WW: Hello, my name is William Winkel. Today is May 17, 2016. This is the interview of Dian Wilkins for the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. We are in Detroit, Michigan. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
DW: My pleasure. I’m really glad to do it.
WW: Could you start off by telling me when and where were you born?
DW: Yes, I was born in Highland Park, Michigan at Highland Park Hospital, which no longer exists. I was born in 1943.
WW: Where did you grow up?
DW: In Highland Park. Lived there, I went to school there my entire life, starting with kindergarten, high school and on through Highland Park Community College, which was one of the first community colleges in the country. It was free, which at that time was unheard of. It was actually called Highland Park Junior College, but it is now what we call community college.
WW: What did your parents do?
DW: My father worked in a factory and my mother was a stay-at-home mom.
WW: So you lived in Highland Park, did you travel to Detroit often, seeing how the city is in the middle of Detroit?
DW: Yes, you’re exactly right. Highland Park is right in the middle of Detroit, it is surrounded by Detroit. So yes, we did do to Detroit often. My mother would take me on the bus to J.L. Hudsons downtown. We’d have lunch there. We went to many different places in Detroit. So yes, we frequently went there. There were certain parks that we went to in Detroit and other events. We went to the Fox Theater, went to the other major theaters in the downtown loop. So yes, very special events were in Detroit and we went to some of those.
WW: Growing up in the 1950s and being in Highland Park and traveling to Detroit, did you notice any tension or anything else in the city?
DW: No, I didn’t. Highland Park was somewhat diverse, not real diverse but somewhat diverse, and my high school and grade schools there were African Americans, there were Arab Americans, Muslims and non-Muslims, very few Spanish, a couple Filipinos, but there were some diversity. I, as a child and a teenager, did not notice any tensions. There may have been but I did not notice any. When I speak to some of my former classmates in Highland Park that’s what they all remember but who knows, maybe people were feeling tensions but I did not notice any particular tensions in Highland Park at that time.
WW: Was your neighborhood integrated as well or just the schools?
DW: The neighborhood as well. The city was predominantly white. I would say of our high school, for example, maybe one fifth of the class was African American and maybe one tenth of the class was Arab American, mostly Muslim, and then a sprinkling of other nationalities. I happen to be Arab American myself and I did not notice any divisions or any problems or conflicts between the groups at that time. Incidentally, one interesting thing: the first mosque, the first Muslim mosque in the entire United States, was right there in Highland Park on Gerald Avenue.
WW: Very nice! I didn’t know that. What did you do after high school? Did you stay in the area?
DW: I went to Highland Park Junior College as it was called at the time. I went there for one or two years, I think for two years. I graduated from there and then I started at Wayne State University. I was still living in Highland Park, we had lived in several different areas in Highland Park and had moved around. At that time, I was living on Moss Avenue in Highland Park.
WW: What year is this? What year did you start Wayne?
DW: I don’t remember offhand. It was right after junior college; I’d have to do the math.
WW: So early 1960s?
DW: Yes, probably. I’d have to work out the math on that.
WW: Not to worry.
DW: So I went to Wayne State for my last two years. Right in that time I also got married and I left Highland Park and my husband and I moved to the Jeffries Projects. We were there for about five or six years until the riots and after the riots as well.
WW: At that time, was the Jeffries Projects integrated?
DW: In a sense it was integrated, in a sense not. Most of the projects were African American, but not all. There was some integration and some diversity. There were two buildings that were devoted to Wayne students and I lived in one of those because my husband and I were both going to Wayne, and those two buildings were very diverse and integrated. We had people from Africa, from all over the world, that were going to Wayne State plus people from Detroit – white, black, etc. – probably predominantly white, but there was certainly a great diversity as well.
WW: So it really wasn’t much of a culture shock for you, seeing as you coming from a not an extremely diverse but a diverse Highland Park?
DW: No, it seemed to fit in. Again, Highland Park was not as diverse as we would have liked but it was still diverse. The Jeffries Projects was somewhat diverse. But you’re right. It felt a little bit separate from the rest of the projects because we were the students – even though we were a diverse group, people from Africa, etc. – and I’ll have an interesting story about one gentleman from Africa and the heroic role he played during the disturbances. But it was a very comfortable place to live and we really enjoyed it. I used to walk to Wayne from the projects, walk to Wayne and back, even at night, so it was kind of a different time. It was considered somewhat risky to do that but that’s what a lot of us did.
WW: Are there any other stories you’d like to share before we move on to 1967, either from going to Wayne or from your time in the Jeffries Projects?
DW: One little thing I can see about the Jeffries Projects is that it was a very supportive and interesting environment. I thought we all had similar goals. We were all going to college and almost all at Wayne. Two buildings were set aside for Wayne students. We did a number of interesting things, at least interesting to me now. We started a food co-op and there was one other food co-op in the city. I believe it was the Cass Corridor Food Co-Op. We started one out of the Jeffries Projects and it was great. We finally even got enough money to hire a person to run it. We would have a team of people go to Eastern Market every Saturday morning. We would give them money and they would go buy big barrels of apples and potatoes and etc, etc. We’d bring it all to my apartment and we’d divide it up into bags and then people from the projects – not just the student buildings – but all over come and give us whatever it was, two dollars a bag, and they would just walk into my apartment, pay two dollars and take the bag of these mixed groceries, fruit and vegetable etc. Also we had a company bring in a milk machine, which was a little bit strange, but we wanted the kids to have access to milk. So, one milk company, one dairy company, put in a huge machine outside of our building and you would just put coins in it and you get a bottle of milk. That was there for years. We wanted to bring fresh produce and milk to everyone in the projects. We didn’t touch everyone but certainly a lot of people had access to it. That was kind of fun and interesting. From there, there were other co-ops that were started in the Detroit area.
WW: It’s amazing. You were still living at the Jeffries Projects in 1967?
DW: Yes.
WW: How did you first hear about what was going on?
DW: If I could backtrack one second – I probably moved to the Projects it must have been maybe like 1964, something like that; 1963, somewhere in the early sixties when I moved to the Projects with my husband.
WW: Where were you when you first heard about what was going on?
DW: By then we had two little children. We happened to be in Highland Park that afternoon at my mother’s for Sunday dinner – I think it was a Sunday – but for dinner. On the way back, my husband and I – we were divorced years later – but my husband and I and the two kids were driving from Highland Park on the John Lodge freeway to go back home to the Jeffries Projects. On the way, my husband noticed a lot of smoke on the right side of the road. He jokingly said, “Okay, honey, see I told you that’s the revolution. See honey, the revolution has started already!” We saw smoke and flames. We thought at that time it was just probably a random fire. So he joked about it was really the revolution. We got to the Projects and then we thought, “No, something is going on here.”
The smoke was very heavy. We walked up to our building and there was a woman out front. Her name was Rosemary. She said, “I’ve been kind of asked to be a contact person for this building and I want to tell you to go into your apartments. There is some kind of disturbance here. There’s fires being set and you need to be cautious.” We could see there was smoke all around. We went into the building. We went upstairs. We lived on the 13th floor. We could see out the window – fire. We could actually see flames. It was frightening and strange and if we left the windows open the smoke smell was too heavy. So we had to close the windows and put the kids to bed. All night we kinda tried to listen to the radio. We talked with our friends in the building. We saw the flames, and we knew by then that there was some kind of riot or disturbance or rebellion, or something happening. So it was a very scary night.
There was this gentleman from Africa. As I mentioned there were students from all over. This gentleman from Africa, who wore traditional dress, he stayed up all night. He said, “I’m gonna guard the building.” We didn’t know what was happening. So he set up a desk downstairs. He had a gun – I don’t know where he got a gun – but he had a gun. We didn’t ask him to do this. He said, “I’m going to sit here all night and I’ll just make sure nobody comes into this building.” He did that and he did that for the whole duration of the disturbance.
I don’t know if it was necessary or not, but he wanted to do that. The next day my husband and I went out in the car a little bit and we saw the tanks rolling in. It was an amazing site to be driving in your car, in your own neighborhood, and see army tanks rolling down the street with the guns or rifles, whatever those automatic things are, those big weapons out and poised and aimed. It was absolutely stunning. We decided that day that maybe we should take the kids and leave and go up north where my husband’s parents lived. So we jumped in the car and we drove five hours up to Alpena and we got to their house. As soon as we got there we said, “You know what? We made a mistake. Our home is down there, our friends are down there, my family is down there, the kids’ friends are down there, everything we know is down there. So we went to sleep. The next morning, early in the morning, we turned around, got in the car again, and drove right back to the projects. So we came in and saw that some of our other friends had left but a lot of people were still there. Again, we saw the tanks and the smoke and it was just unbelievable what was going on.
We did not think it was a race riot. We thought it was because unemployment and haves and have nots and some people were just fed up with the status quo. There was a lot of unfairness and a lot of unemployment at that time and a lot of racism. I vaguely remember that one of the triggers was a fight at an afterhours establishment but I’m now kind of unclear about it. I think an African American gentleman was shot and killed but I’m not sure. You probably know. So we thought it was some kind of rebellion. The Army tanks were there in force, the police presence, the Army presence was absolutely frightening. We became more afraid of them than what was going on because they had guns drawn, they had rifles drawn – it was very scary. From what we’d read in the paper, I believe what we read is that there were 43 people killed in that disturbance and I think maybe one law enforcement officer, I’m not sure. The great majority of the 43 people killed were just citizens and were killed by the National Guard. That’s what was deployed was the National Guard in addition to local police and other forces. The National Guard was there. These were young people, probably not trained that well – they had never experienced anything like this. I think they were too quick to shoot and did not have the background or training to really know how to diffuse situations. So they basically killed 42 or 43 people, some of them just innocent bystanders, some that were looting, some that had nothing to do with anything. So it was a very difficult and frightening time and people that lived in the Projects, we tried to ban together. That’s the way it was for whatever it was, three, four, five days until it finally settled down, so to speak.
WW: Your husband’s comment about the revolution is here, did the two of you sense growing tensions throughout the 1960s, especially regarding employment and the police and other matters like that, or was it just like an offhand quip?
DW: It was probably a combination of both. We were kind of political at the time. We were aware of unemployment. We were very saddened about the unemployment, saddened about some of the inequities in society, unhappy about some of the racism. So we had some of those feelings. I personally though did not sense that anything like this was going to happen. No, I was surprised and shocked at that. But we had both been aware of the issues and the problems. We were both a little politically active so we were aware of issues, aware of problems, but I personally was surprised that this happened. I did not expect that to happen. It wasn’t in my experience to even think about it.
WW: The causes for the disturbances you listed – do you remember if this is what caused it right off the bat or were they later revelations to you?
DW: No, we assumed it was because of inequities in society. I don’t think it was anything about Detroit particularly, those inequities were throughout the whole country. I think we assumed, we knew, it was about certain inequities. I don’t know if it was exactly racism, unemployment, economic inequity or what, but we knew that it was about injustice and inequity and unfairness that needed to be corrected.
WW: After you returned, did you stay at the Jeffries Projects?
DW: Yes, we just stayed in our home, at the apartment, on the 13th floor. Looking out the 13th floor windows you could see all the smoke and the flames. We saw the A&P near our house where we all shopped burning to the ground. One strange thing – maybe not so strange – some of the students that lived in our building and the next building were also looting. That was one of the activities that was going on. A lot of people were looting stores in addition to setting fires. There was a lot of anger, there was so much anger. There was a lot of burning and setting fire to stores. We read some things that said people felt angry at stores because they were denied credit or they couldn’t afford to buy the food and then looting started – people stealing food and stealing record players – back then there were record players – and TVs. There were some of the students also doing looting, a small minority, but we saw a few students bringing in TV sets and other things. Now the students, at least we were all in college, and had some hope for a good life and a hope for a job. So, I don’t think theirs was fueled by the same sort of inequity and anger, I don’t know. But we all had a lot of hope. We were working on BA degrees and advanced degrees so we had expectations of getting a halfway decent job. Some of us did, some of us didn’t, but still. Anyway, some of the students were bringing home TVs and looting as well. We were looking out that 13th floor window and watching people bringing stuff in, we couldn’t quite believe it. I think it lasted four days, five days, something like that – between 3-5 days. But yeah, we stayed at the Jeffries Projects in our apartments for the entire rest of the time.
WW: How did you see the disturbance effect the city? What did you think were the instant ramifications and long term ramifications?
DW: We did see a lot of effort at some point – I don’t remember how long this took – of civic minded people trying to right some of the inequities. I believe shortly after that is when an organization called New Detroit was formed. That brought community leaders together, working class people, wealthy people, corporate leaders, whatever, to try to set a new path – how do we make things better, how do address some of these inequities, how do we prevent this from happening again, how do we get to the core of the problem so people are not this angry and don’t feel disenfranchised, how do we enfranchise them. New Detroit is still around. I don’t hear about them as much but they are still around. For years they were very, very active like with training programs and certain income inequality programs, economic things, educational things. So that was one thing that came out of it. There were other organizations that I can’t remember that did start around there at that time. There was just more consciousness of, “Okay, what do we have to do to make things better?” Now, did things get tremendously better? No, probably not. But there were efforts made and some things got better. But even though Detroit is experiencing a resurgence right now and things in Midtown and Downtown are really developing, it’s very exciting and very wonderful, but there is still a lot of poverty in Detroit, schools are poor, schools still don’t have toilet paper, I mean there still are a lot of issues and problems that are still there.
WW: How long did you stay at the Jeffries Projects afterwards?
DW: I don’t remember exactly, maybe six months, something like that, eight months, ten months.
WW: Did you leave because your degree was completed or were you just wanting to get out of the Jeffries Projects?
DW: I don’t remember exactly why we left. I don’t think my degree was completed. I can’t remember about my husband – ex-husband, later we got a divorce. We moved from there six to eight months after the riots. We moved to Highland Park. My family was in Highland Park. I know we wanted to be closer to my family because they could babysit, that’s where I grew up, we knew people and we got a bigger place. The apartment at Jeffries was very small. It was very cheap but it was very small.
WW: Did the food co-op survive?
DW: It survived after I left. I don’t know when it finally closed. I don’t remember. But I am still friends with the person we hired to run it. I’ll have to ask him more about that.
WW: Definitely. You mentioned there is still a lot of poverty in the city still but you see Midtown and Downtown coming back. Do you have any other thoughts on how you feel the direction that the city is going or how 1967 affected the city?
DW: I mean, I see so much that is exciting that is happening in Detroit right now. I’m concerned about the neighborhoods and the schools. The schools just need so much help and we’re not getting it. So I am still concerned about poverty in Detroit, the school situation for children, and other issues. But a lot is being done and a lot is going on and it’s just very exciting to be in Downtown Detroit. A lot is happening.
WW: Would you like to share anything else?
DW: I think that is about it other than it was a very historic time, obviously, and I’m sort of glad I lived through it. I mean, I was part of history. That’s the way I feel now. We experienced a very historical time and we did see some good come out of it. Tragic that 43 people had to die. It was just an unbelievable experience to see your city taken over by armed tanks and guns and soldiers and National Guard. They were doing their job but I just feel there was either training missing or something because why did 43 people have to die.
WW: Thank you very much for sitting down with me today.
DW: I have one other thing to say.
WW: Oh yes!
DW: The people that were doing the looting or rioting or protesting, whatever you call it, they didn’t kill anybody. They weren’t out to injure anyone. They did loot and they took food and other goods but it was not about hurting anyone or killing anyone. That’s something that maybe is forgotten these days, that it wasn’t a hostile thing towards people. It was more of a hostile thing towards the economy and towards stores they couldn’t access. An eruption of anger, maybe misguided, maybe not – none of the rioters were out to kill anyone that we could tell or that we heard of. So for whatever that’s worth, I just thought I would throw that out there.
WW: No, definitely. Thank you very much!
DW: Thank you. This was very interesting.
In 1967 I was 23 years old, attending Wayne State University, married with a 1-year-old son and living in a highrise in the Jeffries Housing Project, reserved for WSU students, faculty and staff. I grew up in the all white Redford neighborhood, but graduated from Cass Tech where one semester I shared a jewelry table with Diana Ross (great school, great days.) Perhaps that very brief biography provides a context for understanding how my perception shaped my experiences during those hot July days in 1967.
Backgound notes:
In July of 1967 we were connected to the inner city community of Jeffries and beyond in a number of ways. There was a food co-op which shopped at Eastern Market every Saturday and had a milk dispenser installed in one of the buildings. We were actively involved in the 13th District of the Democratic Party. My son's father worked as a community organizer for the United Farm Workers.
Why a food co-op? The nearest supermarket was an A&P on Trumbull, a walkable distance from Jeffries. With a very large population being served, this was a very small store where the checkout lines were usually very, very long. One day we were so exasperated by the poor quality of the produce that we loaded up two bags and took it to the local District Office and showed it to the District Manager. It was truly appalling: slimy lettuce, tomatoes so old and soft they were flattened out instead of round, and cantaloupe covered in brown bruises. Even the district manager was appalled. As a follow-up, several of us went to meet with the store manager. As we were standing outside of his office, we noticed a memo from the District Manager posted on the employee's bulletin board: "Congratulations! Your store had the highest gross sales of any A&P in southeastern Michigan".
Police protection? One day we arrived back at our apartment to find a thief had broken into our apartment. A couple of neighbors from the same floor heard our commotion and immediately came over to help. We decided to hold him there until the police came. On the fourth call to 911, a full hour later, the officer said, "You still have him there?" After they finally came and took the guy away, the first thing the officer said before taking down the report, "What did you expect? What are you doing living here?"
July 1967:
While we heard gun fire in the distance, all was quiet in the Jeffries Housing Project. No one was outside during the day. At night there were armed personnel carriers driving up the freeway service drive, panning the buildings with the mounted cannons. ("Turn off the lights! For God's sake, don't light a cigarette!") We watched streams of tracer bullets lighting up the sky like the 4th of July.
One night word spread through the building that the A&P was burning. Cheers went up! We were unashamed to feel that they got what they deserved.
Afterward we found that the drugstore on Forest and 3rd was untouched. Why, you might wonder, would a fully stocked pharmacy and liquor supply remain untouched? We knew it was because the man who owned the store was unfailingly kind and respectful to all of his customers.
After a couple days of confinement, we decided to drive out to my mother-in-law's home. As we drove through Northville, we saw numbers of men walking around the streets with rifles and shotguns, apparently patrolling the area to fend off the invading hordes. That was so unnerving that, after a short visit, we decided to go back downtown where there was only the National Guard to contend with.
My son's father spent the remaining days helping to bring donated food and clothing from outlying areas back down to inner city collection and distribution sites.
Afterword:
In August or September of 1967 the Detroit Free Press published a summary of the 43 deaths that had occurred. Deaths by snipers? As I read over the descriptions, I found only one that could arguably be described as such: the white woman driving south on Woodward, passing the Algiers Motel. It is more likely the fact that she was hit by a random bullet fired from the Motel than by an intentional sniper. As I recall, every other death was from burns or falls or intended and stray National Guard and/or police firearms. Snipers from the black community? It didn't happen.
WW: Hello, today is August 3, 2017. 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, and I am sitting down with Melvin Dismukes. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
MD: No problem, glad to be here.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when you were born?
MD: My name is Melvin Dismukes, born in Birmingham, Alabama, 1942. Nice area that we set up right across from Vulcan there in Alabama, and I think the little area down below us was called Homewood. I was there until I moved here in 1948.
WW: What made your family come north?
MD: Things in Alabama was getting a little rough. I was always a little kid, there was very friendly, you know, got along with everybody. The area we lived in was on a hill, and I went down in the little bottom valley there and always played with the kids down there. The kids back in the forties, they were all white. Some people didn't appreciate me being there in the area, so most of the time after visiting some of the kids and their parents, right down to having dinner with some of them, I would get chased back up the hill to where I stayed at by some of the white teenagers that was in the area. They’d chase us up – they’d chase me up, at least – with a BB gun, and when I whistled and the cousins heard me coming back up the hill and knew what was happening, they got chased back down the hill with rocks. I had a cousin, he could knock the head right off a chicken. If Uncle Walt would come out and say, “I want that chicken right there,” and Johnny would throw a rock and hit that chicken right square in the head with the rock, that’s what we had for dinner, the chicken. [laughter]
WW: So, when you came up, came to the North, did you settle in Detroit?
MD: We settled in Detroit, not far from here. It was called Adelaide Street, right here at Woodward Avenue and Adelaide, and we were right off of John R, or we lived between John R and Brush. Big apartment building, I think we stayed on the fifth floor, and must have had about four bedrooms in the one unit that we stayed in. Real nice, real nice area, right across Hastings Street was the elementary school called Bishop, I went to Bishop Junior High School there for a while, until we moved from that area, but real nice neighborhood. We walked up to Woodward Avenue, we had every movie theater you could think of was up there, the Rialto, the Fox, and Colonial, all of them was there, and we’d go to the movies on the weekend, was basically what we did as kids, and right around the corner there on John R was a Chinese restaurant that we always, every weekend we definitely went in and shrimp fried rice and shrimp and stuff from the Chinese restaurant. So that area was beautiful, real nice, real nice area to live in. After that, we had maybe four families living in that apartment building, and everybody was moving in from Alabama, we had some people that moved in from Chicago, and then after we started getting established, we moved to the east side of Detroit. I moved to the east side of Detroit, where we lived on Baldwin Street. Baldwin was right off of Canfield, the next busy street would have been Mack Avenue. Went to, I think it was Myra Jones was the elementary school that I was in, I was still in elementary school, stayed there for quite a while, my mother and my other siblings, they moved to the Jeffries Projects, I stayed there with my grandmother, which I was in junior high school by the end, I went to Barbara Junior High School. One night, I ended up getting into a little hassle with some teenagers that had jumped one of my cousins. No one got hurt or nothing, but it was just a fact that a black kid fighting with some white kids creates problems, so when the police came through, they made a report on it, I don’t think there’s anything showing that it was a report made up on it, but they did tell my grandmother that I would have to move and stay with my mother; I couldn't stay there with her, cause she couldn't handle me, which I don’t understand that, because at the time while I stayed there with my grandmother, I worked at a little grocery store right there, Canfield and Townsend, had been working at that grocery store since I was about ten years old, packing groceries, stocking the shelves for them, so I was really no problem. I never got in any trouble as a kid, not much. After the police insisted that I move with my mother, I went over the stay with my mother at the Jeffries Projects as a teenager. By then, I had left Barbara Junior High, went to Jefferson Junior High, which was over there, right off of John C. Lodge and Selden. Went to Jefferson Junior High while I was there. I always was doing some type of work, always doing some type of work. Now I knew staying with my mother, I was told that if I wanted to continue to work, nobody in the neighborhood could know that I was working, because they were on set income, so if they income changed, they could either get thrown out or go up on the rent, which she couldn’t afford, so most of the time when I left the house, I was known as the preacher, because I was always dressed nice, I carried a little leather briefcase, and when people would ask me, “Where are you going?” I said, “On the way to church.” And every once in a while, I would give them a little scripture from the Bible, because as a kid I was a Jehovah’s Witness, which we sold Watchtower and Wait magazines and Bibles, right there at Hastings and Vernor Highway, that was before I-75 went through. So, I would give them a few scriptures, they never paid attention to it, so I would go to work. Worked at a little supermarket, I worked helping out there at the church, and would come home. Later in my life, still staying at the same place, I started running teenage dances at the little elementary schools; I ran the teenage dances there. Not long after that they built Wigle Recreation Center, so we moved from the elementary school to Wigle Recreation Center, where I ran teenage dances, roller skating, and we also handled basketball and baseball right there at Wigle, working with Miss Williams and Mr. Jackson, and we had another younger parks and recreation worker named Mr. Lee, and the people were very instrumental in keeping me straight and narrow. If I had any problems, as far as for fighting, because I was known as the preacher, they said, “You shouldn’t be fighting.” I had Willie Horton, your baseball player, he didn’t live in the Jeffries Projects, but he was always over there, and whenever we had teenage dances he was usually in the area, so if we had any problems with fights and they want to get them broke up, he just went out to the back and I whistled, and then I get Willie, Willie Horton, another kid named Herman Lee Winder, they would come over and break up any fights that we may have there. “You shouldn’t be fighting, Preacher,” so that’s pretty much it. After working with the baseball, I had a girls’ baseball team that I worked with, a boys’ baseball team, and I even worked with the basketball, some of the students there for basketball, even co-ed basketball, we had that also at the time, boxing, had taken boxing in the basement at Wigle Recreation Center, Emanuel Steward taught me to box, Willie Horton also boxed, but I was never a boxer because I kind of grew up with the judo, so if you punch me in the nose enough and I see blood, naturally would throw you and then start pounding on you, so that was pretty much it as to there. After leaving the Jeffries Projects, after leaving Jefferson Junior High School, I went to Northwestern High School, and I was at Northwestern for probably not even a year before one of my counselors, H.P. Brown, claimed that he had seen me cut in through one of the doors – we had a tunnel we had to go through to the lunchroom – he claimed he’d seen me cut in through that tunnel, and kicked me out of school, out of Northwestern, so I went from Northwestern to Chadsey, went over to Chadsey, where it threw me way behind when I went to Chadsey. Pretty nice, I’d taken mechanical drawing, I’d taken a workshop, so you learn pretty much a trade that time at Chadsey, and Chadsey was still the same way as Northwestern, kind of a mixed school. But at Chadsey, we’d taken driver’s training, I remember one of the kids, Speedy, Speedy and I had taken driver’s training at the same time, our driver’s training instructor, Mr. Dobie, also taught driver’s training, can’t remember which school it was at, one of the schools in the area, but he also did the mechanical drawings, so we worked with him, and as teenagers he would let us drive from school to school under his supervision, and so we always enjoyed that, really, really nice there. Some of their football players, Heywood, I can’t remember what his name was now, but Heywood was one of these guys that would take swimming with me, and he would take people and throw them into the pool all the time. So, one day he threw me into the pool – I can’t swim – so when I finally got out of the pool, he must have had me by a hundred and fifty pounds, because he was a big football player, I threw him into the pool, and he was struggling to get out of the pool. We finally got him out of the pool, and he said, “Man, why did you do that?” I said, “Why are you always throwing people in?” He said, “It’s just being fun, just being fun.” I said, “Well, it wasn’t fun to me,” because I can’t swim, and neither could he. After that, we became super nice friends, and they had a game there at Chadsey, always taking the new students, taking money from them. One day, we’re walking down the hallway, and one of the stilettos, there was the stilettos that was there, one of the stilettos popped a knife on me and wanted my lunch money. He had asked me for some more lunch money and I refused, and that’s when he popped the knife, and I took the knife from him and slapped him in the head with it, and then closed the knife back up. I was also into karate, judo, disarming people, and I guess he went and got a few of his friends, they come back and I guess they all was going to jump me, and one of the guys in the gang with him, I can’t remember what his name was now, he was a young white guy that went to Jefferson Junior High School with me, he said “Man, are you crazy,” he told all the guys, he said, “that’s the Preacher, you don’t mess with the preacher.” [laughter] That’s pretty much how my life went. Wherever I went, most of the people didn’t want to mess with me, because if they ever fought me, they knew that they were in for a fight. I never wanted to fight people, I was always a super nice guy, so that’s pretty much it as a junior high school. Volunteer work at the recreation center, there’s a write-up in the Michigan Chronicle about it, and I think Danielle, one of the book writers, she’s going to try to get me the information as to where I can go, I would like to get that article, I lost the article through the years.
WW: Are you talking about Professor McGuire? Danielle McGuire?
MD: Yes.
WW: We’re going to backtrack a little bit, ask you some questions to fill in the gaps. When you first came to the city, what was your first impression?
MD: My impression of the city was one beautiful place. It was definitely much better than the dirty red clay and the dust of Alabama. We didn’t have sidewalks like what they had here, the sidewalks and the walking the street and your merchants. The merchants was all super, super nice, there was a little bit, little hint of prejudice that just depended on where you went, and then at that age, you figured, you know, if it’s going to cause a problem to go into a place, you don’t even bother to go there, and I think that was mostly when I was in the Jeffries Projects, was where you were seeing the problems, because Third Street was a redneck area, and it just was a whole lot of restaurants and bars that would have the undesirables hung around outside, and they would create problems for the black kids that walk through, but other than that, I always thought Detroit was beautiful. The beautiful stores, the merchandise sitting outside the store, completely different than what I was used to.
WW: When you came north, were you expecting to face racism as you did in the South?
MD: Not really. The racism that we’d seen in the South was completely different than here. You see the racism in the South during the night. That’s when your KKK came out and you had the little nasty things. Most of the time during the day, they were always super nice. When I left Alabama, I guess they had a shooting on top of the hill, where the KKK had came up and decided to burn a cross on one of the houses up there at the top of the hill, and I guess the people in that area had had enough of it, and they opened fire on the KKK, and left a few of them up there on the hill until the FBI got up there that afternoon to unveil some of these bodies, and to show you the difference in it, one of the grocery store owners was one of the bodies that was there, along with a couple of the policemen that was there, and these policemen were always super nice to us during the day, you know. The grocery store owner would give us candy and pat you on the head all time, which none of us really liked, but then to find out that they were involved with the KKK, it was kind of hard to accept. But here in Detroit, it was just open. You go into a restaurant, and you could tell right away when you walked in that they didn’t want you there, you know, right down to if they served you anything, they would end up breaking the dishes when they went back to the kitchen and stuff like that. Other than that, it’s a big difference, big difference.
WW: Did you have any more run-ins with the Detroit Police Department after they said that you should leave your grandmother’s house?
MD: No, the next time I had a run-in with them would have been at Wigle Recreation Center. While we were there at Wigle, I walked in one day and the Big Four was there. Big Four harassed all of the kids in the neighborhood. They didn’t bother me because really, I was no threat to them. I didn’t get smart with them, I didn’t try to run from them, went about my business, so anyway, after walking into the Recreation Center, they were beating one of the young kids. Rotation Slim was beating the kid, and it was Rotation Slim because he had one kid glove that he put on when he decided that he wanted to whoop somebody. So, I asked him, “What’s going on?” He said, “This little shit,” which he didn’t say shit, he used the n-word, “is going to tell me what his name is.” I said his name is [Owatonna ?]. He said, “that’s what the little shit’s been trying to tell me.” That’s his name, [Owatonna]. So [Owatonna] had been telling him all that time that that was his name, but he never wanted to believe it, because [Owatonna] was a real light-skinned kid, but he was part Indian, and that was his name, [Owatonna]. Other than that, I never had any run-ins with them until ’67, that’s it.
WW: As you’re growing up throughout the 1950s and early sixties, are you picking up on changes that are going on in the city, as in like regarding the Civil Rights movement or anything else?
MD: Picking up on the civil rights movement, which really as a young teenager didn’t bother me that much. I did walk with Martin Luther King when he was here, which we had to, the ministers constantly told us, you got to be able to turn the other cheek if you’re going to go out there. And we just made a joke of it. Yep, you can only hit me twice, I’ll turn the other cheek, and after you hit that, I don’t know what’s going to end up happening. But you know, we went through it, it was all peaceful demonstrations, and the only problem we had I think was when we got downtown, close to Cobo Hall, we had a few people that was on the sidelines that was harassing us as we were going down, and it was kind of surprising to me that one of the motorcycle policemen, white guy, that was on the side. He read these guys the riot act, you know, which calmed them down right away, which some of the other areas which you had went through was like the policemen didn’t care. You know, they’d just sit back and let the people do whatever they want to do, as long as they didn’t come out and physically try to hurt someone. That’s pretty much it.
WW: Where did you go to high school?
MD: Went to Chadsey.
WW: After you graduated from high school, did you stay in the city?
MD: Yes, I still continued to stay in the city. I didn’t move out of the city until after the riots. I was working for a company called Miami Patio Stones; we made patio stones. The business actually started in our garage when we lived on Baldwin, and now they have a big business over on Shoemaker Street, so that’s where I was working, making $1.75 an hour. Good money. I always had, I think, a check each week, ran about $175, and I always $200 or $300 dollars on me as a kid, until one day, a guy came down from a construction company, and he said, “I see you here, you’re a pretty hard worker.” He said, “Why don’t you come down to Kaufmann and work with them?” I said okay, because things were beginning to slow up there for the summer, so I went down to Kaufmann, WJC Kaufmann, applied for the job, they give me the job, and I worked there. My first week after receiving my check, I went to the guys, said, “Wait a minute, you must have made a mistake on my check.” He says, “What do you mean?” I said, “Look at this, this check is over $500.” He said, “What do you expect, you’re making five dollars an hour.” I said, “Nobody pay five dollars an hour,” at that time, you know, cause every job I had worked on, I worked at Miami Patio Stones, a $1.75, worked at Boulevard General Hospital, they were only $1.50, one of my aunts got me the job there. So, it was just surprising to get paid that amount of money for what you were doing. While working there, I was on the job one day and they were welding anchors on a concrete angle iron so they could build, in the factories they always used the angle irons along the concrete, so they were building these things and they had most of the white guys that was there was trying to weld them. Our foreman Corky, Corky would come through with a sledgehammer and knock them off, so being the only black guy there, I’m laughing at them, and Corky come over. “What the hell are you laughing at?” I said, “I can’t believe they can’t weld that.” “Can you weld?” I said, “Yes, I can weld.” So, I went over, I welded the anchors on, he couldn't break them off. “Where in the hell you learn to weld at?” I said, “I did go to school, you know, Corky.” And after that, I became a welder, which pushed me into eventually going down and being certified. They sent all of the white welders down to be certified. Jim Folly, which was a mason that was very instrumental all the way through my life, Jim Folly came into the shop, and I was the only one working. He said, “What are you doing working?” I said, “Because nobody else showed up, so I’m working.” “They didn’t tell you what other guys went to.” I said, “No, nobody told me anything.” “You’re supposed to be downtown taking a test for certification as a certified welder.” I said, “Nobody mentioned it.” So Jim went upstairs and raised hell about it, and then the next day I went down taking the test as a certified welder. Passed the test, passed the welding test, the whole bit. At that time, that would have been back in the late fifties, there were only two Negroes in the whole state of Michigan that was certified as welders. I did iron work by Fabricated Steel, I went out to some jobs and I set steel. As long as I was in an area where nobody, none of the iron workers would see what we were doing, because they wouldn’t allow me to join the union. So after working about 13 years as a laborer getting iron worker’s rate, they told me, “Mel, you can join the union if you want to now.” I said, “Oh, they opened it up.” He said yeah. I said, “So what do I have to do?” “You have to take a pay cut from $15 and something an hour down to $5.50 for three years as an apprentice.” I said, “Are you kidding?” He said, “Yeah, that’s the way it go in the union.” I said, “I quit,” so I finally quit after that. So I worked for Sears, Roebuck, and Co., I worked for Sears at that time too, as a part time security agent, which I became a manager, I was manager with Sears, security manager for Sears for about 20 years, worked as a private investigator for about 13, 14 years with a company that we did mostly insurance fraud cases. The owner of the company, Jack, I can’t remember Jack’s last name, we had an expense account. I never used mine; I just did my work, because I didn’t have time to use the expense account because of working two or three jobs, so I would get my job done, and boom, back home to get some rest to get to the next job. One day, I guess Jack decided to use my expense account. We had a case that was going down in Monroe where I had to wine and dine one of the guys that we were investigating, had to wine and dine his sister to get information as to where he was working at. Found out he was working up at Kellogg Steel or someplace up in Chicago, so I got all that information, so I used the expense account, which threw him off, since I never used it, he used it, which threw him in the red on his account, so we had a big argument about it, and I quit. In the meantime, a bit prior to that, he was always asking me to become a partner with him, but every time you ask him about partnership, I said, “Okay, let me get an attorney to come in to look at your paperwork, and we’ll go from there.” He never could find the time, but we went to different places and we were able to get contracts with some of these places, and after that I had quit, and then finally I got a call back from him and he wanted me to come in to talk to him about starting back to work. I went in to work there to talk to him, secretary told me, “Only reason he wants you back here is because all of those places that you guys went to, he introduced you as a partner, so all the paperwork was sent back to you, it wasn’t sent back to him, because they wanted to deal with a minority on it.” So, he ended up losing a whole lot of those contracts because of it being that way.
WW: We’re going to backtrack a bit. You like, launched forward on me.
MD: [laughter] Sorry.
WW: Not a problem. Where were you working in ’67?
MD: ’67, I was working for WJC Kaufmann Construction Company, I was doing private investigation work, and I also worked for State Private Patrol, that’s the private police outfit. We patrolled Highland Park, we had a section of Highland Park, which was a real classy area at that time, whole lot of doctors and lawyers lived there. Our scout car that we drove was given to us by the Highland Park Police Department, because they appreciated us working in the area, saving them a whole lot of trouble. We also ran a scout car in what we called Conant Gardens, which was a very affluent area at that time, doctors and lawyers. Won’t believe it now when you look at it, but we patrolled a scout car there, and any time we had a problem in the area, Detroit never came into that area, unless we called for them, or if they looked down the street from Seven Mile and see our flasher going. If our flasher’s going, then they come down. But during the night, say from six o’clock on, you never see a Detroit car in that area unless we call for them. That was basically where I worked at then. Stayed pretty busy.
WW: So going into the week, well, going into that summer really, did you anticipate any outbreak of violence or anything coming?
MD: Yes. I worked at one of the supermarkets that we worked at private security also, Lenny’s Supermarket. Lenny’s Supermarket was located on Fourteenth Street and Davison. Right behind Lenny’s was a house that a whole lot of Black Panthers lived in that house. I was the only security agent that was working in that store that would stop the Black Panthers from doing anything. They would always say, “You’re just being an Uncle Tom. The other guy doesn't bother to stop us.” They’d come in, just pick up merchandise, and walk out. I said, “You’re not going to do that as long as I’m working here.” So I was constantly getting into fights with them, and I told Mr. Davis just prior to the riots, I said, “I can’t work in this store if I’m working by myself. I need somebody to cover my back.” And I couldn't get anyone else to come into the store and work with me, they can only afford one person in the room, in that store, but I did find out, because I used to do collections, and I told him, I said, “You know, you can put two people in here.” At the time, he was only paying us six dollars an hour, six dollars and fifty cents an hour. I said, “I’ve done the collections, and you’re making over $15 a person for working this store, so you can afford to put another person in there.” But he never would do it, so I had quit, and the Sunday prior to the riot, if you want to go forward, the Sunday prior to the riot, I had already quit that Friday or Saturday I’d quit that, and I’m sitting at home and sitting out on the front porch, and watching the neighbors keep carrying stuff into the house. “Damn,” I said, “they must have a sale going someplace on merchandise, because these guys are constantly coming in with merchandise.” Even with new cars, they pulled up in front of the house with new cars. And I finally got a phone call, I think it probably had to be about one o’clock, Mr. Davis called me and asked, “We need you to work tonight.” He said it’s a riot that broke out. I said, “I quit, I’m not working for you any longer.” And he said, “We’re part of the civil defense and we need every man that we can get, and we need you out there to work.” I said, “Okay, fine.” So, I got dressed and I drove into the Lenny’s Supermarket that was located over on Woodward Avenue, one block up from Virginia Park, I can’t remember what the name of the street is now, but I decided to work there, where I worked with two other officers that was there, I was a sergeant on outfit, so I was pretty much in charge. That night, the National Guard moved into the Great Lakes Building, which was across the street. Great Lakes Building at that time was a whole lot of offices, and they manufactured a whole lot of drugs in that building, so they had to make sure that they protected and made sure nobody broke into it and stole anything. First day went fine, second day, you know, went fine. We got a few curfew violators. You would call for curfew violators to get picked up if you got them. I think it was Monday, one of the lieutenants came through and asked me do I know anything about the bodies in the building up on Woodward Avenue and the Boulevard. And I didn’t know anything about it at the time, but then I started thinking, all the curfew violators were being booked at Belle Isle. I had one guy that we had stopped that took a gun off of him that was parked, it would have been north of the Great Lakes Building. I took the gun off the guy, we got into a little fight there, I had him handcuffed waiting for a scout car to pick him up. The first police officer that came there to pick him up, I’d run into the guy before but not like this. The police officer that came to pick him up had a shotgun. He’d taken a shotgun and shoved it in this kid’s mouth because the kid kept running off at the mouth. Knocked his teeth out, didn’t shoot him or nothing, just knocked his teeth out, and I made mention to him, “You know, he’s already handcuffed.” He said, “He’s going to learn a lesson.” You know, so I just left it alone. I’m private; he’s police. They take the curfew violators away, and thinking back at it, they were back in less than ten minutes in the area again. Later on that night, we stopped about six guys that was headed in from John R, this is after the curfew time. National Guard had him stopped there, and they were giving the National Guard a hard time, so I stepped out the store, and when I walked out the store, they began to call me a few names. One of the guys I was a little suspicious of because he’s wearing a jacket, and it was hot, you know, and finally the guy reached back, to the back of him, and I charged the guy and hit him and knocked the gun out of his hand, so that’s another one we caught with a gun. And right after that, I found out that the National Guard didn’t even have bullets in their guns anyway. They didn’t get bullets until Wednesday. So, with that incident, and same guy came to pick this curfew violator up, and he’d come right out the car, already policeman’s standing there, they’re not doing nothing, but when he pulled up in this car, he got out of the car, [imitates pow sound] right in the guy’s face with the shotgun, with the barrel of the shotgun, and began beating up the guy. I said, “You know what? This is not necessary. The guy’s already handcuffed, he’s no problem.” And same thing. “They’re going to learn that they’re going to have to just learn a lesson right here. They’re not supposed to be out here.” Left, same thing, back in less than ten minutes, and that’s when it started dawning on me. I said, “I am not sending any curfew violators in, because I know something is happening,” especially after the lieutenant talking about the bodies. That’s probably where all these kids are ending up at, in the basement, shot. So, I stopped sending curfew violators in, I started making people walk down the center of Woodward Avenue, when you get to your street, put your hands on your head. If you’re arrogant and wanted to be a real a--, then I made you take your shoes off, put your shoes on top of your head, and they walked till they got to their street. I said, “Once you get to your street, turn and go down your street, nobody’s going to bother you.” And the lieutenant said the same thing, he praised me for doing that. He said, “None of the guys were stopped, they just let them go, because they had their hands on their head.”
That Tuesday was when I was inside making myself a Salisbury steak like we normally ate when we were there. Put it on the warmer and made up the steak, and one of the guys came in and said that someone had shot at him. I went outside to find out what had happened. After getting outside there, you could hear gunfire coming from the area of the Algiers, Virginia Park area. National Guard showed up over there to find out what had happened on the corner, and they heard the shots also, so we started headed toward the Algiers, the other two guys that was working with me stayed at the store because we had to protect the store, needed somebody there. Went across the street to the Algiers, gunfire was still coming from the building, lots of gunfire, we couldn't tell where the gunfire was really coming from. One of the policemen that was in the area with us told us to take out the streetlights. I would say I had a rifle, I didn’t have a shotgun, so the guys with the shotgun took out the streetlights. I had one guy what I thought was a sniper, because I’d seen a flash from a window in the Algiers, it was up on, I think it was the second floor. I fired at that guy, I missed the guy, that’s the only shot I fired during the whole riot, second shot I fired with the rifle. Prior to that, I fired my first day on the job on Sunday, I fired the rifle to get some people off the streets, you know, and they wouldn't move, and they wanted to play the honky town thing, so fired the gun, the gun had never been fired before, so the barrel was full of oil, and when it went off, and there’s this dust you get flames coming out of it, and they hollered, “He’s got a flamethrower,” so they all turned around and started running. So, getting back to the Algiers, after shooting at the guy, the guy ducked, and didn’t have to fire my gun anymore after that. By the time I got into the hotel, I came in through the back door, I think one Officer Thomas from the National Guard must have went in from the front door, because I went in through the back door and I was the only one walking in. It was kind of like a maze when you walked in, you walked in through one doorway into a little room, then you went off to the side, you walked into another room, and then you went back to the other side, two, three more rooms until I finally got there, and it was dark in the rooms, no lights was on. After I got to the third room, that’s where I encountered one young man lying face-down with a knife close to his hand. Looking at his body, you could tell that all of this was blown away. There’s bone matter next to his body, and looked like the blood was already beginning to congeal, so that guy had been there for a while. My judgment at the time, I had been there for a while. After walking into the lobby, one of the policemen that was standing there, I asked him, I said, “What did he do? Try to cut someone?” And the police officer that was there, can’t remember who it was, he said, “Sarge, take a look in the back room,” so I walked into the back room. Before we get to the back room, the knife part was something which when you first started working security, and even some of the policemen was probably told the same, if you accidentally shot someone, make sure you had a pocketknife to drop it, so that was a thing when I thought about I’d seen, seeing the pocketknife, because they kind of smiled when I said it, and the guy said, “Sarge, take a look in the back room.” After getting into and going around the lobby, which people was already lined up in the lobby, what they were asking where was the guns, I walked past them, went around to the back room, and when I walked into the back room, there was one body, a teenager I’m assuming, there, and the teenager looked like he was sitting all the way at the back wall watching television, sitting at the side of the bed, and someone walked in shot him three times, boom boom boom, I assume with a .38. Went back out into the lobby after seeing that, I found out later that that guy was still alive, but I didn’t know that at the time, I walked back out into the lobby where they were questioning everyone about where are the guns. The two girls that was there, one of the girl’s dress was already ripped, so I don't know when that all happened, it was that way when I walked in the lobby. I had a confrontation with one of the guys there in the lobby, where I asked him to calm down, you know, just calm down so we can get out of this stuff. So eventually we end up, myself and one of the officers, Officer [Robert] Paille, we went upstairs, and they tell me with one of the guys from the wall went also, we went upstairs and searched the different rooms on the second floor and the third floor trying to find guns. Never was able to find anything. Went back downstairs and the officer that was in charge that was doing most of the telling of the other officers what they wanted to do, I told him, I said, “You know, there was no guns up there.” “Well, they’re going to tell us where the guns are at before we leave here.” I was in the lobby for a little while while that was going on, real violent. They had mentioned something about a broken shotgun, I never did see a broken shotgun there, never seen that, but while I was there, a shot rang out from outside, so that gave me an opportunity to leave the lobby, because it was a little uncomfortable for me, the things that was going on there. You know, they never used the n-word while I was there, you know, but you could hear it when you were upstairs, but once you got down to the lobby, things kind of calmed down a little bit when I walked down to the lobby. I left the building along with some of the National Guard, and we went to a home probably about three doors down from the annex of the Algiers, where the State Police had caught the sniper that was out there shooting, and they were dragging him out, and they drug him out, and dropped him on the lawn right in front of the house, so that the coroner would be able to pick up this kid real easy. So State Police must have got another call, because they all jumped in the car and took off right away. We turned, the National Guard and myself, we turned and headed back up toward the Algiers. Before we could get back up that way, gunfire broke out coming from Woodward Avenue coming toward us. We could tell it was coming toward us because we hit the ground, bullets were flying all around us. We melted, my little big ass shrinked four inches, you know, to try to keep from getting hit. Finally the gunfire stopped. We headed up toward Woodward Avenue, still looking, trying to see who’s doing the shooting. When we got up there, the only people there was the policemen that was standing in front of the Algiers, and asked them, “Who was doing the shooting?” They said they came out to try to find out who was doing the shooting. There was nobody there in the area but them, so someone from the Detroit Police Department did shoot at us that night, probably trying to take one Officer Thomas and I out because we may have seen too much happening in the building. Headed back toward the building, a gunshot I heard from inside of the building. Once I got back to the Algiers and talked to them about who was doing the shooting, I tried to reenter the building. They prevented me from reentering the building by every time I headed toward the door, one of the policemen or two of them would step in front of me blocking my pathway to get back into the building. So I finally seen what was happening, I said, “Okay, fine.” So we’d taken the two girls that was at there—
WW: Who’s we?
MD: One Officer Thomas and I, taking the two girls back over to their apartment, to where they were staying at in the main section of the Algiers, which would have been where the swimming pool and the dancing and all that other stuff was going on, and then we left and went on back, he went back to the Great Lakes Building, I went back to the store, and the next day—
WW: Not there yet, sorry. What condition were the girls in by the time you got them out of the hallway?
MD: One of the girls had blood on her head, which she had been cut, and her top was ripped, she had, I don’t know what kind of tank-like top, I guess that was ripped, and she’s trying to hold her clothes up on her, and the cut on her head, I don’t know how she got the cut on her head, it was that way when I first walked into the building, so other than that, they were just shocked as to having to go through all they went through, and we told them, they wanted to know whether they would be safe there. “You’re safe here, nobody’s going to come over here and bother you.” And like I said, went on back to my job, and the next day was when I found out. Next day—
WW: Not there yet. A couple more quick follow up questions. You mentioned that everyone was in the hallway by the time you entered the building. How long did you wait before you entered the Algiers?
MD: I would say within, from the time that I left the store, I would say that I was probably in the Algiers within 15 minutes from the shootings.
WW: Why did you leave the store?
MD: I left the store because the initial shots was at one of my men, and I wanted to try to find out who was shooting at him, and then getting up with the National Guard, and everybody was moving that way also to try to find out who’s doing the shooting.
WW: Okay, you can go to the next day.
MD: The next day, one of the lieutenants came through, and I think it was the same one that I always talked to during the night, and he asked did we know anything about the three bodies in the Algiers, and I said, “Three bodies?” I said, “I was there,” I said, “but there was only two bodies in the building.” And he said, “Oh no, it’s three bodies in there,” and then I started counting, I said, “I remember it was seven men and the two girls, and I did see the two girls go back to their apartment, and I could have sworn I’d seen seven guys, so I don’t know where the other body came from,” so that was pretty much it.
And later, I ended up getting called to go down to the police department and talk to them about it, so I’m thinking, okay, that’s nothing, just going to go down and tell them that all I seen was two bodies, I don’t know where the third body came from. So got down there, and one of the guys, the sergeant, Clifton Casey, was a sergeant I had worked with in the Tenth Precinct when I worked at the Twelfth Street Lenny’s Supermarket. I used to go down with him and his partner, his partner [unintelligible], shorter than Casey, and whenever we go down to the city on shoplifters there’s someone have to go and pick up the warrants. It’s not my job to pick up the warrants, but since Clifton Casey and his partner was always busy with the other young females that’s down at the courthouse, I always picked up the warrants, and when they finally got to court for the case, I had the warrants and everything for them. But after meeting Clifton Casey this night after the riots, he doesn't even know me. He don't know who I am, so I asked him could I make a phone call, I made a phone call, called my family to let them know where I was at, and I would be there in a little while. Later on during all of the interrogation with him about the three bodies there in the building, he’d tell me that they want me to stay until the FBI get there the following morning, they wanted to talk to me. I said, “Okay, fine.” So he had told one of the officers to book him and take him upstairs. One of the white sergeants that was there, he said, “What do you mean? You probably got prisoners up there when this guy is sent in, and he’s not going to go up there in lockup with those prisoners.” And I told him, I said, “Well, I’d like to make a phone call and try to get an attorney in here.” “Well, you made your phone call.” I said, “I didn't know that I was being charged for first-degree murder for three people.” That’s when I found it out. And the one sergeant, the white guy, he told me, “This is my f-ing desk, you sit here, you call whoever you have to call.” He said, “To hell with them, cause they’re trying to railroad you.” So I called my mother, and my mother got in touch with John Ira Jones. John Ira Jones was an attorney that handled all of the church affairs at St. John’s Church at Woodward Avenue and 75, so he was able to get in touch with a criminal attorney to come down to try to get me out of this. The next morning – I never went up to a cell, probably before daybreak, they sent me to the Fifteenth Precinct, which was Conner and Gratiot Avenue, sent me over there, where I went through the real hard interrogation. You had the guys really being total assholes, the way that they were acting, trying to get me to admit that I had killed the three teenagers that was there. Namely, he said, “Well, you carry a .38.” “Yes, I carry a .38. Everybody in there carried a .38.” At that time, the police issue was .38, so everybody carried a .38, and I never would admit to doing this. In the meantime, my attorney is trying to get to me, this had to be probably between eight and ten o’clock, they moved me from the Fifteenth Precinct to the Fifth Precinct, which was located over on Jefferson, pretty close to Conner, probably about eight blocks down from Conner, near the Jefferson plant over there, where they went through the same thing, the interrogation, I think that was the first time that I met anyone from the FBI was there at the Fifth Precinct, same thing, trying to get me to admit to killing the boys that was there, and I wouldn't admit to anything. I guess by then my attorney had finally tracked me down, and they had no choice but to take me down to 1300 Beaubien to the courthouse, where I was arraigned for first-degree murder.
Before they could start the arraignment, one of the prosecutors from upstairs came down, and he said, “Dismukes,” he said, “I want to put the name with the face,” and he told the judge that was there on the case, he said, “Your honor, there’s no way that I am going to pursue this case,” said, “I can go to my office and find records where this man should have killed the people that he found, that he brought in, they should have never let him get to the station, period, and now you’re going to tell me he killed three people for nothing.” He said, “No way. We’re not going to pursue this case,” so they dropped it. The prosecutor that was handling the case said that they had other charges against me. The charges they came up with a couple of days later was assault, assault on one of the boys, the one boy that I tried to calm down in the lobby, I guess now he’s charging me with assaulting him. I did hit him in the back, not the back of the head, I hit him in the back with the butt of the rifle, just pushed him back up against the wall to stop him from turning around and making it harder for himself. So after going to court on that to listen to all of the charges against me for the assault charge, I couldn't believe the stuff that I was supposed to have done to this young man, and I’m telling my attorney the same thing, and the doctor, they had a doctor, came in and testified that if he had been hit they way that he claimed that he was hit, and my rifle had a cushion on it, it wouldn’t have really hurt him that bad, so after the attorney talked to him for a while, and the attorney just told him, said, “Okay, we have no further questions of this doctor.” The doctor got off the stand and started heading out of the court, and he told him, “But Your Honor, I reserve the right to have him to sit in the lobby until I need to call him back to the stand again.” And the doctor had to sit there for two days before he called him back in. In the meantime, he talked to all the witnesses that supposedly was testifying against me, I had people that wasn’t in the Algiers, but yet they’d seen me the next day, and they claimed that my knuckles was all bloody from beating up people, et cetera. My knuckles was not bloody. After calling the doctor back to the stand, after a couple of days, my attorney told him, “So well seeing that no one wants to introduce the rifle that my client was carrying, I’m going to introduce the rifle.” So he’d taken the rifle out of evidence and taken it over near the jury stand, where the jury was sitting, and he’d taken it and dropped it on the little pedestal there, he just dropped the rifle on the pedestal, and the rifle sounded like a rock hitting the counter. Even the jury was startled when he did it, and the doctor kind of looked up kind of funny, and he asked the doctor again, he said, “Do you want to give your testimony again, as to you said your client wouldn’t have had that severe of a bruise if the rifle hadn’t had a cushion?” And he had the doctor feel the cushion? And the doctor felt the cushion, began to sweat, that part I had to laugh at because he was sweating so bad, and then the doctor changed his whole story. He said yes, if the young man was hit the way he claimed he was hit by me, his head would have ended up into the wall, which would have had damage from the front of the head and from the back of the head. I weighed 225 pounds, his head was six inches from not concrete, it was kind of a tile wall, but there was a heavy tile wall, all the old buildings had that in it, so there was no way that his head wouldn’t have hit that wall if I had hit him as hard as he was hit. The jury, once out, less than 15 minutes they were back with the verdict of not guilty on it, and we went from that to the conspiracy trials: conspiracy to violate people’s rights, conspiracy to murder, all of that, and it’s just hard to sit there with three policemen that you know was guilty of doing something there in the hotel, which they, [David] Senak, [Ronald] August, and Paille, they kind of admitted what happened in the building. So that was when I’d seen my first trial, the conspiracy trial, was the first time I’d seen pictures of the bodies, and that aggravated me even more, because the young man that I’d seen in that room was in the corner, like I said, shot three times. Now this young man has been drug from that corner to the foot of the bed, his body is flipped over, all of his chest is blown away to hide the fact, which they admitted in the back chambers that Ronald August shot this guy, so that must have been the first guy to run all his shots was with this .38. He thought that they were joking, and he went back there and actually, he thought they was serious about shooting the people, and he went back there and shot him. I kind of felt sorry for him a little bit, but then after seeing the way they mutilated that kid’s body, that was rough. Right next to him at the foot of the bed was the third body. There was only two bodies in that building, in that room, when I was there, so where the third body came from I have no idea, but he had also been shot with a shotgun. Not mutilated like the other, [Carl] Cooper, no, Cooper was the first body.
WW: [Fred] Temple was the body found in the room, and then [Aubrey] Pollard was—
MD: The one that was dropped in later.
WW: Who was killed by August because he didn’t know it was a “game”?
MD: Yeah, so after seeing that, that was when I realized that this was just not right, and then you got to sit there through all of these trials, you know, Mason, Michigan, Flint, Michigan, Detroit, and the federal court with these guys and you know, it’s very uncomfortable to sit there knowing that if they’re found guilty, you’re going to end up going to jail also. In two of the trials, I think it was Mason and also Flint, the jury had asked the prosecutor to take me out of it, if take me out of it, they would give them a verdict. Well, of course they wouldn't do it. Up in Flint, they went completely wild. Avery Weiswasser was the prosecutor there in Flint. Avery got me so mad I wanted to get up and hit him, but they went completely wild on trying to, after the jury asked them that, of trying to connect me to the case. Like I said, they had witnesses came in and these witnesses testified against as to what they had seen me do. I had never seen these people before in my life. When the attorneys was all done with them, we found out that the first time these people had ever seen me was the day that they were there in court, through a seven by eight window from the hallway where they looked in where one of the people from the prosecutor’s office pointed me out to them so that they would be able to come into the courtroom and testify that it was me. That was just a rough part of going through the trials and everything with them. My thing up in Mason, Michigan, they tell me Mason, Michigan was a prejudiced area, said it was a KKK area. I didn’t notice that when I was there. I walked the street, I had no trouble walking the streets, I went to different restaurants there, had no trouble. I had dinner at one of the restaurants right around the end of the trial, some people that I knew, mafia people that came up for the trial, and the last day of the trial they took me there for dinner, we were found not guilty. On the way back to Detroit, I drove the Mustang or something, I don’t know what I was driving now, but anyways, we stopped at the expressway, to enter the expressway to go down, one of the guys that was with me that had taken me to dinner stopped one of the State Policemen and asked him to block the entrance to the expressway for at least 10 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes until we got on the expressway to leave , and I looked at him and said, “You think he’s really going to do that?” He said, “Yeah, they’re going to do it.” So supposedly State Police blocked the exit so that nobody would come down, and the only way anyone could come down behind me, because they kind of feared someone would try to hurt me, on the way nobody could come down behind me, they had to drive a half hour up the other way to get onto the expressway, and we also had the same thing in Flint. The Black Panthers, I’d gotten into a fight with one of the Black Panthers down in the lobby having lunch, and he had said the same thing, he said that if we were found not guilty, they would kill us before we left the courtroom. So when George from the city found out about that, a few guys showed up there in Flint the last day of the trial, and walking down our way along with the federal marshals, and someone bumped me and I just thought that, oh no, this is it, and it turned out that it was Gino and some of the goons from the city, and the federal marshals turned around and they looked at him, these cats were all dressed nice, just like they were, and Gino or one of the other guys that told them, “You’re responsible for those guys; this man is our responsibility.” The marshals never questioned who they were or nothing, they just walked on. I never realized how much power those guys had until then, along with the Masons in Detroit, my case in Detroit where one of the Masons came in, he was there at most of the trials anyway, and he would pretty much tell me what was going to happen before the trial was even done, and then he came and apologized that the jury was taking so long to come back. He said, “They wanted to come back sooner, but they figured they better stay a little longer.” Said they had already made up their mind before the case was even done as to what the verdict was going to be. And then the other cases, like I said, the only verdict they would have got a guilty verdict if they had removed me from the case, and they wouldn’t remove me, so that was it. It just was rough having to go through the trial with them knowing they were guilty, especially Senak. Senak was the policeman that used to pick up the curfew violators and was very brutal with them, so I knew him prior to the Algiers, and then after seeing him there and his attitude continued there the way it did on the street.
WW: Did you continue to stay in Detroit afterwards?
MD: No, I would say within a year I had moved out of Detroit. I first moved out to Clinton Township where I worked at the Sears anyway. There in Clinton Township for a while, then moved from Clinton Township to Auburn Hills, and I retired from Sears, Roebuck, and Co. in 1988, and I was still staying in Auburn Hills. But after retiring from Sears, it was kind of a rough deal at Sears. Sears, I had a whole lot of problems there, racial. When I first went out to Sears, they had told me that I would have problems with the neighborhood people, because it’s a predominantly white area. I never really had a whole lot of trouble with the patrons that came in. My racial problems was in the building. Our store manager Mr. Cumberford, I probably shouldn't even talk about him, but he was a type of manager that, you know, no matter what I did, it wasn't good enough. He would try to compare me to the other stores as to how they’re doing things and how I’m doing things. I wasn't catching enough employees, et cetera, et cetera. My first year there at Sears, they had the personnel director to come in for human resources to talk to me because they said that I was doing nothing but firing minorities when I was there, and we sat down and went through the records of people, because I ain’t had pictures of the people that was fired. They had lost thirty-six employees – I started there in August and lost thirty-six employees by December – so after looking at the record, they found that there was only two minorities there. It was just anything they could do to get me out of the store, because it got to the point to where they were losing people, where they would tell me to watch you because you’re a black guy. Watch him because we think he’s stealing and they have a whole lot of shortages in that department, and I would sit there and watch him and just your mannerism was telling me that you really wasn’t doing anything wrong. So when you left your job, I’m still waiting there for whoever’s relieving you, so I find some way of watching this guy, and this guy just looked very suspicious to me, and then you sit there and you watch the guy. The first thing you do is go to the cash register and you pull money out, go get change and you could tell by the amount of money you pull out, that’s not the amount of change you brought back. And then finally I was able to get this guy to confess to embezzling about $12,000, and turns out that he was the son of one of the auditing managers there in the store, and all the employees that I was busting was employees that was well-known there in the store, very good friends with the store manager and predominantly white, you know, and I would catch them doing something wrong. Well, it would warrant them leaving. If you’re just a regular manager in the store, I can recommend firing you, because I suspend you, and then it’s up to human resources to do it. If you’re a staff member, like I was a staff member, I couldn't do anything to staff members, so any time I found a staff member doing something wrong, you would have to go to the store manager, and in this one case, this one staff member, I had him dead to rights as to what he did, but him and the store manager were real good friends. Somehow overnight, he produced receipts showing that this person had actually paid for the stuff. You know, okay, fine. No ring-up on the receipts, but they produced receipts.
WW: We’re going to backtrack a little bit. Given that you were shown so close to the police officers that were involved at the Algiers, did you receive any pushback from the community?
MD: My pushback from the community was that I was an Uncle Tom. Nobody wanted to believe that I was not guilty of – they believed that I was guilty of everything that the news media or the police department had accused me of. There was lots of threats against me. My mother, I think what saved my brothers and sisters, my siblings, was that my name was Dismukes, their name was Harvey. So, my mother told them never to mention, don’t mention my name, because she was also afraid of the same thing. I didn’t know until a few weeks ago, my mother even changed the way she used to dress. She was wearing kind of like a Muslim getup to hide the fact, because just in case somebody knew her and connected her to me. That was the biggest problem with the community. Nobody wanted to believe it. I did try to go to the Dexter Theater where they had conducted that mock trial of the police officers.
WW: It was going to be at the Dexter Theater, it was moved to the Shrine of Black Madonna.
MD: Okay, and the guys that was there, they told me I better get out of the area. But then I found out later that they didn't try me, they tried the picture of three of us. I was told there was a picture of all four of us there, except they only had the white police officers there, so that was pretty much it.
WW: Did you have any contact with the three Detroit police officers during the trial, or did you just show up to the courtroom together.
MD: We showed up at the courtroom not together, we just happened to be there in the chambers together, you know. And like I said, some of the talking, the first part of the trials, they did a little talking about what happened in the Algiers, but after that, nothing, I think. Everybody was just trying to get through it without being convicted. Paille, I have no idea what Paille did when he was in there, they said he did a few things, but Paille was like the little gentle giant. He was a real tall guy, big guy, but he was the one that was instrumental in going through the building helping me to look for guns, you know, and we wasn't able to find anything. Senak, there was no shock at all to what he did, and even prior to that, I mean, the people, they had admitted that he had killed, you know, yet he has never been charged with anything.
WW: Just a couple quick wrap-up questions. Multiple times throughout this interview you said “riot”. Is that how you view ’67?
MD: Not really. I view it more as a rebellion, because you had both black and white out there looting the stores, and they were all doing it together. I don’t know of any incidents where they had any fights of black on white or white on black, other than the policemen, that was the only one where there would have been the violence. I think it was kind of an equal opportunity for everybody, and then Detroit was like a powder keg at the time. You had a whole lot of the teenagers and adults, also, standing around on the street corners, and they’re out of work, and you could tell that any little thing was going to touch off something. I didn’t expect it to be a rebellion like that, but I thought that any little thing was going to make them mad and we may have problems. That was one of the reasons that I wanted to get out of the work that I was doing, because I could see that with the Panthers. The Panthers, they were just crazy, crazy.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
MD: No, that would be pretty much it. Just 50 years of going through all of this here, I’ve talked to the news media, I’ve constantly, every three to five years, somebody would get in touch with me and ask me about this, and they would leave the house and they would print something completely opposite as to what I had to say, and right now, I can’t remember the young man’s name that came to the house on the behalf of Kathryn Bigelow, and he talked to me, and I talked to him, and I told him, “You know, there’s no reason to even talk to you, because I did this for 50 years. Nobody ever said anything as to what I had to say, they printed just the opposite.” So, he had asked me, he said, “Would you mind if Kathryn Bigelow come out and talk to you?” I wondered who was Kathryn Bigelow, and he had to explain to me who Kathryn was, and she showed up a couple weeks later with her little entourage. She came in, the lady was very level-headed, she sat down at the table, played with my dog and cat, and she talked to me, and then every once in a while I’d say something, and she would go back to her notes, and she said, “You know, this was rumored, but nobody ever admitted to it.” I said, “I’ve been admitting to it for 50 years, and nobody ever printed it.” And when she was all done talking with me, she said, “I will assure you that the people will hear your story.” I guess that’s what started all of this. It was just hard for me to believe, although back in the sixties, a black person doing anything, you could find yourself in jail for the rest of your life, you know, and luckily I made it through that. I never got into a while lot of trouble, you know, and I was always respectful of the police, but there was a few of them out there that’s rogues, and you’ve probably still got them out there now that’s rogues, you know. I always ran with a whole lot of policemen: Dick Lear, Ron Davis, Ken Blue, all those guys, they were all friends of mine, so you know, so we went fishing together, and et cetera, et cetera. It was just hard to believe that you had some policemen out there that was just that rotten, you know, because these guys was just super nice, they would give you the shirt right off their back, you know, if they had to. When I was, back in the sixties, I’ve been married four times, so I ended up being in and out of court, child support a whole lot, and they were always there. “Melvin, since you’re parking downtown, we’ll take you down there,” and not thinking about it, but it was nice that you’re taking me down there, because by them going in the courtroom with me, I don't know what the judge was thinking, but my case was rushed right along, so that they could end up leaving with me, so they was always. Any place I went that there was a threat against me, one of them was there, you know. Right down to telling the people, “You want to meet Dismukes?” Here he is right here, and then usually people get up from the restaurant and leave. Not all policemen are bad, but we still got some rough ones out there, and I just happened to run with some good ones.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
MD: Okay, no problem.
WW: My name is William Winkel. Today is May 17, 2016 and I am sitting down with Susan Dodd for the 1967 Oral History Project. Thank you very much for sitting down with me today.
SD: You’re welcome.
WW: Can you please tell me where and when were you born?
SD: I was born on June 29,1943 in Chicago, IL and was raised in Chicago, IL.
W: When did you first come to the city of Detroit?
SD: I came to the city of Detroit in 1964 and I had married someone from Birmingham. I went to Michigan State University, and that’s how I ended up in Detroit instead of Chicago.
WW: Where did you live when you moved here?
SD: First we lived in Birmingham and then we became students at Wayne State University and moved into the Jeffries Project because two of the buildings in the Jeffries Projects were for married Wayne State students.
WW: And what year did you move into the Projects?
SD: 1966. In October of 1966.
WW: Was the building you moved into integrated?
SD: Oh yeah. It was for Wayne State University students.
WW: Growing up in Chicago and later at MSU were you growing up in integrated situations or was this a culture shock for you?
SD: My parents had a full-time hired woman living with us who was Afro-American so I grew up in that situation. I could take the bus and take the subway anywhere in Chicago. I thought I was very sophisticated with living in an integrated environment because Chicago in many ways if you’re traveling around as a kid, it was integrated, even though it wasn’t. Because of where they lived and I could ride my bike to the Museum of Science and Industry and was very, very independent, I went through black neighborhoods. Did I have any friends that were Afro-American, no. We had, I’m embarrassed to say, a full-time woman living there.
WW: What was your first impression of the city of Detroit?
SD: I was shocked that there wasn’t any public transportation because we only had one car and that was for grocery shopping and taking vacations. Other than that we always used public transportation: the subway, the El, busses. And so it was shocking that I couldn’t get anywhere so that was first, and still remains the major impression, that you can’t get anywhere. By eight years old I was riding the busses myself. And it wasn’t as complex or as interesting as Chicago. That was my first impression. I’m not a hater of Detroit, but I do love Chicago.
WW: Don’t worry. When you were spending time in Birmingham and then moved to Detroit was that a weird shift for you?
SD: No. I liked living in the city. I preferred living in the city because, again, I was able to take my kids to the DIA, we could walk downtown because J.L. Hudson’s was downtown. They used to have concerts there. We had a lot more freedom living in the city. No, I loved living in the city. I still would prefer living in the city. We went to puppet shows, I’m very familiar with the Historical Museum, the library. We used the city and we used Eastern Market and we used Hamtramck. I prefer this location.
WW: When you moved into the Jeffries Projects in ’66, did you notice any tension in the city? You were new, but did you notice if there was any community tension?
SD: No, I walked everywhere with my kids. I walked with baby buggies, two strollers, rather. We went everywhere. What I was unfamiliar with was “pussy” was written on all the walls and I didn’t know what that was and I said to some people I met, “Gee, this girl must very popular,” and they laughed and they teased me and they told me what pussy was. And the other shocking thing was I wasn’t familiar with so-called “Rednecks” that lived on Cass Corridor. So the students sort of informed me because they would verbally say things to you when you were walking down Cass Corridor and I did not know about them but other than that, no, I didn’t notice any tension in the city. What I did notice right away that the grocery stores were horrible and there was nothing I would buy from them and finding a good drug store, which I did find on the corner of Warren and Third. I had a baby on formula and I had bought expired Enfamil from a drug store that was down the street and so I started to get very, very, very particular about where I shopped so I ended up shopping either in Eastern Market or they had a grocery store in Lafayette Park, an A&P, and I would drive over there but you would need a car. What they sold at the local A&P on Trumbull, I wouldn’t feed it to my family. And that was shocking. I thought I was pretty sophisticated and it was very shocking to find that the stores and what was available wasn’t really—to purchase expired Enfamil is dangerous for a baby. To find that, that was shocking. The fact that you couldn’t shop anywhere. This was a desert in terms of shopping and if you didn’t have a car, you really were pretty messed up.
WW: During this time were you a full time student at Wayne State?
SD: No, my husband was.
WW: Oh, okay. You were just a stay-at-home mom?
SD: And I substitute taught in the Detroit Schools.
WW: Which schools?
SD: I subbed all over the city. Spain Elementary. There were a lot more schools then but I subbed all over the city and was comfortable subbing all over the city.
WW: During this time, a lot of the schools were still one race. Did you substitute teach at white schools and integrated schools, too?
SD: No, primarily Afro-American schools. I also taught at Wayne County Community College for ten years part time and that was 100% Afro-American students.
WW: And this was before 1967 or just after?
SD: No, that was just after when they first opened up the Community College system.
WW: Okay. Going into 1967, you were still living at the Jeffries Projects, right?
SD: Mm-hmm, and subbing three times a week.
WW: Were you taking part of the food co-op that was there?
SD: We helped to form the food co-op, yeah. And people signed up to do the shopping so I signed up once a month in the morning at Eastern Market and then we had the milk co-op where we had a milk machine brought in so that people could buy fresh milk. And then we had the nursery school co-op where parents had to work in the nursery school and it was well equipped in the basement so kids had nursery school experience. My kids didn’t like it so we didn’t go, but we did love the food co-op. Having the milk machine was great because we were able to get fresh milk. The issue of food was a big issue.
WW: So going into 1967, how did you first hear about what was going on?
SD: I was real comfortable living in the city so I had a blow-up swimming pool and the kids and I were sitting in front of the project. I was tanning and they were swimming and we saw the smoke coming from over where it started and we didn’t know anything about it. Went back in the building at around six o’clock at night and my in-laws called to tell me about it, that they were rioting on Thirteenth. Was it Thirteenth?
WW: Twelfth.
SD: Twelfth. I used to work on fourteenth. So we said, well I could see the smoke but that was it. That’s how I found out. They called, they were concerned; we weren’t.
WW: Going through that week did you have any experiences or did you just continue to stay at the Jeffries Projects?
SD: Well, we were sort of locked in. They sort of locked down the city. We really couldn’t leave so mainly we just stayed in the apartment. We didn’t really go anywhere.
WW: And you just continued to see the different damage across the city with fires and smoke and stuff?
SD: Well, I think the third day the National Guard came in because I think the first three days they didn’t do anything and then they brought in the National Guard. By not doing anything I mean they didn’t bring in the army. Once they brought in the National Guard it got a little more serious because they were kind of scary because all of a sudden we had tanks running around, and there were helicopters and tanks and people with guns, meaning the National Guard. Other than that, the whole building applauded when the A&P got burned town. There was selection in what people were selecting to destroy and it was definitely stores that ripped off people, like the really good drug store wasn’t touched, Georgiona’s Party Store wasn’t touched but the stores that ripped off people were. And then Famous Furniture was in the middle of the projects and that went up in flames and then we saw obviously suburbanites, though friends of mine have argued with me on the subject, obvious white people who were middle class driving down to raid Famous Furniture also. It wasn’t just a black operation. We saw suburbanites. I mean, you don’t come down to Detroit in the middle of a so-called riot in a convertible heading over the Famous Furniture and you’re all white to loot furniture. And what was great about that was all this furniture got looted so people threw out antiques so we would walk up and down the allies and pick up the antiques and redo them because they wanted the new furniture. But that was a big fire. Yeah, mainly we just watched what was going on, but when the National Guard came in it got a little more serious. I didn’t feel threatened at all until the National Guard came in because then you didn’t know if someone was, say, shooting at that them, if that happened, would they open fire on us? So then we put a mattress up in front of the window at night.
WW: Were you more concerned about the actions of the National Guard than you were the looters?
SD: Yeah, absolutely. The National Guard had big weapons and they had tanks and it was intimidating. I believe they did kill some people up on Grand Boulevard, and I think that that made it a more – I understand people wanting to protect their property. I was trying to remember how it started. The police had raided an after hours party, and I believe some people got hurt and that’s how it started. I didn’t think it was – I think that the city decided to protect the property of others and brought in the National Guard.
WW: Going back, when were you and your husband collecting the antiques from the ally? Was it during that week or after?
SD: After, after. Because I was a walker and I walked all over the place and I said to him, I said, “Oh my god, you should see this dresser. People are throwing stuff out.” So we went and got it and refinished it. People who thought they had junk and had gotten new stuff were throwing it out. I walked the allies. The allies are beautiful in Detroit. I walked. I’m still walker. I can walk five miles a day. Just walking around, saw the stuff, sent him to pick it up. That was our routine.
WW: So how did you finish out that week? You said that as you increasingly got uncomfortable you placed the mattress on the window. Did you just hunker down during that period?
SD: Toward the end of the week, I think the last two days, we went out and stayed with his parents because we’d been in the house nonstop. We had two little kids and we drove out and stayed with his parents.
WW: In Birmingham?
SD: No, they lived in, I think at that point they lived in Dearborn.
WW: Okay.
SD: They had an extra bedroom and we just stayed there. Staying in was a lot of work, though then we came back as soon as the – we came back because he was working, too, and we came back the beginning of the following week because then they allowed people to go out so we came back. He was working but he couldn’t work during that period, either. You really weren’t allowed to go anywhere.
WW: What was it like coming back to the city from Dearborn seeing all the devastation as you were driving in?
SD: I didn’t notice any devastation.
WW: Oh, you didn’t?
SD: We took the expressway in, so we wouldn’t have noticed any devastation. The area where the A&P was, that was only two blocks of shops and the other area we shopped at over on Warren and Forest and Third, that area wasn’t touched so we really didn’t see other than Famous Furniture. What we did get involved with was, of course, the rehousing of people. A lot of people lost their houses and that was a bigger problem. We didn’t drive around. We weren’t interested. We weren’t that curious.
WW: Okay.
SD: I think housing was a bigger issue. I mean, the business that were, they were not – The A&P needed to go, and the ice cream shop stayed. Over where we were there wasn’t a whole lot, I didn’t think, because after the riot, they had to move people that were displaced into the projects and into our buildings, too, and it was kind of a rough group so we moved out and we moved over in about November to Commonwealth and Trumbull area, back in there. We didn’t see anything burned out. But as they moved people in who had lost their housing, it was a pretty rough group and the people who lived above us would get up maybe about one in the afternoon and be up all night listening and dancing to “I Heard it Through the Grapevine.” Now, I was a little naïve then, so I sent my husband up to ask them to turn it down because the Projects themselves didn’t deal with those issues. And he came back down and he said, “That guy had a knife. I’m not doing that.” So we just found different housing. But that was a problem afterwards because they were up all night.
WW: How long did you continue to stay in the city afterward because you spoke about how you began working at Wayne County Community College? Did you continue to stay in the city?
SD: We stayed in the city until Lisa was twelve and she was born in 1964. 1976. The kids went to Frenn School. The schools were the bigger problem with staying in the city. We got divorced, so I moved to Birmingham to keep my kids in a good school system. Basically, that’s how it rolled.
WW: Did you continue to do work in the city after that or did you primarily relocate to Birmingham?
SD: No, I continued to teach one night a week at WC3 and I had to work full-time. I went to work for the Head Start program in Oakland County.
WW: Okay. How do you interpret what happened during that week? Do you see it as a riot or a rebellion or a shade in between?
SD: First of all, it was going on all over the country so you don’t know how that affected people like copycat murders. I’ve wondered about that. It was a frustrating time for low-income—I’ve worked with low-income all my life and the cycle of poverty and that’s real. I think that disenfranchised people have—I think it was a combination of factors, that it was going on in other cities. They had Watts, they had New Jersey, New York, Chicago, da da da da da. And there was at that point a fair amount of unemployment in Detroit. Tasty Bread had closed down and I noticed it, the unemployment had increased. And I think that people were frustrated. The police were a real problem back then. They had big guns and they would chase people, this was a big complaint, they would chase perpetrators down the street and children would be playing and they had these huge rifles and they would shoot at them while children were playing on the street. The police were a big issue then. Police brutality, profiling, so to speak, was a big issue. I think that was probably a bigger issue and the frustration of the cycle of poverty. I was involved in politics of the time, also, and went door to door, and the people who were poor were poor and they didn’t have transportation and they were stuck in bad housing, bad grocery stores. They could get medical care because we were on a medical care plan that the United States had put forth and they had targeted that area so everybody in at least the Jeffries Project area, was able to get this medical care out of Children’s. I wasn’t a rioter. I lived there. I can’t tell you why it happened. I don’t know.
WW: Okay.
SD: Other than it was happening everywhere and I certainly don’t know the level of frustration that someone would have. It’s looking again, when you look at the Bernie Sanders and the Trump stuff and you’re seeing people who are disenfranchised, who are pretty beaten down now, so I don’t think people were as beaten down then but they thought—you had Eldridge Cleaver, you had a lot of people talking about the independence of black people. Making your own community. Making decisions for your community. So I think it was more about that. People were feeling frustrated with the police, brutality was a very big deal back then.
WW: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
SD: Only that that we stayed in Detroit, rode our bikes everywhere, walked everywhere after the riot and never felt threated. Lived in, back then Commonwealth and Trumbull was primarily a black community, did not feel threatened. My neighbors were wonderful; I had babysitters from the community, never felt threatened. Today is different. I’m still comfortable roaming in Detroit but there is an edge. It’s much different than it was fifty years ago. I don’t believe that there was the racial edge. I taught in all black schools and it was much different than it is today. I’m still comfortable walking around but I used to walk back from Wayne at night to the Jeffries Projects and I was comfortable. Didn’t feel uncomfortable. I think that the temperament has changed and the feeling that you can do better is gone. That cycle of poverty that I talked about has now gone through four or five generations and it’s really not fair. I will tell you a little story. When I worked in a school district in Berkley and we did English as a Second Language and about fifteen years ago we had the Russian immigrants coming in and the Jewish community got the immigrants really nice apartments, a car, clothing, furnished the apartments, and got them into ESL programs in Berkley or in areas that had good school districts for their children and my thought was if we could do that for everyone in the United States that was poor. Give them a good apartment, give them clothing, give them a car and give them access to a good education, we probably would be able to break the cycle of poverty and I was really annoyed about that. You can tell, I was real annoyed that we have never done that and that was given to people that were immigrating into our country.
WW: Final question: how do you feel about the state of the city today?
SD: I think that it’s booming downtown but I like to take the side roads, like I took Warren down from Grosse Pointe a couple weeks ago just to see what was going on and I think it’s real sad that we have all these vacant lots and all these houses that have been destroyed and that I don’t know where people have moved to. A friend of mine from California asked me about the Jeffries Project and I said, “Well they’re gone. Good question, where did those people go?” Where did the people go? Where are the people that were living there? I have mixed feelings about the city. I use the city. I think that it’s a city for wealthy people to use. What we’ve got now are sports arenas, restaurants, the DSO which is great, but we still have never, ever, ever addressed the inequality of people that don’t have anything. That’s never been addressed. It’s never been addressed by this city. I would love to see it be addressed.
WW: Well, thank you very much for sitting down with me today.
SD: I hope I answered some questions.
WW: Hello, today is August 30, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This is the interview of Wayne Rudolph Davidson. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, sir.
WD: Thank you, sir. Appreciate the opportunity to be here.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
WD: I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1951. I was born at Trumbull Hospital. Trumbull Hospital was located—and is still located, but—the building is still there, but the hospital is no longer operating—off of Trumbull Avenue, and not too far from what was called Tiger Stadium, or where Tiger Stadium was, on Michigan and Trumbull. The Jeffries Projects were not too far—maybe a block or two over—but were being created at the time that I was born.
In 1951 that hospital was not a segregated hospital. It was a—blacks could come there and have their babies. Typically, before that time, I believe you had to have—there were a lot of midwives at that time. So my mother was pretty industrious, pretty aware person, so that's probably why we ended up there at Trumbull Hospital. So—
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in, in Detroit?
WD: I grew up in several neighborhoods. When I was a little kid, I can remember we lived on—not too far from here, this location—on Palmer and John R area. And I can remember—this would have been an apartment that my mother and father had by themselves, because when they came here, they had to live with relatives. And so I learned from my own research that that was the typical thing that somebody from the South would do. I probably need to bring that to your attention, that my parents were both—my father was from Kentucky and my mother was from Tennessee, and they met in Louisville, Kentucky, in the Negro Migration, and they moved up here, following the jobs. And so my father—my mother and father got here in 1950. The Fourth of July—that's what he'll tell you. He's still alive. He'll say "We got here on the Fourth of July and we went straight to a barbecue," you know, on the bus. And my mother was pregnant at the time, and so she's also athletic, and I think because of her athleticness, she lost the first baby. I would have been the second, but so—
So I remember a home on John R, Palmer and John R area, because as a little kid I would walk outside, or somebody would walk me outside, and I saw these cars, and I could remember these big, giant cars, you know, these shapes. I guess I probably would have been about two, three, or four, you know, a little kid coming outside with the parents, looking around, so I remember that scene sort of vividly. And then, subsequently, my brothers were born. Glen was born in '52 and Bobby was born in '53. And so I believe at that time we moved from that area down to southwest Detroit, a place called South Patricia Street. Right now, that house is still there. But at the time, I remember my brothers and I being in the yard and we'd be playing, and there was a yard—we had a dog—some sort of a dog—but the significant thing at that time was the freeway was being built. I-75 was being built. That house sits abrupt to where the freeway over in the Shafer area. And I can remember hearing a lot of noise and hearing a lot of heavy work and so that probably would have been about '54, '55, '56 timeframe.
So I think my father had bought the house—but I think somehow he may have lost the house, because at that time, blacks could not get loans from the banks so what happened was, he probably bought the house through what you call a contract—
WW: A land contract?
WD: A land contract, and probably didn't make the payment, so at some point, lost the house, because I know that's always been a—you could always sense at my household that's been a sore subject between my mother and my father. They sort of didn't talk about that a lot. If you asked questions about it then you'd sort of be put off.
So I believe after that, around '56, we moved from South Patricia to the Jeffries Projects. Now the Jeffries Projects went up earlier, in the mid-Fifties, part of urban renewal. I don't remember what floor we stayed on, but it was one of those things that you got in the elevator just like we get into an elevator to your office, and for little kids, it was a little exciting going up maybe five or six floors. I think the Jeffries Projects were at least 12 floors, I believe. So that was pretty interesting living there, except for on occasions, as the Jeffries Projects got older then the maintenance went down. So one of the warnings that we got as little kids was, "Be careful going into the elevator, because the elevator may not be there." And, you know, I know at least that I can recall, one occasion that some young kid pushed for the elevator and fell down. And fell down to the—because the elevator was not there.
So, those three places were the most vivid. And the southwest component always stuck out in my mind because my—even though my parents may have lost that house, my aunt lived not too far on Beatrice Street, and we would leave either our house on Patricia Street or the Jeffries Projects, and we would go there for Halloween and for special occasions, because I can remember having barbecues and the families would be there. And they'd be talking—this was my mother's side, so they would be talking about the family down all over Tennessee, and whether you were a Shirley or a Cheshire, you know, because they had two different fathers. So that sort of would be part of the discussion.
And we played baseball. We had a lot of room in Southwest Detroit, whereas compared to coming to the Jeffries, the room was, you were living more in a box. Matter of fact, this, your office, maybe if we tore down that wall a little bit, would really add up to being what the apartment size was in the Jeffries Projects. But on Patricia Street we played. We were out in the yard, playing with the dog. We had a lot of sunlight, and you had more room to run around. Whereas in the Jeffries Projects, where you had a lot of people living in a vertical unit, and you'd come down to get out of the—you didn't have—I don't recall having air conditioning. So in the summer you had to come down and sit. A lot of the ladies, the mothers would be sitting with their children in those areas. There were little small parks. But it was not as free, I would say, as having your own place and running around. So, I remember those places vividly. Southwest Detroit I remember because we went Halloween, going to get Halloween candy. There was a lot of—you know, you'd go and get an abundance of Halloween candy. That whole area was like wow. We couldn't wait for Halloween.
WW: The neighborhoods you grew up in, were they integrated?
WD: I know that—I don't think that question was one of the issues at the time, but I think—I don't think—I think Southwest Detroit was integrated with Hispanic people. I don't recall that ever being an issue of—I know that we had to—my parents were always saying, "We can't go here, can't go there." But I really can't define those neighborhoods—the Southwest Detroit neighborhood as being—I know that Hispanic people did grow up in those southwest neighborhoods. Anglos I don't—I can't recall.
WW: Okay.
WD: So—
WW: What did your mother and father do for a living?
WD: My mother was a homemaker, and she later—later she was educated. My mother had—she was trained. She went to school at Lane College in Tennessee—Jackson, Tennessee—and she was trained to be—at that time, they could only be homemakers. They would learn duties of taking care of other folks' homes, and my—she did not work every day. She worked periodically. So she spent most of her time being a mother and a homemaker.
My father, he came from Barren County, Kentucky. He was a laborer. He did not have any education. He went up—educated to the fourth grade. And then—Barren County, Kentucky—Rocky Hill, Barren County, Kentucky, where he lived at, the next school was 13 miles up, and 13 miles back. So he had no middle education. So he was always a laborer.
When he got here, he was always pretty industrious, so he worked his way to Louisville, Kentucky, and he learned the skill of making mattresses. So he talks about this periodically. 1945 is when he left the farm to go to Louisville, and he got a job putting mattresses together. And he learned that trade, and then he—that took him—he got good at that trade, so when he came in 1950, that's what the person who had trained him said, when you get up north to Detroit, you can go here and get a job.
About my dad, so 1945, he left the farm. He went to Louisville and he was learning how to—he always was industrious, so he got a job doing various things, but the one job that he took, that he brought with him to Detroit was being able to put together—working for a mattress factory. So when he came in 1950, he was given an address. And said, "Son, when you get off the bus, you can go over here and get a job."
So he came July the Fourth, in 1950, and the next day — which was a holiday. Then on the fifth—some time later he went to that address and he went to work. He said he walked past the place and said, "Hey, I can do whatever you need" and he gave a point of contact. Next thing you know he was working. And that place made whatever. I don't recall the name of the place, but they made nice, soft pillows and mattresses, and a couple of the pillows I remember distinctively, because I carried them around for years. You know, like a little kid, because they were so soft. Feather pillows.
So the wages were not very large: five cent hour, ten cent hour, whatever. But around 1952 he went to—someone had told him that Briggs was higher. Briggs was the—before Chrysler. So he went and stood in line, and at that time, when you got hired, the hiring—because this was a laborer deal—when you got hired you'd stand there and the foreman, just like you and I looking at each other, you ask me the question, "Where did you work last?" So my dad said "I worked at Jones Steel Place." And then he said "I can't use you." And so that's what the guy told my father. He needs this job so the next guy behind him was asked the same question, and so—but he was not black. So the guy said "I worked at Ford." So, okay, "Fill this paperwork out." And the gentleman went over.
So my father, he didn't go home—he got in the back in the line! And when he came back up, the foreman asked him the same question. He asked him the question again, "Where did you work last?" And this time my father said "Ford." And then my father said "Okay, weren't you here before?" He said, "You cats are all alike!" So he said "Okay, you're hired." And he gave my father the paperwork and he started to work at Briggs.
And then Briggs became part of Chrysler, and then the next—my father worked there for the next 30 years, until 1984—'83, '84. He's been retired from there longer than he worked there. But that's how he got hired there. So he did work, but part of the challenge was being laid off. You know, at those times the union—I don't know if you've ever worked for the union but this is a union town and they battle for certain things.
My father was laid off a lot and I remember when we were in the Jeffries Projects they would be laid off. And so when you're laid off, it brings a lot of challenges, because you don't have anything to do in the day. So him and his buddy would on the days they got their benefit, one would buy—on Tuesdays, Daddy would buy the beer and wine. If it's Thursday, then his buddy would buy the beer and wine, and they'd get together and make what they called a concoction called a Hobo Cocktail. And that would get them through that week of being unemployed. So that was not a good thing, because when you're sitting and you're unemployed, well you ain't got nothing to do. So finally Chrysler called him back to work in about 1957.
But the work was not here. It was in Twinsburg, Ohio. So he had—for the next two years he commuted from Detroit and the Jeffries Projects, where we lived at to Twinsburg, Ohio, which is not far from Cleveland. That plant is now closed, but that's where he commuted to, and worked. And so, subsequently, in '59 that's where we moved, for a period of time.
So—
WW: How long did you stay in Cleveland?
WD: We stayed in Cleveland from 1959 to 1965. That was eight years, so before I get to that, I wanted to bring up that—now going back to the Jeffries Projects, if you remember, rock and roll was going on at that time. It was starting to be big. Well, when you're in a close quartered area, people are need something to do. So most people would sit down. In the evening, they'd be outside. Well a lot of young people would be under the streetlights, and they would be singing. Because— and you know, creating doo-wop songs or whatever. Because they—you know, with the energy that young people have, and so some of the Motown folks grew up in that area in the Jeffries Projects and the Brewsters. So the same sort of scenario, because I was a lot younger, I would have been six or seven or eight—I would have been eight—and so my mother—I'd have been close to my mother. You're running up and you see these guys, you know, whatever they're doing. And then my mother would say "Wayne, Glen, and Bobby get back over here. They're over there making noise." Because mothers—that's what mothers think that kids do: make noise.
So that was a pretty interesting phenomenon seeing some of that as it grew up. I went to Poe Elementary School. Now Poe Elementary School is the school that—it's still there today—because I think I went there for at least two years. And I remember we would come out on—like folks getting ready for school now, and the mothers would walk you to school, and you had a brand new, whatever you've got on.
I bring this up because that was spelled P-O-E. My father is always—he grew up in Barren County in Kentucky, which is the area that the poor house is for the state of Kentucky. So you would hear that word all the time. If something was bad, he'd always be saying, "Well, I'm going to the po' house." You know, and so, when you go—when he's saying that about the "po' house" at home, and then you're going to "Poe" School, from a mental aspect, that's kind of bad.
Now another person who went to Poe School is Willie Horton. He used to play for the Tigers. I see him on occasion. And he grew up in the Jeffries. He's about ten years older than me. So I probably saw him. I didn't know him at the time. And also Gates Brown was there. I think Gates came later, but Willie, I probably saw him going to wherever he went with his baseball bat. So at that time, I was a little kid, sitting with my mother, or my brothers, and my mother controlled us—watching all these guys going to wherever they were going—the older guys.
So as far as I think that would have been the end of that timeframe of being in Detroit, because I remember my father couldn't—he felt that it was too much traveling to and from, so he came back from Cleveland one day with a moving van, and he wanted to move us with him to Cleveland. And it would seem reasonable that that would be okay. But my mother—most of my mother's family is here, was here. They all grew up and gravitated here too. My aunts and uncles lived here. My mother was a real family-oriented person. So it took him half a day to convince her to move everybody to Cleveland.
Because it would have been easier. Had some cousins who helped move, but my mother was real concerned about moving. Even though she had relatives in Cleveland—she had step-sisters in Cleveland, but her blood sisters were here. So that was part of the challenge. So we did move, and then we moved, and that's where we were at. So that was—but we'd come back each year. At least twice a year, and we had family and friends who lived in the Jeffries, so I still saw the Detroit scene, you know. I just didn't live every day here in the city of Detroit.
WW: On your trips back, in the late Fifties, early Sixties, did you notice any growing tension in the city?
WD: Well, I could say that I thought we—my family was also pretty sheltered, because my mother—I think my generation was a sheltered generation. When I say sheltered, meaning we were protected. And there was places—now, okay—talking along Trumbull, there were in the larger houses, there were white families. So yes, that was an integrated neighborhood. But I didn't—I never saw where—I never was engaged where somebody was tossing rocks at somebody, that sort of—or being hostile. Now as far as physical—being physical against anybody.
I saw—I think, you know, you had to be respectful for where you were at, but I didn't see where—I didn't feel that the environment was really hot. Now I can say later on it did, but—during that time frame from '59 to '65, I don't think I could say that I felt that way. I just know that my mother was always a pretty protective person, and sort of protected us from a lot of the whatever was going on. We just weren't supposed to be in certain spots.
WW: After you left Cleveland did your family come back to Detroit?
WD: Yeah. So we came here. We came back because my father got a job at the new—at Sterling Heights Stamping Plant. That opened up, and so when that opened up then the idea was, you didn't have to worry about my mother moving, or—she was throwing stuff in the truck to get going.
Matter of fact, '59, when we left, my mother had just had my youngest—my young sister. She was born in '59. So it wasn't that difficult. She was ready to come back. We came back—we moved on Blaine, between Fourteenth and Twelfth. Now, I can tell you, I thought all the other areas that we lived in were real industrious people. And between Twelve and Fourteenth, it was a little more—it was a little more—hotter or—there was a lot of things going on. There's a lot of street smart people that lived in that area. Put it that way. You sort of had to—I felt that I had to protect myself at all times. I went to Hutchins Junior High School. And that was on Woodrow Wilson. And so we had to walk home now. People were working. People were working, but you also felt that there was a lot of people who wanted to get things a little easier.
Now, here's the thing about living in that area. This is now Motown area, and I know this because in my own research, Motown was on Grand Boulevard. So within that one—and from—it was one point two miles from my house on Blaine. So within that area, many of the Motown stars lived there. So on these houses, on these duplexes, you'd see guys with perms—with hair that—I didn't see that a lot when I was here before as a little kid, as I grew up. And I didn't—it was—you saw that in Cleveland, but—I don't know. Cleveland, folks were a little more—the area I lived in was a brand new project area, and it was a little—it was not—it was very nice. It was a brand new area and it was—I couldn't say that people were hostile.
When I moved to Twelfth—on Blaine and Twelfth, I felt everybody was trying to be Mr. Cool. You know, I remember walking one day from school, this guy—this young guy had his—he had on chains, and he had on a wife-beater shirt. And he was kind of muscular, and he had a dog, a German Shepard. And he had on a chain, and he was using the chain and whatever to control the dog, and looked like he was looking for somebody. And you didn't—it's like you didn't want him to be—you to be the person he was looking for.
So that environment was maybe a little up-tempo. Plus all of the—there were many shops up and down—a lot of clubs up and down in that area. It's not to say it was non-industrious people, it's just that I was now looking through—I was 14 at that time so now things are looking different, you know. I sort of had to protect myself a little bit more. And I remember some guys tried to jump on my brother as we came home from school. And these guys were pretty aggressive, so this was in 1965. We stayed over there for six months. We came back right after school in '65. And we stayed at a four-duplex. And then in 1966 we moved to Pinehurst and Grand River. 12682 Pinehurst, on the west side, and my parents owned that house for 40 years afterward.
So one of the things that when we were living on Blaine, my mother, again, kept us kind of close-hold. We'd get up as a group and go to church in the car, family car. There was relatives who owned churches and we would go there. We've always had like a happy home; my mother was a happy homemaker. She could cook, so we didn't mind being at the house because there was food there, and it was wonderfully made. It's very few times that we went without. So she could do a lot with a very little.
WW: Going into '67 now, were you still—you were living at Pinehurst and Grand River, you said?
WD: Yeah. We had moved. Yeah. So we moved from that area on Blaine and Twelfth—between Twelfth—again, a lot of duplexes there, so multiple families. Matter of fact, going to Hutchins was the first time I even heard anybody really talk about sexual activity. There were two things, two conversations that I heard in school. Because I'm growing up pretty naive.
This girl was talking to this other guy about watching some family members in the house having sex and there was a fight, or a huge discussion on which group was the better group: the Four Tops or the Temptations. Okay, so that was going on for a 13, 14, 15 year old. Now, in my house sex was not being discussed, so that's why I remember this vividly. On television, at that time, you saw relationships, romance but they weren't getting all into what you'd see today, you know. So—
WW: As a 17-year-old, or a 16-year-old going into '67, did you anticipate or foresee any violence that summer in Detroit?
WD: No. So here's the—like my father, I was always working. When we moved over to Pinehurst, that was still an integrated neighborhood. Now I remember the day we moved in—or we moved to the house, or saw the house, our neighbors across there was two senior citizens, white ladies, who saw us as we pulled in. And after that day I didn't see them anymore, so I don't know if they moved or whatever, but our neighborhood was still integrated.
But at that time, white flight was—it was not what you'd call really evident because it was already going on earlier, in the Fifties. And then it's just that when we moved there, it was like whoa, wow, man, because we all had rooms, and it was a large wood-frame house, I think it was built in 1922. The person who—1926, I think it was. The person who sold the house to my parents had lived in the house for 40 years. Then my parents lived in it another 40 years and it was well taken care of.
So the neighborhood I lived in, I went to Mackenzie High School. I'd go down, walk to Fullterton, walk down to Wyoming. Take the Fullerton, take the Wyoming bus to Mackenzie. The neighborhood was integrated. We could walk—matter of fact, The Monkees was a big TV show at the time. Me and the guys that I knew, we'd be walking down the street singing their crazy songs, or whatever, and it was sort of like being in Happy Days, per se.
Jeffries Freeway was not built yet, you know. It was— there might have been some signs up but it was not built by—it was not being built at that time. Because it sort of like happened all of a sudden. It's like, when the riot happened, the freeway was being built. And the freeway divided what I'd call my portion of Pinehurst and divided it to the freeway in the middle, to the upper portion.
So now you've got to cross over one of those bridges, and there's—all of a sudden it's like it's changed. Because man, I could—you used to could ride—I think a young lady named Emma Kidd used to live up the street from us, and a friend of mine that I knew from the Jeffries Projects, he also moved up. Because we would see people that we knew, and we didn't know that they were there. Somebody said, "Hey, are you Wayne Davidson?" Yeah, I'm Wayne Davidson. "Well I'm Willie Jackson. Remember me from Jeffries Projects?" So you'd sort of meet people that you knew before because they were now no longer in the projects.
I think one of my friends had—Willie Jackson stayed in the Projects until he moved on Mendota, which was the next street. Michael Hall—his family moved to Inkster, and then they were able to get a house. And so these houses were now available, and they were being—people who didn't have houses before, were able to get into.
So there were white neighbors and many—there were a few mixed, interracial folks. And everybody was keeping their grass cut, and the places clean, because at the time, they were—people were working. My father worked all the time. People on my street worked. So there was no—what you'd—it was not a bad neighborhood. It was not a neighborhood like on Twelfth and Blaine, that had a mixture of people not working and people doing shady stuff.
So that would have been '66 because I was delivering—the Twin Pines Milk Company used to go up and down the street and bring people milk. Our house had a milk chute. You could order milk and you'd put it in the milk chute. Well, I worked for that guy. You know, and so this is, again, before the riot. So I got up every morning, got on his truck, and I delivered milk to the folks. I had young legs, and he paid me whatever every morning.
And I also had a paper route. I had a lot of white customers. And I'd go up and I'd make sure their papers were properly on their porches, that sort of thing. So I was kind of industrious. I cut a lot of grass, and that's how I knew the neighborhood a little bit. I know there was a guy two doors down from me, he was a white gentleman, he was older, he had a little dog. I was cutting his grass every week and he would pay me, or whatever.
So, yeah. The neighborhood was functioning and it was integrated. So that would have been '66, it was nice and peaceful. Then I guess the freeway was starting to get built.
I went to Mackenzie, so I remember you could ride our bikes. We would ride our bikes all over. Mackenzie is close to going out to the Ford Rouge Plant. I don't know if you ever seen—well, when I was a kid, that was massive, you know, and I worked there later, but I remember we rode our bikes over into Dearborn and then there was a gentleman tried to run us over with his car.
At that point—at that time, Orville Hubbard was around, so you know, you had to be careful, because he was saying one thing, and so we didn't know we were in that area, or whatever, because we were just riding bikes. So I remember that distinctively. That was the only time I can think of where I was just walking down the street and somebody tried to do something to me, or whatever.
So you could be walking—a lot of times, people did get into little scuffles, I guess you could say. I know a friend of mine, he—I think he—my brother and I went over to a friend's house and then this other friend of ours met us over there. Well, when we came back, the police picked us up. And they said that there was a complaint. A little white kid was scratched up, with some sharp object. And it wasn't me and my brother. So they took us—all three, with my friend—to the precinct, Twelfth Precinct, on Schaefer and Grand River. So we don't know what's going on. You know, but it turned out that my friend—they took us because my friend, the one that came later, because he had a sharp object in his pocket. So they search him, and they took everybody. And so my parents came down to get us and my father gave us a speech.
So I don't know whatever happened to that. I just know that I didn't do it. So when you ask about—I think there was one other incident where went to a party, and then somebody, the same person said something to a house—some folks in a house, who were white and then they started chasing them all the way to another place.
So other than that, I couldn't say there was any real hostility, you know, where people were really, like, pissed every day. Well, I don't want to use the word "pissed," but open, blatant, you know. So that would have been '66, '67.
WW: Going into '67, how—in July—how did you first hear about what was going on, on Twelfth Street?
WD: I can tell you where I was at. I was at the Fox Theatre. I can tell you—I got up—me—I got up there, it was a Sunday. I got up. We had made plans to go see Robin Seymour, if you recall, used to have—well, they used to have the Motown Revues. Okay. And that used to be in the winter when they were supported by the Motown Revues.
We'd go there, and we'd be seeing David Ruffin, all these guys. Guys who I grew up around—didn't know them, because they all lived on—between— not far from Motown. You'd see them looking fancy hair, fancy clothes, or practicing or whatever. Everybody else going out to work, they're out there practicing, so all these Motown guys, you'd see them on the duplex.
So we'd go to these Motown Revues, and I would be— because it was my first time, because Motown Revues were prominent in the winter time, and they had started '62, '63, '64. Well I was not old enough at that time, to go. But when I got back—'66, '67, those time frames, I was old enough to go on my own. And you could take the bus anywhere in the city, wherever you wanted to go.
So I would take the west side bus, which bus stop would have been over here and you could just go anywhere. I can remember being at that bus stop and you'd hear the record shop playing Aretha Franklin's music, and you'd be saying man. But the east side folks always looked a little different. That's always sort of one of the things. That it was more east side west side.
So '67. We get up. My friend Willie, Emory—yeah, it was three of us. Me, Willie, and Emory. Willie's still alive; Emory's passed on. We get up. We go to the—we're going to the— down to the Fox Theatre, and we're going to the—basically a Motown Revue, but it's only, it's been booked as Robin Seymour's Summertime Revue.
So we get down there and we're having a ball, you know, because now we see all of the Motowners and whoever was on the bill. It was a quiet Sunday, because on Sunday mornings here in Detroit, people were—you either were coming in or you were going to church. It was quiet, clean, you know, the buses going everywhere.
So we took the bus, and we go past Louis the Hatter, all these stores, Sibley's Shoes, you'd say, man I'm gonna get me those shoes, man, I'm gonna get me this, I'm gonna get me this suit. You go inside and you've got all these pictures of these stars on the thing. Say, man, I'm gonna get that, like [unintelligible] got!
So now we're down here. And everybody, just like when whatever type of music venue you were at, everybody's got their persona on. So it happens to be down in this, everybody's always trying to be cool, just like being a star. So you have to be careful, you don't want to bump into anybody, and start a little fracas. So they started the show, and Martha and the Vandellas and Smokey were the headliners.
So the next thing you know, they stop the show. And Martha and Smokey come out. They announce that there's a little—some disturbance in the city, and some of the bus lines are going to be having a problem. So the bus line I'm thinking about is the Grand River bus line, and when they mentioned Warren, well, guess what? The Grand River crosses Warren to get to go to west side. And we're saying, what the heck?
So after they make that announcement, well, I'm a knucklehead. I'm whatever—16, 17. I want to see the show. I don't know what's going on out there, because I paid my money to see the show. I cut grass, I done all this other stuff. And so the show goes on, and—
[break in recording]
And Martha—this is significant to music fans. On that show was a group called the Parliaments. You know who the Parliaments are? Okay, this is George Clinton and the Parliaments. At that time they were dressed to mirror the Temptations. They didn't look anything like what he looks like now. Because also his—he lived in my neighborhood. Or one of them—the small one named Fuzzy. So everywhere—in the city of Detroit you—it was not unusual for you to be living next to somebody who might have been a popular musician or whatever.
So in '67, at that show, George Clinton was there, and—with his group, called the Parliaments, and they were mirroring the Temptations, and the song that they sang was Old Man River. And they did an outstanding job, because George Clinton was also a writer for Motown. He sung the songs.
So I'm leaving that as a pinpoint for him, and his career.
So now, the show is over with, and we're trying—we're going outside. We had called—we come out from the show, we found that man, it looked like a war zone out here. And so now we're trying to figure out what to do. We're 13, 14, 15, 16 years old, trying to—we're not driving; the bus is our thing. So now we've got to get to a phone. We didn't have any of these—we had to find a—get some quarters and call.
So Willie called his step-father, and he came and got us, and he must have come down Davison to Jeffries to Chrysler and back to pick us up, and that way—we went back the same way, and as we went back, we saw the smoke and the fire. And he also had his pistol in the front seat, just in case there were some issues that he might have ran into.
Once we got home, then my father, again, made me paint the house. We had a white house, two stories—that's what I did. My brother was in Washington, D.C. He was a little more rambunctious. He wanted to come back and participate.
The little group we hung out with was about ten people, and about six of them had—you know, they could have a lot more flexibility than me and my brothers had. So they ended up going out and being involved with things, and they ended up either getting picked up and, I don't know how long they might have spent, but most—they might have spent a couple days in jail. Because they come back with all these stories or whatever. "Well we went down this road and they were burning this." You know, they were with groups of people who were part of the insane activities. So we sat around and we were listening to them. I was sort of glad that I didn't get involved, because most of those guys, they ended up not really doing well later on in life, so.
But, as we went up, all of those houses, all of those businesses along Grand River-Wyoming Area, all of those businesses that got burned out, many of those areas did not get rebuilt. Even Pastor's Cleaners, because many of the businesses were owned by—maybe folks from the Jewish community, and they employed black people. I remember Pastor's Cleaners, that was there on Fullerton and Meyers. It was owned by a Jewish family, but the person who worked the front, and Mr. Friendly, the person who took in all of the workload, was a black person. That's how he made his living.
So many of the people who may not have owned the business, but they earned a living from that, they lost their jobs, because no longer is that place sitting there anymore. So a lot of people didn't think about that. The further down you go down Grand River, the more destruction you could see, because, again, my uncle's shop—I think he might have—he might have— I know he put "Soul Brother" up on his thing. Now he—this is my uncle—G.W. Raspberry, at the time, he's—also was the first black person to put in—the S. S. Kresge store down on Woodward—he was able to start selling wigs out of there. So he was doing pretty well in the beauty care arena, so he, you know, quite truly, he didn't want his business being burned out.
So he suffered, but it was a lot of destruction all over, and many—you know, you could see—when I did was able to get out, you could see some of the smoldering in some of the places that just yesterday, you might have been able to go in there and buy something.
But it was a trying time. I don't—I didn't see—there was—I think the riot was more of an economic deal because of frustration, because there was no time that I ever seen or heard, where somebody like—"I'm coming after you," because I see you—"There's that white dude, let's get him." I didn't hear or see any of that. What I saw was people talking about getting televisions and that sort. Things that they didn't have. Getting things that they needed.
Now I'm a little bit of a historian on some of this stuff—the '43 riot was different, you know. People were actually going for people and attacking them. But the atmosphere was that people wanted stuff. That's what I saw, and that's what I heard. And afterwards that was what was the talk: that people wanted stuff. So—
WW: So is that how you interpreted it? You used the term "riot." Do you see it as that, or do you see it as a rebellion of sorts?
WD: Here's the thing about—I've grown since that time frame. The first time, it was definitely unrest. Because see, with me, it's—that was just part of it, because, you know, there were several events that happened afterwards, that were—I saw '67 as more economic. '68, when Martin Luther King was killed, and Bobby Kennedy—those were—and then with the Black Panthers and all of the race stuff—those, to me, were more race riots, where somebody was saying, "I'm going to get that guy." In '67 I don't recall anybody saying, "I'm going to get that person." They—I thought they said—I felt they were saying, "I'm going to get me a TV. I'm going to get me this. I'm going to get me that."
Even though I guess there was riots in '65, in L.A., that might have been the baseline. But I didn't feel that the '67 riot was the one where people were after a particular group.
I think they were after—they were frustrated, because, you know, it started because there was two Vietnam vets who had returned, and they were having a party. Well see, today, you get recognition. I spent 20 years in the service and I got another 16 years as a civil servant. Now they make darn sure that people come back from Iraq and all these places, that they have ceremonies and they are recognized. And during that time frame, Vietnam, that was not the case. People come home, they come and they want to drain down, they wanted the pressure, the stress—and so they were having a party. Because at that time, they had what they called blue laws. You couldn't buy liquor and all that stuff on Sunday morning. So they were at a particular place, a party, and then they got busted.
Now the cops, I can tell you, I've always been tall, but these cops at that time frame, they were tall and big, and they were shiny. Because they all—many of them wore leather, and they'd be riding horses and stuff. So they looked to be pretty intimidating. So the police at that time were pretty intimidating. So how that clash came about of these guys trying to come back from a stressful situation, without ceremony, and then—now they have ceremony now—it all breaks out into a riot, there on Twelfth and Clairmount—it was on Clairmount.
So that's part of that challenge there. Is I didn't see it as "I'm gonna go get me some guy," you know. I didn't see it as that. I saw it was—because people in school was "Man I got my television, I got this and I got that." They didn't say "I got somebody's head," [laughter], you know, mounted up. I don't recall that. It's just that I didn't see it that way, you know. It was bad, it was rough, but when I reflect back on it I don't see where something—I've seen—in later years I saw people saying, "I'm going over here, and I'm going to do this to somebody else." So that's the difference, to me.
WW: Did your parents ever think about moving out of the city because of it?
WD: No. My—they worked too hard to get the house that they got. And matter of fact, it's a shame—that's part of the challenge now. My parents' house, even though the neighborhood was falling down, their house was still immaculately taken care of. And so many of the—see, those neighborhoods were intact.
They grew, and they—they built those neighborhoods, and the folks working, and they—part of the challenge is that you—many people—most people from black cultures do poorly with inheritance, because they're not—many people from white cultures understand inheritance. They understand that I'm supposed to go from here to there, and carry the family name. Well, it's a little different in black cultures, because sometimes everybody's going in a different direction, and sometimes they're not blood relatives, and you've got a lot of in-fighting.
So inheritance, that particular point in time was a time when people of color owned property, at the greatest—probably the greater time after the Civil War. And what happened is, you couldn't transfer that property down to the next person because they didn't know how to handle it. You know, because they're not used to transferring property. When I say the principle of property, like understanding wills—that sort of thing. You know, "Yeah, this is my mama's house," but then, if you don't pay the taxes on it, or if you don't cut the grass on it, if you don't keep it the way your mama did, then there's a problem. And so then there's—then the person becomes apathetic. Because well, "To hell with this." You know, so that's what I'm saying about that, from an economic standpoint.
If you look at many of these folks with European descent, these properties carry over generation after generation after generation because it's instilled in them. So I'm getting off the topic, but those neighborhoods were—that was the opportunity, because those neighborhoods were built for success. Because once you were able to—because now the banks were starting to lend money. It wasn't land contracts. There were actual contracts with a realtor and a bank and a mortgage company. You know, legitimate. But most people—my mother never shared—she took care of all the business in our house, so my father was not part of that, you know. He, uneducated, he didn't know about—he depended on my mother, and my mother took care of that stuff.
So those are some of the contributing factors, that—he did the work on the house, but my mother knew the paperwork on the house, how to maintain it. All those neighborhoods were like that—people were—they got these homes and they cherished these places because they worked—all these factories, working. But then the problem came in passing it on, because the next group of people may have not really understood what the role should be.
WW: Are you optimistic for the city moving forward?
WD: Yeah, I am. I think it's pretty nice that we've got a lot of this stuff that's being rebuilt. When I go, I see a lot of change, I see a lot of—I'm an optimistic person. When I left the city for a number of years and I'd come back to visit my parents, I would talk or speak with my wife and she'd go on, "This should be this, happening," in the Nineties, and it wasn't happening. It's only been happening recently, and I think it's good.
I think—because we would go to other places, and—I think part of the challenge of change is because we are a union town, and it's hard to change when you're union. You know, there's too many people involved. You know, entrepreneurs have to come in, have ideas, you get that idea implemented and you have less barriers to that. So I'm glad that these families—the Ilitch family and Gilbert, are leading the way. So I think there's a better—I think better days are coming, as the saying goes, with the father Gabriel.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I greatly appreciate it.
WD: I didn't mean to talk your ear off, but let me tell you about George Clinton. You see—he was at that show—his group was dressed like Temptations, after the riot. See, because this is my metaphor, or my picture. When I saw him the next time, he was dressed and acting in the chaotic fashion that he acts now. That's sort of how—that gives an illustration of—on that day—July 23, 1967, when I woke up that morning, George Clinton was a Temptation, per se. When I went to bed, that night, in that chaos, when I saw him again—him and his group were like they were now. Spaced out. So, with that, I'm done talking.
WH: Thank you.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when you were born?
WH: I was born in 1942, in a small town: Arno, Virginia. My parents came north when I was about nine or ten, and I went back down south so I could play baseball down there for a year, and then I came back, been here ever since - before my early teens. Raised up in Detroit. Jeffries Projects. And, matter of fact, this is our old neighborhood. We used to run around over here at Wayne State.
WW: Why did your parents leave Virginia for Detroit?
WH: Well, my dad's mine got shut down, and that's when he came back up this way. You know, they closed down all the mines down there in Virginia, where we were living at at the time.
WW: When you came to Detroit for the first time, do you remember your first impression?
WH: Well, when I first came to Detroit, I was about five or six. My mom's people lived here. I was coming down today, I was thinking about the streetcars I used to get on and ride down Grand River. And then I - that's the first time. Then after that, just come back here, getting raised up in the neighborhood around people, and raised up around the Jeffries Projects. And you know, what fascinated me, everybody thought it was all black, but there were just as many white people in the Jeffries Projects. A lot of people went to Wayne State and stuff like that. But it was a very experience - helped me in my life - coming through that era.
WW: When you came up to Detroit to live, did you feel comfortable when you went around the city and hung out?
WH: When you're a young man you just didn't - you didn't worry about it. You just did things. I tell people, I came up during the time - my first five years in the big league were racial. And that's many years after Jackie Robinson. But our neighborhood, you know - and I talk about this a lot - was churches and schools. We need to get - them two things need to get back together. You had drugs. Drugs been here, but churches and schools, whether your race was black or white, they was your community. And that's what I think about. We did things together - maybe didn't go to school with, but we did everything in the community - neighborhood - together, so I think about that a lot, through my life, as I travel. And it helped me as I started in baseball.
WW: And you said you went back South to start playing baseball again?
WH: Well, when I was younger I went back, and for some reason they wanted to play tee ball or something up here, I forgot, and I'd always been advanced. I went back down to Tennessee and I used my brother Billy's birth certificate so I could play in a higher league. So, I stayed down there one year with my brothers and then after that Mr. Thompson was going to Wayne State - which he was, got drafted by the Rams, and he got hurt, and he was over at Wayne getting his degree, and he came by [Poe ?] School ground, and one day he stopped, and he asked you guys, do you want to play baseball? So, he said, meet me back here next Monday.
So, all the kids in the community, we met him back over there. That's how we got started and actually I talk about how he started the Ravens, from the Ravens to Brown Insulation to the west side clubs. And that's all that started years ago, but thanks to Ron Thompson and people like that, that's the reason I'm here speaking today.
WW: What year did you head south to play ball?
WH: I really don't know. It had been early - I'd go back - I was about nine years old, so you go back - I'm 75, so you can kind of go back in the years and figure that out, but right off, I can't say.
WW: No worries. When you were away from the city did you stay away, or were you coming back intermittently?
WH: I came back at the end of the summer. I'd go back, that first time I played baseball in Kingsport, Tennessee, and actually we had a tournament up in around Louisville, Kentucky, that area, and that's the first time I met Pete Rose as a young man - kid - and Eddie Brinkman. And we all started, the first time I ever laid my eye on them, and later on in my career, playing in Detroit, going to a tournament where I met him again. But I think if you look back, what kept me going in life, I always wanted to do try to do something. I didn't know what at the time. I'm very fortunate my parents got Judge [Damon] Keith at the time to become my legal advisor when I was 13 years old. And what I learned from him, between thirteen and seventeen I signed on - I don't think I could have gotten that learning from eight years in college. But I'm just thinking - today he's still my dad. I call him dad. And he went on - been a famous judge in this country and - but he was a lawyer and people don't realize he was the first black firm to come across Woodward. At the time, you know, on the west side.
WW: As you're coming back to the city and growing up, through the fifties, do you see any rising tension in the city?
WH: Naw, not really. You didn't think - when you were a kid, a young man - you didn't think about it. A lot of things you heard were going on, but, you know, adult, whether you're black or white, they kept a lot of things away from the kids. And we didn't know the difference. Probably a lot of things going on we didn't know - all we looked for, going out to school, going out to the playground and play, doing things together, walking out to Belle Isle and stuff like that. I think as I heard about these things, coming up a kid, I guess when I got involved and paying more attention to it, is after I signed the contract.
WW: Similar question. When you were in the South, did you see the Civil Rights Movement in action?
WH: Not really. We - like I said, down there we only - it was the neighborhood. We always did things together and - you didn't go to school - but I've been around white people, down in Virginia, in Arno, just as much as I've been around black people. Only thing was different - you noticed you just didn't go to school with your best buddy. When I did my first book, years ago, I reunioned with a kid I ain't saw since we were little kids. His name is Munson, in Virginia - but all you did, you would go fishing together - and I mean, we used to - we called them creeks, and we used to catch these fish, we called them suckers – they were like catfish – with our hands, in the creek, and I think about that, and I met him walking to go downtown to play baseball. I cut through their neighborhood, where he's living. We start walking and then I got more involved in baseball, and he did too, and I think what he learned from sports he went on and became a great man in the political world.
WW: Aside from baseball did you play any other sports in the city?
WH: I played - well, you know, I played football. I played basketball. I boxed. Boxing gym was not too far from here - I see they should put a historic site over - used to be Kelsey Recreation Center, but they're going to put some kind of power plant there. They should put some kind of historic name - a lot of people came through there, went on and had fame in life. But you know, we just kept it together. You know, my boxing coach, matter of fact, he got to be up around 90, he's still living. He's still sitting on the boxing committee on Parks and Recreation, the city now. Martin Gillgate.
It just - it kept us busy. You know, you get out of school, you go do one thing. You kept busy. But I think where they learn you - I'd like to see kids get involved in more than one sport. I think it helps your decision skills when you play more than one sport. You might not be good in all of it, but it helps your decision skills, where you can make better choices in life.
WW: Throughout the 1950s and going into the sixties, did you continue living at the Jeffries Projects?
WH: Back and forth. My mom and daddy had a two-room - actually, a two-room apartment, but Jeffries Projects was close to where my mom then, I stayed with my sister, Faye Griffin, and from that, I used to go home, back and forth. It just - you know, in our community, actually, your house - your door - for the people in the community, the door was open for anybody. They'd help you, feed you. I don't think - I don't think I ever went hungry, because you can eat at anybody's house. But I think - I think about that - I go by all the community where I was raised up, now they got new condos and houses over there, they just put a new baseball field several years back, at the playground where we started playing ball as a kid - and usually on the way down to the ballpark I usually drive through there. I usually drive down there two or three times a week.
WW: Going into the sixties, you, of course, joined the Tigers in '63?
WH: No, I came up. I signed in '61. I signed a hardship case to help my parents. And from the hardship case, Judge Keith got involved. There was still racial problems in baseball and stuff like that. And actually, my dad requested that I stay at home with the Tigers, because he let me - 1961, before I signed, to go see Jake Wood, the first black player - African American player - 12 years after Jackie Robinson came through this organization. And that's the reason I signed with the Tigers. I thought I was going to sign for the Yankees, Baltimore, I'd been working out with them. But going down Trumbull towards the ballpark, I asked Papa why we're going that way. He said, “I decided, young man, let you see play baseball, back in June - I mean in April - I think the eleventh or tenth - that I think you can stay home, maybe you might make it different for more black players in the future.”
WW: As you're now on an MLB [Major League Baseball] team, and you're growing in national significance, do you become involved in the national civil rights discussion, or do you focus on baseball?
WH: Well yeah, I got involved, to tell you the truth, go back when I left home. I talk about this a lot - I probably experienced what Mother Parks - Rosa Parks - experienced on the bus - but at the time the bus was full, and I went to the back anyway, but in Lakeland, I got out at the bus station, I want to get a ride to Tigertown - and I thought that - he said he can't take me. You know, at home, I see Yellow Cab, Checker Cab, I said I want to go to Tigertown. He said "I can't take you." And I - to me, I thought - thought he was playing a joke. You know, you leave away from home, you hear about people playing jokes on guys go to college - freshmen and stuff like that - I get my duffelbags, I walk six miles - between four and six miles to Tigertown. And it's funny, after I got there, it still didn't sink in until there was a white kid - I forget his name - we played baseball against each other in Detroit, and we wanted to room together, and I couldn't room together with him.
So, from all the hardship case that I experienced, got me where I went beyond the field. I think to Ernie Harwell and George Kell kind of helped prep me, what I was going to have to go through when I come up with the Tigers. Actually, I used to go eat at Ernie's home on Sunday, to have dinner with him and his family. And they kind of got me into doing that, and I kind of got ready for what I would have to come toward in the future.
And after spring training, we left, and then here going to Duluth, Minnesota my first year, and I have highest respect to [Al Lakeland ?], our manager - that we couldn't stay at the hotel and he took the older guys, and they drew - driving all the way to Duluth, Minnesota, so I think about him in life, and he kind of - people like that help you get where you want to go out and try to make a difference for everybody. And through Ernie Harwell I met Bob Hope. I got involved with the military bases and I'm still involved with the military bases. I've been overseas with Bob Hope for a time, and six other times, and you know, I just - from that, it makes you say - things that you appreciate, that you can reach back and try to put some things together to help all people. Through the military, and I think it helped me get more involved in the community. You know, if you get exposed - standing out in the woods with them at night, not just going there to say hi and goodbye, but you got totally involved. And actually I'm still doing that today with the Tigers. We've got a partnership with Fort Benning. We bring soldiers to spring training, and the families. I go down in November to graduation, et cetera.
WW: Were you in town in '63 for the march down Woodward?
WH: I was out playing in '63. My dad was a part of it. He called me, and Papa, he was part of it, when Dr. King did the march, and I learned through Judge Keith, as a lawyer, that was going to happen. Then I had the opportunity later on meeting Dr. King through Judge Keith, and that's when I said I met a lot of famous people: presidents, entertainment and movie actors through Judge Keith, but I never forget that. But I had opportunity of meeting him before I got home down in Memphis, Tennessee, when he gave a speech down there and I never forget that. And things like that keep you growing. And through life, I look back, and I think that's what keeps me going now, and I try to carry myself according to that.
WW: Getting closer to '67, did you feel any rising tension in the city, or sense anything coming?
WH: Nope. And I remember, it's a funny thing about that. Jake Wood, after he got involved, and I hear his story, and Jake – I got him back involved with the Tigers now, and Jake, he's 80, 81, still playing 72 games of softball. But to hear him speak, he didn't realize that was going on. And I - you'd think, but he'd been hearing about it, he came from New Jersey, and to hear him speak, he said he looked up to me, I looked up to him, because that's the reason I signed with the Tigers, because of him, but he made a statement many times - he didn't realize until he started reading about it.
And I guess because your mind is playing baseball and being part of the fan base, which I call my extended family, and I learn how to play through the fans and made them part of my game, and listen to him say that - I would do the same thing over again because I learned an important benefit of being a professional athlete is going to play the game - and I never put the game before the fans.
WW: In '67, were you still living near the Jeffries Projects? WH: No. I - actually, Jeffries Projects, I got out of Jeffries Projects years before. Judge Keith became my league adviser when I was 13 years old. And he lived on Woodrow Wilson. I was going back and forth, staying at his place. And I actually, after I signed my contract, got mother and them a nice home out near Highland Park, and I set up a pension for my dad for ten years or so, and I think - I still didn't get away from the Projects because I never get - when I went off the first year, '61, I had met a guy that - like my mentor, that I looked up to, was Gage Brown, I talked him into coming home with me. I introduced him his wife, Norma Sterling at the time, and she was in the Projects. We were raised up together, and - but - I think about that. The connection, through people, and actually, I used to stop by there all the time. And I was in the big league and I used to stop, before they started building - developing that new development over there. But I used to stop through there and see people from the past. And that's - I never forgot where I came from. I'm very thankful and humble through God, that he kept me humble. That I never got away from that.
WW: Going into the start of the week, on Saturday night, late Saturday night, Sunday morning, how did you hear - how did you first hear about what was going on?
WH: Well actually, it was Sunday. I didn't hear about nothing like that until actually, I got involved. We had a doubleheader, I think, with the Yankees. Second game, they called the game off, they told us they wanted all of us to go home, and for insurance purposes. And I ended up putting all my clothes in a duffle bag and I end up in the middle of the riot and try to bring some peace to the people. I used to wonder why I did that, but I had no control. I think God had control over that, through the people that I mentioned in the past - Judge Keith, Ernie Harwell - they got me where I was - got involved in things like that. I think about the riot, you know, down there, seeing all this looting and burning, and I talk - try to bring peace - but I mean, the people that kept me going back - they weren't about my security. Go home, Willie, get out of here, and stuff like that.
But I didn't do that. I went home and I come back, and when I told I got involved in the city, government, trying to make it better for people in the city, and one of my pet [inaudible] in life is the PAL [Police Athletic League] program, that Mayor Greer, I think, started that after the riot. Started developing that in 1969 - 1968 - started developing the PAL program and they opened up in '69.
WW: Can you correct the mayor?
WH: It's Mayor Griss.
WW: Gribbs, okay.
WH: And it started for a program that I'm very proud of, that I came back part of that program for many years after that, after playing sports and retiring, that Coleman recruited me to come back and work through the city government, through the police department. Then I came to be a Deputy Director and a Secondary Chief, that Detroit PAL kind of helped spearhead Philadelphia PAL and other PAL around the country, and all the bylaws that they do in PAL today, that we was involved putting that together, and they still use the same bylaws through the schools and PAL around the country, that we had - Inspector Bowham, that got involved in that, and went to the national PAL convention. And they still use the regulations and rules that we established back that many years.
WW: Going back to '67, you mentioned that you were going from near the epicenter, or the scenes of violence, back to your home, and back and forth. Did you run into any issues going to and from your house -
WH: No -
WW: Or did you see anything?
WH: Actually just a few days ago, we left going into Baltimore, playing that weekend, so I didn't see anything like that. But after we came back off the road I was able to have meetings, certain meetings and stuff like that, and I started going to some of the meetings and things like that, but I'm just - and I think that's the beginning of me kind of appreciate the good Lord gave me the ability to do something, that I can get involved doing other things, far as human era of people, that I can try to make a difference in their life.
WW: Did any of your family members have their property damaged, or -
WH: No.
WW: That's good.
WH: No. We - actually, my sister and them, actually still staying living in the Projects and stuff like that. And I know some people down Twelfth Street, that's the only problem got messed up a little bit. I seen a lot of history things - and last year they did a book, a story on the riots in '67 and I never would ask. I used to wonder why I never asked to be part of that, because I was very incidentally involved in that, but I think I've seen a lot of people say the bad things about the riot, but I seen some good things come out of the riot. I seen Detroit grow at the time - whether you want to admit that, or people to admit that, you know, most black people was in the Black Bottom. And through the riot, that's when we started branching out. You might call it a hardship at the beginning when you branch out into the community, but I think that was opportunity. And I seen Detroit grow in the minority area.
WW: You’ve referred to '67 as a riot a number of times. Is that how you frame what it was?
WH: I don't know what time, we was just playing. I don't - I can't say. All I seen was black smoke, look across, over the right field stands. And I didn't have a general idea what was going on until they called the game off.
WW: Oh no, I'm sorry. I mean - do you see it as a riot? Do you see it as an uprising, as a rebellion?
WH: Well, I was concerning, to me, in life, arise - you know, you do it, but don't get away from the meaning. I was telling the people, don't burn your own stuff down. Don't be looting, taking stuff. You defeat what the purpose was. And I'm just - we're just very fortunate they didn't get away from that, because they got busy trying to handle the problem with our own, tick that off, and try to correct it for the future. But sometimes you get - you get out there, defeat the purpose, and people thing you're out there just to start a riot, looting, it wasn't about that. It was about what went on with the police officer and some private people at a club or something.
WW: The police are routinely cited as a major force in inciting '67. How did you feel later on when you joined the police department? Did you think it had changed by that point?
WH: Well, that's many years after I played. You know, I came back - Coleman had a person named Charlie Pringman recruited me. I was living in Seattle, came back and got involved through that, and through the PAL organization. And I had opportunity to get involved with the Police Academy and stuff like that, understand all the bylaws and responsibilities, respect the uniform. I got totally involved. I'm very fortunate, I ended up as Secondary Chief, but that was many years after I retired from baseball.
WW: You mentioned that you became much more - not more involved, but you stayed involved in the community after '67.
WH: Well, actually, I started back in the community involvement back after I signed in '63 - '62, '63, when I met Bob Hope and et cetera. Actually I went back down in 1968, and had the war going on, went back down - and what's the name -
WW: Vietnam?
WH: Vietnam War. And I went back down there after the World Series and I'll never forget Mr. Fessie called, so what are you doing down there? You know. And they're concerned. I came back. But it's something that through that relationship with the military, and I think, working in the community, what got me today doing the same thing in the community, down in Florida now, is through churches and schools.
WW: Did anybody question that? Did anybody else - did anyone wonder why you were becoming so involved when so many people were leaving?
WH: Not really. I didn't - you know, I did things, and my heart's always been about Detroit. And the state - the people of the state of Michigan. I never been questioned why I did, right to today, and I just did things. And you know, I think that's one reason I'm back doing things now and thanks to Mr. Illitch and his family got me involved many years ago, and - but he got me back, not only in baseball, got me involved with the people in the community and their concern of treating people right.
WW: Going into '68. The '68 World Series win was really big for Detroit, and many people cite it as a moment of Detroit coming together. From your personal experience, what do you think it did for the city?
WH: I think it did a lot for the city. It started after we lost in '67, one game, and going into the winter, going into spring training, and started to open the season. People don't realize, newspapers were on the strike then. And I think playing good baseball, and people listen to Ernie Harwell's voice, I seen people - start getting more people at the ballpark and I seen black and white people sitting together, talking together, cheering us on, and a lot of times you need that support when you're with the newspaper, but we didn't have that. I think this town grow closer, because the newspaper's on the strike. I think sometimes, political-wise, things you read might keep you separated. But I seen where we went on, I think that's one of the reasons we won. I think - I always said to myself, I think on the plat down on the ballpark, I think the good lord put us here to win, to heal the city of Detroit. So I think it played a big important role, but I think it helped us as people, the guys that are playing this game - supporters are - we didn't think about it. We started taking, leading in baseball. And I think it started from the riot, and we went to spring training, so we knew we had the best team, we're going to win. And I think that newspaper on the strike, and Ernie Harwell's voice, I seen this city kind of grow together.
WW: Are there any other stories you'd like to share today?
WH: Well, I can talk all day when it comes to people and stuff like that. You know, I'm just very fortunate, back involved, and still involved, like I said, Mr. Illitch got me involved, and his family. And I think about - I go back many years ago, and what's going on in the city now, thanks to Mr. Illitch and his commitment through Coleman Young, that things that are going on, there's been a commitment for him to move downtown, which you see going on, and I think, if you go down there now, you see things growing every week, every day. And I'm 75, and I hope, I envision, I see - I know I won't see Hudson's back, because I used to love to do downtown around Christmas time to see them light up the Christmas lights on the side of the Hudson's building - but now he's got other things down there, and I really enjoy looking at the pictures of downtown at nighttime now, you see a lot of life.
But I think it goes back to - thank Mr. Illitch's family for doing that, for his commitment with Coleman, what's going on now, downtown, but I always think about uproar and the riots and stuff. Most young people don't realize what's going on. It's just like, you go to college, they see things going on in college, you start one of them. I'm following this kid. I'm following this one. They don't have an idea what's going on, they're just following the crowd. But - and that's why I said a couple years back, when Baltimore was having a problem. I said, if they get the people together, the people are going to heal that. And that's what I saw. Political wise, they kind of keep you far away, getting to the truth. But if you listen to the people in the community, that's who heals things like that. And primarily I think, that's what I'm still doing. Doing here, and I'm involved in a program down in Florida in spring training and Polk County and Lakeland and it's something that it's all - the story what we're doing down there is all about what I just explained to you. Go back three years ago and Mr. Illitch told me to go for it. You know, and this thing is growing across Polk County and I hope one day it might be a model for this country, what started when our childhood, coming up in Detroit, and my vision of the future, and Mr. Illitch's support, that right now we - I think we've got over 2200 foot soldiers in the Polk County community. And it's started from incident. But the key to this is churches and schools, and I'm - it's - if you look at life, sometime in the last 50 years or so, I seen churches and schools got separated. We lost a lot of faith in our schools. But you bring them two back together, I think they'll teach you about - remind you how you know your next door neighbor's name and stuff like that. But that's what I like to see. How many more years I've got left, thank the good lord, that I can see that come together, and I think that'll be nice for here in Detroit and for this country.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
WH: Thank you.
WW: I really appreciate it.
WH: Thank you.