WW: Hello my name is William Winkel. Today is March 19, 2016. We are in Detroit, MI. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s 1967 Oral History Project. This is the interview of Adam Shakoor. Thank you very much for sitting down with me today.
AS: My pleasure.
WW: Can you please tell me when and where were you born?
AS: I was born in Detroit, Michigan, August 6, 1947.
WW: Where did you grow up?
AS: I grew up in the Northeast Side of Detroit. An area in public housing known as Sojourner Truth. Public housing, Nevada, Ryan Road, Mound area of Northeast Detroit. Also near an area called Conant Gardens, which was a very middle class stable area, and at that time very working-class area that had some of the historical connections with a struggle that occurred in that period because in the public housing in Northeast Detroit known as Sojourner Truth, it was the first low-rise brick public housing in America. It was something that Mrs. Roosevelt—Eleanor Roosevelt—had been very instrumental in making it happen. As a matter of the beginnings of that particular time period, there was some concern by white Detroiters that they wanted the housing, which had been set aside for the African Americans during that period, and so there were, not riots as such but there were marauding whites that would come in and intimidate the people in the evenings and shoot into the homes and, of course, the men there stood guard and make sure their families were protected. Folk like Paul Robison and many of the historical figures of the struggle of that era—George Crockett, another gentleman that was a lawyer during that time, was very active—Coleman Young was actively engaged during that time period, and LeBaron Simmons was actively engaged—you may have some knowledge of his family in terms of Larry Simmons, who was a part of the Coleman Young administration, and a current retired person from the staff of the county. He worked for the country executive, Ed McNamara. His son by the way is often on MSNBC as a democratic commentator, he’s a political consultant. I can’t think of his son’s name at the moment but the Simmons family was very, very actively engaged over the past 70 or so years in Detroit. So it was—well there were marches and various other kinds of things so you might say that the area that I was born in was an area which was a part of some of the civil rights history of Detroit, and of course Sojourner Truth historically was a person who had led many of the slaves out of slavery in the Underground Railroad. She was a very accomplished person in terms of her efforts of freeing African people who were enslaved.
WW: And the action your talking about—whites shooting into the homes and other antagonizing actions—was that going on while you were growing up still or just in the wake of 1942?
AS: No that was before my birth. That was the history of it. My father was, I think, he told me the third family that moved into Sojourner Truth after it was built. And so he and other of the early inhabitants of the public housing there were organized in ways of essentially keeping watch to ensure that there were none. My older sister was alive at that time, she’s now deceased. And of course growing up I heard all the stories as the men would get together and they’d talk about some of the things that went on. There is a bailiff by the name of Thornton Jackson who was around during that time. The Jackson family—Thornton Jackson’s dad Thornton Senior and my dad very closely in friendship—well Thornton can talk about that in greater detail having experienced it as a young man growing up during that time period that these things were going on. In fact, Wayne State University did a book on Sojourner Truth, public housing and some of the histories as a part of that.
WW: What was your childhood like growing up there?
AS: My childhood was unremarkable. It was just a childhood where I was very well-secured by my family. It was childhood that, as young people, we engaged with other children and the activities of youth. You know, playing baseball, riding our bikes, and enjoying growing up in Detroit. Across Nevada where the fields were, we’d go over there and we would play in the fields. Now it’s developed and I think the Eleventh Precinct is built in that area now, and the prisons—the state made prisons over in that area—but it was a good childhood. You didn’t have any real concerns, just having fun, doing your chores, and growing up.
WW: What was it like to grow up during the ‘50s and the early ‘60s then?
AS: Well in the ‘50s it was some difficulty because a recession took place. My dad had worked at Bohn Aluminum, which was a very large industrial plant. In fact, their UAW local was the largest that the UAW had here, and this is before, I guess, the Ford local 600 had grown to becoming the largest. Jobs were fairly plentiful. People were moving here from the South for some of the jobs. There were very good times but then around the middle part—’53, ’54, ’55—a recession hit and some of the plants shut down to move to—Bohn Aluminum moved to Indiana and jobs thus became less. Of course, my father was a tradesman, he was an active member of his local—in fact he had been the recording secretary of the Bohn Aluminum local, as a charter member he helped organize it, and so he was able to get a job elsewhere, but the fortunes of time were he turned down a job at Ford and decided to work at Packard Motor Car Company. And of course Packard closed in ’56. So he left Bohn, went to Packard, stayed there a couple years, and then they closed down. And after a couple years of doing various construction-type jobs—brick masonry, painting, carpentry, things of that nature, he was very skilled in his crafts—he got on with the Bohn Aluminum over in Iron Street and Jefferson—I think now they’ve got lofts in that plant facility. So it was a struggle during those mid to latter years of the ‘50s. The ‘60s were quite different. In the ‘60s, things had gotten back pretty good for the city. And at that time, my mom had worked as a lab technician. She had been successful in her efforts. She was a college graduate, my dad did not finish college. So she had taught school in the South and came to Detroit. Couldn’t teach school here initially because they required black college graduates to have to take classes at Wayne State or some other institution here before they would let them teach. So my mother, who had taught maybe eight years in Kentucky and West Virginia, had to work in the hospital. Since science was her foundation, that is what she did as a lab technician for several of the hospitals. I remember Brent Hospital, I remember a doctor, Dr. A.B Henderson, who was a very noted black doctor, she set up his lab for him and his private practice, and basically it was a pretty good time in terms of economically.
WW: Being so young did you understand any of the social movements that began to form during the ‘60s?
AS: Yes, because I don’t ever remember a time that there was not some discussion about social issues. My grandfather moved from West Virginia when he retired from the coal mines to live with us, and so we had a rich environment, generationally speaking. We had my grandfather and grandmother, and we had my mother and my father. So since both of them worked, and my grandmother never worked in terms of outside the home, and my grandfather was retired, there was an extended family that was connected that assisted each other in terms of what was needed. My grandfather had been an organizer for the coal miners’ union—United Coal Miners—and had been a person who was very, shall we say, opinionated, on issues, and he was a republican, a black republican. As having been born in 1892, he was a part of that generation of African Americans who identified with the party of Lincoln. My father had been born in 1912, and he became of age during Roosevelt’s time—he didn’t vote in ’32, but he voted in ’36—and in ’36, he voted for FDR. So there were always discussions, always debates about who was better in terms of the candidates, at the national level at least—was it Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson? And so they would go at it, and so I’m a part of that. Then of course the civil rights movement is happening, the issues involved with the end of the colonizing and getting the Europeans out of Africa is going on, so it was a very, very rich, intellectually, and open discussion about the issues of the day as they affected labor, as they affected black Americans, and I was there at the table and taking it all in. As a very young person, it was part of my growth as a person being aware of the events that were going on in and around America during that time.
WW: That’s amazing. Those must have been really great conversations.
AS: Yeah it was very rich. I enjoyed it, and I miss it. Because obviously, you know, after the death of my grandfather and subsequently the family moved back to West Virginia. I stayed here, I was an adult in college at the time, and of course I’d travel back and forth to West Virginia. But the conversations, and the debates especially, in terms of a more partisan flavor, because my grandfather was a dyed-in-the-wool republican, and my father was a dyed-in-the-wool democrat. But it was fine. That was my grandfather on my maternal side. Yeah.
WW: As the ‘60s progressed, did you notice any tensions rising in the city?
AS: Quite a few. Long before the riots happened, probably the latter part of the ‘50s, incidents of black people being shot or killed by police officers, police officers that drove around in our communities—we called them the big four—that often times would pull young people over and harass them some. I was never beaten by the police although my brother was. In those time periods it was a lot of tension that existed and some of the tension I attributed to overzealous policing, but also to neighborhoods as they were beginning to change. Of course, I mentioned about Sojourner Truth; the neighborhood over there in the Northeast Side of Detroit began to change in terms of more and more black folk moving into that area. A lot of the white occupants mostly moving north of Eight Mile and establishing the city of Warren, East Detroit and other places, so it began to be a lot of tension. I guess people made a lot of money during that time period in terms of the scare tactics—when a black family would move in and all of a sudden the homeowners that were living there would put their homes on the market and get out and other families were moving in. It was pretty racially divided. Going to school in that area was—as schools began to change their racial composition, you would get into, shall we say, racial incidents with some of the white children who may have been mimicking what their parents were discussing in their homes and name-calling racially and things of that nature. So, as those events were happening, I mean Detroit was a place—if we could maybe go into the early ‘60s—Dr. King came to Detroit. I mean they were, I guess marching down Woodward in ’63. That was the largest civil rights march in the north as of that time. I was told probably over 100,000 people were there, marching down Woodward Avenue. My father marched during that time period, but I was not in the marching group. I think my sister was a part of that, I know she marched in Washington in ’63. But my sister was away at college. She may not have marched there, but I know she was at the August ’63 march, which came after the Detroit march. So there was a lot of pent-up anger, and those in authority for the city wanted to listen, but they didn’t how to listen, I guess. Or they knew to listen to only certain elements of the community, because Cavanagh was the mayor then and he had been elected principally because blacks abandoned Miriani—Louis Miriani—and came on board with Jerome Canavagh, and he knew it. And of course, he opened his administration up, hiring some blacks into his administration or seeing that they got involved in the housing, police and other things in community relations. But it wasn’t enough. So it just maybe put a temporary lid on things, but it was still boiling under the lid.
WW: How do you refer to what happened in 1967? Do you refer to it as a riot or do you refer to it as a rebellion?
AS: Riot has a connotation of race as its mantra. I don’t see it in that way. I consider it a uprising type of incident—could be more rebellion—but the uprising was based upon some of that suppression that was existing in the community. To give you an example, I expected a riot in Detroit when it happened in ’67 because a year earlier, over in Kercheval and Cadillac, there was a beginning of a riot then. Except it wasn’t at night or in the early morning hours it was in the middle of the day. So I guess because it occurred at the time it occurred, that there was enough police response that was able to suppress it versus three or four o’clock in the morning, in terms of the incident in July of ’67. There were crowds of people, there were actions taken that could have germinated to being a upheaval in terms of property loss and other incidents, crowds gathering. In fact, a former colleague of mine on the bench at 36th District Court was a student at Wayne at the time, Rufus Griffin. Rufus, who is now deceased, Rufus was arrested at that time. I remember when he got out of jail he came back and he was talking about it. Think General Baker, these are all people that I had begun to basically have a political education from as a young student at Wayne, and of course they were my mentors. So as that incident happened, I’m listening to what all took place, and all that so I was of the impression that a riot may happen in Detroit because of the circumstances that were going on in America. In America, as it relates to police-community relations, as it relates to the Vietnam War, as it relates to a way in which people, who had grievances against government actions and decisions were not going to just sit idly by and allow things to go without a reaction from them. And with the manner in which the policing was done at that time, as to beating people to stop them or overreacting to people who had legitimate grievances, that it was kind of like a powder keg, no communication, one force against another force, and that it would at some point explode. So I wasn’t surprised by the riot or rebellion of ’67 because, as I said, I considered it a uprising, a containment that had been put on the community that, at some point, would eventually explode—actually exploded—so that was my take. But racially speaking, in that time period, there was more togetherness in the looting that was going on during the ’67 rebellion than you’d think would exist with the concept of a race riot, because blacks and whites were in the jewelry stores, or the television radio repair shops, and cleaners and everything else, grabbing whatever they could grab. And sometimes a white looter would go get something and a black looter saying, “Man, I was gonna get that.” And, “Oh, well alright you can have that I’ll get something else.” So there really wasn’t race connotations to it. The race had been more the attitude, I think, of the police in reference to the black rebellious folk, and how they surmised it in putting it, I guess, in the way in which they thought everything else that was happening in America was going on. But it was not motivated so much from that standpoint. In fact, my assessment is that most people say it was a surprise, which I disagree with, but most people attribute it to a group of people that are just crowding around at an after-hours club, and at some point just exploding. But as you analyze it, Twelfth Street was a center of black nightlife. People are going and coming all evening. The evening activities are going on. The pimps, prostitutes, the after-hours clubs are going strong, people are getting awful work that frequent those places, and they’re going from the bars closing down and they’re going on Twelfth Street. Wherever you are, you go to the club, you hear the entertainers. At the end of that, the clubs close at two so where do you go? You’re not ready to go home, you go on Twelfth Street. So people are walking. If you’ve been to New York on Times Square and you know Times Square, people never go to sleep. They’re all day, all night walking up and down Times Square. Well, imagine that on a smaller scale, as to Twelfth Street. That’s what Twelfth Street is happening at two, three, four o’clock in the morning. So, in that environment, you’re gonna have people. After-hours clubs are raided all the time. That’s a cost of doing business for those people running after-hour places. And sometimes they had relationships with police officers. So some got raided, some didn’t get raided. Or some were raided, and they knew they were gonna be raided as to their relationship that existed. I’m not saying that it was all from a point of corruption, but it was kind of—why risk officers’ lives unnecessarily? You raided a club with the same people who were police officers, going in as the guys that buy the alcohol to make the case. So, did the doorman know them? Who knows? They’ve been there before, they’ve raided all these clubs before. Did the people running the clubs know them? Yup. After-hours clubs were businesses that were tolerated by the police. I don’t know if the law prevented them from closing them as a nuisance, but if you raid a place three, four times, the law allows you to say it’s a nuisance—clamp it down, board it up. But they didn’t do that. They take’em in, give them a fine. Next week, they’re going again. So I kind of thought that that’s just a cost of doing business in that time period. In terms of the outlet it allowed, instead of changing the law to allow liquor to be sold after 2 o’clock, and changing the law to allow persons who didn’t have a license to distribute alcohol—maybe that would’ve been more difficult than just every two or three weeks raiding them and taking them in and putting some money into the city coffers, I don’t know. But, that evening, the underpinnings were that this was a celebration of some people who came back from Vietnam. That’s what it was. It was a party. It wasn’t even an after-hours normal activity. It’s a party for a couple guys who made it through Vietnam. We’re losing people all the time—“Hey did you hear about so-and-so? Man he got shot. Oh man he got killed. Man I went to high school with him. Went to junior high. What happened?”—you know. So we’re hearing this all the time. So two guys, they’re having a party. I’m assuming—I wasn’t there—that some of the other guys who made it back from Vietnam are gonna attend the party, their friends are gonna attend the party, so you’re gonna have a larger group of people, but you’re also gonna have a group of people who have experienced violence, danger, and an ability to shoot, an ability to retaliate when they see something that’s unjust as they see it. There’s been some development of their own sense of manhood or whatnot in their experience. So I think they kind of ran into a buzz saw. I think they kind of ran into people who were not going to accept a police department that disrespected them before they left. You add to that what has happened in the ensuing years with the anti-war effort, with the black power movement, with an enlightenment on other areas that are all happening converging together, and it’s 1967. So the attitude of these people is a little different than the attitude of what it may be a year or two earlier in terms of raids. And I think the convergence of those things, with what happened at the wee hours of the morning, overwhelmed the police and they just weren’t really ready for it. They didn’t know how to handle it. They didn’t know how to put the genie back in the bottle. It just was a little bit too much for them. And then as that boils over, it explodes and they can’t put it back. They don’t know how to deal with it. “What do we do? Where do we go?” “Well, let’s get the racial leaders that we have.” But the racial leaders don’t know how to put it back. They weren’t even aware of what was going on. So it was difficult to understand it because it was difficult to be able to put yourself in the place of those people who were experiencing every day what they were experiencing from the police department. It just hit them at the wrong time, with the wrong situation, and inability to address it in the typical way police address things, which is force greater than the opposition that you face, and they couldn’t put force greater than the opposition because the opposition kept growing and growing—“Hey what’s going on down here?” People aren’t asleep because Twelfth Street you aren’t asleep. The neighborhood in and around people get up, they walk around, they go on Twelfth Street just like Times Square. “What’s going on?” You know, and it just was a kind of incident that was predictable if you put the right analysis to what really was going on. If you put, “Oh, we got jobs here. We got homeowners here. It’s a good life.” Yeah for some. But so many others, it was, “Here come the big four man.” “Hey, we better get outta here.” “Hey boy, what you doing running? Get over here. Get up against this car.” That’s a different community and some of the people weren’t hearing that. We’ve got racial groups that meet and community block clubs working with the police and, “Oh, everything is fine. We can communicate.” Yeah with those that you’re communicating with. So, no it wasn’t a surprise—I thought it would’ve happened earlier—but it happened when it happened.
WW: Where were you living then?
AS: I was living on campus on Farnsworth—252 Farnsworth. It was an apartment building. The Science Center has taken that street out in that area. So it was an area that was a secondary area to Twelfth Street for activities—John R., Brush Street. The musicians known as The Funk Brothers that played with Motown, most of them played at the clubs and the bars that were along John R., Canfield, and Brush Street. There was a smaller group of pimps and prostitutes and after-hours clubs over in the area around Canfield-Saint Antoine and what had been once Hastings Street, which was now kind of the I-75. So the vestiges of what was once Hastings Street, along Forest, Canfield, John R., Brush, Saint Antoine, that area was still an area where activities were going on, and they had after-hours clubs, but they were a little bit longer in their being in operation and they didn’t get raided as much. They were pretty much stabilized. Some of the older hustlers in Detroit, they owned their own hotels and they didn’t have any things that would cause a greater concern. Of course, Detroit had different precincts that policed the areas, and I think there was a more tolerant attitude in that area. So the college campus was just kind of two blocks or so away from that neighborhood. And so if you wanted to get something to eat at twelve, one o’clock, you’d go to Stanley’s, which was over on Canfield, or the Chinese place, or you could go to one of the restaurants, Anne’s Bar, you know, 75 cents have your chicken and fries or whatever the heck it was. And so it was a area that had vibrancy activities but I guess when the bars close and the entertainers left, they went into a more cloistered environment or went home, versus on Twelfth Street when the bars close, they were on the street looking for more activity. Or maybe they got in their cars and left the East Side and went over to West Side, who knows.
WW: How did you first hear about what was going on that week?
AS: That Sunday, got a telephone call. And television, radio. I guess I got a call, maybe earlier that day, seven, eight o’clock in the morning. “Hey, man, did you hear? Man, they rioting over on Twelfth.” I said, “What?” And of course, you know, got some of the details. And then, you know, some of the coverage that was going on, and some of the reactions. I think after congressman Conyers got on the car to try to put out the emotions and have people get off the streets, that was played up on TV quite a lot. Of course that was a major thing because Conyers was one who we kind of thought was a young dynamic, individual, and, “Hey man, they’re not listening to Congressman Conyers? Whoa.” Cause he could cross the path between those who were more of the bourgeoisie, and those who were community, because he surprised a lot of people by becoming elected as a congressman. Everybody wanted that seat. That was, I think Richard Austin, maybe Conrad Mallett Sr., and you know, a lot of noted leaders in the community. And I don’t think he got a lot of great support from that group. “Well, he should wait his turn.” Or, you know, whatever else. So that surprised me. But then you know, understanding that pot boiling over kind of thing, you know it’s kind of hard to put it back, and he wasn’t successful. When that happened, then I had to make a tour, so I went in the direction of that area, by that time had gone to Twelfth Street, Linwood, and some other areas, Dexter, Davison and then it hit where I was living, over on Warren Avenue, you know, not two blocks from my apartment. So, it began to, you know, spread to Mack Avenue and other places. So wherever you’d go, you would see that. But of course you had to be very careful because by then, police were out looking to see if we’re a part of anything that’s happening to spread it—snipers and whatever else they were afraid were going to exploit it and create the revolution, because that was also a talk that was going on then: “The revolution has begun.”
WW: What was the feeling in the city as the National Guard and the army moved in?
AS: Disappointment that the governor could not deal with it other than with these young, white, inexperienced persons who had no real relationship with Detroit, couldn’t do anything other than perhaps create more problems. The National Guard came in and like soldiers that I’m sure were somewhat fearful. You know, Detroit was kind of a place that they knew very little about, they had their orders for what to do and so they didn’t know if this person was a minister or this person is a worker going to the plant for his shift. You know, plants were operating twenty four hours. You had a day shift, a afternoon shift, and the midnight shift. And you know, they were pulling people over so you had to be very, very cautious of those individuals. We felt somewhat intimidated in that regard because you were kind of guilty unless proven innocent. And these guys are perhaps quicker on the trigger than they are with any dialogue with anyone so that was a very scary period, in terms of that. Most of the people that were rioting or rebelling, however you wish to refer to it, they were just like having a lot of party, fun. “Hey, everything’s off, let’s go get this! Let’s go get that” You know, it wasn’t a sense of someone going to kill or someone going to burn. I mean a lot of the people were of course looting, breaking windows. They weren’t setting fires, I think some of the storeowners set their own fires. “Hey, this is an opportunity for me to get the hell out of Detroit. I don’t wanna try to rebuild this place so let me set it on fire.” I think that some of the homeowners, you know, set some fires or had some people set fires. And not saying that no one who did any rioting didn’t set fires, of course they did. But I think the manner in which it is hoisted and blamed upon all of the people is a misplacement because if it was that, then I would think there would have been some rebuilding. We had a loss of businesses up and down Linwood, Dexter, Twelfth Street. We had a loss of businesses in various areas—Trumbull, Mack. And if you have been operating your business for ten, twenty, thirty years, and you got your insurance money, and it’s provided a good income for you—the people haven’t moved from there, why wouldn’t you rebuild? My roommate’s grandfather—he was a dentist—he had a home on Atkinson. So when I was maybe around the second day, he went to go check on his uncle and his grandfather, and his grandfather had closed down his business. The building was fine, but he just decided to retire at that point. He wasn’t going back. But why wouldn’t a business, especially those buildings and businesses that are dependent on their income from the neighborhood, why wouldn’t they rebuild? And, as you go out, you go further west, it went to Livernois and Warren Avenue. Every area of Detroit had a commercial strip associated with it, where African American people lived. And most of those areas had a reliance upon the people in the community to further their business interest. After the riots, it was almost eighty five, ninety percent of those businesses failed to reopen—failed to rebuild. And that, to me, seemed as though perhaps they may have been looking for a way out in and around the time the riots happened. Maybe they didn’t understand, maybe they weren’t a part of it, but I just don’t blame all of the burnings on those people that were out on the streets. In fact, you see people taking a television or a radio and they’re running down the streets—“Hey, hey, you got that? Oh where you get that?” “Oh, I got it down here in such and such.” “Well I’mma go over there.” “Well you better not cause they’re over there now and they’re standing guard.” And say, “Okay.” So, that’s the way it was. So the way in which the rioting occurred should have been anticipated by police, should have been in some way able to have been suppressed enough with an appropriate response if they understood. Instead of getting perhaps the congressman out, maybe they should’ve gotten some of the indigenous community leaders—the Block Club, some of the labor leaders, some of the people where they worked at Ford or Chrysler or Dodge Main or wherever they worked. Maybe some of these people could have helped in that regard. But it would’ve had to have been within twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
WW: Aside from the economic devastation you talked about, how was the rest of the community reacting in the wake of the riots? Was there a sense of disunity, was there disillusionment?
AS: No I think there was disappointment. I was of the impression that most people were disappointed because the damage was done to the areas that the African American people lived in, and the harm was felt more by them and the restraints on the movement of African American people to do their day-to-day task, and to go about the business of maintaining their families was interrupted. So there was some disappointment in that regard, but I don’t get the sense that there was any way in which they felt that it had advanced anything in Detroit. And then of course as people were arrested and locked up and people were killed, it was even more disappointing because naturally, we thought that the police response and the National Guard response was somewhat overreacting and it allowed racists and those who had elimination of blacks, it allowed them the opportunity to do some things, like with what happened to some of the folk that I knew from my neighborhood at the Algiers motel, where they just lined up and shot you know, guys that were in the earlier group of The Dramatics—Larry Reed and Pollard and those guys. They were, you know, just partying. They were having fun. Had some young ladies that they had brought in from Canada and they were having fun, but they were white—the girls were—and so that incensed the security guard or the police department and so there were atrocities. So I think that it actually was—and these guys, they weren’t political people, they were entertainers. They were people having fun—good friends. They were. They weren’t trying to overthrow anybody at any office. Probably some of them couldn’t have named who were, you know, the leaders of the NAACP or the Police-Community Relations Board or anything of that nature because you know, this is the age of Motown. This is the age of The Temptations, they could tell you all The Temps and The Contours and you know, groups of prominence at that time. So it was kind of devastating to the community.
WW: In the years following, do you believe Detroit changed as a whole, or just segments of the community changed?
AS: Detroit changed in different ways. Obviously, people left Detroit. In terms of businesses, people left Detroit. In terms of neighborhoods, properties devalued. People had no sense of investing in the community. They had a saying that, “The last person out of Detroit, turn out the lights.” But there began to be a group of African American people that said, “No, we’re not going anywhere and we’re going to rebuild this city, and if we are going to survive, then we have to come together to do so.” And so there began to be a spirit of racial unity to begin to impact the political structure. I think—who did we have?—Nick Hood on City Council at the time. He was probably about the only African American, so—
WW: And Patrick.
AS: William Patrick, was he there at the same time as Nick? Maybe so.
WW: Mm-hmm.
AS: Okay. So Bill Patrick—he had been the first—so we had Bill Patrick and Nick Hood. And Bill Patrick didn’t stick around. He got a job with AT&T as their general council, so he may have left before the ’73 election, or the ’69 election, I don’t know which one. But in ’69, Dick Austin decides to run for mayor—before ’69, but his campaign goes in ’69. So there began to be—“We’re gonna get this city on the right track,” by some of the leadership during that time period, post-riot ’67. And so Richard Austin becomes the standard bearer to run. Cavanagh is devastated, his future in politics is basically shot because of the riot, and in the Democratic Party, there is the big divide on the Vietnam War that is a part of Johnson not running for president, a part of the split in the Democratic Party between McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, and McCarthy is kind of pushed to the side, and they pushed Hubert Humphrey out in front. And so he loses, so it’s kind of in an upheaval somewhat, and it impacts Detroit. And so we say, “It’s time for black leadership to come as the mayor,” so Dick Austin, who’s a CPA—I think he was the first black CPA in Michigan. So he gets a large segment of the community’s support, but I always thought he did the wrong thing because he went to campaign more in the white community—took the black community for granted—and he went to campaign in the white community to show that he was a good negro, he was a person who was not going to be a part of this militant group, but it’s time to turn leadership over to the good class of leadership, and I think in that vein, he roused in some of the white precincts, “Hey they may win,” so they got a larger voter turnout when we did the analysis after it. They got a larger voter turnout in some of the white precincts than they had before in the previous mayoral election. And of course, black voter turnout was about the same, so it didn’t increase anything. And of course, that was something that happened after it. But there was a urgent sense that we needed to rise to a leadership role and of course there was the aspect of the ’73 period, where people like Clyde Cleveland out of New Detroit, and Erma Henderson, Equal Justice Council—she was court watching in terms of the justice in Detroit—and of course Senator Coleman Young, and there was a guy on the West Side of Detroit working with youth, Larry Nevilles. They decided to run for city council and mayor and there began to be promotion by guys like Jim Ingram, Drumbeat on the radio, and Butterball, Jr., who was a station manager over at WCHB and talking about black pride, black participation and all of the other things. So they got a larger turnout in ’73 and were successful in getting—and of course the diminishing between ’68 and ’73 of more of the white population. Detroit was on a regular, steadily decline, had they not come in to, I think, some sense of leadership. And of course, from that point forward, it was staving the flow of negative decline to trying to just stabilize. And to stabilize, you had to do some things economically and politically, and then from that point going forward to try and grow it. And I think that was done as marginally as it may have been in terms of numbers. Nonetheless, the biggest task was to stabilize, to stop the flow of negativity that was happening. Otherwise, Detroit would have ceased to exist, because it was on a decline from that point on. The riots really tore economically, socially, and in many, many ways, the fabric of Detroit. Companies left, jobs left, corporations ceased to contribute, all kinds of things occurred in a negative fashion that were of such a magnitude that it could have made Detroit a part of a real negative history beyond the fact of it having this tumultuous event happen in Detroit. It could have just closed it down.
WW: How do you feel that Detroit has managed itself over the course of the last forty years?
AS: I think it managed itself fairly well in the last forty years, except unfortunately, it did not allow some of the more revolutionary ideas of impacting economically that it could have helped. It staved off some potential run into bankruptcy with increase in the ability of being able to have a income tax that voters could generate some income to deal with the loss of dollars from the revenue that was lost with people, you know, leaving Detroit and going elsewhere. It cut some of its work force and no department was sacred. All of them felt the cut that addressed some of the issues fiscally, but it still provided service. But it was still in a holding pattern, but every time it sought to grow, it ran into a lot of opposition, and I think it was a yeomen’s task that Coleman Young, as mayor did, to keep the corporations here, especially General Motors because General Motors was definitely on its way out with the old Clark plant, and they were gone if the deal hadn’t been done to establish the Hamtramck pole-town plant. That saved revenues from the income and the property taxes that were payable into Detroit, and of course, the workers that still stayed here and homeowners and contributed to jobs. I think the thing that failed was the inability of those in leadership to see that Detroit should’ve had gaming a long time ago when it was reposed by Young’s administration, before I became a part of it. In retrospect, that was the only gaming that would’ve been done outside of Las Vegas in America, before Mississippi, before Indiana, before, you know, various other areas, and could’ve kind of cornered the market. I think that there were some things that could’ve happened—I thought when Don Barton and Michael Jackson were gonna do their theme park there—every time I go down and take my grandkids to Orlando, I say, “If a mouse can build up this city like it has, and have such a revenue flow into a place like Orlando, what the heck could Detroit have benefitted, and how great would it have been for a Michael Jackson and a Don Barton to have had a similar impact with a Michael Jackson theme park here, who had fans all over the world.” I think this could have been a place. I think there been opportunities, some have been done well, I think there are opportunities that have been lost. I think now it’s on a level where it’s moving forward. I like some of the effort of inclusion in terms of the plans and growth of Detroit that are taking place now. I’d like to see more inclusion economically, in terms of Detroit so it doesn’t miss the opportunity that everybody becomes a participant in the process, and I think the political forces that are in place today are moving in that direction. So, I think Detroit has a fine future, I’m very happy to see the corporate community become participants, because a great city can’t be great just from a political standpoint, it has to have economic participation and partnership like Atlanta with Coca-Cola and other cities. Those are my hopes. I have not given up on the city by a long shot, I’m still here and will continue to be.
WW: Alright. Thank you very much. Is there anything else you would like to share?
AS: No, I think it’s just a great project that you guys are doing, and chronicling the various reactions to what was a pivotal event. But I also would just like to say that fifty years ago was a rebellion, riot, however you wish to refer to it, but fifty years ago also was the growth of beginning of a great institution that has helped so many lives and that is Wayne County Community College District, by Murray Jackson, who was the founder of it, and currently is its leader, courtesy of Ivory, that it has touched so many thousands and thousands of lives in Southeast Michigan by what it provides as a vehicle. I think that out of the ashes of the riot/ rebellion, the growth of New Detroit as an entity that has brought that partnership, that coalition between business and community, I think the kinds of things educationally, the kinds of things that bring about a forum for people to debate, discuss, share, and understand those voices that they didn’t hear before the riot, but now there begins to be a forum where they can hear helps to give the city a direction with all the information that it needs. So I don’t look at the fifty year period of the riot as so pivotal in impacting Detroit, I think it’s some other things that have occurred as a result, and certainly in reaction to the riot, that are very, very positive, that are very ongoing, and are political, economic, and socially significant.
WW: Thank you very much for sitting down with me today.
AS: Sure. All right. You’re very welcome. My pleasure.
WW: Hello, today is July 18, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is with –
AC: Al Calvert.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, Al.
AC: It’s my pleasure, Billy.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
AC: I was born in Brighton, Alabama on November 1, 1945 somewhere around 7:45 in the evening.
WW: Can you talk a little about growing up?
AC: Well, I grew up into Jim Crow in Brighton, Alabama. I grew up under the auspices of segregation, complete segregation, the water fountain said “colored,” that’s what we drank out of, because it was a way of life. The counter in the, I forget its name, it’s like a Kresge, a Walmart store, I forget the name of the store at that time, anyway, where we ate, if it said “colored,” that’s where we sit. We rode in the back of the bus. It’s the part that said “colored,” we’d walk to the back of the bus. “Boy!” was what you were called, and so we adjusted to that, because it was a way of life. When you’re born into something, you don’t really question it. You adjust to it, so that’s how I was raised in Brighton.
WW: Are there any memories you’d like to share from growing up down there?
AC: I have fond memories. School was everything. My teachers, I remember Mrs. Rancher, who was my dance instructor, who was my, I think, history teacher, she was everything to me. I go back to the first grade, Miss Austin. I was the May Day king, and my mother was very active at the PTA, they made me the cape and the satin knickerbocker pants, and I remember my little queen was Joyce [Lumboyd?], and we sat on the throne as the May Day – so that gave me a sense of leadership, I think, that I have obtained all of my life, but it began in Brighton, at Brighton Elementary School, where our teachers were our role models, and they were great people, very instrumental in a very positive upbringing. Ultimately, I veered from that, but it was internalized at a young age to be somebody in spite of the conditions, because at that time, our parents who were born before us under Jim Crow, they did not allow their conditions to control our lives. They controlled the conditions our lives were in.
WW: Growing up, did you see the civil rights movement firsthand?
AC: Yes. We were in Brighton High School, I think it was around 1963, I think it was, and Dr. Charles Allen Brown was the principal, ran a very tight ship, and of course we had the utmost respect for our instructors, our teachers at that time, so we were, you know, not perfect children, but, you know, we were disciplined, so to speak, and somebody ran down the hall and said, “Dr. King is in Birmingham!” They shouted it out, and I know now it was an act of God. It was a spiritual movement, because we would not have aberrated from the day’s course to run to Birmingham. Now, born under Jim Crow, now, fear of the Klansmen, bully policemen, racist policemen, we lived under that, but we ran from Brighton, took every mode of transportation we could, to get to Birmingham, where they say Dr. King was, and we ran into what people see now, the dogs and the hoses and Eugene “Bull” Connor, who was the ultimate racist at that time. And you’ve seen it on TV, the policemen, the dogs, the water hoses, et cetera, et cetera, we ran into that and confronted that without fear. It was just lifted off of us, and Dr. King was definitely sent from God, because when I went back home, I think around 1986, and I went to the mall and young white girls, I wore jewelry at the time, the young white girls, “Oh my God, look at his jewelry,” and when I left Alabama, you would get killed for that, you know [laughter]. But when I went back, the whole atmosphere of Alabama had changed. I went to a jazz club, I remember, and I saw a young white guy, kind of looked like you [laughter], he’s sitting with this black girl in the jazz club, hugged up, so oh my God! So, all of that happened as a result of that day that Dr. King came to Birmingham.
WW: After you graduated high school, is that when you began your way north?
AC: Yes, I had an aunt that lived in Detroit, Vera Patterson, who lived on Cloverlawn, and her husband, Pat Patterson, worked for Dodge, and I contacted them. Can I digress?
WW: Mm-hmm.
AC: What really necessitated me coming to Detroit, I found out when I was a child in the interim of growing up that I was born out of wedlock, and that my biological daddy, who I had no relationship with, was somewhere in Detroit, so I found out that he lived down the street from my Aunt Vera when I contacted her, so that was the motivating factor to me coming to Detroit. First to get a job at Dodge Main through Pat Patterson, who was a union guy in Dodge Main Hamtramck, in the foundry, and they said my biological dad was living down the street on Elmhurst and Cloverlawn, which was like literally a block down the street, so the combination of those two was the contributing factor to me moving to Detroit, and ultimately I did right after high school.
WW: And what year did you come to the city?
AC: I came in 1964.
WW: What was your first impression of Detroit?
AC: My first impression of Detroit was, coming out of the South, Brighton, Alabama, where there was one traffic light [laughter], you come to Detroit, you say, “wow!” You know, the city, and especially beginning to work in Dodge Main, in Hamtramck, in the foundry, I was making more money than I had ever seen in my life, so Detroit was everything to me. And then you have to understand that the Motown sound was just blossoming. I remember Marvin Gaye “Pride and Joy,” you know, and the Supremes and the Temptations, that whole genre of music has just began to burst into our soul, and so that was just exciting times to be able to make money and buy things for myself, and growing up, to look forward to being a productive man in my life. But then I went over on Twelfth Street one night with a guy I was riding to work with, and he went upstairs to buy some drugs, and so he said, “Hey man, come on up here with me.” You know, I’m a young buck out of Alabama, so I went upstairs with him, and it was a place where the prostitutes were, and ultimately I saw this pretty girl, and I found out what she was doing, so I, what they called at that time, “turned a trick” with her, and that changed my whole life. That changed my whole life in a moment of time. I saw the pimps parked downstairs in the Fleetwoods, the El Dorados, it was like fast things were going on on Twelfth Street at that time. You have prostitutes, you know, “ten and two baby, ten for me, two for the room,” you know, yada yada yada. Just things were moving, and I saw this, and I wanted to be one of those guys, and ultimately I did. My book is about Born a Bastard, Now Born Again, from pimp to poison, ultimately the poison, the drugs, which landed me in prison for five years and nine months federal prison, where God called me to preach. And I thank God that today my life has turned around, and I use all of these sordid parts of my life to help other people, especially young people, not to go where I have gone.
WW: Backtracking just a little bit, after you first went to Twelfth Street, so you continued operating out of Twelfth Street for the next few years then?
AC: Operating?
WW: Or interacting with.
AC: All over the city.
WW: Okay.
AC: Especially Twelfth Street. Wherever that the party was, that’s what we did.
WW: During your few years in Detroit before ’67, did you have any interactions with the Detroit Police Department?
AC: None, none. Never. I heard about the Big Four, but had never had any interactions with them. I knew one time, we were on Twelfth Street, and they drove up to the corner and said, “Now, we’re going to go around this block, and when we come back, you so-and-so-and-so better not be here.” And of course, everybody scattered, and I found out then that even the players at that time, the street guys at that time had the ultimate respect for the Big Four, but personally encountered, never.
WW: Going into ’67, did you anticipate any violence, or did you feel any tension going into it?
AC: Living in the underworld, personally I felt no tension. I knew that there was a problem, because black people were talking about and depressed about how they were being treated, even from merchants, because they were talked to any kind of way, they were being sold bad meat, and just being treated like, you know, third-class citizens. And, of course, contributing to the economic—let me digress a little bit. Money was flourishing in Detroit. The factories were paying good, the number game was popping at that time, the prostitutes, man, I mean, they were getting money, the pimps and the players were making money. There were no hard drugs, you know, just weed and a little cocaine, you know what I’m saying, but that stuff was mainly recreational. And it was just a party time, once again, the Motown sound, you know, the 20 Grand on Fourteenth and Warren, the Driftwood Lounge, the Gold Room, the bowling alley, I think it was owned by Bill Kabbus, and had the 20 Grand Motel behind with the Chit Chat Lounge. We had the Drome’s Show Bar, all the jazz musicians, I mean, the famous guys. I don’t care who, name one, they came to the Drome. You know, we had Esquire Corned Beef, you know, the Greenleaf Restaurant, I mean, it was just a good time in Detroit. Mr. Kelly’s on the east side, you know, it was just a good time in Detroit during those days. And so, living the fast life that I had entered into, we did not one-on-one feel the tension that was brewing in the city, but you know, through conversation, you know, you hear people talk about, you know, I’m sick of this, and so on. You know, deadbeat down here, they’d talk to me over there, gave me bad meat, et cetera, et cetera.
WW: Going into ’67, you were there that night?
AC: Absolutely.
WW: Can you take me through that night, how you got there, where you were?
AC: Well, during those days, being raided was not a big thing. Being in an after-hours club and being in a raid was no big thing, because the house man would tell you, “I might get raided tonight.” Okay, no problem. They would pull up in a paddy wagon, take the men downtown to 1300 Beaubien, we paid $27.50, get out, go back and party again. No big thing. Nobody was shoved around or talked about, you know. I’ve even seen the police come up in the after-hours club and get his payola. The barman would hand them an envelope, he’d stick it in his pocket, and go on about his business, plainclothes policeman, so no fear of being in a raid. But this night, after leaving, we would go to a club, whether it was the 20 Grand or the Chit Chat Lounge or wherever, you know, because the clubs stayed packed. It was like what you see now, the disco thing going on. Well, Detroit was like that, you know, with the clubs stayed crowded, with people just partying and having a good time, ub the black community especially, that we frequented, and so we left the club, and my buddy Westside, who passed a couple of years ago, he said, “Man, let’s go up to Billy O’Neal’s joint. There’s a little joint on Twelfth and Clairmount; let’s go. Let’s try this one tonight.” Because there were several after-hours clubs around Detroit. I mean, you know, Stokes had a joint, somebody else had a joint, you know, but let’s go to the new place that’s just opened up recently, so we went up there. You would go upstairs, I remember that. Went upstairs, and I took a seat, like you’d go upstairs, and the bar was here. And I sit right here at the corner of the bar with my buddy Westside. And when the police came up, they came up, you know, and so, no big thing, we’re thinking it’s, you know, the normal raid, you know. We expected if we don’t get away, they’re going to take us downtown in the white paddy wagon, sometimes guys would be smoking weed in the back of the paddy wagon, I mean, that’s how it was, that was the atmosphere. But this particular morning, the club closed at two. Three-something in the morning, it was a Sunday morning, July 23, these guys began to push people around.
WW: How many people were in the club that night?
AC: I can’t say numerically.
WW: Packed?
AC: Yes, it was packed, and people were constantly coming, but it was packed, and these guys came up, the police officers came up and they began to be irate. Well you know, hey, you’re not going to push a player around in front of his woman. That bird ain’t going to fly, and you’re certainly not going to push his woman around in front of him. That bird definitely ain’t going to fly, so it was a combination of, I would surmise to say, in my own perception, that the police officers could not take the fact that it was crowded with blacks, dressed well, guys with nice jewelry, beautiful cars outside, beautiful women on the inside, people drinking, partying, and having fun. Don’t get me wrong, that after-hours joint is illegal now, but they were getting paid over for this kind of thing, I mean, come on now. Detroit was just like that, it’s a plug-in town. But these guys came up and in my opinion, having witnessed racism all of my life, the racist attitude came up, because they began to push people around and call people names. The owner kept telling them, “Man, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this. If you’re going to take them out, let them walk out down through the back,” – got a back way, which I was unaware of – “let them walk out, and take them downtown, do whatever you’re going to do. You don’t have to do them like that. This is not that kind of place. It’s not a violent place. These people just here partying.” So, they began to get more irate, the policemen did, began to, man, grab people and twisting arms, and man, they’re going to lock you up and calling you names, and you know, and the n-word, and yada yada yada, and the mf-word, and you know. And so, the brothers began to challenge that. “You don’t push me around, man, you don’t have to do me like that, I’m up in here partying, I’m clean, I’m, you know, jeweled up, hair processed.” During those days, you know, it ain’t that kind of party. “Man, you don’t have to take me downtown. Everybody up here got $27.50 and more than that to get out.” But it got out of hand, I remember the owner kept yelling, “Man, don’t do that. You don’t have to do that.” Then he began to curse the policemen out, “You so-and-so, so-and-so, you know, you don’t have no business coming up in my place, treating people like that, you know, these are my people, yada yada yada.” And ultimately what sparked the whole thing into a flame, where the city was on fire, lit on that day. A young lady, sister, black girl, was pushed down the stairs, it was a banister there, and this stick from the banister went through her leg, and when the brother saw that, all hell broke loose. My buddy Westside, we managed to get out the back way, past all of the stuff, and on top of the car yelling to them, you know, just cussing them out, to be candid with you. And we went across the street, and we began to see people coming out breaking in windows. There was a couple of pawn shops on Twelfth Street, I remember that. They began to knock the windows out and taking the jewelry and stuff out of the pawn shop, and people starting coming out of their places, and it just, you know, it just spread. Just like that, and so my buddy Westside, “Man, we got to get out of this area, because this is really getting to be kind of rough over here.” I mean, we pimps, we don’t want no trouble, you know what I’m saying? And so, we began to go back to the west side, up on Northlawn where he stayed, and the Big Four stopped us. My first encounter with the Big Four. Three plain-clothed men and one uniformed officer driving this big Plymouth. They stopped us, doors opened, you know, they out with their guns, and the uniformed cop got the shotgun to my buddy Westside’s head. Well, he’s not afraid of any police, so he start cussing them out like crazy. And it happened so fast, I didn’t have time to fear, and I saw the Big Four take a pistol out of his pocket and lay it on the seat. After they got us out of my buddy’s ’66 green Oldsmobile convertable, he laid the gun on Westside’s seat. Now I believe today that they were going to kill us, because that’s why they put a gun on the seat, got a shotgun to my buddy’s head, they’ve got pistols drawn. When he put the pistol on the seat, all the doors are open on the car. Over the radio, they got a call, up by the console area, they got this little radio, little microphone thing, I remember that, and they got a call saying that that was a problem on Twelfth and Clairmount, where we had just left from, and they got a call to go there, like an emergency call. And the officer looked at me and said, “This is your lucky day, nigger.” And they got in the car and left, and I think that was the only thing that saved our lives and allowed me to be here with you today is that call, because I do believe they were going to hurt us. They were going to kill us.
WW: That night in the blind pig, did you see, like, any Vietnam vets? The story that’s often said is that there was a party that night for two Vietnam vets, which is why it was so crowded.
AC: That’s a possibility, but I am unaware of that. We had heard that there was a new place that was happening, you know, and, you know, players are going to go where the women are, so that’s a possibility. My buddy had got wind that something, you know, exciting was going on there on the party side, so that’s why we went up there, and it was crowded with the women and men. That’s a great possibility – but I hadn’t been there that long to get familiar with who was there. I’m just up in an after-hours place, after-hours joint as we call them in those days. I was just there to hang out, because that was, that was us, that’s what we did. We hung out until the crowd thinned out, we went somewhere and got something to eat, we’d go to somebody’s home after that, kept partying [laughter]. If someone would say, “Hey man, let’s go over to my house,” you know, it was like that. And you’d go to another player’s house and his woman would get up and cook breakfast, you know, we’d sit there, smoke weed, snort coke, you know, whatever. You know, talk crazy, you know, and that was just the atmosphere during those days.
WW: Where did you and your friend go after that encounter with the Big Four?
AC: Went to his home. I think it was on Northlawn. Went to his home and we turned on the TV, you know, and went to sleep, and we turned on the television later that day, and half of Detroit was on fire, and we just looked and said, “oh, my God.” Okay, I remember the state troopers coming to town. We get a call from our dope girl over on Blaine and Twelfth Street that told us there was a young lady over there, she had been a part of the looting, she had some diamonds, and she had some cases of whiskey that she had taken from somewhere. So, she said, if you guys want some jewelry, you know, get over here, because, you know, she has a lot of jewelry. So we weeded our way through the blocked areas in Detroit. They had most major areas blocked to get to certain routes. We weeded our way through, my buddy knew the neighborhoods real good, so we weeded our way through. We had to stop at one of our friend’s houses named Harry Cash, I remember that. We witnessed people peeking out of the window and the troopers would shoot the building. You know, I mean I guess their orders were to completely control the black neighborhoods in Detroit.
WW: The National Guardsmen?
AC: National Guard, yeah, I said state troopers, I’m thinking about the police I just saw on the way over here. Yeah, the National Guard, I’m sorry.
WW: No problem.
AC: And they were somewhat vicious people, little bit overbearing, I would say, but I guess that was their orders. You know, you’re in the military, you do what the military leader tells you to do. I mean, spending four years in the United States Navy, honorably discharged, okay, I know you follow the orders of the leader. So we weeded our way through the different blocked areas, we made one stop, I remember, over to Harry Cash’s house, where we witnessed they shot up the building and stuff, and made it over to our dope girl house. Matchbox of weed we called the deuce pack, you remember the little matchboxes that had the little wooden matches in it? Little box, that was a deuce pack in those days, two dollars would get you some weed, smoke a couple of joints, you know. And we made it over there, and the young lady who had the jewelry and the liquor, she wound up, in those days, it’s called a woman would “choose” a guy she wanted to be with a pimp. So she chose me, and I ultimately wound up having her as my woman for a while, and so that was my experience during those days. I was just a young pimp, 22 years old, had just turned out in the game, the fast life, and just following the lead of my buddy Westside, you know. And I remember his sister got with me, and she was my first real prostitute, you know, so that was my experience.
WW: Just really quick: what years did you serve in the Navy?
AC: I was in the Navy after the riots I went to the –
WW: Oh, it was after?
AC: Yeah, I went to the Navy May –
WW: Oh, we’ll get to that.
AC: Okay, okay.
WW: How did the rest of the week play out for you?
AC: After the riots?
WW: No, after you’d been to that house, where did you go from there? Did you just stay hunkered down in the house?
AC: From the drug house? No, we went back to, I was living with my buddy Westside at the time over on Northlawn, and so we went back to his house and began to monitor the situation on television, and then after that – and it was so insignificant it seems, at the time, because there was so much going on, but that was a killing at the Algiers Motel, and at the time, to be honest, to be very candid with you, I really didn't associate that with the National Guard or the police, because it was so vague, the reporting of it. It was just some kids that had gotten killed, and they were black, so that was a concern, at the Algiers Motel, and as the news began to progress, because it was somewhat under the National Guard auspices at that time, you know, you couldn’t just maneuver and get all the 411 on everything, but as the news progressed, it related to, as I recall, and I’m not very, very sure, but it related to the police or the National Guard or somebody having something to do with the incident that happened there that resulted in, I think, a few people being murdered. I think a young lady was involved, I think, I’m not sure.
WW: The police and the National Guard raided the Algiers Motel.
AC: Okay.
WW: And they were acquitted, but it’s heavily believed that the Detroit Police Department murdered three young men at the Algiers Motel.
AC: Yeah, right. That’s what it was. Yep, that’s what it was, and I think it was a girl there, that she got away.
WW: There were two women there.
AC: And they lived or something like that.
WW: Two women and seven men survived.
AC: And the rest of them were murdered.
WW: Yeah, three were murdered.
AC: Well, I can’t say, because I don’t have a definitive answer for that, but the atmosphere, in my opinion, and for what I witnessed just weeding through and being stopped by the Big Four during that morning, that killing was in the air, that violence was in the air, that fear was in the air. That was the atmosphere, and it all resulted from a few crazy cops pushing people around in an after-hours joint, where people were just having fun. Now, I was there, I saw that much. The after-hours joints in Detroit, nobody was violent, there was no fights, nobody getting killed, usually the joints would have, like, a bar and sell whiskey, they would have a kitchen, an older woman or whoever was back there frying fish and chicken, another room with a gambling table where guys could shoot craps if they wanted to, a drug boy might have been up in there, a couple of them, might have had some weed and some coke, because we’d snort a little coke to stay up cause we’re partying, we’re just partying, but it wasn't a violent atmosphere. When I went to the military and would get information from the streets, the violence only started after I left when the heroin moved into the city, because after the riots, the heroin moved in heavy, and that’s when violence broke out among everybody, especially blacks, in the city of Detroit.
WW: Did you leave the city because of ’67?
AC: I left the city because the FBI. I went to my Aunt Vera’s house, who I initially moved to Detroit to live with, after the riots I visited her, and she said that the feds came by here looking for you as a draft dodger, and they left a letter saying that I either report or pay a $10,000 fine and five years in Leavenworth Prison. So, I had an uncle, my uncle Arthur Calvert, who was already in the Navy, I went down somewhere in Michigan, Detroit, to take the test to go to the Army. Now watch this: I failed the Army test, which is easy, but I passed the Navy test. I believe had I gone into the Army, I would have come back in a body bag like many young blacks at that time, but fortunately I went into the Navy, worked in a very technical rate as a radio man, and was honorably discharged. From ’68. May ’68. May 28, 1968 to February 2nd, 1972.
WW: When you came back to the city, did Detroit look differently?
AC: You see, I anchored down in California when I got out of the Navy.
WW: Oh, okay.
AC: And I stayed in California for about 15 years before I came back to Detroit, and of course, the whole atmosphere had changed when I came back. Because people, you know, had moved on, doing different things, you know. It wasn’t as vibrant, I would say, as it was during those days, when I came back in ’86, I think.
WW: Are there any other ’67-specific stories or memories you’d like to share?
AC: I can’t think of anything significant, because things went downhill for me after the riots. Things went downhill to the point where I almost became homeless. That’s when I went to my Aunt Vera’s house, because I didn’t have anywhere to stay, I think. I thank God that my life was like that, because it pushed me into the United States Navy, where I had a chance to see the world under the expense of the government. I mean, I traveled: Australia, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, I mean, you name it, the Navy sent me there, and so that changed my life completely, but going overseas and witnessing prostitution was more prevalent overseas [laughter] than it was in the United States. Like in the Philippines, prostitution was a way of life, it was a way of life, and I said, “Oh, I’m not such a bad guy after all, they do this everywhere.” [laughter] So that helped my sordid life to continue, because hey, you know, this is the way of the world. I mean, the girls in different ports would be waiting on us. They would know when the ship is coming in before we did, and they’d be in the clubs waiting, and so this one girl in the Philippines, she took care of me, so Olongapo City was like home away from home. I mean, she took complete care of me, which I was used to from the streets of Detroit, so you know, it’s a lot of things that, wow, I could just go on and on [laughter]. I mean, I’m in Hong Kong, China, I’m walking across the street, and this beautiful girl, high pants on, I mean during those days, I’m just walking across the street in Hong Kong, and I said, “Hey, sweetie.” She say, “Sixty American.” That’s all she said. She didn’t say hello, how you doing, you know, she said, “Sixty American.” Now that was my whole pay for being in Vietnam for 30 days, to give her 60 American dollars, you know. I think at that time, it was like 360 yen to one American dollar. She said, “I want sixty American.” So prostitution, it’s everywhere. Somebody said it’s the oldest profession in the world. Not pimping, they say prostitution is the oldest, so women were doing this way before the pimps started pimping, so not casting all the aspersions on the pimps, because the women were doing it first, and they just chose the guys to be with, so let’s get that understood. [laughter]
WW: Just a couple quick wrap-up questions.
AC: Yes.
WW: What do you think about the state of the city today?
AC: The state of Detroit?
WW: Yeah.
AC: Obviously, downtown is coming back, and I think it’s going to rise far beyond and above all of our expectations, because of the venues that’s being constructed downtown, when you have all those sports venues, that’s going to bring about businesses, and Detroit is going to prosper again. The automobile factories are still putting out beautiful cars, so we got no problem there, but the stratification process of economics is going to be, I think, far beyond and above all that we have ever expected for a few. It’s not going to be for everybody, it’s not going to be for the common man, it’s going to be so expensive that the common man won’t be comfortable downtown. I’m hoping and I’m praying that the deterioration in other areas of the city will become affluent again, because I wept when I saw the blonde colored buildings off of Dexter and Livernois. I mean, the four-family flats that were so beautiful in our time, when I saw the destruction and the degradation, and of course the crime that goes along with it, which you can say what you want to say, but it’s all about the drugs. The only thing right now that will make a man lose everything right now, today, the only thing that will cause a man to lose everything is drugs. Drugs. So, somehow it was moved into our society, the crack, the heroin, the whatever, and it has caused the moral fabric, pardon me, of our society, not only in Detroit, but in all of our major cities, all across this country, all across this world, beyond human repair, and being a spiritual man now, being called to preach while in prison by God, under the inspiration of God’s spirit, I believe that since it has deteriorated beyond human repair, it has to be divinely repaired, and that’s what we really don’t want, for God to come back and say, hey, you know, here’s a famine, in the days of Noah it’s going to rain. There’s some countries now that don’t have food. I was watching a story on TV the other night that South Africa, and not trying to cast any aspersions on anyone, but the wealthy people of South Africa, not all of them, but the wealthy, wealthy, they are still behind gated areas and living lavishly, but the other wealthy people are living worse than animals, and now the blacks are living wealthy, and so I’ll say all that to say that if we don’t get it together, then God is going to have his way in aiding us to get it together. We can’t continue with wickedness, racism, killing, and just doing our thing on God’s green earth to God’s people. We can’t just continue that way, because he has a way of making the first last and the last first. I just saw it on TV the other night in South Africa. When there was apartheid, the black folks lived like dogs. Now, the whites are living like dogs, and the blacks are riding around in BMWs and Mercedes’ in the parks having fun, and you know, so we don’t want God to divinely repair this thing, and He’s able to come through and just level it all off and build it up again. You know, Rome tumbled [laughter], as powerful as Rome was, it’s no longer the Rome of old, because God got tired of the wickedness of Rome, and He destroyed it.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
AC: Man, it’s been a pleasure. This is one of the best interviews I’ve had in my life.
WW: I’m glad to hear it.
AC: Thank you.
WW: My pleasure.
NL: Today is June 16, 2015. This is the interview of Alan Feldman by Noah Levinson. We are at 1599 Marshbank in Pontiac, Michigan; the home of Mr. Feldman. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society and the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Alan, could you tell me where and when you were born?
AF: I was born in Women’s Hospital on September 29, 1947. The Yankees beat the Dodgers in seven games.
NL: And where is that hospital located at?
AF: I have no idea. I think it was incorporated with something else.
NL: Okay, and where did you live in July of 1967?
AF: I was going to Michigan State University, but I came home for the summer to my parents’ house. They lived in Oak Park.
NL: So you were home in Oak Park during the summer. And what were you doing that summer?
AF: I sold shoes at Name Brand Cancellation Shoes, on Twelfth and Clairmount. I don’t recall if I went to the other store. The owner, “Uncle Harry,” his name actually was Hoffenbloom, I believe, but I always called him Uncle Harry, much to his chagrin, he also had a store on West Warren—he’s eating Nikita’s food, or he’s eating Sally’s food I’m sorry [referencing pets].
NL: What do you recall about Detroit’s—and Oak Park and the general area, in the mid-1960s, about the neighborhoods and the community of the city?
AF: Well, I was very lucky to grow up in Oak Park. Oak Park was really the first, I guess you’d call it a “bedroom community”. The people came from Detroit and moved to Oak Park, there was Birmingham and places like that that were established already, but Oak Park, we had a beautiful high school, brilliant students—I think we were third in the state, our ranking. I was an idiot, but I went to school with a lot of very brilliant people; and we’re having our Fiftieth Reunion, October 3, in which I will display history from the 1960s. Well, you want to know about Detroit?
NL: Sure.
AF: Well, Detroit – you know I really wasn’t aware that Detroit was disintegrating. Like the governor of the state says, when we went bankrupt, that this has been going on for sixty years—I don’t know where he came up with this ‘sixty years’, it seems pretty extreme, but it was the same way it always was. White people lived in a certain area of Detroit, black people lived in another area; white kids went to high school basically together, black kids went to high school. I taught in a place called Nolan Middle School and—in the mid-sixties, this is before I taught, there were some black kids going to Pershing High School, but still most of the neighborhood was white. After the riot, then many white people moved, so I guess that’s the onset of white flight, but Detroit had high crime. It was a factory town, a huge factory town.
NL: So, growing up even as a child, it sounds like you were aware of the segregation that was happening in the city, at that point.
AF: Oh yeah. My dad owned a store on Woodward and Alexandrine and on Woodward and Canfield, cleaning plants. Everybody that worked for him was black, everybody, and then most of his customers were black, although there were some whites in that area, but not very many. We used to have – I was telling somebody this the other day -- we used to have pimps drive up in their pimpmobiles, for the day, you know, [Buick] Electra 225’s, big Cadillacs—am I supposed to say this?
NL: Sure. Everything you remember.
AF: It’d be a guy, the pimp, was in the front seat just like Mr. Turner—he’s got to be passed away by now—Mr. Turner would be in the front seat and he’d have, like three girls in the backseat, all three beautiful girls, and he’d come in and he’d have this big order of women’s dresses and his clothes. And my father would say to me, “Alan, go help Mr. Turner out with the clothes.” And I’d go outside and they’d all go, “Honey, honey, Hi! You grew over the winter, haven’t seen you,” because he’d have a convertible, so the top would be down, they’d, “Oh Alan, you so handsome!” I’d be like, thirteen, fourteen, I’d be like, Oh my God! That’s when I realized that –see when you live in an area where the only black person that you see, basically, is your maid, okay? When you see women like that you go like, whoa! What’s going on here? I mean, when you’re fourteen— I’m a guy, you look at girls, that’s your one thing. You play baseball and you sleep with the ball, and then you look at girls. So, it always kind of shocked me that there were so many beautiful black women. And in our store that burned down, I used to stand—you want me to put them back out? [referencing pets]—I used to stand, the place was, on the left-hand side there was a window, on the right-hand side there was a window, and then you’d walk into the store. On a hot day when we wouldn’t do very much business, I would stand out on the sidewalk, and people would be walking by all the time. Some of the women knew me after a while, I’d be standing there, “Ooh, you so handsome, why you wearing that? Why you wearing that today? That shirt don’t fit you right.” They get to know you, and in the drugstore, and in whatever, it was amazing. You were one of the community.
NL: So, Detroit was already an obviously segregated city in your estimation by the mid-sixties. Do you remember seeing or hearing about incidents of discrimination against black or non-white people?
AF: In newspapers I remember seeing things, which I have—I’ll show you, I’m pretty sure there’s some in there, but also, Eight Mile Road and Schaeffer, as a little boy, I might have been eight, nine, ten -- right at Eight Mile-Schaeffer there was a hamburger place, I think it was White Castle, and all these black people would line up every morning, right on the curb of Eight Mile and Schaeffer, and white people would come by—I presume they were mostly all white people, and they’d say, “You want to do yard work?” You get in the car, you go do yard work. They’d pick up a woman, “You want to clean the house?” This is how employment was gained. I remember asking my father, why are those people lined up. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven probably. He told me they were they waiting for jobs. So that’s what they did. There were no white people there, there were all black people.
NL: What do you remember thinking or feeling at that time when your dad was explaining that to you? How did that scene strike you?
AF: I don’t know really. It didn’t really affect me very much, but you know what affected me the most was going downtown—I mean I wish I could give you an answer for that, but I don’t really feel like there was an answer it was just like, I wanted to know, who are those people and what are they doing there? And the fact that he pointed out that they were basically black people didn’t really move me—but I saw a black man in downtown Detroit, I couldn’t have been more than five, and this is during Christmas when people—there was no Northland or Eastland [Malls], people went downtown to shop so the streets were jammed with people. There was a policeman and he had this black man up against a wall—I was with my mother—and he had two hat boxes. This is not something I’m dreaming about; this is something that was real, and the policeman had a gun on him and he had his hands up and he was like this [motions], and that’s one of the first remembrances of black and white. I presume he stole hats.
NL: Wow.
AF: And we had a maid for a long time, named Grassie. I never did go to Grassie’s house, so I never did know what her kids were like; I’d hear about them, but I never saw what her house was like or what was going on in her house. It was like, well, Grassie just went home, but I don’t know what she was doing, you know what I mean?
NL: She left work and went home; we all do.
AF: She made great tomato soup and tuna fish sandwiches. Now there’s something to say about that though, but I don’t know how to express it. When you work for a family and then you go home to your own family—because you’re not working for a family, really.
NL: How do you mean?
AF: Well, it’s like they’re part of your family. Grassie was like my second mother. I could come home for lunch and if my mother wasn’t there then Grassie would feed me; and she’d sit down and she would tell me about Louisiana. Baton Rouge. She would tell me about –what is that—a gumbo. This is how I knew about these things. She was so nice, so sweet, and she had little hairs growing out of her chin [laughter], but, you know, that’s my growing up process with African-Americans. And I did know that African-Americans grew up in a different area than we did because of Joe Louis. My father told me the story when Joe Louis beat Max Bayer in 1935. My mother and him went for a ride to celebrate, to see people on the street, and, you know they were honking their horns and everything. Joe Louis was a huge hero in Detroit. I’ve got the greatest Joe Louis collection. They’ve been to my house ten times; the African-American Museum. I won’t give them my stuff. And they threw garbage in his car. So my dad said, it was down on Hastings—have you heard the name of that street, Hastings Street? He said he’d never do that again, ever.
NL: That was 1935?
AF: 1935. And I’ve got a picture in the newspaper of the crowd of African-American people after he won, and they’re going crazy. He was the biggest hero.
NL: Switching gears a little bit, I want to ask you about 1967. First off, how did you first hear about or become aware of the civil unrest in July 1967?
AF: I was listening to the Tiger game at home. I don’t know what I was doing before then. And I needed gas; I was going to a friend’s house named Joe Kass, K-A-S-S, we’re still friends. I went up to Eight Mile Road and Schaeffer; there was a Sunoco station, and gas was 19 cents. I had a car, a Pontiac LeMans that was like a year or two old, it was like brand-new. And back then where you had the license plate, you’d pull it down and the gas cap would be. So I took the thing off and I was putting the gas in, and I just happened to straighten up and look and I saw the whole sky was full of smoke. The entire sky going south, I was like, “Wow! What a fire that must be.” You know? So I get back in my car and I got the ballgame on. They were playing a double header; back in those days you played double headers. Now the [dog barking] players won’t do it unless it’s really a catastrophe.
NL: Yeah, if there’s a rain delay [dog barking] from yesterday or something.
AF: Yeah, right. So they won’t do it, but [dog barking] I turn it on and it says—they’re doing the news and then at the end of the news, I think it was the end of the news, the guy said, “There is a civil disturbance going on in Detroit. Do not go to Detroit; stay out of Detroit.” So, I went home and I said to my dad, “Civil disturbance. I think, Dad, that means a riot; they’re having a riot in Detroit,” and he said, “Yeah, I heard that on the radio,” because my father had a transistor radio, and like a lot of men back then, they had their own chair—did you ever see All in the Family?
NL: Sure.
AF: I swear to God, I swear to God, they came in our house late at night.
NL: [Laughter]
AF: And they saw my father with a cigar hanging out of his mouth, asleep, with the transistor like this. I come home at two o’clock on the morning he’d be like that. I’d say, “Dad, get up!”, and he’d go “[grunts] Ehhh, what do you want from me?” That’s what happened. I went over to my friend Joe’s house and now everybody knew. Like, if you were my neighbor I’d go over and I’d say, “They’re having a riot in Detroit. Did you hear this?” So, everybody knew and you had to be off the streets I believe by 5:30 or 6:30, something like that. I’m not sure; I think it was 5:30, 6:30. So I left Joe’s house and went home, and that night—we lived in a really beautiful apartment complex—people took their TV’s and put them on the porches. We had a celebrity talk show guy in Detroit then, his name was Lou Gordon, if you ever heard his name, and Lou Gordon was on with his wife, Jackie Gordon, and that’s all they talked about was the riots; you know they had people on talking about it, and they were saying it was just terrible. And my father was just praying that they burned down his store; he was praying, he was, “Alan, I want them to burn down the store so bad.” Because he had had a tremendous business, and then, you know where the medical center is there? Like off of Woodward and Alexandrine, that’s the area. They tore down all these houses in that area, and that was my father’s walk-on trade. He had a tremendous route that he did, but that was his walk-on trade; and there were no houses there anymore [laughing] so he was losing a lot of money you know, so he was praying they’d burn down his business. It didn’t happen. We went downtown on Tuesday and the entire city down the Lodge [US-10] smelled of smoke. Everything. I mean, when you got down past, like Eight Mile Road, the entire city smelled like smoke; like fire. So he’s like, “Let’s go to the store. Let’s hope it burned down.” [laughter] Because of insurance, you know?
NL: Right.
AF: So it didn’t burn down so he was very disappointed. Then we went for a ride. I never was sure if my father should have done this, but we went for a ride all over the western side. And what I recall mostly is, right near – I think it was near Northwestern High School in Detroit, they had a gun store. And on top of the gun store were all kinds of police and state troopers, I guess they were, National Guardsmen, one of them was Mickey Lolich of the Detroit Tigers; he was a National Guardsmen, and they surrounded this place; they weren’t about to let anybody get in that place. They’d kill them. If anybody tried to break in there they would kill them. There were troops all over the city, like army trucks, and there’d be like four guys in a Jeep, and three guys would have their rifles pointed out. You probably heard this already. They’d have their rifles out—the driver didn’t obviously, and this went on for a long time, you know, the city was in chaos.
NL: You said that the store that you were at this summer was near Twelfth and Clairmount?
AF: It was on Twelfth and Clairmount. It was on Clairmount.
NL: What happened to the store?
AF: Oh, it burned down. Uncle Harry had that store and one on West Warren, they burned down. The tale is this: Uncle Harry never left the store on the weekend with any money, because the weekend was big. It was like New Year’s Eve, for a lot of people, every weekend on Twelfth and Clairmount. You can’t understand unless you were there. It’s like, during Christmas and Easter, everybody had to have a pair of shoes; you had to have a pair of shoes. And I’ll deviate just a little bit; when I first started working there, people would come in and—you know it was a men’s shoe store, so guys would come in and they’d say, “I need a pair of Stacy Adams,” so I’d say okay. Now I’m like, seventeen, sixteen, I don’t even know what I was, but I was the guy that they kept because I had a way, a natural bullshit way. So I’d say, “Well, what do you wear?” and they’d say, “Oh, I wear like, ten triple-A,” and I go, “Ten triple-A? No, let’s measure your foot,” and it’d be like seven and a half. So I’d say, “Well, what makes you think you wear a ten triple-A?” He says, “I want you to give me a ten triple-A.” I said, “Why?” He says, “Well because that’s what I want to wear, is a ten triple-A.” I said, “You wear a seven-and-a-half,” and then it dawned on me what was going on here; they wanted their feet to look longer. They wanted to look more like a grown-up man or something like a big guy, you know. So I’d get them the ten triple-A, and their foot would stop like right here, and then there’d be a point here, and this is what they’d wear; this is what they wanted. [Dog whimpering] and then we’d go up to—[to dog] ‘Kita! Shhh! That’s a trait of a pointer, by the way; they cry. That’s what she does. –I’d say to them, “You need some socks?” and they’d go like, “Yeah, give me some thick-and-thins, thick-and-thins.” They have, like, a lisp for this. Thick-and-thins are like, the bottom part is a regular kind of sock, and then the part going up, you can see through. So they were thick, and thins. Anyway, I was really good at doing this, and Uncle Harry, who honestly spoke like my father, like this deep voice; he’d say, “You work for me”, so I’d say, okay, so I’ll work for you. The other guys were afraid. So where were now?
NL: You said that the store at Twelfth and Clairmount had burned down.
AF: Okay, so he would never leave the store with the weekend’s receipts. He would go in the basement, and he had a special box I didn’t even know about. He totally trusted me. [deep voice] Alan!” [laughter]. He had a box down there; so supposedly the story was—you know, they burned down the whole neighborhood—he went down in the basement; this is what I heard from my best friend Richard, who was his nephew, and he walked, I guess in the water, I hope the electricity was turned off otherwise he’d be dead, and he went to this box, it was all mushed up, reached in and there was three thousand dollars.
NL: Wow!
AF: There was three thousand dollars. He never worked a day in his life again. He had insurance on, obviously, Twelfth and Clairmount and West Warren; I don’t know what else he owned, he was very wealthy. He grew to depend upon me, because I was an idiot, basically where they would get robbed in the middle of the night. So what you had—remember I told you, you had a window here full of shoes and a window here and they walk in? So all the shoes were left shoes, okay. You never put in a left and a right; because you put in a left and a right, then they have a pair of shoes. So they’re only left shoes. So he calls me up one night—this happened, I think, four times. And this time my father, after he said it, “Okay, pick him up,” he said to me, “You ain’t doing this no more.” So I said, “Okay, I’ll tell Uncle Harry.” We get in the car and we go to the store and the window thing is there, they’re fixing the window, but all they did right then was put up a board, and they were gonna come back and put the glass in, because it was, like, 6:30 in the morning I guess. I don’t know, I can’t recall that much, but I do know that about 11:30, 12:00, this guy comes in—and I’m behind the counter, there’s no business, and Uncle Harry is doing something with the shoes upstairs. He had shoes downstairs; thousands and thousands of shoes. The guy comes in, “Man what’s wrong with you? I want to know what’s wrong with you?” So I said, “What do you mean what’s wrong with me? There’s nothing wrong with me.” And he says, “I came in here yesterday, I bought a pair of shoes, you only gave me the left!” So I said, “Would you say that again?” He said, “You only gave me the left shoe, where’s my right shoe?!” I said, “[loudly] I only sold you a left shoe?” So Uncle Harry turns around with fire in his face, I mean he is really angry. And, the guy looks at Uncle Harry, he looks at me and [clap] he’s gone, he gets right out of there. So Uncle Harry says to me, “Alan, follow him.” So I said, “Follow him?! I’m 18 years old; I’m not a detective! I’m not following this guy.” He says, “Follow him. Just go see where he goes.” So I went outside and I watched where he went, I went down like a block and he walked across the street into an apartment building. I came back, I told Uncle Harry, and he called the police so I think the guy was arrested. They might have found a lot of left shoes. [laughter] You know what I mean? So this is the type of stuff that went on, and there were pimps and whores all over the sidewalk all the time. This was the neighborhood; there was a lot of crap going around, but it was actually fun, a fun kind of place to be. But after the fire, there was nothing left, so now the people—just like in Baltimore and other places—when you think about it, these people think they’ve accomplished something. What they’ve accomplished is, you got to get in your car now and drive someplace else to shop. You haven’t accomplished anything. I hate to say it, it makes me sound like a racist, but it’s the truth. You haven’t accomplished anything; nothing has taken place that is going to be helpful to you. A bunch of rhetoric by a bunch of politicians who really could care less.
NL: What do you remember about the first time that you went back to the neighborhood after the store had burned down?
AF: That’s what I thought about. I was with my dad and my dad really brought it up. It was like, “Well I won’t be buying shoes from you anymore, I wonder where they’re going to have to go.” Nothing really dawned on me, I was like 18 years old or 19 and, you know, you don’t think about these kinds of things; you’re not that deep, generally. And it took years for them to rebuild that area, Rosa Parks Boulevard?
NL: Mm-hmm.
AF: It’s never been the same because it was like the hub of the West Side of Detroit, this area. Like I’m saying, you’d walk down the street and there would be just tons of people, and everybody seemed to know one another. It seemed like bullshit, but it really wasn’t. Of course you could be friendly with somebody and they might shoot you later in the day but, there was a lot of crime.
**MB: Would you please state your name?
AD: Alee Darwish. 59 years old, I grew up here. I worked at Ford Motor Company for 32 years, I retired April 1, 2006. We originally resided in Highland Park. My father was auto worker he retired in 1963. Started at Ford’s in 1916 and we used to live in a neighborhood that was basically a melting pot: a lot of Europeans, we had Native Indians, we had Armenians, Hispanics, Middle Eastern, and we also had a handful of Jewish families.
MB: Can you tell me how old you were in 1967, when the riots occurred?
AD: In 1967 I was 12 years old, it was summer vacation from school and every day six in the morning we used to go out and play baseball. We used to call it the alley, Alley Stadium. We picked teams, get out there six o’clock, six-thirty a.m.; eleven thirty everybody’s mother would be on the back porch to call their kids in for lunch. We’d be back out in the alley in about twenty, twenty-five minutes. Six o’clock dinner, be a rerun of the mothers on the back porch again calling all the kids for dinner. We’d play outside in the alley until eleven, twelve o’clock midnight, but we had the huge street lights in the alley.
MB: So you said your father worked for Ford at the time. Would you consider yourself working class, middle class, high class, how would you consider yourself and your family?
AD: My father was a middle class. As I said he worked for Ford. He was a butcher by trade. He originally came — he had uncles on both sides of the family in Sioux Falls, South Dakota little lake. He came at 13, and he came to Highland Park in 1915 and he started at Ford’s.
MB: In ’67 you said he was already retired correct?
AD: He was already retired four years with 47 years.
MB: What do you remember about Detroit in the mid-1960s before the riots? How was it? How was the city?
AD: Downtown Detroit, it was like a metropolis. There was a lot of heavy foot traffic, not only during the week, but also on the weekends. There was festivities, there was old Olympia Stadium. There was the old Tiger Stadium which was referred as Briggs Stadium, Walter Briggs Stadium. And in the summer time the Tigers would play there, in the winter time the Detroit Lions football team franchise would play there.
MB: And how was the city life? Like where would your family shop? Was it more into the city or more into the suburbs where you lived?
AD: Everybody shopped up and down Woodward between Manchester and Davison. You had clothing stores, you had shoe stores, you had hardware stores. You had women clothing stores, Winkleman’s. We also had Sam’s, which, basically, catered to men, to kids, people who were too tall or if you had a heavy waistline, I mean they had all kind of stores. In fact one of the first Coney Island’s, not the first, was on Victor, it was called Red Hot’s, it was there in 1921, and once a month my late father would take us for a haircut, and on the way back we had a choice; either go to Red Hot’s which was a Coney Island, or there was a place called Red Barn Restaurant which was on the corner of Davison and Woodward and we’d go there and have a big party. So we’d kind of switch every other month.
MB: During the time, in the sixties, how would you describe the relationship between the people in your community and neighborhood and the city government?
AD: City government at the time I guess it was an easy flow, I mean, we didn’t have a whole lot of crime. I mean, even now, every now and then you probably have a minor incident but in terms of the community as a whole collectively, whether your ethnicity was European or southern American or Middle Eastern everybody knew everybody’s kids and all the parents knew everybody’s family. And if one of the parents seen somebody else’s son or daughter doing something wrong, or using vulgarity, they would bring in the house wash their mouth with soap. And you wouldn’t dare go home and say, “So- and-so’s mother took me in washed my mouth out with soap because I used vulgarity.”
MB: How’d you feel about Mayor Cavanagh? How would you say the community felt towards him? Before the riots, how did they feel about him?
AD: Before the riots, Cavanagh was a very young mayor. He had a good administration. There was a little bit of tension between the African American community and the white community, but it wasn’t major until the ’67 riots erupted. In fact that wasn’t the first civil disturbance, they had a first riot in 1943.
MB: Did you feel before the riots that the African American community at the time were being treated unfairly?
AD: Yeah. They were treated unfairly. There was no such thing as equal opportunity back then, and the police department at the time, I think was roughly 80/20 or maybe 70/30. The majority of the police force, the supervisors, the deputy chiefs, all your department heads were basically white.
MB: And what was the living conditions like for an African American family in an area of segregated housing and school?
AD: Well, we all shared the same schools, there was a handful of families that were Catholic that could afford to send their kids to private schools. Most of the melting pot children in our community we all went to public schools, we all went to public parks, we all played together collectively. After school, during the week, when you’re done with your homework or on the weekend, and a lot of times if the alley was taken, we would walk to Ford Park which was between Manchester and Six Mile on Woodward, right next door to the Ford Motor Company Model T assembly plant.
MB: Do you feel that their living conditions were any different than yours, or do you feel like it wasn’t as segregated as people may think?
AD: In terms of living conditions I think that the non-African American households back then weren’t, in terms of upkeep, as good as the rest of the homes in the neighborhood. I’m not saying their lawns weren’t always mowed and manicured and clean, but everybody else in the neighborhood, their homes were much better. Now we had a handful of African American neighbors, which, their lawns were manicured the grass was watered, it was fertilized in terms of lawn nutrition and so forth .
MB: How did you first hear about the civil disturbances that became known as The Riots?
AD: Well that Sunday, in July, we were coming back from a mosque on the south end of Dearborn. We had two routes, usually since we lived in Highland Park we would take Davison all the way down to Oakman, make a left on Wyoming from there we went to the mosque. And sometimes on the way out, we’d take Vernor all the way downtown, hit Michigan Avenue, go north and that would take us to Highland Park. That particular afternoon, my Ma decided to take Woodward, which was a good thing, because otherwise if we would have took Wyoming to Oakman via Davison, we would’ve been caught right in the middle of the civil disturbance, which detailed rioting, looting, and burning down stores.
MB: How did your family react to what was going on as a whole? How did your parents deal with the events that were unfolding?
AD: Well after we got home and we found out, what had happened, it kind of startled the family. But in terms of kids in the neighborhood, the parents first top priority were the kids: stay in the house, don’t go outside”. And then they implemented a curfew. They called in the National Guard and they thought that the National Guard could handle the civil disturbance. They thought wrong; they had to call in the 82nd Airborne Division. And when they called them in, they really clamped down: five o;clocl, nobody on the street and if they found anybody on the street they would take them in. They would ride up and down Woodward with halftracks, tanks up and down the neighborhoods, and jeeps with .50 caliber machine guns on the hood. They also had helicopters roving the skies too.
MB: As a kid, it must have been pretty cool playing in the streets, walking out seeing National Guard members and members of the 82nd Airborne . Can you please explain some of your memories of witnessing all this first hand?
AD: Well as a kid, you’d think it’s cool because you see the army and military equipment being used on certain TV shows like Combat, but this was live. You would see the army people at the gas stations, you would see them at the stores, you would see them patrolling the neighborhoods, but as of five o’clock, you better be off the street. So every parent made sure their kids were off the streets. You could sit on your front porch or back porch you’re not gonna go out in the street, and you’re not gonna go out and play in the alley.
MB: Growing up only three blocks away from the riots did you hear any of the rumors of police brutality going on or any of the unfair treatment of African Americans?
AD: I’m assuming that they were treated not with justice, not with fairness or not with discipline, whether it was from the shopkeepers or to the police department and it kind of got out of hand and the African American community — which I don’t blame them— they started to rebel, they said enough is enough.
MB: And did you, your parents or any of your siblings witness first hand any of the events that occurred during this disturbance?
AD: If you walk out in the alley and you look towards Davison and Hamilton, you can see clouds of black smoke, you can hear the gunfire, you can hear the sirens during the day and sometimes in the evening.
MB: As a child, it must have been pretty scary hearing the stories of looting and burning down buildings. Can you tell me how you felt back in the day, as a child, hearing rumors of possible violence reaching the suburbs? How you felt and how your family must have felt?
AD: Well, it never reached the suburbs because in conjunction with the Airborne Division and the State Police and the Michigan National Guard they contained the violence they contained the area so it was limited it didn’t go outside the boundaries.
MB: So, did you notice an immediate migration of the whites from the city of Detroit to the suburbs, or was that something that happened slowly?
AD: Whether it was Detroit or Highland Park at the time, after the riots, the area started to go south. Most of your white Anglos, predominately Catholics, started to move out of Detroit, started to move out of Highland Park. Tax base shrunk, cities were in the red, and what really put the icing on the cake is years later when Chrysler moved out of Highland Park, they were on the verge of bankruptcy. No tax base, no industrial tax base, was available because they took care of the bulk of the tax base. Ford Motor Company had a limited production facility they were making the jeeps for the military back then. And they had a test rack on the corner of Manchester and Woodward. And as kids we would go there and hang on to the side of the fence watch the jeeps go around the agility track. The would have fast stops, sharp turns and they would check to see if the jeep was durable and that it could handle that type of terrain once it was shipped overseas.
MB: Being a Muslim American man, how was the Muslim community at the time in Metro Detroit during the sixties.
AD: Muslim community back then it wasn’t a tenth of what it is today. You had certain pockets and certain areas and certain neighborhoods. We had basically maybe 30, 35 families that was it. And they were not only Lebanese, they were Lebanese they were Palestinian, we had a handful of Jordanians. And back then everybody was known as Syrian. Syrian bread, Syrian cheese, Syrian food. It’s not until the late nineties all the sudden everybody all the sudden Lebanese. I eat Lebanese food, et cetera.
MB: Leadership-wise, how did the leaders in the Muslim community react to what was going on in ’67? Was there any planning any rejoice —
AD: They were concerned about the health and welfare of the family, the kids getting to and from school safely, but back then everybody walked to school, you had a handful of families that were very apprehensive that they would take their kids to school and they would drive them back. But the riots were not directly towards the ethnic melting pot, it was between the white administration and the African American and how they were treated. Did we have a plan? Not to my recollection but we had very few politicians back then. We had Mike Barry who was the Wayne County Road Commissioner, we had Jimmy Karoub which was one of the most effective lobbyist in the State of Michigan, he represented all the major sports teams and the car dealerships.
MB: Would you consider all these very prominent names, would you consider it a tight knit group or was it more broad spreading out through Metro Detroit.
AD: It was a tight group because they were a minority. And when you’re small you gotta stay intact versus what we have today, just in our area between Dearborn and Detroit, businesses, residences, law firms, medical doctors, cardiologists, you got about 250,000 people—that comes a long way going 50, 55 years back.
MB: Was there any instances of violence coming from members of the Muslim community? Did any members see themselves facing any backlash whether it was the storeowner who owned the store in downtown Detroit or violence reaching their areas?
AD: Most of the storeowners back then, yeah, you had a handful of Lebanese, you had a handful of Palestinians. But most of the party store owners and the liquor store owners were Chaldean. They’d come from Iraq. They are a Christian, Catholic minority that basically come from a town called Telkaif and Baghdad and they have other pockets.
MB: Do you remember any instances of one of their stores getting burned down or robbed during the riots?
AD: There was a couple robbed back then, I can’t remember their names but my father knew them and his friends knew them too.
MB: A big role you could say coming court of these riots was a group called the STRESS [Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets] unit.
AD: STRESS was a decoy unit of the police department—average guy was probably six-foot or better—and they were supposed to make the streets of Detroit safe. How did they make them safe? They would pose as vagrants, homeless people, sitting on the corner, and they would wait for somebody—whether they were African American or white—and when they came to try to rob them or beat them up there was other scout cars in the area, and when they seen this particular action taking place on one of the STRESS members they would come and beat them up, a lot of them got killed, and they were incarcerated.
MB: Did you know or your family know any STRESS officers personally or was it something where they had to hide their identity?
AD: Personally my dad didn’t know any STRESS police officers but he knew a lot of police officers in Highland Park, detectives, sergeants, patrol people but not in the City of Detroit.
MB: How do you feel about them, how do you feel about the STRESS unit, do you think that the way they did their job was a little too extreme at times, do you think they were always fair, or were they a little radical in their approach?
AD: Well, they were radical and the purpose of STRESS was to clean the streets of Detroit and make them safe and that was—STRESS was in action until Mayor Young ran for mayor I think, in 1973, ’74. The first thing he did when he took office and he took that oath was abolish and dismantle STRESS which he did. Not only did he do that he integrated the police department and the fire department which is—if we look back now you gotta say the police department in Detroit is about 75/25, 75 African American and 25 percent are a little bit of everybody else.
MB: Some folks like to refer to the incident that happened in July 1967 as a rebellion or a revolution—how do you see it, do you see it as a riot, rebellion or a revolution?
AD: I see it as a civil disturbance. I see it—people being rebellious, we shouldn’t have to be treated like this. We pay our taxes, we go to work every day, why are we treated as second hand citizens?
MB: After the civil disturbances were over, what did your family do? How did they react? Did they have to rebuild? Did they consider moving?
AD: We didn’t have to rebuild and we didn’t consider moving. We just mind our own business. The kids have to be home by a certain time. We could play in front of the house, we could play in the back of the house, we had a handful of kids, which we always got together collectively and if we went to the show our parents dropped us off to the show, and if wanted to go to at park the parents took the kids and by such and such a time they would say well seven-thirty, eight o’clock, that’s when the street lights went on in the summer time, roughly eight o’clock, they would come pick up the kids. We’d play shuffleboard, we’d take sandwiches, and we’d make a picnic out of it.
MB: Did you notice a difference within the City of Detroit after the riots were over?
AD: Yeah, there was still a lot of tension, I mean, people were killed, a lot of people were killed, they were hospitalized, terrorized, it just was horrible and a lot of feelings got hurt, I mean you don’t forget if you lose a family member or someone got incarcerated or someone lost a limb during the civil disturbance.
MB: Experiencing both incidents do you see any similarities between what happened in ’67 and what’s going on now in Ferguson and New York City, et cetera?
AD: What’s going on or what went on in New York or Ferguson is a little bit more extreme today, and not only is it extreme it’s getting nationwide media coverage. Let me add something: it’s getting worldwide media coverage not just locally, not just nationally. I mean I read foreign correspondence every day and when these incidents took place you could read them on European correspondence German, Russian which are all translated in English.
MB: But police-wise do you notice any similarities between the unfair treatment of African Americans then and now? Do you feel like we’ve gotten better, or stayed the same if not gotten worse towards how we treat minorities?
AD: You’ve had a few major incidents if you read the news, you read the paper sometimes you got cops getting killed, you got white cops terrorizing African Americans, you got a couple of cops get shot in Ferguson, you got a few in New York. Some were fatal and some weren’t. So basically this world is changing. It’s not changing for the better. But the police departments should have guidelines, which they probably do, but they got to enhance them. Because the responsibility of city government is to protect their citizens. Once the public loses interest in the police department and then they feel they have to take matters into their own hands: the violence, the guns. Things are not getting better today. They should be getting better because we live in a world of technology. More people are going to school, they’re getting educated, they’re being professionals, they’re sending their kids to college. We should be going north not south.
MB: As a movement, the African American movement nowadays. Do you see any similarities with them back in ‘67 to how they are nowadays. You know, standing up for their rights against, what’s the unfair treatment of their people? Do you see any similarities movement-wise?
AD: Movement-wise, they are much more organized. You’ve got the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]. I don’t know what kind of headcount they had back in ‘67, but now they’ve got NAACP chapters all over the country. And then you’ve got another guy, you don’t hear much about, Louis Farrakhan, he was very militant and, and he was the type that taught “the white man is evil.” The white man is not evil. There is good and bad in everybody.
MB: So would you say we’re more organized now where they were more radical back then, or?
AD: They’re more organized now. Yes, you have a few radicals. You have people like Al Sharpton. You got people like Jesse Jackson. And power is in numbers and they have the numbers. And the African American community as a whole, they’re starting to go to school now. They’re starting to get educated. They’re starting to educate their kids. Which everybody should be educating their kids, because at the end of the day they can’t take education away from them.
MB: Is there any particular memories that you remember, you know, from what happened back in ’67. Anything that you’ve taken with you til today?
AD: As I said, we were three blocks away, but we never shared any civil disturbance with the other side of Davison or with the other side of Hamilton. We always got along. Yeah, there was a little bit of tension in the neighborhood with the other African American kids. However, but, as I said, the parents knew each other. And you would have a couple of scrimmages, arguments, maybe a handful of fistfights, but next day you’d be playing ball in the alley.
MB: And, you mind me telling me a little bit about your father? I’m sure working at Ford, he did work with a lot of African American men. Did he hold those same relationships as he retired, while going through on the riots. Do you remember any stories he would tell you about how they were being treated and what not?
AD: My father- Let’s backtrack. Henry Ford, when he started production in 1903, there wasn’t a whole lot of people here in this country. He went to South America, he went to Europe, and he went down South. That’s why the majority of the African American communities that work for the Big Three, they still to this day they got family down south. Whether it's aunts or uncles or grandparents. There’s still a connection to states like Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kansas. One example is when somebody dies up here from the African American community, which I have experienced, they keep the body out for one week. The reason behind that, so they can all drive up here and express their condolences. But the base for most of the African American people here in these northern states, or the Midwest, all came from down South.
MB: So, they held a very very prominent role. Can you just give me a little background knowledge about your father, you know, what type of man was he?
AD: My father had a very dear friend. I never knew his real name, but he was African American and his name was Cadillac. And a lot of times Cadillac would give him a ride home. My dad didn’t have that sense of prejudice or bias. My father got along with everybody. As I said, he worked 47 years, his last 25 years he was a relief man. Weekend recreation, they would go out to coffee house. We had a coffee house for basically all the foreign people. Whether you are Armenian, Lebanese, or Palestinian, Italian. They played backgammon, they played Rummy, they played Gin, they played Pinochle. It was just something for them to do. Never had a problem at work. My dad was a very respected individual, in the neighborhood and in the community as a whole.
MB: Culturally, did you notice a difference with the times, as early on in the sixties where, you know, music, fashion would be one way, whereas towards the later parts where the riots happened you see any of the changes culturally where the music became more radical, the clothing became more radical. You know, or was it steady through on?
AD: I remember back in the sixties going to school, we wore dress pants and jeans, but the African American kids, I mean, they dressed up like they were going to a banquet, like they were going to a party. I mean, they were clean, thick and thin socks, pinstripe slacks, silk shirts. And then later in the seventies, if you recall, you had the platform shoes, you had the huge bellbottoms, you had the big disco hats, you had the baseball shirts, you had the fluffy shirts, the button-downs, the pullovers, the fancy colors on the cars, the spokes, the horns of a bull on the frontend of a Cadillac or a Lincoln. Yeah, there was a culture-change in terms of music. The music back then you can comprehend every word, every note. Yeah, that was something. In this day and time, the only thing you recognize is the lyrics, which are all four or five letter obscenities.
MB: So there wasn’t really a big difference in the style of music or lyrics from the beginning of the 1960s towards the end, there wasn’t a big change?
AD: No, up until 72, 73 it was okay. In the eighties and nineties then rap came along. And rap came along and I guess if you knew how to curse, you knew how to sing.
MB: Is there anything you’d like to say about how the Muslim community was structured back in the day? Clergy-wise?
AD: Clergy-wise, you had a handful of clergies. You had an Imam, which is clergy in Arabic. Back then I remember an Imam by the name of Kalil Bazzy, he was from south Lebanon, God bless his soul. You had Imam Shaykh Karoub [sp?]. He was the first one here, he came here in 1912. In 1962, they had a fiftieth anniversary commencement for him. Later on in the sixties, you had Shaykh Chirri who originally came to Michigan City, Indiana, and then he came up to Michigan. Today, you got 10, 15 different clergies and you got X number of mosques, masjids as we call them, or you call them house of worship.
MB: In the sixties, how were they organized clergy-wise? Was there, leadership-wise, was there just one main Imam everyone would come to or was it spread out?
AD: Back then, we had two, three masjids. We had the Hashmi Hall on Dix which is south end of Dearborn. We had the other mosque down the street. And then we had the mosque on Joy road and Greenfield in the city of Detroit. That’s the only mos- Oh, and the Albanians had one over on 9 Mile and Harper off of I-94.
MB: Would you say, how were these funded through the community? Was it organized where there would be a board? Or was it just a community effort?
AD: Every house of worship, whether you’re Muslim or not, they had a governing body, they had a board of directors, they had a women’s auxiliary, and they had a men’s auxiliary, and they also had a youth club. Board members consisted between six and eight, and you had a member from the youth, so it was basically between seven and nine members totally. Most of the funding came from the worshippers, but a lot of times you would get money that came from overseas. You know, from Muslim countries.
MB: Finally, overall, how do you feel that the riots affected Detroit? Do you feel like it ultimately held us back for 50 years or is it something that just had to happen in order for Detroit to move on?
AD: I think the city of Detroit is still scarred from the riots. Because you still have a lot of people who are citizens of Detroit, and the outskirts, who still remember the riots. Who knew somebody who was killed, brutalized, locked up, or abused. Detroit is upcoming now, but I think we still lack behind in terms of being a major player. What made Detroit, or Detroit wouldn’t be where it is today, if it wasn’t for the Big Three. The Big Three pay a heavy tax base in the city of Detroit, whether it’s a manufacturing facility, or administrative, or whatever. But I think we’ve still got a long way to go. Affirmative Action, I’m totally against it. It should be based on your qualifications and your education, not your background, not your skin color, not your faith, or religion, or ethnicity.
MB: How long after the riots did you live in Highland Park? And what did you and your family do afterwards?
AD: We moved out Highland Park in 1969. My mother feared that she would lose us to the integration of the American society and we would end up marrying outside our faith, our ethnicity, so we all moved to Lebanon. That was my mother’s idea. My father didn’t really want to move back because he had no family left. He had many nieces and nephews and cousins on his mother’s side and his father’s side, but he had no siblings left. His mother and father died back in the twenties and thirties. And I said, he came here over, what 1913, he came over here 114 years ago. But after we went, we moved back, we realized we had grandparents. There was a culture behind us. There was a culture that we can create an appetite for, learn our faith. We never knew we had all this family there because we lived here all our lives. So when I moved back here, I had the best of both worlds. I’m American-born and I can just infiltrate society, but at the end of the day I’m an Arab of Muslim descent.
MB: Alright, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.
AD: You’re welcome.
**WW: Hello, today is June 27, 2016, my name is William Winkle. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. We are in Detroit, Michigan. I am sitting down with Mr. Alfred Murphy. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
AM: Hi, you’re welcome.
WW: Can you tell me where and when you were born?
AM: I was born in Dublin, Ireland, May 21, 1922.
WW: When did you come to the city?
AM: I came to Detroit in the United States in 1925.
WW: Can you tell me about how your family came from Ireland?
AM: First of all, there was great immigration from Ireland to America. My father’s brothers and sisters all had immigrated to America, and he was the only member of his family left in Ireland with a wife and five children–I was the youngest of the five. His others brothers and sisters weren’t married or had children, he was the only one that had children in Ireland. So they all came over, and they wanted him to join. So they would send him money, told him to buy a ticket, come to American, and then he could always repay them. But he wouldn’t do it, that type of a man he was, he wouldn’t take the money. So what my mother did, she wrote to his brothers here in America and said “Don’t send him money, send him a ticket. Now if you send him a ticket, he can’t get it refunded in Ireland because he bought it in America. He will have to use it.” So that he did. He came to America with the ticket, and within a year–he was a brush maker by trade–within a year, working two jobs, one as a brush maker, another one as a bouncer at a nightclub speak-easy, some shady place serving liquor in Detroit. Within a year, he had rented a flat, and had saved enough money for passage for his five children and my mother, and he brought us all to the United States after he’d been here three years in 1925.
WW: That was an amazing story. What was it like growing up in the city of Detroit in the 20s?
AM: Like the Bronstein Brothers (??), which I loved dearly, you’re not going to get me to say anything else about it, bad.
WW: [Laughter.]
AM: But anyhow, I went to school in public schools all the way. And in the majority of the schools, basically we lived in a colored neighborhood. My daughter’s a retired school teacher. There were 40 children in the class, 30 were colored and maybe 10 of us were white. That was the environment I grew up in. They were there. That was it, that was life with them. I graduated from high school in 1939. I went to Chadsey High School where two of my sisters graduated from, and my eldest sister graduated from Northwestern High at Grand River and West Grand Boulevard. Some of us went to college and some of us didn’t. As I say, I was raised and grew up mainly in colored neighborhoods. We rented, we didn’t buy houses, because my father had–not exactly an aversion to buying stuff–they rented, they’re still renting the house I was born in over in Ireland. That was a long time ago. That’s what they did: they rented properties, rented flats, rented this, rented that. They didn’t buy them, that wasn’t done. By the time you come over here, they all wanted to buy something, so they did. So after a time, we got settled down, we graduated from school, and then we all started having our own families.
In the meantime, World War II came up. It was well known, that 1938, 39, and 40 it was starting to generate in Europe, that’s what it was doing. And of course when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, I was working in the tankards (??) on Mound Road and 10 or 12 Mile Road at the Chrysler Corporation. I was working there on that Sunday, getting double time, and that’s the day they bombed Pearl Harbor. Of course everybody’s, “Where the hell is bomb harbor?” We soon found out where it was. I was working at the tankards up there, and it wasn’t quite completed as regards construction, and they had a locomotive inside the building because they had railroad tracks in it because when we finished building the tanks, they were placed on railroad flatcars and ended up in Russia. We were feeding Russia because they were fighting the Germans, at the time. So they used the locomotive to provide heat for the rest of the building.
And from the tankards hill, I went to DeSotos. Do you remember the DeSoto Car, you personally?
AM: Yeah, okay. Now, the DeSoto Plant was on McGraw and Wyoming. It was an assembly plant–all the parts were shipped in, the motors, the frames, the hoods, and they put it all together and DeSotos come out the other end. They assembled all this stuff, and so I was transferred over to DeSoto’s and low and behold they start shipping some of the jobs–I was the cutter [unintelligible]–served an apprenticeship, one that sharpens the tools for all the different machines. They started sending jobs from the tankards over to DeSoto’s, the action started producing things. They thought I was a young genius because I knew what to do. Well I’ve watched them for a year or so in the tankards, I saw you do your job and her do her job. And I just by aping them, so to speak, I could do their jobs too.
So I worked in DeSoto’s, and then my brother he had registered for the draft, and they knew that they were going to get him pretty soon. Now, when I was going through high school, I took electrical courses, that type of stuff–machine, shop, also electrical, and my brother went for the commercial, for shorthand typing–he was fantastic: it was 120 words a minutes shorthand, and 70 typing, he was a wiz, he was great for office boards. So what he did, he started shopping around, because he knew they were going to get him in the draft, and the best deal they offered him was the Marines. And they offered him–believe this or not–make him sergeant in the Marine Corps. He would be stationed in the Federal Building in Detroit, and he would be living at home, and they would pay him per diem for living at home. He could also eat at home, they would pay per diem for eating at home, and make him a sergeant. Well, you’d have to know my brother, the type of person he was, he was just like his father, very resolute in certain ways of living, and he wouldn’t accept that, not to say that it was charity, but to say, “I am a sergeant in the Marines,” and he’s working at a desk typing shorthand.
Meanwhile, I was out at the tankards, at DeSoto’s, and a couple of guys and I said we’re getting bored with working, and we said we’d take off about a week or so and went down to Florida for the hell of it. And I had a brand new 1941 Plymouth I paid 724 dollars for, brand spankin’ new. Me and the other guys–we had two other guys–we took the Plymouth, we started from Florida, and we stopped in Pensacola, and you got Naval Air School down there for pilots, in all their nice, white uniforms looked great. So I get back, my brothers talking to me about going into the Marines, and finding some kind of a place to go before they draft him. And I said, “Those aviation cadets look really great down in Pensacola.” He said, “Well let’s join the Naval Air Corps. That’s what we’ll do.” So we went to the Federal Building, and we found out what the criteria and qualifications for joining were two years of college, or be able to pass a test equivalent to it, and these tests were probably a little over three hours. They said, “You have to pass that test if you haven’t been to college, you’ve gotta pass that test.” So we signed up. The Navy Office was closed that day, so we went over to Army Air Corps Office and it was open that day, and they were having the test that day. So we signed up to take the test, and who was the first guy done? My brother. And I finally got done he says, “Did you answer all the questions?” I said, “No.” “What didn’t you know?” I said, “A few of them. I put down what I usually do in school: if I don’t know the answer, I write down ‘God knows, I don’t’.” He says, “You should’ve taken longer.” Anyway, he passed the test and so did I, so we went into the Aviation Cadets. Everybody wants to be a pilot, and we started going on 12 brief flight–this is before Colorado Springs ever came into being, it was stationed in the Army Airfield in Montgomery Alabama. We go there 12 weeks pre-flight. [Unintelligible.] Made it as much like West Point as you could except you were an Aviation Cadet–I don’t know if you ever saw them, but they used to wear a propeller with wings on a hat, that’s what the sign of the Aviation Cadet was. Neither one of us made a spot. I got a terrible tendency to land about 30 feet above the runway, and they take very unkindly to that–bouncing the thing, it’s hard on the undercarriage. I don’t know what was wrong with my brother, but he didn’t make it either.
So to make a long story short, we went to radio school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, six-month course there, radio operator and mechanic. We both went there at the same time. We were all together but, in the three years that we were in the Army, I would say 70 or 80 percent of the time, he was sleeping in the bed next to me. We were that close together. So we got to radio operator and mechanic school, and then we were assigned to Aerial Gunners School in Yuma, Arizona (??). So we went to there together, at Yuma, Arizona. Then we were qualified as – you’re familiar with them, the MOS, but the code for radio operator and mechanic were 756, and the MOS for radio operator and mechanic was 757, so we were both 757s. And we knew they were setting up 10-man crews into B-17s and 24s. So they were setting that up and we could’ve probably could’ve got on the same aircraft, because they’ve got a regular radio man, and an assistant radio man of the 10-man crew that you could fill in if something happened to the regular crew, just like you got two pilots, stuff like that. The main radio man got to be a tech sargent that was three-up and two-down, and the assistant only got to be a staff, three-up and one-down, so that’s why we both didn’t want to get on the same ship. We went on separately on our crews.
So we briefly went over to the overseas training unit, and we went over to England on a convoy, like a chain, a convoy goes as fast as the slowest boat in the convoys. He ended up at the 303 bomb route, and I was about 30 miles down the road from him, the 91st bomb route, same place the Memphis Bell was, if you’ve heard about the Memphis Bell. I was in the same outfit, they were just pulling out as we were pulling in. See, their claim to fame was–not a claim, they did it–they were the first crew to complete 25 missions without anybody getting killed. That was really great stuff. If you ever saw the movie, and I’m sure you did, all the things that happened to them, which happened, no doubt about it, but they all didn’t happen in one mission.
WW: Mhmm.
AM: It’s spread out over 25 missions. Anyhow, they were pulling out as we started bombing. He was 30 miles down the road, and we’d get passes to go to London. We’d go to London, we’d go to Cambridge, and we had a couple of small towns close by. On his ninth mission – oh, by the way, we had 25 missions to go like the Memphis Bell had–until Old Henderson, General Henderson, got in charge of the 80th Air Force of which we were a part of, and he made it 30. And our old buddy Doolittle, after he got done with bombing Tokyo – if you remember, [unintelligible] – and he got all of the 8th Air Force and he made it 35, and I said, “These people are going to kill me!” Memphis Bell had a hell of a job with 25, why not make it 35.
So anyway, my brother being 30 miles down the road, on about his ninth mission the navigator got killed–if it was by flack or fighters I don’t know which, but he got killed. And a couple of missions later, they were going to run [unintelligible] him again, I don’t know if it was fighters or flack, but they got hit. The pilot got hit in the right arm so it was torn off. He looked over at the co-pilot, the co-pilot was slumped over the yolk (??) bleeding from the head, and the pilot figured he was dead. So he reached out and pushed the red button, first time he pushed the red button to get ready to go pop your chest chutes (??) on your chute harness and get ready to jump because when he pushes it the second time, you go. So the result is that he pushed it the second time and he looked over at the co-pilot and the co-pilot’s coming up out of it, and evidently was flack because whatever hit the co-pilot in the head damn near tore the pilot’s right arm off because the co-pilot’s sitting to the pilot’s right. To make a long story short, the co-pilot takes over, he puts it down on the deck, and heads for England and they make it back. This is my favorite war story, by the way. And somebody in heaven, and the Eighth Air Forces, this crew has gone through enough, send them back to the States for reassignment. So they shipped ‘em back to America. So they made it back to the base, and they were ordered to Liverpool. From Liverpool, they went on the Queen Elizabeth–three liners that could travel unescorted and not on a convoy. They were so fast, the size of ‘em, going 35 miles an hour across the ocean. Get there in four days. I would say Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, and the Maritania, and he was going back on the Elizabeth. I later on came back on the Maritania. He left on the Queen Elizabeth and got to America, landed in New York and crossed from New York to Oakland, California where he was now assigned to the Air Transport Command as a radio man of DC-4s, four-engine transport planes. And we were starting to take the islands back from the Japanese, and their missions were to fly supplies out to the islands that we had retaken, and bring the wounded back from the fight thereof strapped to the insides of the DC-4 and bring them back for hospitalization, recuperation in Oakland, California.
They were tooling along doing this, by the by, I finally, I make it, I make 35 missions. The Battle of the Bulge, the worst day I ever spent in my whole life up to and including now. It was on November 2, 1944, the 322nd bomb squad of which we were on the 91st bomb squad en route. Put up 12 airplanes on a mission to Mersberg, Germany. Mersberg was to Germany what Detroit was to the United States: arsenal of democracy. They had the airports, they had synthetic oil plants, they had railroads, they had everything, just like Detroit. They were the number one priority target in all of Germany. We went there six times out of our 35. We went there on November 2, 1944, we put up 12 B-17s and six of us got shot down. Only six of us came back. As I say the worst day, I ever spent in my whole, whole life. But I finally made it through 20, 35 missions up to the Battle of the Bulge, and we were fighting in the Battle of the Bulge through my last mission as a radio on the 17th, during December of ’44. We fought our last mission on January 2, 1945.
We went back to the base, and we went through London, we went to Liverpool, and we went from Liverpool to the United States. We crossed the United States, and I was assigned to Santa Ana, California outside of LA to get recuperation and reassigned, and they gave me a lot of tests for this. Air or gunnery school, I could sign up for a tour on the B-29s, I could go back to England and fly another tour – I said, ‘You guys are crazy, I’m not going back’ to get back or something like that.
My brother come down from Oakland, because for every two or three days he was gone from the base flying the islands – coming back took two, three weeks – he got a day off. So he came down and saw me because I was staying in Santa Ana getting all these recuperation dates. Here’s the deal: he’s flying these islands, flying out from Oakland, taking supplies out, bringing the wounded back in, and they’re flying to get a call – you know, directions, orders – to take the DC-4 and to take it to Okinawa. We didn’t know it at the time, but we had dropped the atomic bomb and the surrender process unconditional [unintelligible] in Texas and Missouri were setting up, and they told them to fly to 54 for Okinawa. And they got to Okinawa and landed at the main airport, and they said “You’re going to take on board a load of paratroopers.” And they said, “We are not set up for paratroopers, we’re set up to carry wounded and stretchers.” Cuz you see the hookup, you know–
WW: Mmhmm.
AM: –and they go out the door. They say, “You’re not going to drop them, you’re going to fly them into the main airport at Tokyo, Japan, and they’re going to take over the airport.” And that’s what they did. They flew from Okinawa to the main airport in Tokyo, Japan. The paratroopers got off and took over the airport. Here’s the deal: My brother starts and he’s in Germany, bombing Germany, based in England. He flies back across Germany, across France, across Holland, across [unintelligible], across English Channel, through England, crosses England all the way through the English Channel, to the Atlantic Ocean and he takes the Queen Elizabeth all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of New York. He gets off the boat, gets on another train, travels all the way across the United States to Oakland, California. Oakland, California he gets on board a DC-4 and flied out into the South Pacific now, ending up in Tokyo, Japan. He damn near transnavigated the globe! That’s my favorite story about the war, my brother. Meanwhile I went through all this and became a Morse Code instructor. That got me a little notice. That was my war experience.
WW: What was it like coming back to the city afterwards?
AM: Well, that was the thing. We came back and we had our mustering out pay, which I think was $300. My mother says, “You’ve had a hard time, son. Take your time and rest easy.” Two weeks: “When are you going to get a job? Get back to work!” I said to my brother – and I told you the story about him going shopping – he decided he was going to join the police force. My sister’s husband had already served a term in the Navy during when we were in high school; they were about two years ahead of me. The big depression, the Great Depression, was going on 1938, 39, 40. A lot of them joined the Navy, one less mouth at the table to feed. He served a term in the Navy. He shopped around and he got a good rate the Coast Guard. Anyhow, he said he was going to join the police force. Mike, my sister’s husband, joined the fire department. “Alfie,” he says – they called me Alfie – “Join the fire department. They’re looking for guys. It’ll be quite a wait; it’ll be a couple of months before they ever call you.”You got you made it. Your mother will get off your back for getting the job done waiting for the fire department to call you.” Meanwhile my brother is starting the police academy. I’m waiting. I was discharged on September 4. In November 5, I’m in the training school for the fire department. They called me. My brother, as I told you, is a smart cookie. He also took the exams for the fire department. He passed them but I beat him. He had the scores but he was cognitive and I was practical. He knew all about the typing and the big words and all that sort of stuff. I’ve come from a stipend and I’ve going upstairs to do my ablutions. You know, stuff like that. He joined the police department and he had it made because of the secretarial skills work in the precinct. So that was the deal. I joined the fire department and I went in as a fireman. I graduated from the training school and spent five years as a firefighter. I’m leading up to the riots. I spent five years as a firefighter and I was 23 – 1945. So I was 23 years old when I went in, spent five years as a firefighter, fully qualified. By 1952 the fire department – I’ll show you in my book here – were completely radio equipped. I shifted from firefighting to the communications department of the fire department and helped install radios and remote receivers and a lot of other stuff because I knew what I was doing. So that was 1945, 46, 47. I spent five years as a firefighter and then when the riots came – I had five years as a firefighter and 17 years as a fire dispatcher in the communications division. Now here’s the thing: when I was in charge, I was senior dispatcher, and I was in charge of the day shift. So on July 23 or was that the 27 – 1967 when the riots hit – and I was in charge of the day shift. I was going to be in charge. I walked in -- 7:30-3:30 was the shift. I asked the guy in charge of midnights what was new. You got briefed, you know. He says, “Murph, I got these calls. There’s something going on on Twelfth Street. I don’t know what it is, police dispatch won’t tell me anything. But I hear there’s a great police presence gathering at Herman Keifer Hospital. But no one will tell what’s going on.” Normally police dispatch and fire dispatch are cheek and jowl.” They work together and cooperate. So I tried and the same thing. “I can’t five any information about anything going on.” I went home two days later. That’s when it started. I’d like to ask you a question, if I may.
WW: Mmhh.
AM: Did you get a tape or receive a tape to American House about a tape recording. We started there and that tape would be so much help to you. Two hundred of the chief executive of the firemen – that’s what we called it Car Two Hundred. [Unintelligible] He’s out there in the field, right in the heart of everything telling me what he wants and what he is going to do. I’m giving him all the information he wants and any help that he wants. I’m doing this end and he’s doing that end and together… I’ve got an article that I wrote for the Firefighter Magazine. This is an article I wrote. I was approximately a little over a year after the riots. If you want to go ahead and give it a shot, go ahead.
WW: I won’t read any right now.
AM: It stated slowly as they say because police dispatch wouldn’t tell me anything. Two hundred came down to Central Office. You see, there was police headquarters, Receiving Hospital and a teeny little brick building behind Receiving Hospital. That was us, Central Office, Communications Division of the Detroit Fire Department. The conditions were war-like and had to be fought as such. The chief dispatcher was a guy who used to be in the Marines and I had spent three years in the Air Corps already. We knew about wars. So we broke up the fire department and set up three command posts. These guys were coming and going and the crews were exhausted. I said we need help, we need help. So what we did is we assigned people to call all surrounding communities for help. Now, Detroit had contracts with all of these surrounding – not all of these but quite a few – neighborhoods to give assistance to them for X hundred dollars if they wanted it. We would send one engine, two engines, whatever they needed to help. But we didn’t have any contracts to get help. We were Detroit. We had 55 agents, 29 trucks, 12 chiefs, 7 squads, 6 phone lines, 4 high pressure rigs, I won’t go on. But we didn’t need anybody, we were Detroit! So we sent out the call. The answer from as close as Windsor and as far away as Flint and we got 56 pieces of fire equipment. Imagine that, that’s the response that we got. Now can you imagine the logistics of these 56 pieces coming into Detroit? Where do you want us to go? Who do you think they called? Us. We set up the command post. How are you going to get fed? Where are you going to sleep -- all of these problems. I explained in there most of these things, a lot of them, we had procedures for. I helped set up the Second Central Office in Palmer Park. We had control of the transmitter, control of the telephones – Bell would switch the lines over to us if we so desired, you follow? So we could actually run from Palmer Park. We went to the command post and had 56 more pieces of equipment. Then we got extra phones installed in each one of the command posts. So they were strictly for dispatching, nothing else. The telephones were left free for me to tell these guys what to do. So from there on they went to the dial system. Then we went to (?) to help set up the EMS. The riots were the big thing, several disturbances now. Do you want to ask anything?
WW: You said it was like a war. Can you describe your experiences in the first few days of the riot? You spoke about what you did but what about your experiences.
AM: The first few days I walked in on Sunday morning and went home 48 hours later, my daughter will testify to that. That’s when I got home I put in 48 straight hours. I could take a nap but in the office. Most of these things had never happened before. As I said, we didn’t need help from anybody, we were Detroit. All of the sudden we’re asking for help. Once we got it, we said what the hell do we do with it now? Where are they going to be based, what engine houses, how are we going to feed them, how do we get places for them to sleep. It all worked. In fact, a lot of the procedures are still in effect today in the Detroit Fire – if the situation arises or is needed. We made it up during the first two or three days and after --- well, you saw pictures of it, you studied that whole thing. Tremendous. They were pooping in their own nests, let’s face it. What they were doing was burning all the wrong places down. You had a little to do up at 7 Mile and Livernois. They had avenues of fashion up there. Our job was to keep everything fluid and keep it moving. That’s what I was doing during the riots.
WW: Did you see or expect violence that summer? Or like going throughout the 60s, did you sense any tension?
AM: Turn it around. My brother was a policeman, as I said. He was pinned down in a precinct at Conyers and East Jefferson. Now at Hart and Jefferson, which is only a couple of blocks away, we had Engine 32, Chief 6 never pinned down by snipers. The precinct couldn’t work because they were pinned down by snipers. I couldn’t get the engine out of their Chief 6 because they were pinned down by snipers. When we did get a few hours off they told us we could go home and see our families. My daughter will testify. I’m driving the expressway at 70 miles an hour with my lights off because there were snipers up in those overpasses. It was all virgin territory, so to speak. Never happened before! You had to play it as you could. As it transpired you dreamt up something and covered it. Even our own guys – hell, I was there for two days, a lot guys spent the whole two days there and we dispatchers needed relief too -- Same thing, virgin territory. But as I say this is very informative because this is just two years before the riot. Look at that equipment! Installed in 1870! It went in over a hundred years before. I’m not knocking anybody but when we finally got to be radio equipped we didn’t even have dials. The phones – we were just working up to that – EMS, something in the future which came up a couple years after the riots and I was involved in that which was very interesting too. If you have a copy of that tape that I’m talking about – it’s me talking, that’s me on that tape, 2200, the executive chief of that department. This is the tape that I’m talking about. I’m almost positive it is. If you have any knowledge at all, I think it is the one we’re talking about. I think that’s what it is. Any more questions you want to ask about things?
WW: How do you think the fire department handled ’67? Do you think that since you were creating so many different things on the fly that you worked really well or were there shortcomings? How did you see the department in the new light?
AM: Considering the circumstances, I think everybody in the fire department – the firefighters fighting it, the fire prevention and inspectors helped out, the crews at central office helped out, all the executive chiefs helped out, everybody put out. As I said, it was an entirely new scenario. A lot of the things were covered, as I said we had a rule book about yay thick of rules and regulations in those days like the Army or the Air Corps. But a lot of things were strictly new. We had to improvise, figure out something and the police, again, cooperated greatly too. I’d talk to 200 and he’d say, “how many fires have you still got going in the area and where are they?” and he’d say, “ The National Guardsmen are going to drop off 50 soldiers at every corner coming down 12th Street.” One example, one little thing, Captain George Marsh, Captain of Squad One, coming out of downtown fire headquarters, he’s coming to the 12th Street fires, they shoot out his right front tire – sniper blew it out – but he got to the fire and so in the rescue rigs, rescue squads, they’re built like trucks, they’re built on a truck chassis, singles in the front and duals in the back, so George has the guys jack it up and take one of the duals off the back, put it on the front and he was back in business. One other thing – that’s what was going on improvise, do this, do that. My boss told me, “We’re going to have to go to command posts.” I was in the Air Corps, he was in the Marines. He was used to ground wars, if you know what I mean. I’m flying around in airplanes. But he told me what to do. We kept it fluid. If we had too many at one command post, I would shift it. It was my job to keep the thing going. Gradually – as it says in the article there, “like ripples in a pond” – going out like this, it finally started slowing, slowing down. You notice nobody’s name is in that article; my name isn’t in, 200’s name isn’t it, nobody’s name is, just executive chief or central office. I’m not trying to give anybody credit, I’m not trying to give anybody blame, just telling how it was. Most of it was new. We’d never experienced it before. I had seventeen years as a fire dispatcher. [Unintelligible]
WW: Where were you living in 1967?
AW: In 1967, we were living at 8 Mile and Greenfield. I watched Northland get built.
WW: On the Detroit side of 8 Mile?
AW: Yeah. You had to live in Detroit to work for the police and fire. That was mandatory.
WW: Did you look at the city differently after ’67 after seeing all the devastation?
AW: Yeah, well I could have retired when I was 48. Instead I just got this promotion to seniordispatcher and your pension goes in the last five years in grade. I stayed on till I was 53 then I took off for Florida. At that time, if you remember back then, I don’t know how old you were then or how old you are now, but that’s when the interest rates were 15%, 16%, 17% on the CDs and stuff. You go down to Florida and real estate was going like this. It would have taken a talent to lose money. You would have to work at it to lose money. So people would sell their houses up here for good price and move down to Florida and for half of the price they got for their house up here – of course, there were no basements because the water aquifer was up so high, you stick a stick in the ground and it starts to grow, two car garage, swimming pool – for half the price that they sold if for here. Everything was going like -- Carrie came down, that’s when they were getting 15, 17% on CDs. That’s where I moved down to -- I spent almost ten years down there.
WW: What brought you back?
AW: What brought me back?
WW: Didn’t mean to stump you.
AW: No, no I’m just trying to relive it. Everybody came down to Florida except my brother. Two of my sisters – no, all three of them were down there. Edna was down there, Carrie was down there and Claire was down there, all three at the same time. My father had died and my mother was living with my sister in Florida just a couple miles down the road from me. One sister died and then Mike, the one that was a fireman, he moved out to California. My sister Caroline came down and bought a house and all crammed in. She bought a condo where my sister and mother were living. I’m trying to think of why I went back. Oh I know, a very good reason. What I wanted to do -- I was making money, as I said it would take a talent to lose it – I wanted to have a place up north and a place in Florida. My wife, my second wife, her daughter was living in a co-op. Do you know much at all about co-ops? They are very reasonable places to buy into as a stock holder in a corporation. All you are paying is your utilities. It’s great. She was living in this one built in 1967, the year of the riots, on a 40 year mortgage at 3%, which means that it was due at 2008. The mortgage would be paid off. So she was there from the inception of the thing – ‘67. She lived there, raised her two kids there, and I said “Hey, this is for me, it’s only a few thousand dollars to get in, to buy.” There was limited equity. That was set in the bylaws and everything else by HUD. HUD was every other word in the rules and bylaws and regulations. When I hailed in there it was the 2000s. It was about 2004 and I get up there at the residence meetings, board of directors and everything, and I says, “Hey, in four years this is going to be paid off. If your son was going to go to college, you start thinking about it when you’re in high school. You start making preparations. I said this place is going to be paid off and it’s never happened before, something like the riots.” These all were 40 year mortgages, what kind of equity, what about the bylaws. I rewrote all the bylaws for a million dollar a year corporation. Had them vote on it, had them do what you’re doing right now. Because they didn’t want anybody living there saying “You didn’t tell us about this, you didn’t tell us about that.” Play it. Here’s where I cover that. That’s what brought me back. I wanted six of one and six of the other and it would have worked out well. I knew there was a good reason for me coming back. I had a co-op up here and I sold the last house, I always bought houses on lakes in Florida because they are a cinch to sell. Everybody wants to live on a lake. But that’s what brought me back.
WW: Last couple of questions: do you feel that the riots significantly changed the city of Detroit?
AW: I think it had a definite influence, yes. Just for the futility of it, if nothing else. All it was was destruction. There was no construction, nothing positive that I could see. As I say, they were pooping in their own nests is what they were doing – no regard to where they were burning it, what they burning. I had to a whole lot of things. But the fire department is strictly seniority. Police department -- there is tests plus seniority, written tests and fire department no, seniority 100%. I’ve been on the job a day ahead of you, I get the promotion. You got to wait for me. That’s how it turned out. I was also going to school when the first coloreds came on as firefighters in the Detroit Fire Department. I don’t remember what year it was. So they were thinking of going to exams, all of the colored firemen says “No, no we’re getting all the seniority. We’re going to have all the jobs in just a few more years. Don’t start making tests now, for God’s sake. We’ve got the seniority. All we have to do is wait.” If anything, that helped to change the structure. Did it have a positive effect? Well, I left as I say in ’75. That was eight years after the riots. I retired then. I’ve been retired for forty years now.
WW: Are there any other stories you’d like to share from ’67 about your experiences?
AW: In 1967? As I say, the newness of it, the flying by a blind wire, a blind hand, whatever you want to call it -- these things came up, you never faced it before. Nobody there had ever experienced it before; you had to innovate, you had to do something. It had to be done, something had to be done. We did it. As I say, a lot of the changes we made – fundamental, like command posts -- we carry out to this day in the fire department. As regards to the firefighting end of it, I was only a firefighter for five years but knew enough to learn all the nuances of being a firefighter. I was a fire dispenser for a lot longer than that. As far as the fire department communications division with the EMS, you know, with that sort of stuff - helped set that up. That politics and stuff, you know Ike McKinnon, so do I and so does my son, we had a meeting with the fire commission – how long ago was that, Virg? – last year. Given an award by the fire department for 30 years of service. Had all the division chiefs and all that and Ike McKinnon were there and the mayor and all that. My son gets up, he says – all these chiefs are there, all these uniforms – he says, “I know why the city went bankrupt. My Dad got all those pension checks coming in for forty years. That’s what bankrupt the city.” He brought the house down. “That’s what broke the city. Him getting those pension checks for forty years this guy’s been retired, getting those pension checks every month.” That’s one thing that happened. The engine houses when I was like – the trial men was like, there was six month probationary period. The crappy jobs, let’s put it that way, they gave to the trial men. Make it a little hard on them, you know what I mean? Break them in, do this, do that, give them the hard jobs to do and stuff. Overall and generally speaking, the volume of the calls and the services of the fire department I think are great, I really do. Everybody got more training, everybody got more experience, it’s what you need. It’s much like the police department. The police department – any policeman in Detroit can get a job as a policeman in almost any large city in the United States because when you’ve been a policeman in Detroit, you’ve been a policeman. Same thing with the fire department -- you know what you’re doing. Overall, probably – I won’t say it was for the best because there was destruction. You don’t want to ever have it happen again.
WW: Thank you very much for sitting down with me. I greatly appreciate it.
AW: What?
WW: Thank you for sitting down with me today.
WW: Hello. Today is February 7, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. I'm sitting down with -
AC: Sister Alys Currier.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me. Would you like to share your story?
AC: I was not in Detroit at the time of the riots, but was living in Marian in - it's in Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Birmingham - and commuting in to the University of Detroit in order to - where I was in class when we got word of the riots. And so they ask us if we would bring down food for the people that were working to - in the churches downtown, and helping out, feeding whomever needed to be fed, and so on.
So we went out in the kitchen and we made an assembly line, and we made - I don't know how many sandwiches, but we made a lot of them. And then Sister Rose Ange and myself was asked to take them downtown. So we got in the car and we took other things down that they needed, like clothes and things that people might need, and we drove downtown, and as we pulled into the alley in back of the Baptist church where we were going to deliver all of our goods, all of a sudden I looked up and the car was surrounded by all soldiers and their guns were pointed at us.
And we just looked at them with surprise, and they came running out of the Baptist church. Said, "Oh no, no no no no, they're just delivering things." The soldiers thought we were looting. And so the helpers unloaded our car and the soldiers stepped back but they didn't go right away. They just stepped back and then we left. Went back to Marian. And that's about the substance of the story.
WW: Do you remember what it felt like for you driving into the city?
AC: No different, I mean - I didn't think a lot about it because I was not in - you know, we just heard about it in Marion, so I didn't think a lot about it.
WW: Did you see any smoke or anything on your way into the city?
AC: No, I don't remember - I have to go back - did I see? - I probably saw the soldiers and things as we were driving down the streets, but that's -
WW: Do you remember what Baptist church it was?
AC: No, I have no idea. We went into an alley in the back of the church and we didn't even get out of the car. I mean, they took everything into the church. We didn't even go in to the building.
WW: Did that experience - being surrounded by soldiers and such - did it change the way you looked at the city?
AC: No. I didn't - No, it really didn't change the way I thought about the city. I was missioned in the city later - a couple of years later - and I saw the changes, and that was different. I saw the changes, because I lived right down where much of that happened, and I think I experienced it more a couple or three years - I don't know how many years later - when I actually taught in the city. But not during the riots itself, what it did to the streets and the - it was in Twelfth Street. I think Twelfth Street was kind of hit hard, well, that's where I lived. Right down near Twelfth Street for a couple of years. And that's where I saw. But that wasn't during the riots itself. It was after the riots, so that's - you know.
WW: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
AC: Hm?
WW: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
AC: No. Except that Rose Ange said to me, "I'm glad I brought you, you're calm." [laughter] You know, I didn't react. Which is a good thing.
WW: Do you remember what kind of sandwiches they were? [laughter]
AC: No, I really don't! [laughter] I just know we made a lot of them, and we didn't go to school that day. But we - I think we went to school the next day. I went back to U of D the next day. I'm not sure, but I don't remember - the thing I remember mostly, is the driving in that alley, stopping, then all a sudden look up and see all these soldiers with your guns pointed at you. That's - it kind of, you know, I kind of think I reflected on it a little bit after I left and thought, you know, that was - not for myself, but for the people in the city. Because it didn't really bother me that much. I didn't think about - myself, that much about it. But I did think about the city after that. But before that, it was - it was kind of removed, because I wasn't living there.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I greatly appreciate it.
AC: Mm hm.
AO: So today is November 17, 2016, my name is Amina Omar, this interview for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am currently sitting here with—
AT: Amne Talab.
AO: Ms. Talab, where and when were you born?
AT: I was born on July 17, 1959, in Highland Park, Michigan, at 137 Pasadena Street.
AO: Where did you live in July of 1967?
AT: I lived at 137 Pasadena Street in Highland Park, Michigan.
AO: And what were you doing that year?
AT: I was about eight years old and I was going to school. And while we were in school, they sent us home, I remember, at that time. On the first day.
AO: So what was it like being a Muslim Arab growing up there?
AT: So back in that time, there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on what you were, whether you were Muslim or Christian or black or white. The area we lived in was a very diverse area, so we had people from the Middle East, from Mexico, from—we had Native Indians, African Americans, it was a very, very diverse area. And nobody really focused on being a Muslim or a Christian or anything like that back then. So you were just—everybody was called Syrian back there. If they were from the Middle East, they were called Syrians. So we didn’t emphasize—it wasn’t a factor in anything. We were just, you know, from the Middle East. We were considered from the Middle East people. And we didn’t feel any uneasiness or any type of, like, we’re being looked at because we’re Muslim or Arab, at that time.
AO: So what do you remember about Detroit in the mid-sixties?
AT: So being that I was so young, I don’t remember a lot. I remember, like I said, our street was very diverse. We had people from all different nationalities, different countries. It was a beautiful neighborhood at the time. I remember I always went downtown for the parades, the Thanksgiving parade, and we’d always go downtown—I think it was on Woodward, Hudson’s was there, which is now known as Macy’s—but we would, you know, we grew up very comfortably over there. We used to go to the Tiger games. There was this one restaurant there called Red Barn, we always went there. It was a very, very fun time before, of course, the riots started. But it was a very nice neighborhood that we lived in, and we enjoyed—we really enjoyed it there.
AO: So your neighbors, did they all interact?
AT: Oh yeah. Our neighbors were—I mean, nobody had computers or phones or DSs, or whatever those—all these little technology gadgets. Everybody went outside and played in the alley. We either played baseball, the boys played football, we’d play whatever, you know, we were always outside playing and enjoying ourselves. It was more of a—being out in nature, rather being inside of your homes doing things. In fact, when we left—we did leave the country in 1969 and the whole block had a party for us before we left, like a farewell party.
AO: Wow. So there weren’t any tensions between races and different backgrounds?
AT: Before this time, it wasn’t. There weren’t any. After it became—and not against Arabs or Muslims, just it was more of a white and black issue, when the riots started.
AO: Okay. So how did you first hear about the riots?
AT: If I can remember—again, I was about eight years old. We were in school, and they said there’s been something, some civil disturbance, some public disorder, something’s going on, you know. I think it was—some problem had happened the night before at a bar or at a restaurant or—I don’t know. And then the police had to come in. And then the police had to come in, and—I can’t really remember, like, specifically, but something where the police got involved. And then they said, you know, the blacks are fighting against the whites, and whatever. The police are shooting and there’s a lot of chaos in that area, wherever—I can’t remember where that area was. So they were kind of worried so they sent all the kids home from school. So all I remember is my mom coming and picking us up from school.
AO: So how did your family react to this event?
AT: At the beginning they just thought it was just an incident that happened and got out of hand. That’s what we thought before, because it was so peaceful there before. So we didn’t think so much of it. They didn’t say it was a riot or anything. They just said there’s been some civil disturbance, there’s been this—an issue. This is what I recall, and I can’t remember vividly, but I remember they said that something happened, and the white people and the black people were fighting, and the police came and started shooting, and that’s all. So we didn’t think of it immediately as a riot, or—we just thought, you know, maybe something happened and they’re just worried about the kids. And our school was right off of, like, a main street, so they just told us to come home and sent us home. That was the first day.
AO: Do you remember if, like, the mayor or anybody from the government told you guys anything? Or how did they react to it?
AT: To be honest with you, I was too young. I remember Romney was, I think, the governor at the time, and President Johnson was the president. I remember that because I read about it later on. But I think after a while, there were, like—they would come on the TV and say stuff like, “Everybody needs to be calm, everybody needs to keep order,” or—I can’t remember, I can’t remember exactly. But I know, like, it started to get serious after—because it was like about five days where it was awful. But then they started—and then the federal troops—I mean the, yeah, troops came in, and it was almost like a war. I mean, by the time—as we were progressing it was getting worse and worse. Then nobody left their homes, we all stayed home for a little while. And then we went back to normal life after that. But there was a lot of tension then. There was a lot of tension. Even after things had settled down, because I think, like, about—a good number of people died. I think when I read about it was like 45 people maybe died? Actually black and white and women—they categorized it like that. So I know even after things calmed a little bit, there was still a lot of tension then after that. So we weren’t really allowed to be out alone. You know, only in the backyard, only close by home. You know, first we used to go play in the alley and on the streets and we would go places, but after that there was a little bit more caution. Parents worried more about their kids. All parents, not just the Arab parents. Everybody on our block really worried about their kids, and we tried to stay together. And what was beautiful about this whole thing was that even though there was all this tension, the people on the block were very, very still close. Because we had been there—you know, our parents and their parents—had been there for a long time. So there wasn’t a lot of—like, within our block, whatever number of houses there were. But nobody really ventured out. We didn’t go the parks. We used to go this park called—Ford Park? Or Palmer Park? I can’t remember the name of it. It was also off of Woodward, but we weren’t allowed to go to the park anymore. So things like that.
AO: So I know some people describe this event as a riot, and others refer to it as a rebellion or an uprising. How do you think you would describe this event?
AT: Well, at that time I really couldn’t figure it out. But after what I’ve seen through the years, I think it was more of a social disparity or financial disparity issue, where there was a lot of—I think at the time, if I recall correctly, at the time there were some issues where there was a lot of poverty. And I think that the African American community or the black community was feeling also that they maybe were not being treated well, or maybe that the white people had the upper hand, and something like that. I mean, that’s what I remember. And I don’t think they did this because they just wanted—you know, they just wanted to create tension. I think it was more triggered by some of the social class issues and the way people are treated and maybe discrimination. I don’t know, I mean, this is just what I think. I don’t think it was just because somebody woke up and said, “I’m going to shoot 10 white people,” or a white person woke up and said, “I’m going to shoot 10 black people.” I think it was more of the whole economic situation, in addition to the social discrimination issues that were happening, maybe, then. And again, I was very young so I don’t remember everything. This is how I analyzed it.
AO: How do you feel like the experiences during the riot affected your life at all?
AT: Well, even a year—probably a year later, it was still—like I said, maybe there weren’t people killing as much and having all these—it was more controlled because of all the police force and everything else that was there to control everything, but there was still fear. And I think I had a fear at that time, because I had to walk back and forth to school, and I was always supposed to be with my elder brothers, and I always had a fear that something may happen to me for the few times that I had to come home alone. And there was a constant fear factor after that, if I ever had to be alone or I ever felt—I always felt like something would happen. So life wasn’t the same after that. It wasn’t the same.
AO: So what message would you like to leave for future generations about your memories of Detroit before, during, and after the event of July?
AT: Well, before the riots, it was beautiful. Like I said, we had a beautiful childhood there. We really enjoyed it. After the riots—the period of the riots was really fearful and scary. I think because I was young I really had a lot of fear. But—again, I think the message that Detroit was beautiful at that time. I was in Highland Park. During the riots it did get a little bit ugly, a lot of people were killed and bad things happened to people. And it was a fearful time, you know, that’s the message I want to say, it was a very fearful time. And at the same time, it was due to some reasons that we were too young to understand at the time. So I don’t know if that’s why they ended up calling it riots, or—but there was some other factors that contributed to this happening. Like I said, not just because—so it was a bad time, the message is it was a bad time, it was a fearful time. But then after I think—I left the country. So I don’t know what happened after that. We moved out of the country, we went away for seven years. And when I came back the first place my brothers took me was back to our old address, because I wanted to see it again, and we did go back to Allen Park. And this was in 1976. It was different. Our house was gone, there was no house, it was burned down. There was no house. But, I mean, the message for Detroit—I think Detroit is right now doing very well. I think that the revitalization of the Detroit area needs to get attention from everyone. We need to revitalize Detroit and make sure that it’s one of the best cities in the country. I love Detroit. I don’t like Highland Park too much because of my experiences there, but I love Detroit and I think we should all work hard on trying to make sure that it is revitalized and becomes one of the best cities in the country.
AO: Is there anything you feel we haven’t discussed or should be added to the interview?
AT: No, that’s good.
AO: Well, thank you for sitting with me today.
AT: No problem.