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Dublin Core
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Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Carl Lauter
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
Noah Levinson
Lillian Wilson
Interview Place
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Royal Oak
Date
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07/07/2015
Interview Length
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00:42:49
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Dr. Carl Lauter was born December 30, 1939 and grew up in Detroit, MI where he lived and worked during the 1967 disturbance. Dr. Lauter worked at Detroit Receiving Hospital in 1967, and after being in the Air Force for two years, returned to Michigan to work at Beaumont Hospital. He currently lives in West Bloomfield, MI.
Transcriptionist
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Devon Pawloski
Transcription
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<p class="Normal1"> </p>
<p>NL: Today is July 7, 2015. This is the interview of Dr. Carl Lauter by Noah Levinson. We are at the Medical Office Building in Royal Oak, Michigan on the Beaumont Hospital campus, accompanied by Lily Wilson and Thea Lockard and this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society and the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Dr. Lauter, could you first tell me when and where you were born?<br /><br />CL: I was born in Detroit, Michigan, December 30, 1939 at the original Providence Hospital, which was on West Grand Boulevard at that time.<br /><br />NL: And where did you live growing up?<br /><br />CL: When I was just a little baby, first born, family lived in an apartment on a street called Pingree. Pingree was near Twelfth Street. Twelfth Street is now known as Rosa Parks Boulevard. And when I was about a year or two old, my family moved into an up-and-down flat on Gladstone. And Gladstone was also between, which was only a block over from Pingree, between Twelfth and Fourteenth street. And I lived there until I was nine years of age, when the family moved to an area known as the Dexter-Davison neighborhood. And I lived on the street Burlingame. 3012 Burlingame. That was between Lawton and Wildemere, and a block and a half on either end was Linwood to the East and Dexter to the West. And I lived there most of my childhood and young adult life and my mother and my younger brother were actually living there still in 1967.<br /><br />NL: Could you tell me where you were living and what you were doing in 1967?<br /><br />CL: In 1967 I was a second-year internal medicine resident, that is a training physician learning to be an internal medicine physician, and I was at Detroit Receiving Hospital, which was the main teaching hospital of the Wayne State University Medical School.<br /><br />NL: And where exactly was Receiving Hospital?<br /><br />CL: Receiving Hospital at that time was in the city in the downtown area, not where it is now in the Medical Campus area, and it was basically in Greektown. It was right across the street from what was originally the main police station, and I wish I could remember the street address. I think the main address was a Saint Antoine address, and it was right on, just to the west of the Chrysler Freeway Service Drive.<br /><br />NL: Can you tell me where you were and how you first <br />remember hearing about turbulence and civil unrest in the city in ’67?<br /><br />CL: Yeah. Well, maybe a little background. I had started my residency in July of ’66, so I was technically done with that second year in June, but I was slated to join the Air Force. There was an obligatory draft, including doctors’ draft and I had joined a program called the Berry Plan where you get to choose your branch of service and defer until you finish some of your training, but I was called up to start duty sometime in early September. So I had asked my chief of the department, Dr. Richard Bing at that time, since I didn’t know what to do between June 30 and September, I asked if I could keep working as a third-year resident even though he knew I couldn’t finish the year for the next couple of months and he said yes, so I was in the very beginnings of a third year internal medicine residency. I’d finished a second year and I shouldn’t have been there anymore, I should’ve been somewhere else, but I was working at the hospital. I was off on the weekend that the riots started. I was off duty, and it was a Sunday morning that I first found out that there was something going on in the downtown area. I actually had been driving my mother grocery shopping. And since I usually got bored sitting around inside the market, so I was sitting in my car listening to the Beatles music and my mother was in the market. And I listened to the news and it described that some rioting was going on in the city of Detroit they said something about, I don’t remember the exact details, but there had been a police raid on a blind pig, that when they tried to arrest people, then a crowd gathered and then there was civil unrest, and shooting and fighting and throwing things, and by ten or eleven in the morning when I heard about it, it was quite a bit of problem going on in the city. So I took my mother home and when I was at the house I called Receiving and talked to some of my friends or colleagues that were working and I said “What’s going on?” And they said, “Pretty hectic.” And I said, “You need any help?” And he said, “Absolutely.” And I said okay. But they said, “But don’t drive your car, it’s hard to drive through some of this, it might not be that safe.” So I said, “How am I gonna get there?” Not gonna take the bus, it sounded worse. So they said, “Try and see if the police will bring you.” So I called the police and the police said, “We know you’re probably needed, Doctor, but we really are too busy to do this.” And they suggested that I call a black cab company. Now you have to understand that I didn’t know there was such a thing as a white cab company and a black cab company. But there apparently were two black-owned cab companies in the city at that time and the police gave me the numbers, they knew who they were, and I called and they said yeah they’ll come and get me, and they came to my house to pick me up. At that time, now I’m more grey than blonde, but I was blonde and very fair-skinned, and I walked out of my door and got into the cab and the cab driver was a really wonderful African-American gentleman and as we’re driving toward Chrysler Freeway to get on the freeway, I could see him looking at me, and he was starting to get nervous. And he said, “Doctor, it wouldn’t hurt your feelings, would it, if I asked you to scrunch down in the back seat?” Those were his exact words. And I said, “No, no problem.” He was afraid we might be a target. So we headed down the easiest way at that time from where I was living, which was in that Dexter-Davison neighborhood. So normally you would go down Chicago Boulevard where there’s an entrance onto the John C. Lodge or US-10 and then we ended up on the Chrysler. I think he took the Davison over and we ended up on the Chrysler, somehow. Somehow we got across to the Chrysler. And we’re driving down the Chrysler and it’s dawning on me that things are happening. You can hear a lot of gunshot wounds, gunshot noise, you can see fires already and that was just Sunday afternoon. And when we get the exit to get off into Greektown area where Receiving Hospital was Lafayette exit, which is still there, and we couldn’t exit the freeway onto Lafayette because there was a roadblock set up there by the police. So they wanted to know who we were, and [I] said “Doctor, going to the hospital.” And they let us through. When we got to the top of the ramp there was another checkpoint or roadblock and there were already state police there. And same thing, we had to say who we were, and they let us through. And then the cab driver dropped me off at the front door of the hospital, and he went on his way. I had the foresight, I guess, to realize that I might not be leaving in a while, so I had packed a small suitcase with shaving equipment and extra underwear and some shirts and so on. And it turned out to be a good thing that I did that because I was stuck there for almost seven days. At first I didn’t have a car, I couldn’t get out of there, and most people felt it was not a good idea to drive in the city of Detroit at that time, especially if you were white, you might be a target of snipers or things like that. So I ended up spending the week there at the hospital, there were a number of doctors there working really hard. Most of the activities, as you could imagine, were surgical rather than medical. There were gunshot injuries and knife wounds. I can say that after this all finished and I did go into the Air Force, I was in the Air Force for two years and I never saw anything in the Air Force two years like I saw in that one week at Receiving Hospital as far as those types of injuries. I’m a medical doctor so I wouldn’t normally see the trauma type of things, that surgeons were taking care of, but we were all chipping in to take care of that. The hospital, which I think at that time was much bigger and was probably 400 or 500 beds, basically by the time the week went on, every single patient almost in the hospital was a prisoner. You know, there was so much civil unrest and lawlessness, not just people shooting other people or trying to hurt other people, but all of the looting, and so a large number of people were arrested. Police had no place to put them, so if they had any injuries they obviously went to different hospitals and Receiving was the main hospital. But the Detroit Street Railway (DSR) Busses were parked all over the downtown area mostly surrounding the police station which was across the street from the hospital, and there must have been twenty or thirty of those busses filled with prisoners because the jails were totally filled. And so they would have to live in the bus and they would only get out of there to stretch or to go to the restroom and other than that they were in the bus for several days before they were able to process them all when things settled down. Well I think as you might know from reading the history or you’ve been going through all this, the police and the state police could not handle it and then the Governor, I’m trying to remember who it was at the time--<br /><br />NL: Romney <br /><br />CL: Romney, mobilized the National Guard on about the second day and then Lyndon Johnson, a day or two later, sent in the soldiers. So the city was under full martial law and by the third or fourth days when I would make my rounds going patient to patient to see how things were going, my typical doctor rounds, I was going around on rounds with four soldiers with me, dressed in full uniform—82<sup>nd</sup> Airborne—full dress uniform, carbine on their back helmet, that’s how I made rounds every day for the last three or four days of that week. And there were soldiers all over the city and my mom told me at her house, that was in that Dexter area, that one block over on Collingwood, there was a synagogue on the corner at that time called B’Nai Moshe, which is now out in West Bloomfield somewhere, and there was a tank, the military had a tank there to use to keep peace in that area and there were troops everywhere trying to maintain order. Back at the hospital, as you could imagine, mostly they were trauma—knife and gun, or people hit on the head with different things—but the medical patients that I was mostly involved with would be people like diabetics, who would run out of insulin and they couldn’t get to the drugstore because everything was closed. So they would come in, the police would have to bring them in because of that problem. We also had injured police and injured firemen, who were being shot at by snipers. The most amazing one that I was not in the emergency room when this gentleman came in but everybody was called down [because they] couldn’t believe this, was a fireman was brought into the emergency room, he had been shot right between the eyes. The entry wound was <em>here</em> and there was an exit wound<em> here</em> and he was absolutely normal. The bullet had apparently ricocheted inside around his skull, or the calvarium, and had not hurt him. It was like a miracle. So that was like one of these crazy stories that you hear. Wayne also ran the Veterans’ Hospital, which now is downtown, of course, in the Medical Center, but at that time was in Allen Park, and some of the surgeons were going back and forth so they were riding down I-94, and that was a disaster. One of the surgeons when he arrived said, “I’m not going again.” Because he said he heard a gunshot wound and a bullet went through his car. So people didn’t want to leave anymore, no matter what they were afraid. So this was the kind of activity that was going on at the hospital. At night we would sleep in the resident on-call room, so Receiving Hospital was just a little on the east side of the downtown so we were just a couple of blocks off of Gratiot. You could look from the eighth floor where the resident sleeping quarters were, where we would go at night and was dark at night and if you looked down Gratiot, as far as the eye could see, both sides of the street were on fire. There was fire all the way down, you couldn’t see anything but flames and we couldn’t even sleep because it was so bright, it was like daytime out at night because of the bright lights from the fire. And finally, when things calmed down, one of the other doctors who had been trapped there earlier, so his car was there, his name was, I guess I shouldn’t use his name, Felix Liddell, he was a resident with me, he was leaving and he drove me home. Felix went on to practice, and I think he might still be practicing if he hasn’t retired, he became a lung specialist later. None of us were specialists in anything, we were in training. When I got home I was still surprised to find that even in our neighborhood, there were still some issues. My mom had told me that, when I would call her on the phone, and for awhile you couldn’t call on the phone either because the phones were down, and we didn’t have cell phones in those days, and she told me that my mom and younger brother were sleeping on the ground floor or in the basement because they were afraid of bullets, turned out none came into our house luckily, but they were afraid of that, or they were sleeping under their beds, you know. Even after I got home, the power was out in a lot of areas and I was watching out my window, like the second day that I was able to get home and the Detroit Edison crew came to fix the electric system and they came and it was a convoy—four Jeeps with four soldiers in each Jeep, two in the front, two Jeeps in the back and then the Detroit Edison truck. The people from the Jeeps, the soldiers, would fan out and basically control the neighborhood, so that then the Edison people could safely climb up the poles and do their work. They were afraid to go out, because they were afraid someone might try to take a pot shot at them. So it was that type of a fearful environment. Now my father-in-law, who I didn’t know at the time, was a family practice doctor downtown in the city of Detroit, his name is Dr. George Mogill. He’s still alive, he’s going to be 98 at the end of July. He had an office in the inner city and he had a lot of African-American patients and he had a lot of suburban patients, he had a typical practice of that era for many people who had offices in downtown. His office was saved, or spared, from destruction because some of his black patients actually parked themselves in front of his office with a shotgun and wouldn’t let anybody loot it or break in. He was able to actually go down a few times, I thought later this is just insanity, and when things settled down he was able to go back and see that his office was in good shape. So that was the story and then, of course, I finished up that month for a few more days and I headed to the Air Force, and I spent the rest of ’67 in a place called Rantoul, Illinois. When I got my orders I thought that is was Rangoon or something, I’d never heard of Rantoul, Illinois. Turns out it wasn’t in Myanmar or Burma, it was right here in Central Illinois, surrounded by cornfields. So I spent two years in a place called Chanute Air Force Base. C-h-a-n-u-t-e. Which has since been one of the air force bases that has been closed by our government, cost-cutting. But I spent two years there, and as I said I didn’t need to go to Vietnam or Thailand, the only war injuries I saw were people who were well enough to be air evacuated from Vietnam, which we saw them within sometimes 48 hours—amazing—so I saw war injuries but nothing like the type of thing I saw in the city of Detroit during that seven days.<br /><br />NL: I have a couple more questions especially about your time in the hospital during the riots.<br /><br />CL: Sure, oh yeah.<br /><br />NL: Are there any other specific injuries or treatments where you provided the medical or surgical care that you care to share?<br /><br />CL: Sure, well we all had to help out with minor suturing even though generally internal medicine doctors don’t do that stuff. You know, so people had cuts and bruises, so we would take turns because people in the emergency room were exhausted and they needed a break. We all went down and helped with cuts that people needed sewed up and so on, we all did that. I didn’t deal with digging out bullets, I had no idea what to do, and things like that but, mostly medical treatment. We were treating pneumonia, heart attacks, diabetics, so things that were just routine but they were precipitated or aggravated by the fact that there was no way they could get healthcare anywhere else. They had to go to a major hospital, there were no doctors’ offices to go to. There was no such thing as walk-in clinics in those days anyway, you know like we have urgent care today. And so you had to go to a hospital if you ever had anything wrong with you, and many went to Receiving, which was the hospital of last resort anyway.<br /><br />NL: What do you remember about the collective mentality of the residents and the doctors of staff there, as compared to any other time you went to Receiving?<br /><br />CL: Interestingly enough, it was mostly upbeat. And I think that there’s a certain type of nervous energy and adrenaline that you work on when you’re not getting a lot of sleep and you’re very busy and you’re not really thinking too much about what’s going on, you’re just doing stuff that you need to do. There wasn’t a lot of time, maybe at night, we would think about it, but we didn’t even know the big picture that was going on outside of where we were locked in to this sort of protected environment. We were very safe, we had soldiers and military around us, as long as we didn’t go outside, it was like a fortress. So we were very secure and we were just doing our medical work and we didn’t even know ourselves the magnitude of what was going on outside. I’d get a little inkling when I talked to my mother on the phone or if we listened to the radio, but we didn’t really know until we went home and we started to really see the details of what had been going on. So at night when we were going to bed, or sitting up for a while and looking at those fires on Gratiot, is when we would say, “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this.” You know that type of amazing, how can this be happening. Now the funny thing is, is it brought back some memories to me because my father was no longer alive, my mom was a widow at this point, but when my father was alive, when I was a youngster, he had told stories about a previous riot in Detroit that took place in the forties. I don’t know exactly what year it was.<br /><br />NL: ‘43<br /><br />CL: ’43. And then when he told me the whole story about it because he used to work in the city, so he was very much about them at that time and he said it started with some type of melee on Belle Isle, actually. And it exploded into the city and the city was also under martial law, and soldiers had to be brought in for a period of time, but I don’t think there were the deaths, there were forty people eventually who were dead, one way or another from the Detroit riots in ’67. I don’t think they had that type of situation earlier, people didn’t have guns in those days either, probably. So this was not the only time that this has happened in Detroit, but of course what had happened in Detroit in 1967, we know that this has happening around the United States. There was the so-called “Long Hot Summer,” there was a lot of racial tension, you know Newark, Watts, Chicago, a number of other places had riots of this type. Interestingly enough, the people doing the looting, we all find out later by the prisoners we saw, were not all African-American at all. Many white people participated in the looting, which was hard to understand what was [going on], they were just opportunists. They were just taking advantage of the unrest and trying to get free shirts and free clothes or a free TV and breaking in to the store fronts and so on.<br /><br />LW: What was the function of the soldiers that follow you around during your rounds?<br /><br />CL: Well I think they felt like they had to do something and they were doing their duties and they couldn’t just sit there all the time so they were assigned to the doctors. They were also there to protect us, because not all the prisoners were actually shackled to their beds. They had to be on a certain amount of good faith that they would behave themselves. Yeah, there were prisoners that were there for serious behavior, and they were shackled to their beds.<br />NL: Do you remember every seeing what you perceived as a difference in the care provided to somebody in the hospital based on their race?<br /><br />CL: Never. That was never an issue. I’ve never seen it ever in my life. I don’t know if it ever occurs, maybe in other parts of the United States, you know where there’s more issues like that. I don’t know what people feel like in their personal life about who they want to date or who they want to go to a movie with or go to dinner with, but I can tell you, I’ve never ever seen that in the healthcare situation, where doctors or nurses ever differentiated. A sick patient was a sick patient. And I’ll tell you a vignette, since it’s about the same time frame, that had nothing to do with Detroit, but when I was in the Air Force, and here I won’t mention the name, but one of the doctors that was with me in the Air Force was from New York, and he happened to be a Jewish doctor. We had a number of other people from other militaries training at the base we were at, so we had Egyptian pilots that were at our base, and remember this was 1967 and there was the war in the Middle East, the ’67 war. And this particular doctor said, “Well, if any of them come to the hospital, I’m not gonna treat them.” We’re talking about Air Force, we’re in uniform, we’re doctors, and I said, “You’re absolutely full of baloney. Of course you’re going to treat them, and don’t say that out loud, you’re an idiot! You’re a doctor it has nothing to do with anything like that. You’re going to treat anybody who’s sick, and don’t open your big mouth and say stupid things.” You know, quite frankly. But almost never would you hear of people doing that. And we know for instance in Israel, the Israeli doctors take wonderful care of the prisoners that they capture, and so on.<br /><br />NL: Do you remember how it was that food and drugs and supplies and things were shipped into the hospital during that week?<br /><br />CL: That’s a really good question. I wasn’t really involved in that. I know that we had food, we did not run out of food. So somehow or another it was either arriving or we had a good supply. I can also tell you that the food at Receiving Hospital at that time was mostly inedible anyway. In fact one of the jokes we used to have, because the food was so bad, I used to carry a lunch because the food was just not very good, if you’d eat it, pardon the expression, and you’d get diarrhea half the time you’d eat the food. It was like traveling to Mexico, you know? Oh God, I can’t say anything bad about Mexico, I’ll get in trouble like Donald Trump. [laughter] So the big joke among us residents is if you stand out at Receiving, there was a big loading dock where things will be delivered and also there was garbage taken away and when food would be delivered and garbage was taken away, we always jokes about the food being delivered and we’d want to know if was shipping or receiving. [laughter] Because you couldn’t seem to tell the difference. But we had plenty of food to eat, you know regular food that was adequate to meet our needs.<br /><br />NL: And the medical supplies were adequate?<br /><br />CL: Yeah, generally we were fine. That’s a major hospital, major trauma center and we had all the bandages and needles and syringes. We had a good supply of medicine, so we were okay. Now I don’t know how much longer it might have lasted, but we were okay for the week.<br /><br />NL: So by the time you were able to leave it had been almost fully a week later ahead that the frenzy and the excess of patients and beds and prisoners and things, had <br />that started to decline?<br /><br />CL: Yeah, it was much better. The city was obviously much better, though there were pockets of misbehaving people. And there were still many, many hundreds, maybe thousands of prisoners. They were slowly being processed and most of them were just released because they were minor infractions but they just had to get them off the street and so it was a winding down, but of course there was major damage to the city. Many buildings were burned and destroyed and had to be cleaned up and quite a mess. And there are still some, as we know.<br /><br />NL: When did you come back from Illinois?<br /><br />CL: I was in the Air Force for two years and I didn’t return to Michigan, I actually went on to finish my residency in another city, in Philadelphia. So I didn’t come right back to Michigan at that time.<br /><br />NL: Okay. What point did you come back to Michigan?<br /><br />CL: I was in the Air Force between 1967 and 1969 and I left Philadelphia in July of ’69 and I returned to Detroit, pardon me, I left in ’70 and I returned to Detroit and I completed my specialty training in infectious disease, I have two specialties one is infectious disease, at that time right back at Wayne State at Detroit Receiving Hospital and the affiliated hospitals in that network which is Harper, Hutzel, and those hospitals for another three years and then I became part of the teaching faculty at Wayne Medical School for another six years and then I took a sabbatical year and did my allergy training at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and then after that I came to Beaumont in 1980 and I’ve been here ever since.<br /><br />NL: So 1970 when you first came back in the summer, so that’s a full three years after the riot. What do you remember at that point, physically about how the city had changed? Obviously the fires had been put out by then. What was the difference?<br /><br />CL: The city looked pretty much back to normal. The only difference was, obviously, there was an acceleration of the white flight that had been going on ever since the fifties, but had been more of a trickle over time, it had just moved very quickly. So a lot of people moved out of the city, a lot of businesses moved out of the city and it contributed obviously to the problems that eventually Detroit had to go through the next thirty years.<br /><br />NL: And how did it compare to your visions of Detroit when you were growing up?<br /><br />CL: Oh well, you know it’s very hard, when I try to explain to my own children, and to young doctors or students here at the teaching hospital or the Medical School that we’re part of, at Oakland University, you know if I try to tell them what Detroit was like in the fifties, they just can’t imagine it. And I say have you been to Chicago to the Miracle Mile? You know where all of the nice stores, the beautiful stores and high-rise department stores and high fashion, and I said well, Downtown Detroit was identical. It was identical. There were three major high-rise department stores: J.L. Hudson’s, Crowley Milner and Kerns. There were innumerable other stores. In fact, when I was in high school I worked as a stock boy in a men’s clothier called Harry Suffron, and then later there was a competing company called Hughes Hatcher. Their main office used to be right next door to where the Fox Theatre is, you know. I would work on Saturdays and sometimes after school for a few hours, unpacking pants, putting them up on the shelves, you know, stuff like this. I’d go to lunch, and if I’d go to lunch on a Saturday, I probably had 150 restaurants to choose from. And the library, which is still there, right behind where Hudson’s used to be, I used to go there and sit and read or, if it was a nice day, sit outside in one of the parks and it was such a beautiful downtown area. Of course there were fancy restaurants that I didn’t go to and there were bars and cabarets and stuff for nightlife. It was just an amazingly healthy and viable city. I would go to Saturdays sometimes when I was even younger and my mom would go shopping and she would drag me along, we would take the bus downtown, or even before that the streetcars, then they got rid of the streetcars, one of the hugest mistakes the city ever made, and here was a relatively low energy, clean form of transportation. I didn’t realize even then as a kid how extensive that Detroit Street Railway system was until when the Detroit Historical Museum reopened after they had been closed for a while, and my wife and I went down to see what it was like and there was a wonderful exhibit on the history of the Detroit Street Railway system, which you may know about. And what I didn’t realize as a kid growing up, because I lived in the city and I used it to a limited degree, I used to take that streetcar, there were two people there was a conductor and the guy that took your money, you know. And you’d get on, you’d get off, you know just like in San Francisco with the cable car, but it was a real streetcar, you know it was electrical stuff. But what I didn’t realize was that you could go up on a streetcar from Downtown Detroit to Port Huron. You could go on the streetcar from Downtown Detroit to Ann Arbor. You could go on a streetcar, I live out in West Bloomfield, and beyond me there’s an area called Keego Harbor with a lot of lakes, I was looking, I was shocked, that streetcar went out to Keego Harbor, people would go out to lakes for the day, you know, pack a lunch and they’d go to the lake. I mean it was an amazing, wonderful network where you didn’t need to rely on the automobile. And it was cheap, of course, in those days it was probably 20 cents or something like that for the whole ride. So, you know the automotive industry, are you familiar with a book called <em>J’accuse</em>?<br /><br />NL: No.<br /><br />CL: Emile Zola?<br /><br />LW: No.<br /><br />CL: You ever heard of that one? Alright, so the auto industry, <em>J’accuse.</em> I accuse you of being in collusion with the legislature, they ruined the bus system, got rid of the streetcars. Our streetcars still running in Mexico, by the way. And we were proud of having the best highway system in the world, and we did, at one time in Detroit because they wanted to sell cars. But look at ours now. We have no rapid transit, essentially, and we have the worst highway system because we haven’t’ been fixing it. So, I remember, as you say, going back, great highways and great public transportation. Clean and safe. And a downtown that was a beautiful place to visit. My mom as a treat would take me to, she’d get a cup of coffee after shopping at the Mayflower Coffee Shop, which is obviously no longer there, and I would get a glass of milk and a donut. You know, that was my treat. And, you know, there’s things you don’t forget, you know, there were just wonderful experiences growing up and, you know, when you see Detroit is coming back, you know, it’s making a wonderful comeback but it’s obviously slow and it’s gonna take a long time and there’s a lot of work to be done and there’s a lot less people there, so there’s a lot of space to figure out what do with, but the fact of the matter is that it’s very hard for people who didn’t see that when they were younger, growing up, to imagine how wonderful and viable and healthy the city of Detroit was as late as the fifties, when I was growing up. Now in 1924, I was reading about this, Detroit was not just the richest city in the United States, it was considered the richest city in the world. Could you imagine the change that we’ve seen in less than a hundred years? And the reason why I learned that is when the Book Cadillac reopened there was a lot of literature with that, and my son had his wedding at the Book Cadillac and they had a lot of reading material, so I was reading about the history of the hotel and the history of Detroit. And there’s also a wonderful book and I can’t remember the author, and I feel really bad about it, but my brother-in-law insisted that I read it. My brother-in-law is a teacher at Cranbrook Schools and one of the books that used to be mandatory reading for the middle school, he’s a middle school math teacher, is a book called <em>Arc of Justice</em>, and that book takes place in Detroit in the twenties, and it’s a true story, but the beginning of the book paints a picture, what was America like in 1910, 1920, talks about Detroit. Actually if you aren’t familiar with that book it’s an amazing book about Detroit history. And what really happens is later on after they set the stage and tell you all about Detroit, there’s the events of a black doctor, a young doctor who trains in the South and comes to Detroit and he marries the daughter of a successful black businessman and they buy a house in a white neighborhood, in the city, they were large [homes], mostly white. And they’re not accepted, and there is all kinds of turmoil and their house is surrounded and there’s some gunshot wounds, and one person is killed and one is wounded and there’s this huge trial of the century going on, not the Scopes Monkey trial, but almost as big because the NAACP, a fledgling new organization, this is all in the book [that] I learned [this], wanted to make sure to have the best representation for the black people who were being basically lynched on this because they were under attack in the first place, they were trying to defend themselves from the white crowd. So they were able to get the best lawyers in the country, they debated black lawyers and white lawyers, they debated this and they decided they’re going to forget the racial stuff, and they got the best white lawyer and they actually worked pro bono, or for minimal money, and Clarence Darrow, the same lawyer that was in the Scopes trial was in Detroit for almost two years with his whole team defending these black people because they were trying to put them up for murder. At first there was a hung jury and then there was another trial and they got everybody off. And when you read the book you realize this must have been the most exciting thing you could ever imagine, but in the meantime, it’s giving all this background about Detroit and what’s going on in the twenties, you know, in that time. The judge who presided over that was Frank Murphy, and the police station downtown and the courthouse is Frank Murphy Hall. He later became the mayor, he became governor, he became a justice, and he became a Supreme Court Justice. He distinguished himself in this trial by keeping it fair. And he was a great man obviously because he was under a lot of pressure to stick it to the black guys. It was a white city at that time, and you know the police were all white, everything was white at that time. So it’s an amazing story and if you really want a good background of Detroit, obviously not ’67, but the type of thing that Detroit was like before things changed, you read that book, it’s an amazing book.<br /><br />NL: I’ll have to check that out. Do you have any other questions?<br /><br />LW: I don’t, but is there anything else about ’67 that you want to share with us?<br /><br />CL: Well, I’m trying to think. Obviously ’67 started, I was a first year resident at Henry Ford between ’65 and’66, July to June, so ’67 started and I was halfway through that second year of the residency and you know, I don’t think there was that much eventful, at that time, you know, the Tigers were playing pretty good baseball, I wasn’t a big Red Wings fan. Basketball, nobody watched. I don’t know when the Pistons arrived from Fort Wayne, but it wasn’t a very popular sport at that time.<br /><br />NL: If they had arrived though, the NBA wasn’t really popular until the eighties.<br /><br />CL: And NFL, the last time the Lions won a championship was 1957, so that was already ten years before. So that was it. Detroit was otherwise like any other big city. When I graduated high school in 1958, the population of the city of Detroit was 1.8 million, it was the fourth largest city in the United States, and it was just a few years after that, that we were passed by Houston. Remember when we went from four to five [in the rankings], now we’re like 20. Okay.<br /><br />NL: Alright. Thank you.<br /><br />LW: Thank you so much, that was great.<br /><br />NL: Thank you for sharing your memories with us today.<br /><br />CL: I hope this was something that can help you.<br /><br />LW: Of course.<br /><br />NL: It’s tremendously helpful and we appreciate your time and willingness to sit with us and share this.<br /><br />LW: Thank you.<br /><br />CL: Thank you.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
**
Search Terms
Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Detroit Receiving Hospital, Medical resident, U.S. Air Force, Downtown Detroit, Detroit Street Railway System
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07/07/2015
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DAcxL-5rc50" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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Dr. Carl Lauter, July 7th, 2015
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Detroit Receiving Hospital—Detroit—Michigan,
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Description
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In this interview, Dr. Lauter describes working at Detroit Receiving Hospital in July 1967 and taking care of patients that were injured in the civil disturbance, some of whom were under arrest, and being followed on his rounds by a military detail. He also discusses the changes that occurred in Detroit following the unrest.
1967 Arab-Israeli War
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Detroit Edison Power Company
Detroit Receiving Hospital
Detroit Street Railway System
Downtown Detroit
Looting
Medical
Medical Staff
Public Transportation
Snipers
United States Air Force
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https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/6c4173c1aebfbb70ce0171b6088e19df.JPG
deead521c996fc04be8e5c34d6334d2f
Dublin Core
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Eide Alawan
Brief Biography
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Eide Alawan was born and raised in Detroit and lived in Dearborn in 1967. He remains committed to the Muslim community of Dearborn today.
Interviewer's Name
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Amina Ammar
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Dearborn, MI
Date
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10/03/2016
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00:25:45
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Amina Ammar
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11/26/2016
Transcription
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<p class="BodyA">AA: Today is October 3, 2016. My name is Amina Ammar. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am in Dearborn, Michigan currently sitting with-</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: Eide Alawan,</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: Mr. Alawan, could you please begin by telling me where and when you born?</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: I was born in 1940. Detroit, Michigan.</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: What brought you and your parents- or what brought your parents to Detroit.</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: What brought my dad to Detroit. Well, my dad originated out of Syria and came to American in 1910. He left Syria because of the Ottoman empire at the time the Ottoman Empire was very cruel to Arabs- Turks are not Arab. Also, he was Shia, so there was a double whammy. And he left there with his brother and ended up in- or he came to South America- from South America he went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Michigan City, Indiana, and then Detroit, Michigan to find a way to make a living. When he got here, there was an opportunity to work in a factory, earned a measly few dollars as to get started. Eventually married my mother in ’26, ’27. He had a family here of four children. And that’s why he came to America is basically because of the situation with the Ottoman Empire. The Turks controlled Syria at the time as well as being of the Shia tradition, it was a challenge. Not reflecting on Shias in general, just reflecting on the fact that he was in Syria as a minoritist Muslim.</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: What do you remember about Detroit in the mid-Sixties?</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: Well, what I remember about Detroit in the Sixties is basically, Detroit was changing. We had changes beginning to occur. Of course, at that time you had the hippies coming around doing things throughout the United States. People were smoking dope, smoking marijuana. They were doing things that were not only un-Islamic but also improper, social improperness. It was a time of change at the time, we weren’t part- when I say we weren’t apart of the change, I was not part of the changes because basically, I came from a very family, conservative, or religious. Religious in the sense that I didn’t look at those things as fun thing to do. It was a matter that we stuck with the community. We were a part of the community in Dearborn. Southend Dearborn had a mosque that was a converted bank. There was another mosque there down the street. The Sixties were kind of a change in social environment; the way people thought. And of course we had the Cuban crisis situation, Vietnam had begun- it started to begin somewhere in the Sixties but things were changing. Different presidents were proposing using the atomic warheads if necessary against Russia- Khrushchev was the head of Russia at that time. The country in general was in a turmoil or a time of question about what the properness of what was happening with our government so on, so forth. But that’s basically what I remember.</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: Do you remember where you were in Detroit in 1967 when the riot occurred?</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: Yep. I remember the riots. Yep. At the time we had one son and he was about a year- he was about 16 months old and my wife and I were going to a picnic out at the fairgrounds. The fairgrounds were at Woodward and Eight Mile, which is not there now- Woodward and Eight mile. So we went for a picnic, a Muslim picnic, a community picnic and it was hotter than heck. It was up in the 90s, it was hot. So about 2 o’ clock, I told my wife I don’t like the heat. I don’t take the heat very well so I told my wife lets go home. Not that we had air conditioning at home. It just would have been more comfortable to be at home and just to relax with the baby. We came down Woodward Avenue to Davison Expressway. We got on Davison Expressway – if you know anything about the Davison Expressway, it’s the short – I think it’s the first expressway, if not in Michigan or the United States- very short. I mean I don’t think it’s more than three quarters of a mile long. And we came down there, we went on the express way came up on the surface, Davison to Davison Street and then noticed a lot of people in the streets. And at the time we didn’t have the radio on, windows wide open - you know, trying to catch as much air that you could get in the car by driving. And we came up off the express way, the express way goes right into Davison Road and we noticed a lot of people in the street. And the people were African American people. And I got kind of worried seeing people in the street and then looked over to the sides of the street as we got closer to one of the main streets on Davison and saw that windows were broken, saw a lot of people in the street, people throwing things. I can remember telling my wife to roll up the windows. No power windows at that time we had to roll them up. Roll up the windows, made sure they had their seat belts on. She’s sitting in the backseat with my son and drove carefully through the crowd. Of course I didn’t want to run over anyone. I was scared just like most people would be not knowing what was happening. We had put the radio on even in the morning or on the way to the fairgrounds because they had been talking about the raid they had made on this one location that got the African Americans upset, and caused them to riot. We just drove slowly until Davison, then we came to Oakman Boulevard. Once we got on Oakman Boulevard, we headed into Dearborn and lo and behold we had found out that there had been disruption in the community about what had happened with the police and their invasion of the night club or something of that sort. So it was the beginning of turmoil in the community. Remember also that we lived in Dearborn and Dearborn police were on the lookout. At the time we had a mayor called Hubbard and he basically forewarned black people not to come through Dearborn or they’d be arrested. I don’t know if they arrested anyone or not but I’m sure it was pointed at the African American people. I can remember that day plus a couple more days right after that is, you’d see military trucks traveling up and down Wyoming or Tireman. I can remember I went past a high school probably the next day called – not Wayne State, called Way – no, not Wayne. It was a high school I’m trying to remember the high school’s name at Grand River and West Grand Boulevard. Anyway, at the high school there were tanks, jeeps, military, National Guard basically National Guard. They were camped out on the grass. Excuse me, Northwestern High School it was called. Northwestern High School. They were camped out there. And so on and so forth. I also did go to work that morning. On a Monday morning. And I was talking to someone out in California. I was working for a company called Goodyear Tire Company, rubber company. I was a manufacturer sales rep for them and I was talking to California, and California being three or four hours behind us, they asked us, “What are you doing? How did you get to work?” They had the perception that the city of Detroit was on fire, that there was chaos and the media was different at that time. It didn’t cover it like you would see now. It was a different presentation how they covered it. But I told them it was not a problem and that I, in fact, was on the express way. I was the only person on the express way from Lonyo down to work which was past the interchange. It was unbelievable. I didn’t see any cars, maybe one car, two cars at the most, and got to work, stayed there until three or four o’ clock. They dismissed us, told us to go home. But I stayed around, finished my paperwork and went home and basically had no problem. The confusion or the disruption was happening at a different part of Detroit. But of course, people could have been on the over pass, throwing something over but it didn’t seem to have any problem with that. That’s where I was.</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: You said the media covered it differently than it does now-</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: Pardon me?</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: You said the media covered it differently, could you elaborate on that coverage, what you thought about it?</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: I think the media seemed to operate on sensationalism. They focused primarily on the rioters. To me it was more of a scare tactic situation and I think it’s a lot different than what it is now. It seems to be more on the scare tactic you know, it was scary then but the media was covering it on all the stations which you’d expect but they were also covering it in a manner that made you fear and of course they showed most of the people in the disturbance were African Americans. Now what you’d see on television some whites joining the African American people of different colors, nationalities it was a first of the kind that I remember. Now my brothers being older than me remember when they had the problem in the Forties when at Belle Isle African Americans were thrown over the Belle Isle bridge. I don’t know if you knew about that. That was happening, I think that was happening, that was ’44. I’m just guessing at the date. So, ’44. There was a disruption of African Americans and whites in Detroit at Belle Isle and they were, my brothers, at that time they were about 14 years old and they remembered that – 16 years old. They remember that African Americans were thrown over the bridge, so that’s the difference. But it was an awakening to us I couldn’t figure out at the time was why during the ’67, why the African Americans were rioting and slowly but surely they talked about the invasion or that the police did on I don’t know if it was a night club or speak easy or whatever it was but that’s what occurred.</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: Some people describe the event as a riot and others refer to it as a rebellion or an uprising. What term do you think best describes that?</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: You know, I guess it’s a fine line between a riot and an uprising. Looking back on it I think the African American people, it was an uprising. At the time it was a riot but thinking about it now, I think it’s more of an uprising that they felt that the police mishandled the whole thing. And even now, we’re talking about 30, what 40 some years later and it’s still a problem and what’s a solution for the problem? I don’t have a solution for the problems but there are problems and hopefully that the society can deal with them. There’s always troublemakers in groups even if people are law abiding people, if they want to make a point they will show some disruption of destruction or demonstration or so. And I think the people still at that time, the African Americans still felt the frustration and this raid was a good enough reason to do something of dissatisfaction of how it was handled. I can’t remember exactly all the points they made but the point is they felt it was a disadvantage to the ones that were harmed during the invasion.</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: So switching gears just a bit, but ’67 was also a big year for Arabs, because of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. How did you first hear about the events that led up to the war and the war itself?</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: ’67 War?</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: mmhm</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: National TV basically was covering it. The Arab community was the kind of a community that they didn’t know how to take it, where Israel was getting the upper hand after so many days- six or seven days. Their thought was kind of interesting. They thought that quantity is more successful than- what was I going to say- they were thinking that the populist put out to the sophistication and the sophistication is that Israel was a very successful army. And I did not stay home from work but I know several men in the community- in fact one of them is still living right now, that were ashamed of the Arabs losing the upper hand that he stayed away from work for at least a couple weeks. The reason for it was he was just embarrassed because his nationality- being the Egyptians or the Syrians were not meeting up to the Israeli pushback. It didn’t bother me –I mean, it bothered me but it didn't bother me to the extent it did them. And the only way I can figure all this out is being an American born- so what? What can I do about it? But a lot of people who were first generation in this country stayed home, stayed off the streets and were just frustrated with the whole thing. It was a turning point for the Arabs to realize that we had Israel to now deal with. And we’re still dealing with them, still having a problem with our governments. Our governments, Arab governments are not to the expectation that they should be and not that they are going to win any wars with Israel, but the point is they are not doing what they should be doing for their own people.</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: Do you have any particular moments or memories about the war and how it was covered in the [United States] that you would be willing to share?</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA The coverage was coverage. Of course it painted a bad picture for the Arab side of it. When I say it painted a bad picture, I didn’t say that it wasn’t truthful but we got our butts kicked. It’s interesting the statements that it takes only one Israeli to turn off a light switch but you need ten Arabs to turn off a light switch. I mean the sophistication was just better. They had an army but the point is the army wasn’t as sophisticated as the Jewish, Israeli army. I mean it even proves it right now- we’re talking about almost 50 years later and we still don’t have the sophistication. Even if you have the weaponry, you have to have the sophistication and the strategic manner of dealing with a war. But we’re still in it together as Arabs or Muslims.</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: Is there anything you feel we haven’t discussed that you want to add to the interview?</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: Not really. I think we need to deal with history and be realistic with history. I’m talking about Muslims or Arabs. When I say Arabs, most of them are Muslims. I don’t know about Christian Arabs- have you interviewed Christian Arabs yet?</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: Not yet. No, not yet.</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: You should get their point of view. I think there was a different slant there. I’m not sure if they felt as badly as Muslim Arabs because they probably had a feeling like, “Well you know that's what it is.” They have been mistreated in Arab countries for years and maybe they were happy with it. It’s just with the frustration- I don’t worry about the Middle East. My focus is on Muslims in this country. We have to overcome something which is this Shia and Sunni situation and the best place to do it is here in this country. There was a group here just before you came- 70 people were here. When I tell them that Muslims are good people, they [Muslims] get frustrated at times just like anybody gets frustrated. But Muslims need to get out into the community and they need to partake. You’re getting an education; they’re going to see you in a different light than they saw people back in the Sixties that were from the old country. All of our parents came from the old country- either all of them or both of them. We as Muslims, through education, will prove that we have the ability to be educated, sophisticated, and knowledgeable. That’s what we need to do. We can’t live on what happened 600 years ago. One of the big things as a Muslim is that we need to come together as brothers and sisters. We can’t continue- and it’s not happening right now, it’s changing right now. Shias and Sunnis need to come together on the basis that we are one Ummah. Muslims talk all the time about the Ummah. It’s almost a make believe place in our minds. But to me, it isn’t a make believe. It is: we are one family. We gotta act like one family. My focus is that I don’t care- when I say I don’t care what happens in the Middle East, I do care about the people in the Middle East. But I can’t worry every day. My concern is about the Muslims in this country. I have a young daughter married to my son- in- law, he’s of the Sunni tradition and supposedly she’s of the Shia tradition. And we have two granddaughters from them. And I call them sushi granddaughters. Have you heard of that terminology?</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: No, I haven’t.</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: So it started about eight or ten years ago when we were referring to mix marriages as sushi marriages. I don’t know where you see it, but I can tell you my next door neighbor, and people I know are that inter-married. They are both Muslims, they both have in their religious traditions: prayer, Salah, Seam and all the things. I think America is going to give us a chance as Muslims to be the Ummah that we talk about that, that we dream about. And that’s more important to me than being an Arab. You know, I’m proud of my ancestral background. My dad came from Syria, Arabic heritage. But my dad even changed it to being more religious rather than the ethnic part of it. We, Muslims, need to come together. We’re doing our best now- either through marriages or through events, that we’re coming together. That’s a priority. I don’t care about the Middle East. I can’t do anything about the Middle East. I feel sorry for the people living there that are being hurt and taken advantage of. Is your family from Lebanon?</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: They are.</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: People just came back from Lebanon, Beirut in particular, and they tell me the streets are terrible. People throw paper- we have a little of that here in Dearborn. The point is, I can’t worry about them. They are going to have to solve their own problems. But my concern is the Muslim people. My nationality- I don’t care about my nationality. I live to support my faith of Islam, with my brothers and sisters and the Muslim tradition- that’s what it’s all about. Hopefully, the young people will continue this. It’s the greatest gift that an Arab could have- if he’s Muslim or he’s not a Muslim, he’s Christian, he still has a gift of practicing his or her faith. My Arabism is [hand gesture] like that.</p>
<p class="BodyA">AA: Thank you so much, Mr. Alawan, for sitting with me today and having this interview.</p>
<p class="BodyA">EA: Well, thank you.</p>
<p class="BodyA"> </p>
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
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25min 45sec
Interviewer
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Amina Ammar
Interviewee
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Eide Alawan
Location
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Dearborn, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cvLc24l2q7s" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Eide Alawan, October 3rd, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Alawan discusses his family’s emigration from Syria and what it was like to grow up in the Muslim community in Dearborn in the 1960s. He mentions his perception of the global political and social tension that pervaded his youth. Alawan describes his memory of seeing people in the streets during the uprising in 1967 as he and his family headed home to Dearborn from a Muslim community picnic. He also touches on the way he felt the media sensationalized the events of 1967. He ends with a discussion on the Arab- Israeli war of 1967 and what his identity as Arab-Muslim means to him today.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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11/29/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
1967 Arab-Israeli War
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Dearborn
Detroit Community Members
Muslim community
-
https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/b921498f46631f90b0a57f73535f5609.jpg
a1af5fc6830e3cb021c88546b07e18ed
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Nabeel Abraham
Brief Biography
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Dr. Nabeel Abraham was born in North Carolina in 1950 and moved to Detroit in 1955 when his father opened a store on Michigan Avenue. He attended Cass Technical High School and was a teenager in the summer of 1967.
Interviewer's Name
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Amina Amar
Interview Place
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Dearborn, MI
Date
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10/31/2016
Interview Length
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01:01:26
Transcriptionist
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Amina Amar
Matthew Ungar
Transcription Date
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08/11/2017
Transcription
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<p class="Body">AA: So today is October 31, 2016. My name is Amina Amar, I’m currently in Dearborn sitting with Dr. Nabeel Abraham. Thank you for sitting with me today, Dr. Abraham.</p>
<p class="Body">NA: My pleasure.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: [laughter] Where and when were you born?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: I was born in North Carolina in 1950, and—yeah.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: How did your family get to Detroit?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: I think we were living in Erie, Pennsylvania for the first five years of my life. We didn't stay in North Carolina apparently, and my father was selling Oriental rugs and other sundry items like linens and tapestries, I think, things like that, and he opened a store in Erie, Pennsylvania. How he got there, I don’t know. I know my father used to live in that area because he was married one time to a woman from that region, not Erie, per se, but Pennsylvania, and I think his nephews, his nephew, rather, moved to Detroit, and they told him, “You know, things are great here,” apparently. I was four or five years old, and so I never understood why, and we wound up here in 1955. So that was a good time for Detroit, post-war, I think the Korean War had ended, too, more or less, so this was a boom time for America, the economy, the car, the automobile was a big thing. So, this was the decade of prosperity, of great prosperity. They did have their boom and bust cycles like 1958, I do recall there was a recession and there was a lot of gloom. Now I’m about seven or eight years old at this point, but I could sense people were having trouble, because in the neighborhood where I grew up there were a lot of auto families that worked in the auto industry, but they tended to be the specialized people, tool-and-die, white guys who got paid more, and a lot of them were from the South, because my kids I grew up with, their fathers were from Tennessee, they came up from Tennessee or Kentucky, places like that. Anyway, so how did we get to Detroit? I think it’s because as my mom would say, my father’s nephew and his kids had moved to Detroit, and I think they kind of coaxed him over, and he opened a store on Michigan Avenue near First Street, downtown Detroit, on the edge of the heart of downtown. And that’s how we got here.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: So, do you remember where you were living in July of 1967?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: Oh, yeah, definitely. I was still living in Detroit. I grew up, my father bought a house for us in southwest Detroit along Vernor and Central area, and we lived in that house, well, my mother continued living in that house until 1978, so that’s about twenty some-odd years, 1955 to—twenty-three years. ’78. In 1967, when the riots occurred, I was living there, I was in high school.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: What was it like being a Muslim Arab growing in Detroit during this time?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: It was being virtually unique. Everywhere I went, like in the school system, I was pretty much the only Arab kid. Was in Harms Elementary, then Wilson Junior High, which no longer exists, it turned into something called Phoenix School, and then I went to Cass Tech. At Cass there were a couple probably Arab Americans, but their Arab identity had been really watered down to the point where you really hardly knew they were Arabs. In fact, I can only think of one guy, and he was actually from my neighborhood, his name was Jim Ray, I mentioned him in my essay <i>To Palestine and Back</i>, and Jim, I didn't know he was an Arab American until later. And then I found out that his aunt, who never married, was a very fascinating woman. Her name was Catherine Najor, Najar in Arabic. They were Orthodox, I think Greek Orthodox, and Catherine was a very unique woman, she had a doctorate in social work, I believe, and she had gone to China at one point. She was, I recall, rabidly anti-communist, I remember that part. She was very pro-Palestinian, which was very American in many, many respects, but she knew some Arabic. It turned out her sister had broken with the family and married a non-Arab, a white guy, who I wound up meeting because she was the mother of Jim Ray. And Jim was a tall, big guy. You wouldn't know he was Arab American from looking at him, his behavior, anything. So apparently the father and mother had divorced, so when I met him, we wound up going to the same high school. I met his mother once or twice, and that’s when she identified herself as Arab, and it was a complete surprise to me. And later I learned she was sisters with Catherine Najor, who I knew, and she was on a number of committees that I was active in, so she was very political, very intelligent, well-read woman. Her sister apparently had just taken off with this white guy and got ostracized, and I only put the pieces together many, many years later. And she was living, the sister and Jim, apparently the only son, were living in southwest Detroit. Now at that time in history, it’s probably pretty much still the same and worse, but back then it was a pretty cohesive white, working-class neighborhood. No African Americans, there were some Mexican Americans, on my street there were a Maltese family, there were people from the South, so-called hillbillies, there was a French-Canadian family. We were the only Arab family in that immediate area. Relatives of my dad did live probably about half a mile—actually there were two sets of relatives on my dad’s side were living in the area as well, as well as my mother’s mother, my grandmother, and my uncle and aunt on my mother’s side. They lived with us and then they lived in the area, but I didn't know any other Arab kids. There were no other Arab kids in the area. Jim Ray, of course, did not identify as an Arab at first, as far as I could tell, and I didn’t know him growing up. He went to a different elementary and junior high, so it was predominantly a white working-class neighborhood, it was predominantly strongly Catholic, and Protestant, Baptist, there were some Lutherans, I think, yeah, one of my best friends was of Norwegian descent, white-haired kid, who always his nose bled, his name is Mike Unger, he was a Norwegian. So it was a mixed community, but white, no African Americans. Working class, with a few small businesspeople, my dad being one of them. The Armenians being businesspeople who were near, there were a few left.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: So what do you remember about Detroit in the mid-1960s?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: In the mid-sixties? Well, I started high school in 1965, which meant that I had to go downtown to Cass Tech. That was a bus ride – two buses actually – or a bus ride and then a walk to school from the bus terminal, the City Bus Terminal, which was open-air, really, and then you walked across, I think it was at that point Fort Street, a couple big streets, Woodward, it was at that juxtaposition of Woodward and I think Fort Street and a couple others. We had to walk maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. Now, back then, nobody thought anything of it, that kind of walk. I think today people are afraid to walk that distance. Well, the downtown was still bustling, Hudson’s was <i>the</i> store, it had satellites, there was Northland, there was Southland, I think there was Eastland, and maybe a Westland by then, but Northland was the big opening of almost a suburban style mall, it was one of the first in the country. I remember my geography teacher at Wayne talking about this; he worked on it. So, Detroit, to a kid who was 15 years old, Detroit looked like a bustling city. We rode buses to school, I got a ride with my aunt for the first year, because her factory was a small factory in the GM area, which is now called, well, it was called Newtown or New Center, where the Fisher building is, and GM headquarters used to be, now it’s a state government building. And so she’d drop me off at Cass High School, and she’d go up Cass to her job, which was another five, ten minutes up the road, and on the way home I’d take the bus. I hated the bus, but it was nauseous, it was slow, and it’s Auto City, you know Detroit was unchallenged at cars. There was no Japanese competitors to speak of, there was no even German competitors. Volkswagen—Jim Ray had a VW Beetle, but it was a rare thing to see. People bought American cars, and they bought big American cars. There were the small ones, like the Falcon, the Ford Falcon and some others, but mid-sized and big cars cars dominated Detroit, and that’s what boys like myself growing up, we dreamed of having a car. Generally a fast looking car. You know, a Mustang. Mustang came in in 1964, so boys my age would salivate on a Mustang or its competitor, the Camaro, the Chevy Camaro, things like that. So, 1965 Detroit was still bustling, but underneath, underneath people were leaving quietly. How do I know this? Just from my own experience as a 13, 14, 15 year old. I had several Armenian friends, and they were, as I said, tended to be businesspeople, professional people still living in this predominantly working-class neighborhood. One of our neighbors was a white guy who was an engineer but most people were somewhere on the factory floor, usually at skilled labor, but not always. So what happened was slowly my Armenian friends started leaving. So Charles Nahagian, whose parents owned a dry-cleaner on Vernor Street, near Sammy’s Pizzeria, which now is something else – I was in the neighborhood not too long ago, by the way, so some of this is fresh in my mind – but the Nahagians had a dry-cleaning business, and they had one son, and that was this Charlie kid, who was in my elementary, we were school classmates, and they took him to Disneyland, I remember all the things I wished I could do, because Disneyland at that time was only one, it was in California, so they took him there, and he’d tell me about it. They moved. They kept the business going for a number of years, but they moved out into the newer suburbs, or the expanding suburbs. Another friend of mine, Greg, he was a twin with his sister, Greg and Sharon Arvegian, their father worked at Ford as an accountant, but then opened his own business, and it’s still on Michigan Avenue near Telegraph. Arvegian, I’m sure the dad has long, long since passed, but his son took over that business, the accounting firm, and they moved out to Dearborn Heights, probably around 1965, ’66, because I remember we went together to a Rolling Stones concert in 1965, and then shortly thereafter, the family moved to Dearborn Heights, and they picked me up one time and took me out to the place, and I thought Dearborn Heights was out in the middle of nowhere. So, this is 1965, and there were all these new suburban houses. I had no clue, and I remember this kind of house which you know, today, in my mind, is a colonial house, but back then, and no trees, I remember there weren’t very many trees, that was a startling thing, whereas my neighborhood, where I grew up, the house that we lived in had been built in 1925, so here we’re moving in in 1955, so it was thirty years, but there were fairly big trees, et cetera. And then the streets were narrow, you know, city streets. So another Armenian family I’m trying to think of also left, so you could see just from my little narrow, I wouldn't even say window, my little peephole, at the history, you could see that the professionals that I at least knew, the few with, more businesspeople, were already leaving the area. So when the 1967 riot occurred, of course then there was a stampede of a lot of other whites leaving. But there were whites, too, I remember a gal in my junior high, her family moved out to Flat Rock – well the father, I think, probably worked for Ford or something, and you know, Ford Motor Company built a factory out there, it’s still there. I remember when she said, we’re moving out to Flat Rock, I didn't know where Flat Rock was. Now I had been out of the area with my dad on a road trip in 1963, I was 13, so I got to see parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania and a little bit of Western New York state, but I didn't see or notice, let me state, these new suburb-type things, treeless suburbs until later in life. I saw like established small town, middletown cities, and I always thought they were charming. So you asked me how did Detroit appear to me in the mid-sixties. Well, it was on the surface still bustling and vibrant, but there were anomalies taking place, to my mind. People were moving out. Not clear why to me at that time.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: How did you first hear about the unrest that became the riots, rebellion, wherever?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: I don’t know how I first heard about it, you know. So, this is July 1967. I have to back up and just tell you that in June of 1967, June 5th to be precise, war broke out between Israel and its neighboring Arab countries, Egypt and Syria in particular, and that was on my mind. We can talk about that at another point. That was foremost in my mind. And I kind of was, at the end of that, the stunning defeat of the Arab countries, the so-called Six Day War, as the Israelis like to call it, left me demoralized, feeling as an Arab American, a Palestinian American. So here comes the riot [laughter] of nineteen—I’m going to call it riot, even know I know people like, and for years I referred to it as rebellion, and you could say I think it started as a riot, turned into a rebellion. I don't recall how I heard about it, maybe people, you know, kids in the street, somebody said, something’s going on, and then you go inside and turn on the TV. I think probably that’s how it went, but I don't have a clear recollection of how the news hit me. Because we didn't see anything. You know, southwest Detroit, at least the corner that I lived in, we didn't see or hear anything. It was too distant from the areas that were impacted. Which, you know, Twelfth Street, which would have been about five or six miles down the road, and then you have to go up, if I go east on Vernor, it would take you to Twelfth Street eventually, if you’re heading toward downtown, and then the areas up that way to the north of that area, I think were the primary areas that experienced the bulk of the activity, the police and the public clashing. The looting that also occurred.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: So, do you remember anything that was said at all?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: Well, I remember we watched on television, like anyone around the world, really. We watched on television buildings burning, people running, people looting, cops shooting, that kind of thing. It was all black and white then, there was no color. So whatever images I saw, it was in black and white. Now, the National Guard did position itself in Patton Park. Patton Park was west of where I lived. If you took Vernor Avenue which ran all the way down to downtown – actually, it ran all the way to the other side of town, the east side there’s a Vernor, too, but it breaks up downtown. If you took Vernor west from my house, you'd come up to the Dix mosque, right? And just before you got to the Dearborn boundary, there’s a park there named Patton Park, named for General Patton, and that was the edge of Detroit city limits, where at that point it meets Dearborn from the east-west. Of course, there are other areas around Dearborn that interlock with Detroit, right? North and so forth. So anyway, we went down, kids, the boys, my brothers and other friends, we’d go down and take a look and see the, I don’t think they had tanks, per se, but they had armored personnel carriers and you know, camouflage or green military stuff. We’d just look kind of awestruck by the—wasn’t a lot, but there were just enough, at least that we were allowed to see or saw. You know, looked like it was serious stuff, and I think we didn't go to work, because I used to work near the Ambassador Bridge at that time, and I had a girlfriend, a girl I was dating, rather, on the east side of Detroit, a German American. So, I think we were kind of like unable to go to a lot of places toward Detroit, like the Eastern Market, obviously, downtown, those places, nobody went. I don't know if the buses stopped, because I wasn't riding the buses at that point, I had a car. So we did see some of the National Guard posted there, and the neighbors, the rumors among the white neighbors, especially the Southerners, were that they got their guns out. I didn't see their guns, but you know, talk was, the rumor was these white neighbors got their guns, quote “The African-Americans, the black people,” and they probably used the N-word “have gone crazy.” People were panicked. I never felt panicked. I mean, maybe there was a whiff of it at first, but I thought, yeah, it’s kind of crazy, we don't see anything, we don't hear anything. Now, I told you I did work on the Bridge, near the Ambassador Bridge at a liquor store selling duty-free liquor. One of the guys there, I had sold him the car I got from my dad, it was a ’59 Ford. I’d sold him this car, and my dad had bought my brothers and I a Mustang, which I really wanted. I mean, this was kind of crazy, but you know when you’re 16 years old, 16, 17 year old guy, you want the latest. And so I had this new Mustang, and I had sold this ‘59 Ford to a guy named Bill, I think, Bill Conley, who was, you know, a middle-aged guy, he was a middle manager at the store where I worked, and he had lent the car to his brother, who was a Dearborn—Detroit police officer and that car wound up going to the war zone, so to speak. And he told me, “You know, that way I lend it to my brother, but he was having trouble staying running or something so he poured honey in it, in the engine,” and I thought, why would you do that, and he was trying to blame me, insinuate that I had sold him a bum car, I said, look, the car only has one hundred thousand miles on it. Back then, that was considered a lot of miles. Today, a good running car, a hundred thousand miles is nothing. And he said it stalled in the riot or something, and you know, I just shook my head, why in hell are you telling me this? I sold you the car, it was at a decent price, it was running, what your brother did with it is beyond me. And so, I remember that, when they opened up the freeways, I went to see this German American girl from my high school on the east side. So that means you’ve got to go down I-94, Edsel Ford Freeway, to go down, say, to Cadieux and then, we went, she, I, and maybe some friends of mine, we went and toured some of the burned down areas, and I still don't have a vivid memory of what I saw. You know, it never did just stay with me, but I remember taking her home and her German mother, her parents were from Germany, and when she found out that I’d taken her daughter into these areas, she was completely, she lost her mind. She started, you know, “How dare you! How could you go into the area, the riots!” I said, “That stopped! Everything calmed down.” But, you know, it was my first lesson in how panicked people are. So, there are my little vignettes of what I remember of what happened. And then, of course, there was a lot of talk about the Algiers Motel incident, and that went on for quite a while, but to tell you the truth, I was torn between dealing with the repercussions of the Arab defeat, the humiliating defeat of ’67 only the month before, having a new car and turning 17, and my sex hormones active, very busy at this job on the weekends, and just trying to stay in school, so this is the perspective of a 16, 17 year old kid. It wasn't that I didn't care about politics, but I was more into international politics, foreign affairs, because of my Palestinian background and you know, my parents, that was their concern, too. So, what happened in Detroit really didn't make any sense to me until I started becoming politically radical after that, like in the next year, when I started developing a political philosophy that went beyond, “Arabs should recover Palestine.” That was basically kind of a nationalist thing handed down to me. Now, I’m developing, you know, a worldview based on class struggle and injustices to African Americans, and Indians of course, Native Americans, so forth. Well, I didn't have that consciousness during the riot, rebellion, what in the beginning we all called a riot. Then I later learned, well no, people were rebelling against gross injustices that had actually been going on for several centuries, and, you know, you start learning all that. As you progress, you start putting your head where your feet are, and that is in the United States, in Detroit. I was always concerned with international affairs anyway, but now I broadened my understanding as well as my scope to look at the United States. Now, the other thing that’s going on at this time, too, is of course the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War is kind of picking up speed, we are kind of aware of it, I was aware of it even in junior high because I remember in social studies, which was a favorite subject of mine, the teacher asked the kids one time, you know, “What are the countries that comprise Indochina?” And I was the only one who raised his hand. And he said, “Well, what are they?” And I said, “Well, Vietnam, you know, North and South, Cambodia, Thailand, what else, Laos.” And he was like flabbergasted. How did I know that? Well, cause that’s what I was paying attention to. I wasn't paying attention to Detroit so much, other than the geography of where the girls were in my high school, which was later, right? Because I went to a unique high school. The kids that came to my high school were from across the city, whereas, had I gone to my local high school, which would have been Western or Southwestern, kind of we were bridging the two high schools. They were terrible schools. We wound up at Cass. Well, Cass you wound up knowing people from the east side, the north side, the west side, international students, even, and it was a whole different world, and so I learned the geography of Detroit from dating girls from different parts of the city. So ’67 kind of like came and went, and my consciousness was basically tied to my neighborhood, which was, we didn't say African Americans, although we had exceptionally good relations with one African American teacher at our elementary school and I’ve written about her a little bit, Mrs. Colding, who was friends with my mother, but that’s another topic. Cut me off if I’m talking too much.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: No, not at all. Okay, so just to be clear, how would you describe the event: as a riot or a rebellion?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: I think it started off as probably a riot and then became a rebellion. I think the anger of African Americans had been building at least for decades, in the case of the people there on the ground. The discrimination, the housing, being boxed in, the lousy jobs, last hired, first fired, all the things that one learns about and much, much more, the policy brutality, all those things add up to make a powder keg, and people just say, “something starts it,” and then it ignites into a rebellion. I think there are people in these moments of crisis, there are people that take advantage of them and go get some groceries or whatever they want. You know, it’s called looting. There are others who say, We are really angry about big things, and they're demonstrating, they're manifesting their anger at that. And then, of course, the police and law enforcement, and the political class are compounding matters by declaring all of them looters, and shooting to kill, injustices and so forth, and so they're adding, actually, more fuel to the fire. You know, they beat people, shoot people, so people do fire back, which apparently happened. But I’m no expert on that event, even though I lived on the edge of it. It’s amazing how much you can miss, just by being outside of it, and not being pulled by the currents.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: Okay, so let’s go ahead and talk about international politics.</p>
<p class="Body">NA: Okay.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: So how did you first hear about the 1967 Arab-Israeli war?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: Well, the thing had been building up. There’s at least a month to two months of buildup in the news. It was a showdown between Egypt and the Israelis, and I think Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt had ordered I think the UN peacekeepers out, if I’m not mistaken. This part is a little fuzzy to me, because I never really studied the ’67 War. There’s some excellent books on the subject. I just never got around to them. But he closed the Straits of Tiran, T-I-R-A-N, that goes into the southern reach of what is Israel, Eilat, the Port of Eilat, and the Egyptians also controlled the Suez Canal. Well, the Israelis, backed by the United States, turned this into a <i>Causa belli</i> – a cause for war. The Israelis cleverly aided the buildup, the propaganda buildup of this thing by saying Nasser was going to attack them, the Arab country’s going to swoop in, when, a point of fact, they were the ones who started the war, and they were the ones that ended it. I mean, they controlled the whole thing, because they had the superior military force and they were resupplied by the United States. But in the newspapers, it looked like the Arabs were the belligerent group, and that they started it, when they didn’t. In fact, Nasser was bluffing, and they used his bluff, to out-maneuver him. The Jordanians held off the Israelis in East Jerusalem for a while but the king of Jordan had no stomach and didn’t really – he just pulled out</p>
<p class="Body">How did I hear about it? Well, as I say, it was building day to day, in my high school English class, the teacher was Jewish, forgot his name now, but he would bring in a newspaper everyday to class, and I think he was reading at that time the <i>Manchester Guardian</i>, which is today called the <i>Guardian</i>, the <i>London Guardian</i>, he’d come, really tissue paper. And he’d open it up and show us, “Look at this, this little country, this tiny little country of Israel, being surrounded by all these Arab countries, 20, 21 Arab countries,” and you know, they’d do a little diagram with the armies in each country, you know, and you add them all up and you got, you know, a hundred to one, a thousand to one. Well, that’s on the paper. In reality, not all those armies joined in anyway, and had they, they would have been tripping over each other, because you just can’t throw armies together like that, spur of the moment, no unified command, I mean anybody, you don’t have to in the military, you just know enough about how things work. So the whole thing in bogus. It would be like saying some big country is beating up on a little country. Well, if that little country has a very organized military and the big country is poor and doesn’t, the little country is going to beat it. It’s not a question of size. It’s a question of how effective your force is. So, it was building up every day and every day. Then Israelis decided to start and they did. They bombed all the airports, the military installations, so the Arab armies had no air force to speak of and they surprise attacked them. They had a plan and the Arab side really didn’t have much of a plan, apparently, and they got creamed.</p>
<p class="Body">How did I first hear about it? I don't recall. Obviously, probably just the news in the morning, you know, the TV news, which was far worse than it is today. You had three stations, ABC, NBC, and CB[S]. That’s it. There was no cable, not that that is really making much of a difference today [laughter]. And we could get on occasion the CBC, the Canadian broadcasting from Windsor. You didn't have any other sources. There was—radio news was bad, there was WWJ, WXYZ, they were basically just appendages of the TV stations. There was no National Public Radio, not that that’s much better; in my opinion, it’s deceptive. But your sources of news were very limited. There was no Internet, of course. You could get news, maybe somebody call you from New York and say something to you. So, your sources of news were limited, the newspapers were horrible, but most news came by the newspapers. But it was always dated, right? I mean, when you get the printed newspaper, it’s already late, because things have happened in the last twelve hours, especially in a fast-moving war. So, you had the <i>Detroit News </i>and the <i>Detroit Free Press</i>, and we’d get the <i>Christian Science Monitor</i> by mail, and my father would go down to the train depot, and we’d run in and get for a quarter at most, maybe fifteen cents, you would get the <i>New York Times</i> that came shipped by train, off the train that sold there. Well, that was late, too, but a little more extensive. There was an Arab weekly program, run by a woman named Josephine Fadul, who was a Lebanese Maronite, so her news was always kind of, nobody believed it on the Muslim side, and I think Faisal, I don't know if he had his station yet, he was an Iraqi Chaldean, he had a reliable station, I don't think it went back that far, I could be wrong, but you know, that was once a week, kind of a roundup of news. Well, they had local events and music, people listened for the music, usually. How do we know? Probably by TV. You know, you turn on, probably back then the dominant station was NBC, or CBS, Walter Cronkite. And there would have been a morning show, like <i>The Today Show</i>. The news came on at 6:30 Detroit time, where Walter Cronkite would give his half hour, interspersed with commercials. And the others had their main person, and everybody seemed to trust Walter Cronkite, because he sounded more honest, but you know, that was it. That was your main sources. So, we probably heard it in the morning, because they would have started, you remember, there’s a time delay, so if they started, the Israelis bombing at five in the morning Egyptian airfields and the Syrian airfields. It would already, you know there’s a time lag, we would be sleeping then. You’d hear about it in the morning, well it’s already late afternoon there, so a lot has happened.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: So do you remember what the sources said?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: Oh, well you know, they were completely, I mean implicitly, if not explicitly, but certainly implicitly, that they saw the war from Israel’s side. They may have had a correspondent in Cairo or Damascus and probably in Beirut. They would have had a correspondent in Beirut, maybe Cairo, possibly Jordan, but most of the news was given from the Israeli side as it always has been. “Miraculous” and “The Israelis have overcome odds.” I mean, they set this up so that the Israelis are the David and the Arab states, the Arab governments are the Goliath. So, they set that equation up and the rest fell into place: “Goliath is winning now”, “Goliath is overcome.” There are studies of this. I think one of the best is a trilogy by David Neff who was a reporter, I believe, for <i>Time </i>magazine for many years in the region. And he did one on the Suez war of ’56, the ’67 War, and I think he did one on the ’73 War. Another guy was Stephen Green did a coverage of ’67. The Neff series, I’m told by reliable sources – I kind of just glanced at them because my interest was always going more contemporary than the past – is considered one of the best. It may be in this library [in the Arab American National Museum] in fact. You can probably find them. But for me again, just having turned 17 years old, no, actually I was still 16 at that point, it was really devastating, because I had, I’d grown up believing President Nasser of Egypt, who was the spearhead of Arab nationalism, was going to save the day and recover Palestine, and that was the thinking of a lot of people in the Middle East, and I felt, “Man, this is, what the hell happened, you know,” so I kind of just stepped back away from my Arab nationalist side at that point. I was just like, “These people are a bunch of losers,” you know, and it was hard to be an Arab at that time – an Arab American – and have any consciousness, because it was very humiliating to listen to the news. You know, you were made to look like a jackass, Arabs couldn't do anything, they were humiliated. It’s like, imagine the home team, football team, winning against its rival, say, Michigan versus Ohio State or even Michigan State, and winning the Rose Bowl, and if you're on the other side, how humiliating it is to go into school, if you’re with the other side so you're the definite minority, and everybody’s enjoying their victory. It’s very hard to deal with, especially if you're a young person and you didn't know all that much. So, I remember, and I wrote about it in the piece you mentioned, when Jim Ray pulls up in his Volkswagen where I was working, and he’s got a towel on his head and a belt for the <i>hatta agal</i>, the headdress, the traditional Arab headdress, and he’s playing Arab, and it was kind of felt humiliating. Now, I know he was just having fun with it, but people would say to you, “What the hell’s wrong with the Arabs?” Now there was still some anti-Semitism that was palatable, you could still feel it and hear it. People say, “A bunch of Jews, can’t you guys beat Jews?” it was this kind of racist, because to them Jews, to a lot of white Americans, German Americans and others, Jews were the little scrawny guy with the round-rimmed, wire-rimmed glasses, was a pushover. The football players, “how is it,” you know, they’re thinking Israel is Jewish, the Jewish state of these scrawny, little, nerdy kids, that they knew or people they knew in their world. They didn't know much about Arabs anyway, and they're saying, “How is it you Arabs can’t beat up a bunch of Jews?” Well, you know, it’s not about a bunch of Jews, it’s a nation-state that happens to be Jewish, it could be Irish. If it’s that well-organized and that well-armed, and it’s an extension of Europe and ultimately of the United States versus third world countries and governments, of course it’s going to win. South Africa was a hell of an opponent to the neighboring African states, you know. Rhodesia, under a white minority government was a terrible, powerful military adversary to its neighboring African states which had just come out of the colonial era. It has nothing to do with scrawny little white guys, nerdy white guys at the University of Michigan-Dearborn campus beating up a country of fifty million Africans. The country of fifty million Africans or Arabs is undeveloped, and its military is not that organized, and you have to have a certain education level in your military to make it work, with modern technology, firing missiles, everything, it all depends on math and calculus and timing and organization, leadership, and weaponry. It’s not just the fact that, the size of the guy in the room matters. Doesn't matter all that much if you’re firing a missile at somebody. It’s your training and your weaponry. So, but it was humiliating, you know, for a 16, 17 year old, it’s very humiliating, and I had put a lot of stock into the image of Nasser’s Egypt being forward-looking and thinking and progressive, and you know, the Russians were arming them, and so forth, and I remember my dad saying, “You know, Arabs can’t really handle this, this is something for big powers.” He says, “Nah, they can’t do it.” I was always dismayed that he didn't have confidence in Arabs being able to do it. Now, just for the record, we’ve seen, when Arabs get organized and do something, they can do things too. They can stand up, and I think of the one best examples is Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. They stood up to the Israelis. They’re not a state. They don’t have the open support that Israel has around the world and they stood up. The Palestinians have occasionally stood up. A bit rag-tag, disorganized, so what. If people are given a chance to organize, they can do something. Now, I’m not advocating war. I would really like to see this conflict resolved peacefully. But I’m just saying for the point of argument that it’s not something genetic with Arabs or Africans. Look at what the Vietnamese were able to do against the United States, the most powerful military force in the world. Now, the United States destroyed Vietnam, there’s no question about it, they killed a lot of people in Indochina, some estimates are as many as five million people. So, the United States can do an awful lot of damage, Israel can do an awful lot of damage, but that doesn't mean they’ll necessarily win against a very determined, organized opponent. So, it’s not a question of genetics, it’s a question of organization, leadership, and having at least some level of weaponry to fight back. So, but you asked me about the ’67 War, and how I felt. It was devastating, devastating to my ego, to my identity, and I kind of withdrew for a while.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: Were you able to get in contact with any family members overseas who may have told you anything about the war?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: You mean at the time?</p>
<p class="Body">AA: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p class="Body">NA: I don’t think so. I wasn't in contact with anyone overseas, of course, I was too young and I didn't know anyone. I did hear that my mother’s, one of her family members, was [unintelligible] Jericho, and he was fleeing across the Jordan River and they were napalmed, their car was napalmed, and I think he died in it, or was seriously, seriously burned. So, we’d hear things like that, but that was after things settled down. You remember, communication was not as quick. People were writing letters still back in those days, or picking up news from a traveler, you know, who went back and forth, but I don't remember much, hearing much about that.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: So how has this war impacted your family?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: The ’67 War?</p>
<p class="Body">AA: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p class="Body">NA: Well, okay, my dad is from a village outside of Jerusalem called Beit Hanina. Beit Hanina was part of the West Bank, so in 1948, when Israel was established and grabbed as much as they could at that time of British Mandate Palestine, that area, where my dad’s village is, was outside the area that they took. In other words, the Jordanians retained that part in the West Bank. So, my dad had some property there with his relatives which was not impacted at that time. My mother’s family and she lived in what was called traditionally New Jerusalem, which now the Israelis refer to as West Jerusalem. So it was that area of Jerusalem that fell to Israel in 1948, so my mother’s family, much of her family were impacted directly by 1948 and were made either refugees or they wound up living on that side of Jerusalem that stayed with Jordan until 1967. So, 1967, all of British Mandate Palestine is now under Israeli control, that would be the West Bank, Gaza, so those two parts were part of British Mandate Palestine, part of the mandate Britain was given over Palestine in 1919, so Israel takes control of those last two pieces, and those are called the occupied territories. Israelis call them Judea, Samaria, and stuff, but legally they’re the occupied territories in the UN. They also took part of the Syrian Golan Heights. So, my family was then therefore impacted–my father’s side of the family was impacted by the ’67 War, because now their town, village, it’s now a town, it’s actually a suburb of Jerusalem now was impacted directly by Israeli rule. So that was the main thing, and in the case of my mother’s people, those that were outside of the Israeli jurisdiction now became part of Israeli jurisdiction, and those that were under Israeli jurisdiction, probably some of them have Israeli citizenship, and therefore have probably more privileges, slightly more than those who are in the occupied areas who don't have privileges.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: So, did you feel like there was an impact from this war on the Arab American community in Detroit at all?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: Well, the Palestinian part of it were impacted pretty much along the lines that I just described for my family. It was large for the rest of the Palestinians, those who were from the ’48 areas, now felt themselves pushed even deeper into history, and then those from the ’67, West Bank, Gaza, we didn't have many Gazans here, none that I can recall, but the West Bankers, they were now becoming directly impacted, so there were a lot of those people, Ramallah, Beit Hanina, Al-Bira, Deir Debwan, those are the villages in this area from the West Bank that are living here among other places in the United States and elsewhere, and so all of them were impacted. The Palestinians tried to do, and did make, organizations. Some were existing pre-1967, like the American Arab Congress from Palestine, and then a number of those after 1967. So, 1967 forms kind of a boundary between old and new, so we used to talk about the refugees of 1948, and now we’ve got refugees in 1967, some 1948ers are now refugees twice over, because they fled parts of the West Bank – even in Gaza they fled – and went to neighboring countries, so they’re twice over refugees. And then there are some new refugees, and then there are those that are just now new rulers, which would be the Israeli military. And then the organizations pop up, but my recollection is the big things start happening in 1968, with the rise of the Palestinian resistance movement. It’s at that point that hope is re-instilled in people and there’s a flourishing of organizations here in North America and elsewhere, you know Europe, South Africa, South America, everywhere. People are connecting kind of like they go down to the pit of depression and despair in ’67, and they bounce up in 1968 with the news that there’s a Palestinian resistance, the Battle of Karameh in 1968, where the Palestinians allegedly held off the Israelis for a while, not quite clear exactly what happened, frankly, but it was enough to reignite the hopes of Palestinians and Arabs in the future.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: Do you want to elaborate on the activism that happened? Here in Detroit, or America?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: Well, I can’t speak for the rest of 1967 very much because I don't think I participated in very much, but by ’68, we’re starting to see the rise of activism on the part of people that were frustrated, I think. For example, the Arab students, the foreign Arab students, organized usually under the umbrella of the Organization of Arab Students, OAS, they became reignited with the rise of the Palestinian movement, and it took great publicity and canard. Then there were non-student organizations that got started by supporters of the Palestinian revolution, if you will, or by people who were inspired, I’m trying to think, some of the groups—there was the United Holy Land Fund, but that was just a fundraising group, there were solidarity committees, I guess, but the students really led the way. Another group that led the way was the Association of Arab University Graduates, AAUG, which I worked with for a while, but there were mostly university professors, researchers, academics, in the despair after ’67 started an organization, which got buoyed by the Palestinian resurgent nationalism, if you will. It was a main focal point for many years. The students and the university graduates were the two main focal points, and then there were these support groups, supporting different factions of the Palestinian movements, unofficially, officially, clandestinely, quasi-clandestinely, they were all over the place.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: Is there anything you feel we haven't discussed about these two events you’d like to add to this interview?</p>
<p class="Body">NA: Offhand, I can’t think anymore, I’ve got to tell you, I’m giving it from the perspective of a late adolescent, you know, early-adult version.</p>
<p class="Body">AA: Well, thank you for sitting with me today, Dr. Abraham.</p>
NA: Yeah, my pleasure. Did you get what you were looking for?
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
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1hr 1min
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Amina Amar
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Nabeel Abraham
Location
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Dearborn, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V9hCYMnyEfg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Nabeel Abraham, October 31st, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Dr. Abraham discusses his memories of the summer of 1967 as an Arab teenager living in Detroit. He remembers his relationships with his peers and the reactions of the people around him. Abraham was more interested in international politics at the time and discusses at length his memories of the War of 1967 between Israel and Palestine and the ramifications of that summer.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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09/08/2017
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
1967 Arab-Israeli War
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Dearborn
Michigan National Guard
Teenagers
-
https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/bb84e4315ec762dc643112bf01a35ba1.jpg
a1af5fc6830e3cb021c88546b07e18ed
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/quiI3Wvhui0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Barbara Aswad
Brief Biography
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Barbara Aswad was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She attended Bucknell University where she received a grant to study in the Middle East. She transferred to Edinburgh University where she chose to study Anthropology. She briefly worked for Senator Phil Hart in Washington, D.C. before she her doctorate from the University of Michigan where she specialized her research on the Middle East – specifically in Turkey and Syria. She began teaching at Wayne State University in 1966 and currently serves as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. She has also served with many organizations that promote Arab-Americans. She and her husband Adnan currently live in California.
Interviewer's Name
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Amina Ammar
Interview Place
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Dearborn, MI
Date
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03/25/2017
Interview Length
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00:41:10
Transcriptionist
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Julia Moss
Transcription Date
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07/25/2017
Transcription
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<p>AA: So today is March 25, 2017, my name is Amina Ammar, this interview is for the Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am currently sitting with—</p>
<p>BA: Barbara Aswad.</p>
<p>AA: Okay. Ms. Aswad, where and when were you born?</p>
<p>BA: I was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1937.</p>
<p>AA: Okay. How did your family get to Detroit, or how did you get to Detroit?</p>
<p>BA: How did I get to Detroit—they didn’t. I actually—they moved to Philadelphia when I was seven years old, and we really lived in sort of an Italian community and I thought most Americans were Italian until I found out I wasn’t. But anyway, that was a wonderful experience, I’ll say, to Mediterranean people, and I think it to some degree helped me when I lived in villages in the Middle East and married an Arab from Damascus because I was used to big extended families.</p>
<p>AA: So where did you live in July of 1967?</p>
<p>BA: In ’67 we were in Ann Arbor, my husband and I. We were commuting—I was commuting to Wayne State and we’d both gotten our degrees from University of Michigan, our doctorates. And it was quite a volatile period, the sixties, as you know. I mean, civil rights and anti-Vietnam War period. And I had just started my teaching at Wayne State in 1966. I had just started—in fact, I hadn’t finished my dissertation but I had done my research in the Middle East, I’d studied Arabic and Turkish and lived and done research for a year in the villages on the Turkish-Syrian border inside—just inside Turkey near Antakya. The Hatay it’s called, near Aleppo. And it used to be Syria but the French gave it to Turkey to keep the Germans out of the Dardanelles in 1936, but most of the rural population were Arab speaking.</p>
<p>AA: So what do you remember about Detroit before 1967?</p>
<p>BA: Before ’67? I wasn’t really teaching here. I was more in Ann Arbor and doing research in the Middle East, so I didn’t know a lot about Detroit until I started my job in ’66.</p>
<p>AA: Okay.</p>
<p>BA: So I do remember it was ’67 and the uprisings in Detroit. I remember I had just started teaching and I looked outside my window and I saw armored guards coming down the streets with their guns and thought it was sort of back in the Middle East where I’d seen guards with guns on the streets, and it was very shocking in the uprising period. It was a period certainly of African American uprising, civil rights movements which we all felt in this area, and I was involved definitely in the anti-war, Vietnam war movement. Started when I started teaching. Started teach-ins against the war. I lived in peasant villages and taught peasant society at the university and I saw how much Agent Orange we were killing the Vietnamese populations with. And so we started teach-ins, which got us in some trouble. As I mentioned before, I ended up on the Red Squad list because, probably, of that. I don’t know, maybe other things. My associates, I’m not sure. But that was sort of a scary kind of thing, and we couldn’t find out for ten years until the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] won the case and opened those lists up, and then in those lists which I saw in about 1980 I guess, I found that there was nothing— it was all whited out and I couldn’t figure out what they had found. And the guy said, “Well”—the police department said, “Well, did you talk about anything foreign?” And I said, “Well, of course, I teach Middle East anthropology at Wayne State.” He said, “Well, that’s why it’s all crossed out.” But I did find that they had followed me to various people’s houses and my license plates—in those days we didn’t have the updated surveillance systems, but apparently they were following a number of us here in this area during the anti-war period, and that was pretty scary. And of course I remember ADC [Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee] being organized which was wonderful, in ’67 after the ’67 War. And my husband was the treasurer for a while. I had been married by that time to Adnan Aswad from Damascus, and he was doing his doctorate in engineering at University of Michigan and he was also my Arabic TA [laughs]. That’s how I met him.</p>
<p>AA: So how did you first hear about the uprising?</p>
<p>BA: Which uprisings? The Detroit?</p>
<p>AA: Oh, the ’67. Yeah, Detroit ’67.</p>
<p>BA: Like I said, I was teaching in the city when they happened. And of course, some of my co-professors wouldn’t come down to Detroit because they were scared. I came anyway. I sort of—maybe because I’d lived in the Middle East I wasn’t really afraid of things. And so I came in—at that time I was still living in Ann Arbor. And it was very obvious what was happening. I mean, I could see it happening in Detroit, and it was worse in Detroit. You have a high percentage of African American consciousness and everything. It was sort of a scary period in the uprisings here.</p>
<p>AA: So how did—you said you were teaching around that time. How did students react and what did you see in Detroit?</p>
<p>BA: They were scared too. I mean, it was a scary period. You had—like I said, the National Guard was called in so they were all over the place, all soldiers all over, which we’re not used to. And students were afraid; we were afraid. And we had been involved in demonstrations against the war, so they were also photographing—they had cameras on campus at the university, so they were photographing us. So it was sort of a very fearful period. And I kept teaching for some reason. I guess I’m not afraid of things. And so I kept teaching, but students were afraid. But I had many Arab American students too, some from Dearborn, some from Algeria and the Middle East, and I think some of them had been used to some conditions. But everyone was pretty much afraid during the period of the uprisings. They’re often called riots, but wrongly. They were uprisings.</p>
<p>AA: That was actually going to be one of my questions, was how do you refer to this event? Would you refer to it as a rebellion, an uprising, a riot?</p>
<p>BA: It’s a rebellion. And many of the people who were in it from what I remember had come back—they were African American soldiers who had come back from Vietnam and they didn’t like the way they were being treated in Detroit, so some of them who were spearheading this knew some military tactics. And that’s from what I remember, organizing, the early organizing of the rebellion. And I don’t know what else to say except, you know, driving in and out of Detroit and there was fear among many people, but most of my faculty and my department didn’t come in to teach. They were in the suburbs and they wouldn’t come in.</p>
<p>AA: Okay, let’s switch gears a little. Let’s actually talk about the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. So how did you first hear about those events that led up to the war?</p>
<p>BA: Well, I was finishing up my dissertation, which I finished in ’68, and we had our whole living room full of Arabs and Arab-Americans talking about the war, and I was trying to finish my dissertation at the same time. And I just remember all the conversations and all the discussions and, you know, the—what else—anger at the war, the results of the war. And, of course, I had been in the Middle East, I came back in ’65. So it was very close and very personal to me because I had traveled earlier in ’56 all throughout the Middle East. Five Arab countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and then Palestine and Israel, so I had been there and I knew the area. And so we were following it, of course, very closely, and were—you know, I think everyone was humiliated by the results of it. And my husband was Syrian and they had gone into Israel I guess. They were the one army that had sort of gone into the Golan Heights and that area, and they felt sort of proud that Israel didn’t get to Damascus. But it was—for the Egyptians, they were very angry, and one of the professors that I had helped hire at Wayne State, Doctor Rushdi, to teach Arabic, I know—later—but her husband at that time was a doctor in Gaza, and Israel had gone in and lined up all the doctors and nurses and shot them, and had shot her husband. She later married Hani Fakouri, an anthropologist, but—and she didn’t know about it for a year. I mean, I didn’t know her then, but later I met her and—so many of the experiences were pretty horrific that we were hearing about. And, you know, it was pretty horrible. The war was very terrible. And the fact that, you know, this was—okay, why it was also—that was earlier of course. When I was there in ’56 in Egypt, we had an appointment with Nasser—we were in villages and as a student group of eight of us, went around the Middle East, and we had been in villages and then we had an appointment with Nasser, and he had to cancel it. He said, “I’m sorry, I’m really busy,” and he nationalized the Suez Canal, so we sort of forgave him, if you will. He was busy. But by the time we got to Israel after going through the Arab countries, in ’56 this is—okay—we saw these French troops in Israel in ’56, and we wondered why the French were doing maneuvers with the Israelis. And then we had to leave, and shortly after we got back to America, Israel and Britain invaded—and France—invaded Egypt to take back the Suez Canal. That was in ’56. So that was an interesting experience right then. So I had been at a young age, when I as 19, I had been into the area and, you know, familiar with quite a few of the politics in the area, ever since I was 19. I am now 80 years old, okay [laughs]. So I have a long history of involvement in Middle East politics. Also I might say that because my husband is from Syria originally, Aleppo and then Damascus, we went back often to visit his family as well as doing my research in Turkey and Syria near Aleppo. We went back to Syria many times to visit his family over these years. So we loved Syria and we’re very, very upset over the tragedy that is hitting Syria now.</p>
<p>AA: So do you remember how the larger Arab community or the Detroit community reacted to the ’67 War?</p>
<p>BA: Well, there were different approaches depending what countries people came from I think. The ones that were involved directly and—probably the Yemeni, for example, weren’t as affected because it wasn’t in Yemen. But certainly the Palestinians, I mean, this had a huge effect on Palestinians. Because they were conquered and then of course the Golan Heights of Syria was conquered and Egypt was conquered. So it depended what countries they came from, but certainly I think the whole Palestinian issue got more and more dominant in it, and that really consolidated a lot of things which led to AAUG, Arab American University Graduates, which my husband was one of the founders of. And I had always sort of criticized them at the beginning. I, of course, wasn’t Arab American, but that wasn’t my point. My point was I thought they should let students in and they didn’t want to. I thought it was rather elitist to just have us academics as part of it. I became an associate, because now I’m Arab. But I always thought that was a little elitist. In some ways maybe they were right, because the students were also divided and they were very political and it may have disrupted AAUG. I don’t know. They did allow them to give papers if they weren’t members, and that bothered me. I was very happy that they—one of the reasons for AAUG though was that we who were trying to publish on the Middle East, especially on Palestine, found it very difficult in academic circles to get our publications at that time. And AAUG provided a publication and the first book, really, I published on Arab Americans and—on Arab Americans was co-published by AAUG. So it allowed us to get publications which allowed us to get tenure eventually. You had to have publications or you couldn’t get tenure. So an important part of it certainly, of the elitist, academic part of it was publications. And Ibrahim Abu-Lughod very definitely pushed that aspect of it, and he was right. He was the head of the publications for AAUG for a long time, so I appreciated that because it did help me. And I had much—I had many problems teaching on the Middle East. I changed the name of my course eventually from Middle East anthropology to Arab Society because I had trouble with the Jewish community—the Zionist community, I shouldn’t say Jewish. The Zionist community who really didn’t want me teaching on Palestine and Israel. And with Arab society, I could include Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza and not necessarily teach a whole lot on Israeli society or Jewish society. So, I changed the topic, because I had—I had resistance, but when I had been in Israel, when I was 19 at the end of our trip, we had talked to Ben-Gurion and we had talked to Martin Buber who was a wonderful philosopher in Israel, who said he was a Zionist but not a state Zionist. He didn’t believe in the state of Israel, and he’s very famous in Jewish circles, philosophical Jewish circles. And we had worked on a kibbutz for a couple weeks, so I would tell the rabbis who called up to get me out of my position at Wayne, I’d say, “Have you talked to Ben-Gurion? Have you worked on a kibbutz?” And of course none of them had. And I said, “Well, I have.” I had something. I was glad I had been to Israel myself and talked to some of the people there, because it—and we had been to Nazareth, talked to the Palestinians there, and we knew sort of what was going on. Saw the refugee camps. So at a young age I had some background that I could use to keep my position at Wayne. But I think also where I had worked was Turkey, and with Arabs in Turkey, but I said I worked in Turkey, and that’s how I kept my position for a couple years, because my chair was an ardent Zionist and did not want me teaching on that, and probably would not have hired me if he’d thought I’d studied Arabs. So I did study in Turkey, on Arabs. But I said—and my husband’s mother was Turkish, and I spoke Turkish to her, and he introduced himself to my chair as a Turk and it worked for a few years until I got tenure. Then we told him that no, he really was an Arab, because he saw himself—his father was Arab from Aleppo and—anyway, interesting history of the pressures of trying to teach on the Middle East at Wayne State. And by the way, my positions has not been fulfilled for the last ten years and I’m very upset about it. I did get—I’ve been retired for about 15 years, and I managed to get a very successful young man named Tom Abowd to fill my position in 2000, and he wrote a wonderful book just recently called <i>Colonial Jerusalem</i>, and he did his work in Jerusalem. And I told him to try to keep his head down a little while, which he couldn’t do. But there were a number of reasons I guess, but he didn’t get tenure, and since—then they hired somebody for a couple years, but since ’07 there has been no position on Middle East anthropology at Wayne State, which is very distressing considering the largest community in the United States in Dearborn and what’s going on in the Middle East today. I told the president that-- Wayne has gone down in population, he said the state was not—had reduced the funding. They have a new president who impresses me, I like him, but I said I didn’t see that as an excuse. But seven years without teaching Middle East culture or Arab culture I think is inexcusable. I’m so glad that U[niversity] of M[ichigan] Dearborn here is starting Arab studies. I mean, they have had it and it’s good, but we have a graduate program and they don’t and it makes a difference of—in academics.</p>
<p>AA: So do you remember any particular moments about the war and its coverage in the United States?</p>
<p>BA: The ’67 War?</p>
<p>AA: Yeah. That you’d like to share?</p>
<p>BA: Well, it was pro-Israel. What can you say. We were supporting and have been and always have been supporting Israel in this country, with millions and billions of dollars. And our media was that way. There was not an objective view that I could find in our media then. I really couldn’t. It was very one-sided. And it always has been until today. One of the facts which a lot of Americans are not aware of is that you can get members of the Jewish community, typically also, many of them—give money to Israel and it’s tax exempt. It’s the only country in the world that you can give—only foreign country you can give money to and take it off your taxes. You may not have known that. A lot of people don’t know that. And it’s unbelievable. I mean, the power, the political power is incredible. I even worked down in Washington for a short time after my B.A. in anthropology. Couldn’t find really a job, so I worked for Senator Hart, Phil Hart from Michigan who was a wonderful man and had Senate Hart office buildings named after him because he had such a conscience and he read all his legislation, which many of them don’t. A wonderful man. But, you know, on Israel, he had worked in World War II—fought, and was pro-Israel. Wasn’t Jewish, but was pro-Israel, and we would have these discussions and I just couldn’t—at that time, ate with Kennedy before he was president—and, you know, it just seemed to go nowhere. And I was very glad to come back to academia, because the politics in Washington I didn’t like. And I was mistaken in not knowing the politics of universities, I thought that this would be merit—you know, a merit, and didn’t realize how political universities can become too. But that was a very short time actually that I worked in Washington. Came back, did a doctorate. But it was an experience and I didn’t like it. But just to show at that time the feelings, even of very sensitive, very liberal kinds of people were just pro-Israel. It was, you know, from World War II. Hangover, really, for many of the older people, and understandably because the Holocaust was so horrible. And then, of course, many of them got very rich and they could put their money into supporting Israel, and it just got worse and worse until we have today, with Palestinians getting, what, 23 percent of the land or something that they had in ’48. I went back to Israel and Palestine about seven years ago with a group of older people from California, and the director was—he’d been head of the YMCA in Jerusalem for 40 years, he was Palestinian Christian, and of course knew Hebrew and Arabic and everything, and about thirty of us went from a retirement center out in California. And, you know, having been there earlier and then coming back, showing the differences. We were driving on Jewish-only roads, all these apartheid situations that separated Arab towns and villages that used to intermarry and could hardly do that anymore. Went to Bethlehem and the Wall. I mean, it’s just outrageous what I saw, and that was seven years ago and it’s gotten worse, much worse, even since seven years ago. And I had a very hard time getting out of the airport because of my name Aswad. And the lady didn’t want to let me out. She said, “Where did you get your name?” I said, “My husband.” She jumps up, looks around, goes, “Where is he?” I said, “He’s in Los Angeles.” “Well, where was he born?” And I said Turkey, which was true. It was Syria, and he was born in Antioch, but I said Turkey. “Well, what languages do you know?” I said Turkish. I wouldn’t say Arabic, I do know Turkish. “Why? Why do you know Turkish?” She knew my name’s Arab. I said, “Because I studied it in college.” She’s sitting there with her machine gun, she said, “I’ll take it to my commander,” and she runs off. And the rest of my airplane is getting on the plane and, oh boy, here I am, stuck in Israel. Finally she comes back and sort of throws it at me and says, “Go on.” But it’s just, you know, it’s the harassment, even for someone who’s Anglo like myself, with that name. I might mention my Anglo name was Black, which if you’re an Arab, Aswad means black. So Adnan said he married in the tribe [laughs]. Sort of an unusual combination. But it was a very scary period, and those of us who knew the Middle East, had lived there, it was scary and just horrifying the way America supported Israel. I was very happy in ’56 when Israel invaded Sinai with France and Britain, because—it was Eisenhower, I think, then, and he wouldn’t go along with it. America did not defend Israel on that, and he said they should get out. And they had to get out, primarily because we did not—Eisenhower would not support them, and they did have to leave the Suez Canal in ’56. But certainly in ’67 we supported them, with military—our military, what do we give? Six billion now? Something like that. Military the highest of any country in the world, and they don’t need it because they have the nuclear weapons, two or three hundred of them. When I was in Israel the first time too, we did go to Dimona which is their nuclear area with the Weizmann Institute. We went way down and saw the nuclear things. That was ’56, they were doing nuclear things then. And people here never talk about it, and they don’t talk about it today. You will not find in newspapers anything about Israel being a nuclear power, and that it hasn’t signed the nuclear proliferation treaty. And neither have we, and we’re forcing, of course, Iran to do that. And so much of our politics is still run by Israel. [President] Obama and much of the Democratic party, they gave in to this. Certainly Hillary [Clinton] did, she didn’t say a word about it. She’s highly funded by AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee]. Good thing for me, anyway, as an older person that’s seeing groups like JVP, Jewish Voices for Peace, which I belong to and support heavily. Just to see the young Jewish people coming and being on campuses, things like this, it’s wonderful. J Street, another Jewish sort of moderate organization had a meeting just recently. They still won’t let Jewish Voices of Peace come to their conferences, which I think is very interesting. So, obviously within the Jewish community there are a lot of different views, and certainly not—they’re not all Zionists. And in Israel they’re not all Zionists either. I mean, I was glad and still am I have relations with Israelis. Jeff Halper who has ICAHD, which is Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, takes Jewish and Palestinian young people out and they rebuild home after Israel has demolished them. He’s an anthropologist like myself and he’s a good friend and he’s been in jail 13 times. And of course they’ve only managed to rebuild one percent of all the homes that Israel has damaged, but it’s a wonderful effort to bring the two groups. And then the Women in Black, and I have friends in Israel who are Jews who are very progressive. So it’s a country like any country, where you have progressives and fundamentalists. But we are supporting their policies. They couldn’t do it without us. They couldn’t do what they’re doing now. They couldn’t be the threat, they couldn’t be the nuclear threat. We didn’t give them—France, I guess, they got their nuclear weapons from. But, well, we support them militarily. And now they’re having relations with Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, so things are changing. And not for the good, because those are very not progressive states.</p>
<p>AA: Is there anything you feel we haven’t discussed, or should be added to the interview?</p>
<p>BA: Well, I know you were wondering maybe where I get my radicalism, and I mentioned before my mother was very much part of this. She was a feminist which, in the twenties, was somewhat unusual for a woman, although not totally but that’s where it started. But it was—and she was a history teacher, and I always described her as a closet socialist because she would—I mentioned we were raised Baptist. Her mother had died when she was 23 and she went to the Baptist church. Before that had never been anywhere, but she needed help. Emotional help. And so I was raised, and she would take us to black Baptist churches in the forties which, believe me, no whites did this. And she’d take us out to farm workers who were picking pickles and all this to show us different classes, and my father went along with all this. And so I grew—I was very lucky in growing up, and she showed us models of Indira Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt when we were young girls to, you know, sort of say look what women can do. So that helped me, always gave me strength. She always—my family always supported me. And then as I said, I got into—went to a place called Bucknell University because I had a Baptist scholarship and I really wanted to play field hockey. That was my main interest in going to college, which doesn’t sound very good, but we had moved from Philadelphia to Michigan again and there were no girls’ sports and I’d played field hockey in Philadelphia and I loved it. And so I came back East to go to college, and I had some money as a Baptist, and Bucknell is a horrible school. It’s quite a good university, but they had sororities and fraternities, and my roommate was Chinese. I got invited to all the sororities, she got invited to none. So I started fighting the sororities and then—what am I doing at the university? I’m not supposed to – I came here to learn something. And I don’t know, some of us got in trouble, and a Soc[iology] prof then said, “Would you like to apply for this grant to go to the Middle East?” Which I knew nothing about except the Bible. And I said, “Sure.” And landed, of course, in Midan Tahrir in the villages of Egypt, and it was quite a tour. It changed my whole life, and I ended up—didn’t want to come back to Bucknell so I went to Edinburgh University, met a bunch of anthropologists there, some of whom have become very famous like Talal Asad, and thought, well, that’s a good profession. I can study the Middle East and do something interesting. And sort of became a Quaker in Ramallah I remember, gave up this Baptist business and became a Quaker, because Ramallah has a big school, big Quaker school, and that impressed me that they didn’t talk much but they did a lot of work. And—but then I have ADD and I couldn’t sit for an hour without people talking, so I sort of quit the Quakers too. Later became a Unitarian, who are often called noisy Quakers [laughs]. Unitarian, and then of course I married a Muslim, and they will take people of any faith in Unitarians, or no faith or whatever. But—so my background has been fairly progressive and had wonderful experiences abroad meeting different people, and that’s what anthropology’s all about. Studying other cultures and respecting most of them [laughs]. Not all of them, but having respect for them. So I consider myself lucky in many ways, even though it was a fight trying to teach objectively on the Middle East at Wayne State. But it worked. Had wonderful students, and now you can see all these wonderful papers being produced, which weren’t then—we didn’t have something like the Arab American Studies Association. I did join MESA, Middle East Studies Association, in ’92 I was president of Middle East Studies Association. And that was quite an experience. Initially we couldn’t—well, that’s why AAUG was founded really, because we tried to present papers at MESA and we couldn’t on Palestine, so that really is what pushed AAUG to get publications and everything and a place we could talk about Palestine. And I think that was the first paper I ever published—no, second one, that had to do with Palestine. And it was published in an AAUG book by Naseer Aruri who was one of the presidents, and it was really refreshing for Arab-Americans to be able to have their own organization where they could say what they wanted. So it’s always been a struggle with Zionism. I won’t say Judaism, but Zionism. And now in California where my husband and I are retired for the last 16 years, in a way because of the horrible bigotry and discrimination going on under the Trump administration, it’s very interesting because we now have—we are close to San Bernardino where there was a very bad tragedy. And there’s a lot of fear of Muslims, and the mosque in Clairmont was threatened. There are three mosques threatened with bombs in California, southern California. And what has been wonderfully amazing, it has brought the Jewish and Christian communities together with Muslim communities. A couple weeks ago, about a month ago we had rabbis at the Friday one o’clock sermon in the Islamic mosque. We’ve had Muslims going to the synagogue. This would never have happened before this administration that I know of. I mean, maybe it did, I don’t know. I’m on some interfaith committee, and maybe that did happen but not the way it is now. And we’ve had marches. And in 2012 – when the bombing in New York —and the mosques were again threatened, the Christian ministers formed a blockade around the mosque and said, “Any attacks on the mosque is an attack on our churches.” So in a way these crisis kinds of things do bring groups together, and there are marches, interfaith marches, and it’s wonderful to see. So there is some counter—counter Trump things going on. And Bannon, the push on white Christian nationalism that’s going on today, which is very scary. I don’t know what’s going to happen right now, but it’s a very fearful time to me. It’s a very dangerous time. Emphasis on militarism. As an anthropologist studying way back in many civilizations, all empires have ended. Maybe this is the beginning of ours. I don’t know. But I will say one thing: I have always been critical of much in this culture, especially the genocide among, I guess, Native Americans and of course the way we treat African-Americans and other minorities and now Muslim-Americans. But I have now after all these many years begun to realize we really have some really good things in our democracy, and the free press is so important. Not that it’s always free, but there is Rachel Maddow and some of these people who are still wonderful people, and we’re able to say these things. So I almost—it’s like, wow, we really do have wonderful things here we have to support. And unfortunately the contemporary budget has cut—seeming to cut all those good things. Evening affecting this museum we’re in here. NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities], NEA [National Endowment for the Arts], UN [United Nations], all these things that are, you know, being cut by our country, by our regime, or are trying to be cut. The health benefits. California’s a little more—it’s nice to be out there, because they’re trying to go for single-payer now, health [insurance], which I don’t know if they’ll get there but it’s been there before and it may go. They want to be a sanctuary state. I don’t know if that’ll happen, but the pushes there are very progressive. Very progressive Governor Pratt and the Senate and the House are all very strong in California against—they’re pushing back against the administration very strongly now. I don’t know the outcome, but it is good to see organizations like this, Arab American Studies Association, all these papers and all the real pushback against the current administration. That’s about all I have.</p>
<p>AA: Well, thank you Doctor Aswad for sitting with me today.</p>
<p>BA: You’re welcome, and thank you for the interview.</p>
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
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41min 10sec
Interviewer
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Amina Ammar
Interviewee
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Barbara Aswad
Location
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Dearborn, MI
Dublin Core
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Title
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Barbara Aswad, March 25th, 2017
Description
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In this interview, Barbara Aswad discusses her life as a professor of Anthropology and the Middle East. She recounts a trip through the Middle East as a 19-year-old and how that changed the course of her life and how relations have changed on subsequent trips. She talks at length about the relationship between Zionists and Arabs and the War in 1967. She also discusses her memories of the summer of 1967 in Detroit as a professor at Wayne State and similarities between the situation in the United States and the Middle East.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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10/13/2017
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
1967 Arab-Israeli War
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Detroit Community Members
Michigan National Guard
Vietnam War
Wayne State University