hills.
HS: And when did you move out of Detroit?
BC: We moved in ’76.
HS: And why did you move out of the city at that point?
BC: We moved, well I have to be honest and say better schools.
HS: Okay.
BC: We started off at Pitcher school, but both my wife and I are retired educators and we just felt that there were more opportunities for our children in Farmington schools. And I might also add—nothing that’s any secret about that—that many, many, many other African Americans have done the same thing. I have African American neighbors who live next door to me. Few years ago, there was an African American lady who was retired from the Detroit Police who lived two doors away. The church to which my wife and I belong, it has a membership that’s roughly half and half between African American and members of European descent. The flip side, I’m very happy about the fact that an increasingly large number of people who are of European origin are coming to live in Midtown and Downtown Detroit. I was at a special event at 2nd Baptist Church in Detroit, which as you probably know is one year older than the state of Michigan. I was at a special event there not quite a year ago, and I met a biracial couple and the guy was in medical school here at Wayne State. And they said, “We’re looking for a church, we just thought we would stop by, visit your church and see how it is.” I don’t know if they stayed or not, but at least it was nice to meet them. To me, that’s an encouraging sign. As I’m sure you know, about two or three years ago, National Geographic magazine had a special 23 or 24 page article about the resurgence of the neighborhoods of Detroit. Not talking about midtown. Not talking about downtown, or even Corktown—well maybe they mentioned Corktown, I don’t recall, but the neighborhoods of Detroit. I thought that was very hopeful, and some of my friends who are out of town say, “Everything’s going to pot in Detroit!” and I said, “Do you know anything about National Geographic?” “Yeah, we know about it.” “All right, do you get National Geographic? Well check out this particular month, if you don’t get it personally, go to your local library, pull it out, read it there, see what it says, then let me know what you think of the article.” I’m very happy about that. And then, you were asking about the community where I was born. Like I said, I was born on a farm. And the county where I was born has a county seat in Livingston Tennessee and it has a population of about 4,200 people. Only about 6 or 7% of the population of Livingston are African American. They’ve been there since, way over a hundred years. Now, you have a town 100 miles east of Nashville and the population is overwhelmingly white, small Hispanic, but it’s like about 6 or 7% African American. What would you think would be the likelihood of them having an African American mayor?
HS: Probably slim.
BC: His name is Curtis Hayes. He was elected once, twice, and in the last month, he was re-elected for the third time.
HS: Wow.
BC: Every time he gets a bigger margin. Last time he was elected by a two-thirds margin.
HS: Wow, that’s impressive.
BC: So when some of my friends say, what’s going on in Oberyn County, Tennessee? I say, “Do you know anything about Mayor Curtis Hayes?” I’ve met him twice now. Fine guy, and his wife, she is of European descent, he is of African descent. That in itself says something because I remember when I was a kid down there the worst thing that could possibly happen would be for anybody to be biracial. And that was something that was set up here, I mean when I was in high school, I remember my parents thinking that could be the next worst thing to sin itself. That’s one side of the coin. The other side of the coin, you know, Mayor Duggan, the margin by which he was elected. And from what I’ve heard, if he were running for re-election today, he’d probably be in with a landslide.
HS: Probably. Getting back to the riots or disturbance, how do you perceive it? As a riot, rebellion, uprising?
BC: Well first of all, there were a lot of cases—I’ll use the term “riot.” But I guess one of the things that surprised me was that—and I know it happened in 1943, I read the records of that—but one of the things that surprised me was that it could’ve happened sooner. I was thinking, okay, how are we in Detroit so fortunate that it did not take place?
HS: Did you notice any tensions in the city leading up to the summer of ’67?
BC: Not of immediate sense, but just kind of an underlying, “That might be possible” kind of a thing, and particularly after Los Angeles. I’m thinking, thanks to God that we’re not there. And once everybody saw Los Angeles go up in flames and you realize, Detroit, how are we saved? In that sense, I was not surprised—although I was surprised about the immediate thing—and of course the blind pig story. Naturally there have been a lot of changes in the Detroit police department since and I think the police commissioner’s doing a fine job from everything I’ve heard about him. I would consider it an uprising—well sometimes it becomes a hard distinction, like South Africa, when Nelson Mandela led his uprising, or the Civil War. Well, the war’s a war, although I remember when I was a kid, some of the other youngsters down there called it the War of Southern Rebellion or the War of Northern Invasion. Never could see that. When you get a large number of people who basically take the law into their hands, they’re not elected to anything, and they basically say, “Well, we’re going to seize the power.” And then they burn up not only—well, they burned up their own neighborhood, in most cases. Very, very few white homes were burned up, as I recall and from what I read afterwards, very, very few. Businesses, yeah, there were a lot of Jewish businesses. But very, very few homes. When you think about burning up your own neighborhood, that’s certainly a problem. And then of course, a lot of it was caused by flames going from one building to another, particularly with them being so close to each other. I know there have been several books written on the subject as well as scholarly publications. I read two or three of them.
HS: There’s actually a book attached to this project, too, that’s at the publishers right now.
BC: Okay, I’ll be interested in seeing that. Who was the one that wrote the one about four or five years later? There’s been about three or four. You may know more than I on that. Anyway, I don’t know what the grade is on my interview today. Do I get at least a D-?
HS: Oh, definitely. [Laughter] I just have two more questions for you. How do you think the city has changed since the events in ’67?
BC: Well, I referred to some of that already. There has been very major white flight. There has been a much broader increase of metropolitan Detroit. Detroit no longer—when you think of Detroit, I remember as a kid, I’d ride my bicycle from Livernois and Fenkell out to what is now Northland Shopping Center. It was all empty land. Our neighbors, the [unintelligible] had their vegetable gardens out there. They’d ride the Dexter bus and then they’d get off the bus, they’d plant their garden, and then they would come back, and that was in addition to what they put in their backyard. Northland Shopping center, built in 1954, of course it’s now closed. Now, you say what’s Metro Detroit, you’re talking about going as far as Brighton, you’re going up to Clarkston, you’re going to Chesterfield Township, going south to practically Monroe. Well if you want to go official, you’ve got Wayne, Oakland, Livingston County, you know. So the population density is much less and I don’t know hardly anybody except right here in the immediate area who builds their home on a 30-foot lot. And virtually everybody’s got—if they can afford it—they have two cars. I do. We had a simple one-car garage, and we had an alley behind it. Nobody has an alley behind their house anymore. So those are some of the things that have changed. As I mentioned, the neighborhood in which I live is in Farmington Hills. Our school district is very diverse. We’ve got 80 different languages in the district, and we’ve got probably somewhere between 35, 40% African American, maybe slightly more. Dearborn—Orville Hubbard—everybody remembers anything about Orville Hubbard knows that he was number one when it came to racism. Now, there are African Americans that live in Dearborn; I happen to know one. One guy, in particular. Cass Tech got an invitation to go to Washington for Obama’s inauguration, and if I remember right, did seem like Martin Luther King High School did also. One or the other. In order to try and keep more people from leaving the city because of the schools, Renaissance High School was established, and basically that’s why it was put up, on West Outer Drive. And if we lived in Detroit, our kids were high school age, we probably would’ve sent them to Renaissance or Cass Tech, unless they objected. Again, I’m just really happy about some of the positives that are going on. And again, it’s not just here in midtown and downtown. Just down the street here, about a mile, is Ecumenical Theological Seminary in the old Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church. My wife and I were there for graduation three weeks ago. We parked on Edmond street because we had to shoot out of there to get to Grand Rapids for a high school graduation reception immediately after. Anyway, we were there and we were looking across to see the new Hockey Town arena that’s under construction. And I remember when I was a kid at Cass, all those buildings were completely occupied. Then they were abandoned. Now that’s the hottest property that you can find anywhere. There was somebody that wanted to get half a million dollars for a house that had been appraised for about $7,000 only about two or three years earlier.
HS: Oh my gosh.
BC: So that’s an example of some of the changes. And there are people who are white who are moving into the city. Not by a large number, but some. So those are some of the changes that have taken place in recent years. So it’s a mixed bag.
HS: Yeah.
BC: And I’m glad that the Detroit Historical Museum is doing well. At least I hope so.
HS: Oh, yeah. All right, is there anything else you’d like to share with us today?
BC: Well, I appreciate the opportunity of being here and reflecting on some things that I’ve not thought of for a long time.
HS: We appreciate you coming in. [47:20]
WW: Hello, today is April 17, 2017, my name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I’m in Detroit, Michigan. I’m sitting down with Carole Hall. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
CH: Thank you. Happy to be here.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
CH: I was born in Detroit, 1936.
WW: Did you grow up in the city?
CH: Yes, I did. I grew up on Willis Street between Hastings and St. Antoine in Detroit. I went to Lincoln Elementary School. I had two brothers and a sister. We lived in what people would term now a shack, because it didn’t have a bathroom. Originally it didn’t have a bathroom. Later on we got a bathroom with a bathtub, and we shared it with another family. We grew up really happy, believe it or not. It wasn’t until we had a chance to go south to Alabama with my mother, to visit my grandparents, that I began to realize that there was a difference between how I was treated and other children were treated. We were on the train, we had to cook our food in advance before getting on the train. Once on the train, we were literally bottled up together, almost, in one little small area. Once we got to Alabama, we transferred to a bus, and the real shock was having to walk to the back of the bus, with all of the luggage. Four children, and a mother, all in the back of the bus beyond a certain line that was drawn on the bus, to sit. And our luggage had to be stored over our heads, and it was so much with other people that it kept falling down on us. Yet we kept seeing the empty seats, and I bolted a couple of times towards the front, because it didn’t make sense to me—I guess maybe I was about five or six. And my mother grabbed me by the tail of the dress and snatched me back, and said, “Don’t you ever do that. You’ll endanger all of our lives.” It was the first time I really came to grips with what was really happening there. I loved being in the south for the first time, seeing cows and seeing wells. I didn’t love the outhouse, which I saw for the first time. I held my food in so long until I almost got sick [laughter], and I had to finally let it out. They didn’t have toilet paper; they had catalogue paper from a news catalogue—it may have been Sears Roebuck, or J.C. Penney or something. And my mother and grandmother showed me how to ruffle it up in your hand to soften it up, so that when you wiped with it you didn’t scratch yourself. I remember those days very fervently.
I remember coming back home—one of the highlights for me was having had the opportunity to meet Mary McLeod Bethune. She came to our classroom in Detroit, and I remember the kids in the class being astonished, because here is this very dark black woman with snow-white hair all over her head, and there were kids—because in those days, there wasn’t the pride of color that there is now, and in those days, if you were dark, it was not a sign of being pleasant. If you were called dark, it was derogatory, it was negative. And here was this woman who my mother had spoken of so many times, because she had met with—Roosevelt—
WW: Eleanor.
CH: Eleanor, that’s what I’m trying to say. Eleanor, she had met with Eleanor Roosevelt. And we had listened to her on the radio talk. And my mother said, “That’s where we’ve got to go. That’s what we’ve got to do.” And I said, “She talks different,” and she said, “Well, she has an Oxford accent.” And I thought, what is an Oxford accent? And she said, “It’s a particular way you frame your words, you use your words.” And I thought, that’s interesting. But I noted how ingratiated my mother was, of what she had done. And so now, to be able to sit in a classroom on the floor—we sat with our legs crossed on the floor, to see this woman—and there were kids in the back, snickering, again, because her hair was very wooly, and very white, and very stark against the very dark complexion, and she was kind of heavy-set, sitting in a chair. And the kids, of course, were looking at what movie stars like Lena Horne and that sort of thing look like, and this was a celebrity but she didn’t look like Lena Horne, so that was the snicker. And I remember her telling the story of how she started the first school, with an orange crate as the desk, and the kids using the ground and a stick to write out what their lesson was for the day. Apparently they were able to gather enough little boxes and stuff to put together what looked like a frame of a classroom outside, because it was in Florida, and they got the boxes all set up, and they were having class, and they came back one morning and all of it was burnt up. When I realized that she had gone from there to starting a college, I was just floored. I was just enamored with her, with her voice, with her mission, and about that time I just decided that that’s what I wanted to do. Somewhere in education, somewhere in being valuable to something, to someone, or to some things, that that’s what I wanted to do. She ended her commentary by saying, “The door is closed to you now, but it’s going to open. It’s going to come, and it’s going to open, but it won’t be for very long. You must prepare now. You must get ready at this moment. Get everything you can, learn as much as you can, do as much as you can, but seize the moment and move forward, every day.” And I took that with me, I’ve taken it with me unto this day.
I was in school—in the elementary school—and was taken out of the school at one point, and sent to an open-air facility. We had a teacher at the elementary school that apparently got sick from something, and she left the school and several of us kids that were in her classroom were taken out, tested, and we were taken away from our families. So I was gone for several months, away from my family. Had the chance to meet with several patients, young patients, children my age, somewhere in iron lungs, what they’re called, what they use I think for TB, for tuberculosis patients or something to that effect—
WW: Polio.
CH: Polio. And I met—one of my best friends became Sheila, who was in an iron lung. And, as you know, this is this huge machine, metal machine, and she’s always in it. They’d just come in, clean her up, and then close it every morning. And she and I would read together, and we shared stories, and I became very, very close to her, and very touched by the reading and the sharing of words, and I think it was the first interracial relationship— outside of having had teachers— but on a personal level, that I’d ever had.
We’d go from there to finishing high school here. My family moved several times—my parents. And I had the opportunity to go to an all-black school—elementary school with all-black teachers, which was the first time for me, on Eight Mile Road. Went to Mumford High School for a brief period. Went to Northwestern High School for a brief period. And I decided that I wanted to go into missionary work, and I felt that it was important to learn languages in order to do it. I had read about Haiti and how it was—the history of it, about Toussaint Louverture taking over there. And I realized that I needed to maybe learn to speak French, I realized that they spoke French. And so I started taking French classes, and then I realized that I probably needed to take German, because I’d also read about World War Two, and we’re part of—my generation was part of what was happening in Europe and in Germany and in England. And so I transferred from Northwestern to Central High School to take German. I’d taken, also, Spanish when I was in my freshman year.
I married—moved to the west side, and I married—my husband was a graduate of Hampton College, which was a southern college. He had been in World War Two. And I had not—at that time, I had not met anyone, on a personal level, who had been a college graduate.
WW: Before we talk about after you graduate high school, while you’re still in high school and you’re transferring to these different schools, you said you were where first, before you went to Central?
CH: Before—Mumford.
WW: Mumford. What was the student population like at these—were you in the minority at these schools?
CH: Definitely in the minority. I was in the minority at Mumford, in a blend and a transitioning cultural area at Northwestern High School, and definitely in a minority at Central. I think that the total at Central High School may have been seven black students. From Central High School, I went to Wayne State, here, and from Wayne State I went to Michigan, and eventually from Michigan I went to Harvard.
WW: Are there any other stories you’d like to share? Do you have any memories of the 1943 race riot?
CH: Yes. The race riot was a pivotal point in my life. At the time I was teaching, married, with three children.
WW: Oh wait, sorry, one moment, ’43, not ’67.
CH: ’67.
WW: I said if you had a memory from ’43 –
CH: Oh, I’m sorry, yes, definitely. No, no, no.
WW: I was like you were definitely not teaching. [laughter]
CH: No, no. I wondered why you looked at me like that!
No, I was on Willis. Willis Street, here, East Willis, 33 East Willis. And I recall people running, and shouting, and screaming. And I recall there were people passing me with clothes or some kind of garments or something in their hand, or some pots or pans or something. And I remember hearing that someone had been killed, and that there was a riot. And because we were on Willis between Hastings and St. Antoine, we were kind of probably pretty close to the real segment of it that took place. It had to—because Hastings, I understand, was one of the major streets that it took place. I remember going up, with my parents, my dad sheltering me, because we were out doing something, and we just kind of happened to run into it. It was the first time I saw a dead person. I didn’t realize he was dead, I just knew he was very still, and I asked my dad, “Shouldn’t we help him?” And he said, no, that he was gone. And it was the first time that—there was conversation about it, of course, after that. Usually on Saturdays, every other Saturday—my dad worked at Chrysler, and every other Saturday some of his Chrysler buddies, they would go from home to home, occasionally, and that weekend, or during that period, there was just a lot of discussion about what had happened, who had been killed, what had started it. There were several different versions of what really had actually started—they never seemed to come to a conclusion, any one thing, but it seemed to have be related to some police stuff. The word Belle Isle came up. I don’t— I’m not familiar with all of it, the intricacies about Belle Isle and what happened out there. I always thought, earlier, that it had started on Hastings, but it seems like it started someplace beyond that. So that was the first introduction to riot for me. So essentially I’ve lived through two: the ’43 and then 1967.
WW: Was your family affected when Hastings Street and Black Bottom were torn down?
CH: Severely. Severely affected. In two ways: we left Willis Street, upgrading, hopefully, to a street that doesn’t exist anymore called Sherman. And we moved to Sherman, and it was so nice because it had the bathroom inside, and it was between Dubois and Chene, I recall, C-h-e-n-e. And Dubois. I don’t even know if Dubois exists anymore, but it was between those streets. And—I’m sorry, I lost my point. Your question--?
WW: How was your family affected by the loss of Block Bottom?
CH: Yes. So we moved on Sherman, and I got a chance to go to Russell Elementary School, I was still in elementary school. We were looking at moving—we were with my grandmother, for the moment, because we needed to leave the Willis location. With grandmother, we were looking for moving in a real house, where everybody else wasn’t there and we had a home to ourselves. And one of the areas that we were looking at was on the east side, of course, we had been Eastsiders predominantly. And one of the areas that we were looking at was not too far from the Riopelle area, Mack, because there were homes in the Mack area. And word came out that—urban renewal, we heard the word for the first time, urban renewal. And I recall my parents saying something—that urban renewal meant Black removal. And I wasn’t sure what that meant, how that impacted us. And they talked about Hastings Streets, that Hastings, St. Antoine, coming up to Woodward here, and what was called the Black Bottom area, downtown Detroit, where my dad, who was a musician, would play—that all of that was going to be affected. And that had been a large part of our culture. Beaubien, St. Antoine, all the way downtown to a store they used to call Sam’s, where everybody used to shop, at Sam’s Department Store, at the time. Essentially we kind of had our own community, where we had our own grocery stores, we had our own drugstores, churches, it was just a continuous community that we had—the furthest out we were thinking of moving was to move to what was called the North End, to move up to Oakland, in that area. But once the tearing down and the disruption of Hastings—eventually it affected Mack, because how we would get to Eastern Market, all of that began to change—it began to just simply disrupt everything. We had—our family and our larger family, my uncles and aunts and so forth, were just beginning to move north, move further out. And we looked forward to being able to communicate and commute on the Oakland streetcar, it was called, between north and coming south and going downtown, that was kind of our alley. And the urban renewal, the tearing down of the homes, the tearing down of Hastings Street, the tearing down of the projects, which were on Beaubien, all of that significantly impacted where we were going to go, what we were going to do, it just kind of felt like you were left kind of dangling. That’s essentially how that affected us. For the first time, we began to look west. You never thought of moving to the west side, but we eventually began looking west, and we ended up on the west side of Detroit on a street called Ohio.
WW: After you graduated high school, and you finished university, did you run into any problems finding employment in the city, along racial lines or any other?
CH: I did and didn’t. I did in the sense that I was told that it was going to be very difficult for me to get a professional position, because I was black. That kind of knowledge, it just permeates the black culture. The history of what we’ve been through, so it’s just always there. Whether you want us to look at it or not, it’s always there. And one of the issues that my mother had emphasized very early, when I was very young, was that whatever we did, and whatever field we went into, it was going to be very important for us to be able to communicate well. She was banging on us all the time about speech. “That’s not pronounced correctly!” And it gets back to this notion of the Oxford language, that use with Mary McLeod Bethune. I think she wanted this English sound, and I realized that Oxford, she was thinking of England. So that was in my mind, that that was going to be a barrier. And sure enough, before you could teach in Detroit at one time, you had to take a speech exam. I didn’t see—I went—I applied to teach, I had to go through several of the Detroit public schools, I had to go through several exams, and one of them was a speech exam. And I had to read and they asked me questions and I had to answer them. And I remember feeling outraged. Because everything my mother said to me started coming into my mind, and I thought— a person that was ahead of me going through this line of applications, did not have to take a speech test. And it didn’t hit me until I was in the room that she didn’t have to take it, and I kept saying, well why didn’t she have to take it? We went through everything else together. And she was Caucasian. Subtly it hits you sometimes, just, [claps] what’s going on? What?
So I had to read and I had to answer questions and so forth, and then the person, I guess, that was doing the analysis, said, “Well, you did very well. You did very well, you speak well. You don’t have a southern accent.” And I thought, what is a southern accent? When I got home, I talked to my mother and my mother said, “The language that I kept telling you as a kid that you could not say the words, I said you could not say, the way you could not enunciate or pronounce, that was southern. I was switching you over.” That disturbed me very early. Very early. And even now, sometimes I think of my grandkids, with their—growing up, someone accused my granddaughter of sounding white. Because that does impact the culture. Why are you sounding like this? Why aren’t you speaking like us? Or I’ve heard her say—well, not her, but her generation say, somebody is speaking flat. And I didn’t know what flat was. Flat was just using black lingo. And I realized that that has permeated how we feel about ourselves, and how we feel around others. That came up when I was getting ready to teach, so. That’s the long and short of that.
I taught at Northwestern and then I taught at McMichael. It was called Intermediate in those days; we call them middle schools now. And I left McMichael because I took a class—because I wanted to know them through a particular period—
[Pause in tapes]
CH: There was some noise?
Okay, McMichael was a turning point in my life. I student-taught there for a moment, and I decided to go back after being at Northwestern, I decided to go back, because I wanted to get kids a little bit earlier. I wanted to get to know them more in depth, and I wanted to be with them longer. I knew I was not going to stay—I knew I wasn’t going to stay in education, I’ve always known that, but I felt that this was a good time when my children were small, for me to grow as well as bring them up. I took up classroom 276, and I had 276 for the seventh grade, the eighth grade, and the ninth grade. And they were the most—I was fortunate enough to be able to get a class that they would allow me to keep continuously, without breaking them up. When I first got them—I knew— I didn’t know that sometimes on the newest teachers they put so-called, quote unquote, worst kids, with the new kids. Because all of the more seasoned teachers knew who the good teachers were and who the good students were and they would single them out. And I didn’t know that they had singled them out by test grades. IOWA Test was the predominant test instrument that they used then. And my class—my class had tested D and sometimes up to triple-E on the IOWA Test. I did not know that. And this was a test—this was a great experiment in what you do when you don’t know. My objective was to make them the best students coming out of my class as possible, and the school allowed me to keep the same group for both English, social studies, and occasionally Spanish. Those three subjects. So I got to know their families, many of them came to my home. I got to know their churches, where they went to church, and that sort of thing, some of the social activities, some of the recreational activities that they had. We became very close.
The last year that I had them, we focused on black history very heavily. Each student had the responsibility to select a black hero and do a full report, both an essay—they had to do a term paper and they had to do a speech. And these were eighth graders. They did it magnificently. We went to the library, social work, and so on. Later on, they had to do the presentation in the auditoriums during Black History Week, Black History Month, whatever it was in those days. And they did a brilliant job of it. Two things came out of that. One was one of the students, Aubrey Pollard, who was in that group, was killed during the riots. He was one of those students. The second thing that came out of it was that I left teaching. I left it early.
The riots took place in 1967. Riots took place in the summer, and at the time I was living on Vermont Street, one block off of Twelfth, between McGraw and Antoinette. And I saw the smoke, I heard the sirens, and people calling—it was a beautiful day originally, summer, very warm. And when I heard what was happening, saw it on the news, I was in shock. For a moment I was just frozen. And then I realized, when I saw the trucks—whatever those—the tanks—whatever those things that were coming down the street with the guns on both sides, on those wheels that looked like they were in Berlin, and I thought, is this World War Three? It was just the most disabling moment of my life. I grabbed my children. I can’t even remember where my husband was. I don’t know whether he was at work, whether he was at church, he was very active in church and stuff. But my nephew and niece was downstairs. I grabbed all the kids, I grabbed my sister who lived downstairs, and we left Detroit. We went and drove to Chicago, checked in a hotel— Black-something, Blackstone, Blackwood, one of those Black names—and stayed for about three days. When we came back and I drove up Twelfth and saw what had happened, and found out about my student, I decided that I couldn’t go back to teaching. I think, now that I look back on my life, I think the Mary McLeod moment came through about that time. You’ve got to do something. You can’t sit here and complain, or just cry about it, you’ve got to be that one drop. That’s got to make a difference. And you start with what you know of where you’ve been, and it was with my class. When the riots hit in ’67, my students had graduated. And I wanted to know where they were. I did a survey, and I discovered that, in spite of the fact that they had tested E, triple-E and D, on their last test, they elevated to Bs and As. I didn’t know because they didn’t share tests then as they do now. But in spite of their improvement, less than ten percent of them were going to college. They were outstanding students, no question about it. I’d put them up against anybody, any place, any time. When you take—when they’ve gone from a double-E, double-D, triple-D, triple-E, to B, and A, and A minus, that shows that there’s a learning— extremely good learning capability. And they had done it. So it is no question in my mind whether they were college-eligible, because for those years that I had them, I pounded it.
I then began to check with their parents, and to find, where are they, what are they doing? Within a three-month period, working with the assistance of other teachers, we were able to get all of them into college. There were scholarships that were there for them, there were groups like the Urban League, and there were special college programs that were reaching out, especially after the riots, to get students in, but nothing was there. The NAACP had done a study, and their study showed that less than five percent of students, black students who graduated from even outstanding high schools, were going to college. The result is that three of us decided to put together a volunteer placement program. VPC we called it. We had Doug Ross, who later became—was one of the teachers at McMichael at the time. Christine, another teacher. Just the three of us, we formed the corporation, a nonprofit. I filed for the 501C3 from the IRS to get that, went to the mayor’s office, told them we needed some space. I told my husband, “I have to leave teaching, and we’re going to have to live off of one paycheck.” Which would be difficult, and it’s become increasingly difficult even now. But we’re going to have to just do what we can with these boys, I can cut back on everything. He said, “You know, you may have to give up one of the cars.” I said, “Well, I grew up riding the bus. There’s no problem there.” So, he was gracious enough to say, Okay, we will survive. And we did.
Jerome Cavanagh was the mayor at the time, and Conrad Mallett was his deputy, and I went to Conrad and asked him for some assistance, and he said, “What do you want to do?” And I said—showed him the statistics, I said, “The three of us want to be able to have an office so we can recruit volunteers to help us provide information to get kids into college and job and training programs.” Because at that time MPTA, Man-Powered Development Training, was growing. [President Lyndon] Johnson’s Great Society, that was developing. And those programs were out there, and Detroit was seen as sort of like a pilot in getting funds to get those types of programs going. We were one of the first to apply and move in that direction. So sure enough, they gave us an office on Grand River, across the street from the old Northwestern High School, ironically. We were able to recruit in excess of two hundred volunteers, after we put together an exhaustive—it took us a month to put together, working day and night, literally. We didn’t have computers in those days, we were on the old type-type—but we were able to research all of the job training programs that were available in the city, and that were available outside of the city that kids could get to. There’s number one. Number two was to make sure that we were able to take advantage of those kids who were job-ready, who had already developed a skill working part-time sometimes, or whose parents were in a certain business and they’ve learned certain skills, we wanted to make sure we got those. The third one, which was the most important one, we wanted to get every kid, regardless of grades or whatever, to apply to college. So to do that we had to put together three major manuals for that, and that month was set up for putting together the manuals. We located all of the colleges, put them in a catalogue, determined just the basic data and determined what their basic strengths were. We then did the same thing with training and any employment programs that existed, coded this information and put it in the hands of volunteers. We recruited ten Vista volunteers in Service to America, Vista volunteers, and assigned them, each one, to ten high schools. We started with the twelfth grade, we interviewed every student—each Vista had a responsibility for every student, every twelfth grade student there, to interview them, to find out what their interests were, to work with the counselors to make sure that we got their grade-point averages, and that we had some sense of what their strengths were, and then to assign them to a volunteer to make sure they follow through on those areas. Towards the end of the semester, we then communicated with every major college in Michigan that a student could get to, whether was at Marquette, Big Rapids, whether it was Wayne State or Michigan, whatever. And we arranged in each high school, each of the ten high schools, we arranged for each college counselor coming from the universities, like Wayne or Michigan—they had a table in that school where they could sit and talk to the students. We presented each college recruiter with the student’s grade-point average, with the student’s written biography, with the student’s grade summary by the counselors, with all of the basic data that they would need to make a decision on whether they could accept a student or not. We did that for them—we got the information ready for them. Their commitment to us had to be that they had to accept or reject the student that day. We got 60 percent acceptance, at every school, at all ten. Because all of the information that they needed—the autobiography or the biography, the grade levels, the counselor’s recommendation—all those things that they needed in those days was in their hand. So it made it easy for them.
Our first class, we had pretty close to 80 percent accepted at a college. Whether they wanted to go or not, they were accepted. We did a follow-up study three years later, and we found out that pretty close to 50 percent of them stayed. That was outstanding, we thought. We got a Rockefeller grant to continue the program, and Rockefeller, the foundation, wanted us to implement the program within the school structure itself. That wasn’t easy. But we tried the process, but going through institutions is different when you’re a nonprofit, you’re on the outside and you’ve got a board and you can make quick decisions, you don’t have to go through a whole lot of hoops to get things done, so we were able to move very quickly. The board structure was such, like most institutions, that by the time you meander through all of the different departments, you’ve lost the concept.
So, ’67, that’s what speared that program. The riot did. It did it personally for me, it did it professionally for me. And in the long run it speared me to do most of the things that I’ve done in my life, the majority of my life.
WW: Wow. Just a couple of quick follow-up questions and then the final ones and we’re done. You’ve referred to ’67 as a riot throughout this oral history. Is that how you view it and frame it, or is that just the colloquial term you use? There are other people who use uprising and rebellion.
CH: That’s interesting that you put it that way. I’ve heard it referred to as a disturbance. Civil disturbance is one of the words that I recall. I don’t think—the other word was civil disobedience; I’ve heard that term. I think of the poetic term, that when something is so full and so toxic and has been under so much stress that it explodes, and it’s more like an explosion to me rather than a riot. I’m not clear on the term riot. I understand disturbance, that some people get disturbed, but disturbance says that something has disturbed the status quo. Explosion is something that—something toxic has happened and it has reached this point, and it goes.
WW: Just a couple quick questions to finish this up. How do you feel about the state of the city today?
CH: Mixed. There’s a sad part of me, like most of us that continue to see what was left after the riot. We never really recovered until now. And the fact that we’re recovering is good. The price we pay, have paid, for the memories of it still brings back some painful thoughts and painful feelings for me. My neighborhoods are gone. And I know progress comes and that things have to change, and that nothing’s going to stay the same forever. But when you travel Europe and you see the things that have been there for hundreds of years, and you realize that this is still a very young country. You’d still really like to feel like there’s something left that has value, that’s historic. And I felt that loss, I felt the loss of Hastings, I felt the loss of Grand River. I drive down trying to find Hastings and I don’t even think there’s a sign that says the word anymore. I see Grand River and can see—I’ve driven it recently, and I can see that there’s signs up for lease, for sale, vacant land. Across the street from Northwestern, Northwestern High School is gone. The building that I started, and we started VPC with is gone. I see new roots coming up, and I love that. I live in a historic neighborhood. And so I’ve stayed. I’ve stayed and seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and the growing beautiful. So I see for my children—and I’m not talking about my biological children, I’m speaking of children forever—that there’s an excitement, and there’s a new growth and a new beginning, and I see a phoenix rising. I see that happening here. But I can’t help but sometimes feel the pain of what it’s taken for this to get to this point. I see a younger generation that’s here that’s more open, that’s more caring, that’s more giving, more thoughtful, and that makes me feel real good. I see a generation that’s my generation, that’s, I would say, maybe late fifties to eighties, nineties, that’s been very resistant to change and wants to go back to the old world. That’s sad, for me. But overall, I feel hope. I think the real estate— I see what’s happening with every week it’s some new building, it’s some new restaurant. We’ve all seen it, you know, we’ve seen what’s happening in Midtown. And that’s the price of change. But I just keep hoping that at some point, we learn something from history. I see dreams, and I—you know, at 80, hopefully 81 this year, I think I can leave the earth knowing that something is better than when I came.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
CH: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
CS: [My name is Carter] Stevenson. I was born in Detroit, 1946. I went to public schools in Detroit. McMellan Elementary School from kindergarten through grade 8. Cass Tech High School for high school, and I also went to Henry Ford Related Trades and University of Michigan in the Rackham Center. Lastly, at the time of the riot, I was a student at Mercy College. I had worked in my neighborhood, in my community, in Del Ray before I could, you know—my family was very much a part of the community there. My dad had baseball teams, he organized a boys’ club. I had gone to Presbyterian neighborhood services in the area. We had a lot of family interaction in terms of things that went on there. I graduated from high school in 1964. There was always rumblings of things that were going to happen. I remember the freedom schools on the north end, around Northern High School. I don’t know if he’s still alive, I think Chuck Colding was one of the people involved with that. Of course, Judy Walker and guy who’s an attorney now, but they were involved in that. Through my community activity, I was involved through the Presbyterian Neighborhood Services. That organization or that presence changed names over the course of the time, and there were events that brought about that. Presbyterian Neighborhood Services became Protestant Community Services and eventually became People’s Community Services. Each time there was a change, there was an event that was related to it. It’s sort of a distraction to go through it, but it’s important to know that that’s how it evolved. But through that social services institution, we had a presence in terms of things that were going on. They were not just present in Del Ray, but they were also present in Hamtramck, they were present in some other areas of the city. Through the torch drive and UCS, there were a lot of social services, folks who were looking at conditions and things. During those times, they would get together and talk about things that were imminent or happening. During that summer, there were rumblings that something was going to happen. It’s 1967, after graduating from high school I had gone to work for the city of Detroit. I was a stationary steamer apprentice. I worked in my neighborhood, literally on Jefferson and Junction.
GS: Moving back just a little bit, as far as growing up, what neighborhood did you say you lived in?
CS: Del Ray.
GS: Del Ray. Was that a very racially integrated neighborhood?
CS: Historically, yes. Even then, and as it is now, yes. It didn’t always feel like it, but it was. To play baseball in my neighborhood my uncle had to be conversant in three different languages. There was a church there, Holy Cross, where the priests had mass on Sunday in two different languages, and neither one was English. When I was a freshman in college, I tried to organize against what now became—what now is the Water Sewage Treatment program. We tried to organize against Urban Renewal to the extent that we were interested in stopping the imminent domain from depossessing residents of their properties to build the Water and Sewage Treatment program. What had happened was that there were a lot of people who spoke Polish and Hungarian as a first language and only language who were still living there, and the younger folks who were bilingual were getting better prices for their property under imminent domain, and we tried to organize with Father Jacobs—Father Jacobs was the priest at Holy Cross—to help the other people who didn’t speak English get better prices for the acquisition of their properties. It was an internal conflict and turmoil, so when I got to college, I was looking for people who could speak Polish and Hungarian to do that, which, of course, made me somewhat notorious at my campus, because there was this guy trying to influence people to volunteer in his neighborhood. Yes, the neighborhood was like that. It had always been that way. To some large part, it still is.
GS: Moving to the 60s, you said you heard some “rumblings.” Could you expand upon that a little more?
CS: Yeah, well, before I quit my job at the city, 1965, I had gone to some meetings where people were talking about not taking it anymore. What was interesting was that there were people who—I had gone to meetings with people who were interested in not taking it anymore and doing something about it. I remember guys being really highly upset about what was going on. By the same token, one of the guys I worked with had me go to another meeting, and they were the opposition to the people who were doing the other stuff. I’m an 18-year-old kid who’s sort of interested in civic affairs but somewhat unknowledgeable. So what I would do invariably, though, is a lot of reading. I’d read all the literature and see if I could figure out which side was I on, because it was very evident that there were different sides. There also was this precursor to Americore, which they called VISTA: Volunteers in Service to America. What that basically was was an avenue for some religious kids who were liberal in persuasion, some college kids who were looking to have summer jobs. They would come or join VISTA, it was either a summer experience or maybe even a year-long experience. They’d come and live in these areas and they were going to do good. It was like a domestic Peace Corp. Well, Delray is probably the lowest socioeconomic status by definition area in Detroit, so the VISTAs were located in my neighborhood, stationed there. Of course, it always intrigued me that there would be people coming in to help my neighborhood because it wasn’t like—well, it was my neighborhood! I considered myself their ambassador and guide, since they were coming there and they were going to help basically the extended neighborhood, which also is my extended family. When the VISTAs came, I would make myself known to them and we’d become friends. When these people came, we’d do that. We paled around with them. I remember it very well. I got taken to what turned out to be historical kind of event in Detroit. It was the Winter Soldier protest. Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland were at this place in midtown, which later became my actual church, but they were speaking. I remember going there because there was some VISTAs who actually lived there too. Since I wasn’t too much younger than most of the folks who had come to work in my neighborhood, I kind of palled around with them. By then, I’m working for the city, initially, and then I quit the city and went to college. Now we’re at the eve of the civil disturbance, which is what Romney called it. He did that for insurance reasons. It would depend on how the events were classified as to whether or not the people who had commercial losses would be indemnified or would get money. So if you called it a riot, then that was usually excluded from a commercial business, commercial insurance. So when Romney was asked about the events in Detroit, he said, “Oh, no, we had a civil disturbance,” which means then that the insurance companies had to pay the people for their losses. What things are called had a big impact on what was going to happen in the aftermath.
GS: Moving to the civil disturbance itself, where were you when you first heard about it?
CS: I was in college. I was going to summer school, taking a Latin-American history class. But I also was working for Protestant Community Services—back then, that was what it was called—in a program called Summer Weekend-Evening Entertainment Program, SWEEP. That basically was to avert civil disturbance. Obviously, that didn’t happen. But I was working with VISTAs, and it was sort of my summer job as I was going to college. The first night, ostensibly—and there are lots of different perspectives on how things happened—but ostensibly, on 12th Street, there was the shooting of a prostitute named Cynthia Scott at an after-hours bar. That was the spark. That’s one way of looking at it. To that point of view, one of the people who they interviewed as a consequence of that was a guy that I had gone to high school with. They were twin brothers, Charlie and Wilbur Marshall. Charlie Marshall I knew a little better than I did his twin brother. But it was his twin brother, I believe, who was a witness to the shooting. That was the spark and things sort of got out of control. Now another way of looking at the same event were some of the things that had been happening before then. Another perspective was the evolution of the police officers as a bargaining unit and as a political force. Police as—police organizing, or police department as a unit—much like the other organizations and unions in the Detroit area, organized labor—that was, at the time, that was beginning to happen in this country and it really did start in Detroit. The Detroit Police Officers Association was just beginning to formulate, and I think they had, Carl Parcell was the chief organizer. I don’t know that I could prove that there was a blue flu, but there was certainly a reduction in law enforcement as it related to dealing with, monitoring and preventing crime on the streets. Some folks might call it a blue flu, but everybody knew that folks were getting away with a lot. There was also a newspaper strike. The word on what was happening inside of Detroit was not good as far as communications were concerned. The then mayor, Jerome Cavanagh, had been elected primarily as a—it wasn’t exactly a fluke, but he had been elected and run against the power structure of Louis Miriani, who I guess subsequently may have spent some time in jail, even. They’re both Catholic, they’re both white. Cavanagh was running to represent truth and justice. Miriani was the old establishment. The setting was right for the police officers to actually do their organizing because the situation was fluid. It was a better time for them, I guess, to do it. Now, this happened, starting in Detroit, and was true all over the country in terms of policemen organizing. It’s difficult to say that people talk about looking back at it. Historically, sit-down strikes were an effective tool in organizing unions. Blue flus is still such a sensitive kind of a thing that you don’t say that to police who are shirking their duty.
GS: You were in college when you first heard about it, the civil disturbance starting. How were you reacting and how were the other people around you reacting?
CS: Well, I used to commute by bus to Mercy College. I couldn’t get there. First day, I kind of stayed in. When they called the National Guard, I don’t remember which day it was. I remember going on my porch and a guy came by on a jeep and on the jeep he had an anti-aircraft gun. I’m standing on my porch. This guy pointed the anti-aircraft gun at me and said, “Go back in the house.” I went back in the house. There’s nothing like having an anti-aircraft gun being pointed at you. So I went back in the house, but I decided that I was going to do something, from that point on. Because we already had the facility, I started to go to find out what kind of things happened. These folks that we were working with, with SWEEP, had meeting and went around the room, talking about things that were happening, and I can remember one of the guys that was involved in that program had been a civil rights worker. He and his wife had both been involved there and were looking at things and part of the stuff that I was supposed to do was keep the lid on and keep young people active during the course of that summer. We had pool tables, and we were running a pool program, doing all kinds of things to keep the lid on because folks were afraid that something was going to happen. Somebody else said, “Well, it happened in the area that we were working in, and we had our nose to the ground.” I decided that I was going to take on, as my running buddy, the guy who had been the civil rights worker. He was from Chicago and he and his first wife had gone south to Alabama to be involved in what was going on. She had gotten killed down there. Then he met his second wife. There was a whole kind of subculture in terms of people who had been involved in SNCC and had gone south from the Detroit area and were coming back. Those folks were generally about four or five years older than I was, so I missed the civil rights movement. That was terrible. So I had to be involved in something, so I was involved in this in terms of this stuff. The adventure was very high, my sense of adventure. We’re out there doing this stuff and I happened to be tagging along with the Scott B., was his name. We went to a house over on—I can’t remember exactly the address—but we were in the shadow of the seminary, Sacred Heart. In the grotto there they had a statue of a Madonna. We’re in there talking with this family. The family became kind of famous, and still are, sort of. One of the little boys—I say little boy, I was 20, 21, he must have been about 14—came in, him and his buddies had painted in that grotto the Madonna, which was cast, and they painted it black. He came in and he said, “We painted the statue black.” He was just sort of beaming, because it was his act of civil disobedience. There wasn’t much else going on with those folks involved in that kind of stuff because obviously the program that we were dealing with had not been successful in averting something. So the next thing that happened was that anybody who was caught on the streets was being picked up. They were putting rioters or suspected rioters or potential rioters or people who fit the general description, myself included, in jail. They put them in jail in Detroit and they put them in jail any place that they could put them.
GS: So you, yourself, were arrested?
CS: No, I wasn’t. But they were putting people in jail, and then I found out about the Detroit Defenders Association who were trying to get people out of jail. But there was another step between those, and that step was identifying and locating people who were picked up and put in jail, so we could notify their families. I joined. So I’m at the now deceased judge Claudia Morcum. Her name then was Shropsher. I guess she had married a couple of times. Her maiden name had been House, and her nephew and I had played football together at high school. He was one of the guys who was maybe a year, year and a half older than me, because I started high school fairly early. I was like 12. He might have been as much as 14 when we started high school. I’m not sure if he left high school to go and be involved in the civil rights movement, but he might have. I don’t know if he graduated with our class. In any event, this was his aunt. What we were doing was finding people, locating them, and then notifying their families. So they gave me something else to do during the riots. I did that. I met a guy two years later at a Midwest United Nations seminar, workshop. I couldn’t—his name just sort of hung with me. Then it dawned on me that he was from Sandusky, Ohio. He had gotten off a bus at the bus terminal in Detroit, been picked up, and transported to Milan, Michigan for incarceration. Because he was a suspect. There were people as far away as Milan. There were people—anywhere they could lock folks up, they were locking them up. Our job was to find them. That was my job during what was going on. I mentioned to you that the kids, the Hankerson boy, went and painted that Madonna black. Now, that was significant for three reasons: one reason was that the aftermath in terms of what happened was that there was an artist named Glanton Dowdell, and Glanton Dowdell did a portrait of a black Madonna. That was, you know, important because it was at that time a significant statement in terms of what was going on. The other reason, second reason was the Reverend Albert Cleage changed his name and renamed his church to Shrine of the Black Madonna. That’s two. But what I think is significant is that after the riots were over, in that grotto, the people—I guess it was Sacred Heart Seminary—went back and they repainted the Madonna white. Then they had some consciousness and they thought about the significance of the act, and then they went back and painted it black again. That was fairly significant, I thought. So those three things came out of that one event. Police Officers’ Association became POAM: Police Officer’s Association of America [Michigan]. Leadership nationally, in terms of police officers as an organized entity, that leadership came out of Detroit. I witnessed a parade down 12th Street that lasted an hour or maybe an hour and a half. I think the organization as called BCA: Black Construction Association. These were basically black contractors who said that they wanted to be part of the solution in terms of the rebuilding of not just 12th Street, but Detroit and any areas where there was stuff. That parade had a total media blackout. I mean, no television, no radio, no newspapers, no ethnic newspapers, no ethnic radio, no nothing. No one—I don’t know if you’ve heard this before—saw it. No one reported it. No one talked about it. If you hadn’t been there, you would never have known that any of this stuff had gone on. It was over. I went back to college, I got an Incomplete for my History of Latin America. The president of the school, who was a nun, asked me to take her and show her the area because she knew that I had been involved in it. So I did, and I took her to the Shrine of the Black Madonna. We went there and the kid that painted the Madonna is generally credited with being one of the founders of techno music. You know what I mean. His name is [unintelligible]. I think he’s the music director for one of the casinos here, in town. After that, they came up with New Detroit.
GS: All right. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
CS: No.
GS: All right, thank you for sitting down with me today.