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https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/eb439f04c056ccf7752c8a85be822691.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
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Written Story
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Text
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I am a white male, now 67 years old. When the violence broke out on July 23, 1967, I was 17 and in Ann Arbor for Freshman Orientation at the University of Michigan. I was sitting in the cafeteria of one of the dorms after a late dinner, pretty much by myself. I remember it was beginning to grow dark outside. The music streaming into the cafeteria was The Doors' “Light My Fire”. All of a sudden, the music was interrupted with an announcement that National Guard troops were being ordered into Detroit to quell the uprising. It was eerie.
Original Format
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Email
Submitter's Name
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Sid Groeneman
Submission Date
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08/14/2017
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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Sid Groeneman
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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08/25/2017
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
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Text
Language
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en-US
Type
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Written Story
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Ann Arbor
University of Michigan
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https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/6486b2e57ce521714fa29fbcba3c81f9.JPG
629bebac7bd80aefda884fd85fe3b998
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
A name given to the resource
Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
A language of the resource
en-us
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Roger Manilla
Brief Biography
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Roger Manilla was born in Detroit in 1942 and grew up in both the city and the suburbs. He graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and later worked as a social worker for several community service organizations in Detroit.
Interviewer's Name
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William Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, MI
Date
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10/17/2016
Interview Length
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00:50:30
Transcriptionist
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Julia Moss
Transcription Date
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06/02/2017
Transcription
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<p>WW: Hello, today is October 17, 2016, my name is William Winkel, this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am sitting down with Mr. Roger Manilla. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>RM: Sure, my pleasure.</p>
<p>WW: Could you please start by telling me where and when were you born?</p>
<p>RM: I was born in Detroit in 1942, November 16th, and I grew up in Detroit—a couple different neighborhoods.</p>
<p>WW: What neighborhoods were they?</p>
<p>RM: Well, my earliest memories were living in the Dexter-Davison neighborhood, which was a Jewish neighborhood at that time. I lived on Elmhurst and attended Winterhalter School, although my parents told me that before that we lived on Sturtevant, which is in the same neighborhood. So that was a very rich community and time, you know, in my childhood. I lived there until I was seven. I then moved to Northwest Detroit, so I lived on a tree-hurst, Elmhurst, we moved to Pinehurst, another tree-hurst, and we were basically around the corner from Schulze Elementary School and a couple blocks away from the newly-constructed Mumford High School, so those were the schools I went to at that time.</p>
<p>WW: Growing up in the Dexter-Davison and Northwest, were those areas integrated, or were they all white still?</p>
<p>RM: Well, integrated. The Dexter-Davison area in my childhood up to around the age of seven was integrating. It was still a largely Jewish neighborhood and a lot of black people were moving in. In fact, my grandfather died, my father inherited a block of stores on Dexter, and he rented a couple of them out and later sold them to an African American guy who was quite radical. Not sure if he was a Muslim, but he was certainly radical, and a lot of people of the day who were askance at that. Many years later I saw him distributing political leaflets. I can’t remember his name, but he was kind of running as an off-party candidate for mayor, and I introduced myself and he gave me a big hug and a big kiss on both cheeks, and he said that my father was the only one at that time way back then that would rent to him, and that his politics didn’t matter, his race didn’t matter, and my father was willing to sell him the building later on. He thought that was, you know, amazing.</p>
<p>My parents were always liberal, radical, union supporters. My mother organized the first union of welfare workers for the welfare department in Detroit. Before they were married they hitchhiked to Boston to protest the <i>Sacco-Vanzetti</i> trial. They made sandwiches and went up to Flint and passed them into the sit-down workers. So it was that kind of an environment that I grew up in.</p>
<p>BW: Wow.</p>
<p>RM: Wow. It’s continued to today, that kind of political involvement.</p>
<p>WW: Growing up in Detroit, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhoods or did you venture around the city?</p>
<p>RM: Well, it depends on at what age. When I was young and we lived in the Dexter neighborhood, probably up unto my teens, I would go places with my parents. We would go downtown. There was an automat—I think it was called Greenfield’s or something—my mother liked to go there, you know, take me there for lunch. She worked for the Jewish Family Agency, she was a social worker as well, and they were located right here on Woodward at one time, so we would come down and sit in the front office window and look out and watch the Thanksgiving Parade from her office. So I had a feeling for downtown Detroit, but mostly the Westside. Detroit seems to be an East-West split city. You grow up on the Westside, or Northwest, you know the Westside but you are not really familiar— that familiar with the Eastside. It always seemed like another city to me as a kid. And we would go to Hudson’s, we’d go to Crowley’s, shopping. I remember getting my first haircut at Hudson’s. They had a, like, a chair that looked like an animal, sort of like you would ride on a merry-go-round, for the kids, and that was interesting. Detroit had a very sort of rich mercantile life at that time—downtown Detroit did. And my family took me around there. And later when I was in high school and was living out in Northwest Detroit, so sort of near Curtis and Meyer’s, I would come into Detroit and go—there was a jazz club that didn’t serve alcohol but brought really great headline acts—Miles Davis, Cozy Cole, top local people like Youssef Lateef, and really good jazz. It was sometimes so packed that people would line up around the block to get in. You could only get in when somebody left. And they weren’t an alcohol-serving place so the music would go on until two in the morning, so in high school I used to go down there a lot and come into town.</p>
<p>WW: Do you remember what the name of the bar was, or the venue was?</p>
<p>RM: Yeah, the Minor Key, it was on Dexter. And there were a group of us that were kind of hip, you know, followers of jazz music, writers, artists, you know, at least we thought of ourselves as that at the time. So we would come into the city for that. And I found that, you know, cross-racial stuff was very friendly about that. There wasn’t a lot of hostility. You know, these white teenagers coming in from the suburbs. People would talk to us, we got invited up to some after-hours gigs at people’s apartments, there was no fear about going anywhere. You know, people treated us very well. Plus, I started to get involved with kind of a left-wing group of people, and that was very integrated, you know, black and white and talking about revolutionary things. That had some implications for what happened in ‘67 also, so it’s a background.</p>
<p>WW: Was it just a loose formation of people, or did you have a name?</p>
<p>RM: No, later on I got involved with Students for a Democratic Society and anti-Vietnam War protest and, in fact, I dropped out of school for a while and became a community organizer for them in Roxbury, Boston, and would go around and speak on different campuses. And was involved with people like Tom Hayden. And some of my close friends were involved in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. A woman that I met in Ann Arbor, who’s actually grown up to be a fairly well-known historian, Martha Prescott. She was a major people in SNCC, major figure in Mississippi voter registration in the summer. But that was later, that was when I was in college. We were really good friends, and we’ve remained friends—not close now, because of distance, but over the years whenever we see each other it’s like old-home week, we hug and, “What have you been doing.” Some of her family are buried in Ann Arbor in a cemetery that’s around the corner from a house I own in Ann Arbor, so, you know, there’s a lot of connections there. One of her sons is a doctor and she comes back to Michigan to see him. So that’s interesting.</p>
<p>WW: So being at the Minor Key and meeting these left-wing people, did you—</p>
<p>RM: Well, I knew them before, I didn’t just meet them at the Minor Key. I met some pretty famous musicians through the Minor Key, but.</p>
<p>WW: And when you went to U of M Ann Arbor to go to school, it amplified?</p>
<p>RM: Well, here’s how my education went. I got admitted to U of M late, okay, like the end of October. But before then I accepted a place at Michigan State, so I spent my freshman year at Michigan State, and given my family background I kind of gravitated towards sort of leftish-leaning groups, philosophical discussion groups and stuff. Then, I had always had my eye set on U of M, so for my sophomore year I transferred to U of M, and I met some people. We used to hang out in coffee shops and discuss—there was a guy from England who had gone to the London School of Economics, he got a first, he had come to Ann Arbor because a fairly famous economist, Kenneth Wilding from England, was teaching in Ann Arbor, and his name was Jim Arrowsmith. And I was majoring in philosophy at the time and there was a woman I knew who had applied to go to London for her junior year, and I thought, what the hell. So I talked to Jim, I sent away to London School of Economics. It was almost impossible to get into, it’s like getting into Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge, it was one of the top schools in the world. And I got admitted. So I left and went to the London School of Economics for my junior year and studied political philosophy and political theory.</p>
<p>WW: And what year was that?</p>
<p>RM: Let’s see—so—</p>
<p>WW: Sixty-three?</p>
<p>RM: Sixty-two and sixty-three.</p>
<p>WW: Okay.</p>
<p>RM: Yeah. The school year.</p>
<p>Here’s an aside, okay? I went to high school with a guy named Richard Wishnetsky. Have you heard of him? Richard Wishnetsky was a straight-A, brilliant student in high school and a straight-A student at U of M. He was also nuts. He ended up assassinating a rabbi—what’s his name—I don’t remember his name, but a famous, famous, famous case. He went onstage and blew his head out, and then committed suicide in front of the congregation. He was very upset.</p>
<p>But we were close friends, and when I went to Europe I met a French woman, and then when I came back here I told him about her, and then he went over there for some reason—some internship or something—and looked her up, and then years later I went back and saw her and she said that he had been such a nice guy. And then I told her what he had done, and she was appalled. And then some years after that I was sitting in a coffee shop in Ann Arbor and I was talking to this girl and I said I was from Detroit and that I’d gone to Mumford, and she asked if I knew her brother. And that she had changed her name and had a completely different identity, and I said yes, that I had known him, and then she sort of broke down and talked about what a disaster it had been for the surviving members of the family, you know, based on what he had done.</p>
<p>So there were a lot of tumultuous—you know—I mean, it’s a life, you know, you go through life and stuff happens. But he was absolutely brilliant, never got anything other than an A or an A plus. Got admitted to Harvard to study, you know, philosophy, but instead—Jewish kid—he took a position for graduate school at the University of Detroit. You know, Catholic school. And, you know, he was very troubled about religion and its role in people’s lives and God and morality, and then, you know, he ended up committing one of the most immoral acts one could imagine.</p>
<p>WW: Yeah.</p>
<p>RM: So that was another thread of people I knew. I was also sort of a budding artist and sculptor at the time, so I hung out with people in high school who were under the tutelage of our art teacher at Mumford, his name was Raymond ________ (??). And he was a member of the Scarab Club down here, so sometimes he would bring his students on sketching trips into Detroit, and we would go to the Scarab Club and he got us into exhibits that were there and stuff. So that again brought us out of the suburbs into the city and stuff.</p>
<p>WW: Once you returned from London, did you continue your community activism?</p>
<p>RM: Well, that’s interesting, because when I got back here, one of the first people that I sort of saw was an old friend of mine—in fact, our parents had been friends forever—named Peter Werbe. You know who Peter is? Peter Werbe is the publisher—the editor of <i>The</i> <i>Fifth Estate</i>. He also has a radio show in Detroit. In fact, he would be a great person to interview, because he was all involved in all of this stuff. So through Peter—he was going up to Ann Arbor. Tom Hayden and a guy named Todd <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Gitlen</span>(??) and I think somebody else were living in a house on Arch Street in Ann Arbor, and had, you know, a big radical poster, you know, on the door—in fact it was glued on the door, it stayed on the door forever. I ended up buying that house later on, just to preserve the door. Later I sold it, they painted over the door, they took the door away. But I got involved with a group of them who were the sort of core of SDS, Students for Democratic Society, and through them I met Al Haber, who started SDS, and his father later became Dean of the Lit School in Ann Arbor. And who I’m still very close with, who’s moved back to Ann Arbor from living in San Francisco, in Oakland for a while, California. And at that time there was a debate within SDS about whether we should be involved in community organizing, or whether we should be mobilizing against the war in Vietnam. I didn’t see it as an either or, but people lined up on both sides of that issue. And I had family in Boston, I had an aunt who had become a Dean of Social Work at Simmons, I had an uncle who teaching at Harvard, and I used to visit them as a child. I used to visit them in the summers. And—not the whole summer, a few weeks here, a few weeks there. So I had an affinity for Boston and they started a community organizing project in Roxbury. So I actually went—you know, I got into social work school and after my first year I took time off and went to Boston, and worked as a community organizer in Roxbury. And it was pretty much through this contact with these SDS people. You know about SDS, right? It started in Ann Arbor.</p>
<p>So during that time also was my undergraduate years. I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World], and the Wobblies. So that also got me involved in doing labor history and labor research, and very interested in the songs of the time, you know, Joe Hill and, you know, the organizers. And years, years later, the IWW still has a little hip pocket office in Chicago, and I went there. There on the shelf of all the books that had been written about the Wobblies was my undergraduate honors thesis. I thought, where the hell did you get that. They said, we got every word that’s ever been written about the IWW. So they had—I used to hang out at that office and just reminisce with them and read through stuff.</p>
<p>At the time that I was writing my undergraduate honors thesis, I was also working part-time at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations. In fact, Al Haber worked there too, we would edit _______ (??) of articles for a journal about labor economics. And there was a woman who was also affiliated with the institute named Joyce Kornbluh, and she wrote the sort of definitive history of the IWW at the same time that I was writing mine. And so we would exchange notes and talk and stuff, and she was a noted labor historian.</p>
<p>So this is all kind of preamble, you know. This is my background. These are things that I was doing. I came back from Boston, got my masters in social work, was in a doctoral program, so I found myself working for UCS with these kids in Detroit.</p>
<p>WW: And what does UCS stand for?</p>
<p>RM: United Community Services. It’s a—there was a subdivision of it but I don’t remember what it was called. But it was located right over here on—I think on Warren. Was it Warren or Forest? Anyways, it was right near Wayne. And I think they still have that same building. But it was basically, you know, the red feather agency, it was an umbrella of a number of different agencies, community agencies.</p>
<p>WW: And what was your work here? Oh, I should say, when did you first arrive here to do this work?</p>
<p>RM: Well it isn’t a question of arriving, I mean, I’ve just—I’ve always sort of been here. My parents continued to live in Detroit until, you know, a few years after this, when they moved to Ann Arbor to be closer to me, I guess.</p>
<p>WW: When did you start working for United Community Services, then?</p>
<p>RM: In the summer of ‘67.</p>
<p>WW: Okay.</p>
<p>RM: Yeah. And the people I hung out with at that time in Detroit—Peter Werbe, Frank Joyce, you know who he is? Okay. Really? So I was just at this conference, they had—the Sound Conservancy had a conference, and—so I’m talking to this woman, her name was Marsha and she has a radio program, you know, music program. And so we’re talking about—you know, and she asked me a little bit, like you did, about your background, so I mentioned some of the people I know. So I said that I used to hang out with Frank when he lived over here on Prentis and stuff, and she said, “Oh my god, I was married to Frank. And we have a 40 year old son.” And that was pretty funny.</p>
<p>So Frank Joyce was living over here on Prentis, Peter Werbe and his wife Marilyn was living over there, it was an apartment building where everybody lived in. And when I would come into the city—and I was working down here, so I would see them. And they were involved with some pretty radical people. Especially some very revolutionary black people, you know. And they were far out, even for me, I mean, they were out there, they were armed, and they really expected insurrection to take place.</p>
<p>So a little aside, when the riots broke out—not that that they started them, but a couple of them piled all their guns into the trunk of their car, and they were stopped by the police—if I got it right, they were stopped by the police, and they found all these guns, and I think a couple of them ended up in jail. There was a guy I liked very much, good-looking guy, very nice, his name was Will McClendon. I think—you know him?</p>
<p>WW: Yep, he was with ACME [Adult Community Movement for Equality].</p>
<p>RM: Yeah. Well, he was involved with these guys. Another offshoot that I had was through my working at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, I met a guy named Dennis <span style="text-decoration: underline;">DuChez</span>(??), who worked at Chrysler at the time. And he was—he was an inside employee of Chrysler, but he was a big supporter of DRUM, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. So I met some of those people. So it’s—you know, it’s like loose associations, you know. The only group I was ever really—ever formally part of was SDS. But Frank organized the Northern Student Movement, that was his organization. I can’t—I was at a party with him and some woman, I can’t remember her name, but she was—she’d been drinking a little bit, but she’d pushed me up against the wall and, you know, was like right in my face and was asking me all these questions about how radical was I really, or was I just a white dilatant down here from the suburbs that was slumming, and what had I ever done for her people. And you know [laughs], it was very confrontational. That’s the only time I think that anybody ever, you know—all my time in Roxbury, and other times in Detroit. But times were changing, you know, people were now much more openly angry, and—</p>
<p>WW: And what was the work you did with United Community Services?</p>
<p> RM: Like I said, I rounded up these kids, recruited them, got them involved with the police, took them around the precincts, taught them about how the police department worked. And sort of took them into the neighborhoods, staked them out in a two or three block area and let them do basically an inventory of the neighborhood. Abandoned houses, abandoned cars. You know, just to get a general—and they would write up a few paragraphs about the neighborhood, and list these things, and they would get paid. They got paid pretty well, you know, for then. I think they might have gotten 7 dollars an hour, and they were late middle and early high school age kids. So that was pretty good money for them back then.</p>
<p>WW: How did working for the Detroit Police Department impact your friendships with these left-wing activists?</p>
<p>RM: Well, I wasn’t really working for the Detroit Police Department, I was working with the Detroit police. I was working for United Community Services. But I’ve always been sort of circulating in different worlds. I’m a sociologist, you know? In fact, one of the country’s top social scientists—sociologists of police, Albert Reese, wrote a couple books about police—was one of my professor’s at U of M. And then later when he got to be chairman of sociology at Yale I went and visited him. I think it’s important to just understand all the institutions of society. My own political beliefs and feelings—you know, I don’t have a lot of animosity towards the police. I think that there’s a—the police in function in society is, by its nature, sort of oppressive. I mean, you’re basically looking for things that people are doing, and some of the things they’re doing, and telling them they can’t do it, and if they continue to do it you arrest them, that’s not very nice. I remember when I was a kid, I was driving down Linwood with my father—I must have been about 12, 13—and a couple young black kids—15, 16—were walking down the street. And a police car was driving by, and it pulls over, drives up on the sidewalk, and pushes these kids up against the wall and starts frisking them, and just hassling them. And my father’s driving by, he slams on the breaks, jumps out of the car, and goes up to these cops, writes down their badge numbers and starts shouting at them, and saying, “What are you doing to these young men? What have they done? I saw them just walking down the street, and you basically have assaulted them, and I’m going to report you, not only to the police department but to the newspapers. What are your names?” You know, these are big cops, white cops, and my father—five foot six, little Jewish man, screaming at them. And they were intimidated. They were really intimidated by him. And they kind of apologized to him, and he said, “Don’t apologize to me, apologize to them and let them go on their way.” And the cops did. And man, I was so, so proud of my dad, and also scared for him. So that, you know—stuff like that in Detroit.</p>
<p>WW: So as your working that summer, do you sense—is there like a feeling in the air that there’s something that’s going to happen in the summer?</p>
<p>RM: Well, you know, I was involved with people that are talking about revolution, insurrection, this that and the other. But it was like—I didn’t think it was—they thought—a lot of them thought it was real. I didn’t think it was real. I mean, I’d go back to my parents’ house in the evening, I didn’t live in the city and I didn’t have my finger on the pulse of what the inner city was going through. And I was aware of the economic gulf, I was aware of the people in DRUM being dissatisfied with the union and with their contracts. But I was always sort of on the edges of things watching stuff go on, rather than being in the center of things, as, you know—</p>
<p>Later when the Vietnam War was happening I got more involved. I organized about eight busloads of people to go to Washington, and I recruited a guy who became my life-long friend, Carl <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Ogalsbee</span>?, recruited him to SDS. He was a technical writer for Bendix at the time, basically working for the military-industrial complex, and I confronted him about his principles and his life and how they were out of sync, and he actually quit his job. He had two little kids—three little kids at the time, his little boy was a baby, and he walked out of a good-paying job to work for SDS.</p>
<p>WW: So going into that week, how did you first hear about what was going on, on Twelfth Street and Clairmount?</p>
<p>RM: Well, our kids were out there. Inventorying cars, and it was on the news and we got a call to get the kids off the streets. They were wearing T-shirts that said Detroit Police Department, they were wearing bright yellow helmets. And there wasn’t really anybody else there. I was at the office, and they said, “Take our station wagon and go get those kids.” So I drove in and started rounding up the kids, okay? So I’ve got these black kids that I’m picking up off the street, with their T-shirts saying Detroit Police Department and their bright yellow helmets, and the buildings around us are on fire, and people are breaking in the front windows and walking out with TVs, and burning the files, so if they owe any money that stuff will be destroyed. And it was like—well, it was like Mardi Gras, it was like a street party. Nobody was stopping them, there weren’t any police on the street, and some people had guns but nobody was shooting anybody. It’s just—it was kind of pandemonium. So I’m driving and then people are in front of me on the street, so I stop. I’ve got these kids in the back, you know. I’m white, they’re black. And a guy comes up to me and says, “Roll down your window.” So I roll down my window, he says, “Are you fucking crazy? What the hell are you doing here?” I say, “Well, I’ve got to get these kids off the street, I’m with this program blah, blah, blah.” He said, “Get in the back, get down, don’t let anybody see you. I’ll drive you out of the neighborhood.” So he gets in, I get in the back, get down. He drives the car out of the neighborhood, and gets away from what’s happening on Twelfth Street.</p>
<p>And—so we take the kids back to the office and they’re waiting for their parents to pick them up, and then I kind of turn to him and say, “Well, where do you want to be?” He said, “Well, I certainly don’t want to be here. This ain’t no place for a black man to be.” And I said, “Well.” He said, “I’ll tell you, take me as close to back where I met you as it’s safe for you to be, and then, you know, you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine.” And, you know, we never saw each other or talked to each other again. But that’s my most vivid memory, the buildings burning—oh, I was taking pictures, too. He said, “Are you crazy, taking pictures of these folks walking out of those stores with those TVs?” And it was—it was an interesting experience. I wasn’t really afraid, but I had never—I had never been encountered around racial issues or about being white or anything, in a way that would make me afraid. And I had really amicable relationships with everybody, so it just, it wasn’t on my radar. Looking back on it, it was probably fairly dangerous, at that time, to be taking pictures of people robbing stores. But it didn’t seem to me to be at the time.</p>
<p>WW: Did you have any other experiences during that week? Or did you hunker down?</p>
<p>RM: Well, I wrote up all my thoughts and reflections for a report to the agency I was working for. And they wrapped it around a description of the program and its goals and then, you know, a sort of an evaluation of the program at the end, and brought it out as a kind of, like a white paper, you know. Bob Potts wrote a piece, and the director of the agency, his name at that time was <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Emerick Curtagh</span>(??)The assistant director of the agency was a guy named Harold Johnson, who later became dean of social work at U of M. So, you know, these were people that were—you know, became significant in their field.</p>
<p>I had another friend that worked there, a black guy named Madison Foster, and he was an interesting character. When I first met Madison, let’s see—I was in graduate school in social work, and so was he, and he wore, like, a tweed jacket and smoked a pipe and was affecting an east coast accent. And then a year or so later he was involved in the Black Student Movement in Ann Arbor. And then a year or so after that he was selling marijuana. And then a year or so after that he and a couple partners had started a really great soul food restaurant in Ann Arbor. And then the restaurant failed. And a year or two after that he was a professor at Morgan State. And then a year or two after that he was at another college. So my thoughts about him and the transition he went through—you know, the different lives he led, and then the different people I met through him who were his friends at different stages of my friendship with him. It’s sort of a fascinating chronicle of the kind of evolution of a black person’s experience and self-concept and, you know, and all of that.</p>
<p>The other thing I was involved with, I was really peripherally involved in the drug culture in Ann Arbor. My roommate, lovely guy named Ned Shore, was probably one of the biggest marijuana dealers in the United States. And he did it for years, out of the apartment I was living in. So when he got arrested and they were investigating him, just like this only it was the FBI sitting across the table from me—but what happened was the last—and he owned Ned’s Bookstore, first in Ann Arbor and then it was a major off-campus bookstore in Ypsilanti. So he had a viable business. And his brother was also involved. His brother was absolutely brilliant, I think he got his PhD at nineteen in nuclear engineering. So, you know, I mean, they were very unique people. Good businessmen. So they had farms and planes and fleets of cars and everything. But they had a big ship that they filled up with bales of marijuana wrapped in plastic, and I think that it was some kind of hurricane or typhoon—maybe it was the perfect storm that they made the movie of, the Perfect Storm. But the ship was destroyed. Broke up. It was coming up from South American and it broke up, and bales of marijuana washed up on the Atlantic coast, from Maine to Florida. And people were driving out on the beaches with Dune Buggies and jeeps, just picking these things up, just collecting them off the beaches. And so the federal government said, we’ve got to find out who’s at the root of this. And they found out, and I think he spent seven years in jail.</p>
<p>WW: Coming back to Detroit, how did you interpret what happened in Detroit? Did you see it as a riot? Did you see it as a rebellion? An uprising?</p>
<p>RM: Well, you know, for the people that were politically involved, it was an uprising. I don’t think it was a rebellion because it didn’t really have, like, a set of concrete sort of goals and a program, you know, demands. It didn’t—I didn’t see it—now, maybe it was, but I didn’t see it as a group that was, you know— used it as a stepping stone of the halls of power, that would bring about any kind of major changes in this city. I think some things happened in the wake of it. But I think that the thing that attracted most of the attention was the part of it that was a riot. The looting, the burning. I mean, it wasn’t—that part wasn’t organized. It didn’t take the form some of the protests of police shootings of black people today. It didn’t take the form of people in the streets or shutting the city down, or a movement like Black Lives Matter coming out of it. So I think that the notoriety and the fear that was engendered by it was more by people who saw it as a riot. I saw it as a riot, I didn’t see it as programmatic. I could be wrong, Frank might have a completely different idea than I do. Maybe that’s my liberal rather than radical leanings. But it didn’t seem unified, it didn’t seem programmatic, and it didn’t seem to lead to something that would be ongoing. Taking over a wing of, say, city government or the Democratic Party, or a third party, you know, or something that would have a lasting—be a lasting political force. Even DRUM, for the time that it existed, had some influence at Chrysler, but it never could take the next step. Never. And the fact that they were really left-wing—they didn’t use their leverage to really influence the UAW [United Auto Workers]. So it—a lot of that stuff didn’t have any ongoing political consequence. I mean, it might have had social consequences, you know, in terms of the quiescent liberal white community being woken up. It probably had some consequences in terms of speeding up white flight from the city, although that had pretty much happened already.</p>
<p>WW: Do you think that the events of ‘67 still hang over the metro area?</p>
<p>RM: Yeah, in a way, in a way. I think that—I think that a lot of the things that people were dissatisfied about then, they’re dissatisfied about now. The wage gap, you know. Even though we have black people in political power, and we did have—we had Archer and Young and black mayors and stuff, I don’t think that the left wing had much influence. It’s the builders and the developers and the people who bided their time until now and then can pick up—they can buy Detroit for pennies. I don’t really see any kind of major economic developments. I mean, you know, the jobs were starting to leave and then they accelerated. You know, they went down south and then they went to Mexico and they went overseas. So the drain of good-paying job just left people more economically troubled, economically depressed.</p>
<p>WW: Are you optimistic for the city moving forward?</p>
<p>RM: Now I am, because it’s sort of hit bottom. People were talking about a new industry for Detroit being urban farming. It’s such a radical, radical shift from manufacturing industries that could employ ten, twenty, thirty thousand people, you know, and give them good paying, 40, 50, 60,000 dollar-a-year jobs. Well, where’s that economic base going to come? Growing eggplants? I don’t think so. It’s going to be a whole cultural shift. Detroit’s never going to be a manufacturing powerhouse again. The people that are buying up the factories are converting them to condos. They’re not turning them into manufacturing plants. And the new economy—Google, where did they locate? Ann Arbor. Six thousand new jobs in Ann Arbor, not Detroit.</p>
<p>I’ve seen Pittsburgh. One of my daughters got her master’s degree in Pittsburgh, and I saw the sort of transformation of the steel industry, so now there are computers and medical research and education. And that seems to be a viable rebirth of Pittsburgh. Waiting to see what the configuration for Detroit is.</p>
<p>I’m working for a construction management company now, where I’m doing strategic planning and project management—I worked for the Detroit Public Schools for twenty-four years as a school social worker. I got an award, top school social worker in the state of Michigan, blah, blah, blah. I retired, you know, a year ago—well, June. And I’d been a consultant to this company, and as soon as they found out that I was retired, they asked me if I wanted to come and work for them part-time. So I’m involved, I’m involved in sort of overseeing the DuCharme Project. You know what that is? And we’re involved with Sachse, they’re the general contractor there, we’re involved with Monaghan, some of the top builders around here. We just bid on doing a few buildings on Bagley and Trumbull.</p>
<p>So I see that kind of thing. But these are—these are residential and small store buildings. They’re not going to be major employers. I’m involved in trying to raise the money to restore the Grande Ballroom right now. We just did a tour of the Grande and we have the 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary concert for the Grande, so I’m involved with a guy named Leo Early, who wrote a book about the Grande. So I’m sort of spearheading the fundraising to try to at least stabilize the Grande so it doesn’t deteriorate anymore, and to try to raise the money to put it together. Still involved, seventy-four, still try to stay active, you know.</p>
<p>WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, I really appreciate it.</p>
<p>RM: Sure. I mean—was it interesting?</p>
<p>WW: Oh, it was good.</p>
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
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50min 30sec
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HTvOtCz3458" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Roger Manilla, October 17th, 2016
Description
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In this interview, Roger Manilla shares his experience of growing up in Detroit and the suburbs, his association with radical left-wing groups, and his memories of ‘67.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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6/29/2017
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit MI
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Audio/mp3
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Activism
Ann Arbor
Community Activists
Race Relations
-
https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/be582aafcc320293318cc28364111700.JPG
296aa19127ca73e48e35bdece3e84e10
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
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Ann Kraemer
Brief Biography
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Ann Kraemer was born in Detroit, Michigan and during the summer of 1967 was a student in the School of Social Work at University of Michigan. Her time spent helping the people of Detroit influenced her decision to continue working with young adult groups and support groups and later working with Coleman Young in the Neighborhood Town Halls.
Interviewer's Name
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Bree Boettner
Interview Place
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Detroit, MI
Date
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06/18/2016
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00:28:31
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Julia Westblade
Transcription Date
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07/14/2016
Transcription
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<p>BB: This is Bree Boettner with the Detroit Historical Society Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Today is June 18 and we are at the museum and I am sitting down with Ann Kraemer. Thank you, Ann, for sitting down with us today.</p>
<p>AK: I am glad to be here, Bree.</p>
<p>BB: Okay, we’re going to start. Can you please tell me where and when you were born.</p>
<p>AK: I could tell you that. I was born in Detroit, Michigan in July of a long time ago.</p>
<p>BB: You don’t have to put a year, that’s fine. [laughs] “Of a long time ago.” I love it. You were born here in Detroit so your parents lived here. What did your parents do? What were their occupations?</p>
<p>AK: My Dad worked for Internal Revenue Service.</p>
<p>BB: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>AK: And my mom was a homemaker and mother to we five children.</p>
<p>BB: Wow. Older siblings, younger?</p>
<p>AK: Younger. I am the eldest.</p>
<p>BB: You’re the eldest. Fantastic. Where did you live in July 1967?</p>
<p>AK: At 10210 Second Avenue. At the corer or Glen Court a block from Chicago Boulevard, I believe.</p>
<p>BB: What were you doing in 1967?</p>
<p>AK: In 1967, I was a student in the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan. During the summer, from approximately May until August I was assigned to a field work experience at Moore Elementary School on Oakland and Holbrook.</p>
<p>BB: And what did you do in that position?</p>
<p>AK: I worked as a school-community agent in their program.</p>
<p>BB: How old were your siblings? You have four younger siblings; how old were they at that time?</p>
<p>AK: Oh dear.</p>
<p>BB: IF you can’t think of specific ages, roundabout ages is fine.</p>
<p>AK: Like 24, 22 –</p>
<p>BB: Okay. So, older adults.</p>
<p>AK: 19, and 16.</p>
<p>BB: Sounds good, sounds good. What do you remember about Detroit in the 1960s? Before 1967, describe how the city looked and how it felt.</p>
<p>AK: Oh, I liked the city. Yeah. Even when I grew up, I have fond memories of taking the street car down to Hudson’s. Everything revolved around going down to Hudson’s. I loved it.</p>
<p>BB: The toy floor is infamous. I’ve heard stories.</p>
<p>AK: The Christmas one. Oh, it was just unbelievably beautiful. And then as a teenager slash young adult, Detroit was the happening place to be -</p>
<p>BB: [at the same time] I can imagine.</p>
<p>AK: -I truly enjoyed it.</p>
<p>BB: Along with visiting Hudson’s, what other fun activities did you and your siblings do in the city? What occupied your time?</p>
<p>AK: The library. We spent a lot of time at the Detroit Public Libraries. Going to the movies, that kind of thing.</p>
<p>BB: Did you –</p>
<p>AK: And dances. I went to a lot of dances.</p>
<p>BB: Did you feel any racial tensions in your early life and in your 20s?</p>
<p>AK: No, not really. I attended Wayne State before I went to U of M and that was a somewhat diverse campus, so.</p>
<p>BB: So it wasn’t something new for you.</p>
<p>AK: Right, right.</p>
<p>BB: I just wanted to clarify that. What was your community, the area – You grew up on Second Street.</p>
<p>AK: No, I did not grow up on Second. That’s where I was in 1967.</p>
<p>BB: So where did you grow up?</p>
<p>AK: In far Northeast Detroit near Seven Mile and Meringue.</p>
<p>BB: Can you describe your neighborhood and community for us?</p>
<p>AK: It was a kind of a blue-collar neighborhood. All single family homes. The area was predominately Catholic, heavily Italian and Polish.</p>
<p>BB: How would you describe the relationship between your community and the government? So your community and the city of Detroit or were there any tensions of any sort that you saw?</p>
<p>AK: As I grew up? Yeah, a couple of things. With one exception, there was never anyone from the Detroit City Council who lived on the East side. They were all Northwest siders, or lived on the Northwest. And that was always a sore spot. You know, why do we vote but not have any representation. That was one thing. The other thing was that it was not the most welcoming area for African Americans. It was not.</p>
<p>BB: So we’re going to come up to ‘67, how did you first hear about the riots? When they first broke out, how did you hear about them?</p>
<p>AK: I received a phone call because I was working at Moore Elementary School, the school system called the school community agent and she then called – there were two of us assigned to work at the school with her. So they called and they wanted to know what we had heard or had we heard and if so what had we heard. And because both the other student and I lived in the area where the –</p>
<p>BB: Where the riot broke out. And being somebody that was in that area when it broke, how would you classify the event? Some people like to call it a riot, some call in an uprising, others call it a rebellion. How did you perceive the event?</p>
<p>AK: More of a rebellion.</p>
<p>BB: More of a rebellion. Can you tell me some accounts of what happened or what you saw?</p>
<p>AK: Oh yeah.</p>
<p>BB: That’s okay. You can take your time.</p>
<p>AK: We were asked by the school system, I guess it was called School-Community Relations Department - Go into the community surrounding our schools and try to get an estimate of how many homes needed baby formula, any kind of supplies for little ones because the stores in the area had been burned down or looted. And then likewise on the other end of the spectrum, any disabled or elderly person that might need oxygen replacement, anything like that where they could not leave their home to go to another part of town and get it. So with the single exception of July 24, we were, I think at least ten straight days, we were on the streets talking with people, finding what the needs were. And through my wonderful boss and the fabulous principle, trying to make plans to meet the needs, it was good. The school had a very good relationship with the community so we were asked if some of the kids from the community, teens, could be of assistance to us. So they did, they’d come up, “Miss Kraemer, [laughs] we’re taking care of you.” Kind of thing. The kids were absolutely marvelous in reaching out to us. The other thing, oh nuts, I forgot what you had asked. Alright, this is what we did for ten or twelve days because the community was so tight. On a Saturday, I went back to Ann Arbor to spend the night because it really was very hot here. There was lights out every night. The helicopters – I was on the top floor of the apartment building where I rented – the helicopters were right on top of us so when we finally weren’t going to go to work, I went to Ann Arbor. Low and behold, about eight in the morning, didn’t I get a phone call from the Public School Office, the central office of School-Community Relations saying where is your boss? The actual employee. And I said, oh, she went fishing with her husband in Canada. Where is your colleague? The other student from U of M. I forget where she had said she was going. They said, Well, the federal government has declared you a disaster area and Chrysler is coming in with its trucks in an hour or two to bring all sorts of food and supplies. We need you to go over to the school and open it up and round up some kids to help Chrysler unload all of these supplies. So I believe one of the maintenance crew came in as well as me. I worked again with these wonderful teenagers from the area and we unloaded the trucks. I got the school open and we unloaded the trucks.</p>
<p>BB: Wow.</p>
<p>AK: It was something.</p>
<p>BB: Did you see any – there are so may various accounts of 67 but did you see any of the actual uprising? The rioting, the looting. Any memories of actually seeing that or were you more on the front lines of aid?</p>
<p>AK: More on the front lines, however, what I did see. I went out early in that week, the week of the 23. I went out on Oakland surrounded by the teens to see what was going on and what the needs were. The National Guard was driving their tanks down the street and I saw this young guardsman shaking his rifle like this as he went by and then it went off.</p>
<p>BB: Like, by accident?</p>
<p>AK: Yeah. By me. By accident but by me.</p>
<p>BB: Did he hit anybody that you know of?</p>
<p>AK: He hit the building but there was –</p>
<p>BB: Surreal.</p>
<p>AK: Yes, it was quite surreal. And I also remember on the 23, backing up a day. The day that it started. I was taking one of my godchildren to the zoo that day. It was his birthday and I said we’ll go to the zoo and when I came home is when I received the phone call about what’s going on. Well, I then went to church. It was the Sacrament Cathedral and the pastor was a chaplain. An army or a guard chaplain, and he said from the pulpit, This is a very – I’m trying to think of how he put it – a unique experience because I’m here and all around us on Woodward, everything was devastated. And he said, And I will be leaving to go and work as a chaplain to the guard that has been brought in to assist with this. It was those kinds of experiences I had rather than actually watching somebody. I saw some of the loot, don’t get my wrong. Kids would come in and they all of a sudden had shoes and several of our kids were missing and I went down to police headquarters to find out. Gee, the family is not able to locate their son James, can you help? And being Caucasian, and I was carrying a briefcase, they thought I was a lawyer so the police were very kind to me in terms of. They did help me to locate the boys and girls that we could not find. So it was more that kind of thing.</p>
<p>BB: So, just a few more details. Because you did have five younger siblings, were your siblings living in the area at the time?</p>
<p>AK: They were all living in Northeast Detroit. I take that back. One of them was married. One, maybe two were married, but one was living in Roseville.</p>
<p>BB: Do you know of any accounts they may have had in relation to the riots? Did they call you to be like, Oh my goodness, what’s going on? Or anything like that?</p>
<p>AK: Right, my dad was quite upset. He knew exactly where I was living and Second to Twelfth is -</p>
<p>BB: Yeah, very close. Dad was worried, huh.</p>
<p>AK: Right.</p>
<p>BB: That’s good to know. There was, after the event, how did you see the city of Detroit change?</p>
<p>AK: Immediately after the event, there was such a coming together of the community. It just strengthened us. Strengthened it even more so immediately after. Also, shortly thereafter was the development of New Detroit and then some more community based organizations designed for Caucasians to work with Caucasians to understand that we also had a big part in creating the tensions that lead to the rebellion.</p>
<p>BB: How did your position at the school pan out after the event?</p>
<p>AK: That was -</p>
<p>BB: Cause I could imagine that would be an interesting transition.</p>
<p>AK: It really was. A week or two after the event, we were called back to Ann Arbor. There were lots of students placed but most of them were dealing with what most social workers to is therapy. None of them worked and my colleague and I and, like, two others were sitting there and we had worked through it every single day. They gave us As and we said, for what? We did was social workers are supposed to do. We did respond because we really were in the middle of the situation both in our living situation and in our fieldwork.</p>
<p>BB: Some serious experience you got on that resume quite early. [All laugh]</p>
<p>AK: It really changed the whole – people were like, “You were there?” Yeah, we were.</p>
<p>BB: So I have to ask, how did that affect your work after? Because you were a student and you were learning about social work at that time and you were faced with an event that dramatic in the city of Detroit, did it affect how you went forth in your career and how you worked with the community?</p>
<p>AK: I think so. I think I got such a good grounding in what to do through the person I reported to and the principal. I had such a good ground in the community work so that I wound up being hire to do that kind of work in subsequent years.</p>
<p>BB: What was your position afterwards once you graduated?</p>
<p>AK: I worked organizing teen groups. I’m sorry, young adult groups after that and then I worked with a program to organize church people to support poor people through the – friends offer rides. We organize groups of men and women, primarily women, to support poor people involved with the welfare system. So I did that for a number of years.</p>
<p>BB: Fantastic. You’ve got some notes. Anything imperative we need to discuss?</p>
<p>AK: Well eventually I worked with the Neighborhood City Hall. I worked for Coleman Young. I was the manager of the Neighborhood City Hall. </p>
<p>BB: And how what was --</p>
<p>AK: The mini mayor.</p>
<p>BB: Yeah, and what did that entail? What did that work entail?</p>
<p>AK: That entailed working again with the community responding to all of their concerns. Representing the mayor if there was something coming up that he was not able to attend.</p>
<p>BB: Just a few more questions to wrap up. What was the impact of the unrest in July 1967 on you and your family?</p>
<p>AK: I would say, it was challenging for some people in my family.</p>
<p>BB: Do you want to elaborate on that?</p>
<p>AK: I went to my parents’ home one night. Neighbors – in those days you didn’t move 93 times. You bought a house. You stayed there. This was your neighborhood. Everybody’s kids were your kids. What you probably heard as a younger woman is that when you went out, if you did anything wrong, there were three neighbors to tell your mother. It was all the time. I went home, I saw these same people with guns. “Let them come into our neighborhood. I’ll get ‘em.” Kind of thing. That was awful. That was devastating and it was made kind of more devastating and difficult for some members of my family because they knew I didn’t feel that way so I was kind of the oddball. It was a challenging time for everybody for different reasons but you grow through it. And everyone changes appropriately, positively. </p>
<p>BB: Fingers crossed.</p>
<p>AK: No, I mean, they did.</p>
<p>BB: Oh, they did, okay.</p>
<p>AK: Oh yeah, oh yeah.</p>
<p>BB: Good. It was a good change.</p>
<p>AK But it takes time for all of that to happen.</p>
<p>BB: So we talked a little bit about how the city changed but one of the facets of this project is trying to educate the next generation about this topic, right. So, is there a message you’d like to leave for future generations about Detroit before, after, and during 1967 and how they can grow from that information?</p>
<p>AK: One thing is I felt that the field placement that I had was, I was so fortunate to have that because the principal at the school where I had worked had made a decision to have a school that had a bell shaped curve of students. It did not, it was kind of a flat curve and so he set in motion a number of changes in the school that would help the kids learn and become stronger, better educated members of society. And it was working in the school community program by involving the parents of the children and the community around really backed that up. We had so many programs working with that community. And if I could say anything to the next generation, it would be that. It’s most difficult to enter any place without a preconceived notion of what you will experience and what the people there will be like. Once you get through that, if you can get through that, and see that goodness and strength of people, you will be able to help to develop a strong community. Strong communities lead to strong cities and I think that would be the message that I would like to leave. I am not saying that I did not know people who acted inappropriately, people who destroy other people’s property and businesses but I am saying that the goodness and strength of the community far outweighed that. They just couldn’t see it. All you could see was the destruction. The fires and everything. It was awful. A few days ago I went to lunch with a woman who I only knew from one situation from church, period. And something came up about, I don’t know how it came up, “Where did you used to live? Where did you used to go to church? And I said, “Oh well.” And when I said, “In ‘67 I went to the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament,” and she said, “Well I did, too, Where did you live?” I said, “Second.” Well she lived just a few blocks away in Highland Park and she said, “Oh yeah, the blackout, the helicopters, the tanks.” She said, “I could never forget it.” That’s not the kind of message I want to send forward but it is something I will go to my grave remembering.</p>
<p>BB: That’s kind of all the things that I wanted to discuss.</p>
<p>AK: Not.</p>
<p>BB: Not anything you can think of:</p>
<p>AK: Not that I - well, I’ll say one thing and you can decide whether to leave it in or not, but the day I was called in Ann Arbor to come back to Detroit and open up the school I stopped at this one young man’s home because I knew that if I could get him on board, the others – he was like the leader of the group and he’s a big guy. Real big. Well this was early on a Sunday morning when I went knocking on his door and I knocked and knocked and banging and the police came up and they “What are you doing?” They thought I was a prostitute. So I will remember that time, too.</p>
<p>BB: Did you have to turn and be like, I’m just trying to get a muscular guy to do some lifting?</p>
<p>AK: They’d heard everything at that time.</p>
<p>BB: I’m sure they had. Well that’s a fun little snippet. Well, I did give you my contact information so please don’t hesitate if you have any further stories you’d like to add to your oral history, please just email them to us. We’ll definitely add them to your profile and I will end this for us. So thank you so much for sitting down with me.</p>
<p>AK: Thank you. </p>
Original Format
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audio
Duration
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28min 31sec
Interviewer
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Bree Boettner
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Ann Kraemer
Location
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Detroit, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rA1royug0zc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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Title
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Ann Kraemer, June 18th, 2016
Description
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In this interview, Ann Kraemer discusses her role as a field work student at the School of Social Work for the University of Michigan. Kraemer and her coworkers went through the neighborhoods making sure families, children, and the elderly had the supplies they needed and then organized the distribution of supplies.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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07/19/2016
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 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Ann Arbor
Community Activists
Gun Violence
Michigan National Guard
Moore Elementary School
Volunteers
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https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/9688279e943cc73afec5adcb8b0c8296.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
Written Story
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Text
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My name is Sandy Livnat (formally Shmuel Livnat) and I was born in Detroit on December 4, 1948. <br /><strong><br />Describe the neighborhood(s) you lived in. Socioeconomic and/or racial and ethnic demographics as well:<br /></strong> <br />At the time of the riots, my family lived in Southfield, MI, where we had moved in 1964, I grew up in several middle class/upper middle class neighborhoods in Detroit. From birth till 1952 we lived on Burlingame off of Dexter. From 1952-1959 we lived at 3359 Leslie just off of Dexter (first house my parents bought). From 1959-1964 we lived at 17586 Wisconsin in the 6 Mile/Wyoming area. There our next door neighbor happened to be Jerry Cavanagh who became Detroit’s mayor as of 1962. When we moved out of the city in 1964, I was 15 years old and in high school (11th grade). When we moved in to the above two Detroit neighborhoods, they were almost exclusively white and predominantly Jewish. My first elementary school McCulloch (where I spent K-4th grade) was comprised primarily of Jewish children though there were always several black kids in my class. My 2nd elementary school, Bagley (where I spent grades 5-6) was predominantly Jewish children and was less integrated than McCulloch. I seem to recall that in my 5th and 6th grade class, we had 3 non-Jewish students, one of whom was black. I attended Post Junior High School for grades 7-9 which, because of its drawing from (at least) 3 elementary schools, had a larger number of non-Jewish as well as black students. I began high school (half of 10th grade only) at Cass Tech, a magnet school downtown which was highly integrated, although my class (in the Science and Arts Magnet program) was highly predominantly white. I have a distinct memory of one black classmate at Cass Tech, the daughter of city councilman William Patrick. I remember her as being whip-smart, outspoken and rather sarcastic, and I felt respect and fondness for her! Within 2-3 years of our moves into the above two Detroit neighborhoods, black families began moving in. I have no personal recollections of any serious racial disharmony. I do recall a bit of tension between white and black students at Post Junior High – though these mainly surfaced in Gym class when competitive sports and physical contact were involved. What I do remember is that the “for sale” signs began appearing on the lawns of Jewish homes once the influx of black families was in progress. While my parents were not among those who rushed to move out in response to these demographic changes, I do recall hearing talk at home that property values would fall as more black families populated the neighborhood. Based on their personal experiences with such loss in value, my parents in fact counseled me against the purchase of my first home (in suburban Seattle, WA. which we knew would be for a short period). It turns out that not making that purchase would have been a big mistake financially, as the property value almost doubled in one year! <br /><strong><br />What do you remember about Detroit in the early and mid 1960's?<br /></strong> <br />My memories of Detroit in during that period were positive and happy. Not being familiar with places like La Jolla Beach in California, I thought Detroit was a “nice place” to live. In hindsight, Detroit was a perfectly good place to grow up. As a kid, I didn’t have the same feelings towards the long and difficult winters as I do as an adult. My parents (along with maternal grandparents who lived with us) were survivors of the Holocaust who immigrated to Detroit in early 1947, coming directly from a displaced persons camp in Austria because my grandfather had an older sister who had settled in Detroit many years earlier, and such displaced persons needed a sponsor in the U.S. at that time. My grandfather and parents opened a tailor shop in Detroit which eventually grew to two stores and ended up in the suburbs. I recall as a youngster being proud of being a Detroiter, in large part due to the success and power of the auto industry (more so than the status of the Tigers and Lions in sports standings – which were not terribly strong in that period). I recall joking with schoolmates that Detroit would be a major target of the Soviet Union were a nuclear war to break out, given the presence of so many manufacturing facilities that produced military vehicles, airplane engines, etc. When considering and discussing racial problems around the country, as a kid I distinctly recall having the (mis)impression that racially, all was well in Detroit, in particular because the auto industry and its related industries provided “full” employment for black people. Personally, my family was excited about the fact that our next door neighbor, a young attorney of no particular note, Jerry Cavanagh, ran for mayor in 1961, survived the primaries in 2nd place, and then defeated the sitting mayor in the general election. <br /><strong>Where were you living +what was your occupation in July 1967?</strong> <br />As noted, we were living in Southfield, about 1 mile outside the city limits. I was a college student at the University of Michigan between my freshman and sophomore years. I had attended summer courses in Ann Arbor the first part of the summer, and, in July, I was working as a camp counselor at a sleep-away camp in upper Oakland Country. How did you first hear about the unrest that became the riots/rebellion/uprising? I recall hearing radio reports (from camp, where we had no access to TV) about a police raid at a “blind pig” at the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount and the surprising result that this led to unrest and protests in the surrounding neighborhood which was predominantly, if not completely, black. I was unfamiliar with the term “blind pig” at that time and found it interesting. What was very interesting to me personally was the fact that this was a mere few blocks from the place my parents had lived when they first arrived in the United States (i.e., it had been a “Jewish neighborhood” in the 1940’s.) Consequently, as I was aware, a number of store owners in that neighborhood were Jews, as were a fair number of landlords who owned rental properties there. Our family knew some of them personally.<br /> <br /><strong>How did your family and friends react upon hearing this news?<br /></strong><br />I recall primarily feeling “disappointment” that my sense of the tranquility as to race relations in Detroit was so wrong, particularly after the L.A. Watts riots in ‘65 at which time many of us thought, “this would never happen in Detroit.” I seem to recall my parents being both angry and fearful, and it brought out various anti-black sentiments that they held. I recall fearing for those business and rental property owners whom we knew when looting and burning in the “12th Street area began and spread. I had a day off from camp during that week and was shocked by the sights I now saw on TV. My fear became more widespread, for everyone who lived in the affected areas as well as the police and National Guard troops that were brought in. I also recall feeling very sorry for Mayor Cavanagh, our acquaintance and former neighbor, that this happened on his watch and that he had to face a situation for which he (and others like him) were certainly ill-prepared. I also felt bad in the coming years that this effectively damaged his ability to run successfully for higher political office, both governor and U.S. senator. <br /><strong><br />Historians often describe this events as a “riot”, what term would you use to describe this time?<br /></strong> <br />I have no disagreement with the use of that term to describe what went on. It certainly fit my view of what a “riot” was. <br /><strong><br />Any particular moments or memories that stand out from that summer?<br /></strong> <br />My parents owned a clothing store/tailor shop in Oak Park, at 9 Mile and Coolidge. While there was obviously no geographical nexus between that location and the location of the riots, the fear of destructive activity hit us when we could see smoke rising in the distance from the area which known as “Royal Oak Township”, located in Oakland County, just north of 8 Mile Road and west of Meyers Rd, one mile west of Schaefer/Coolidge, namely, rather close to our store. We understood (correctly or not) that area to be populated by blacks and to be somewhat impoverished. I recall that these concerns of riot-like activity there were confirmed by news reports of some fires. That triggered a flurry of activity on the part of my family, at which time I (taking an extra day off from camp) and my brothers, helped board up the front windows of our store, and transport the more expensive items of clothing from the store to our house several miles west (in Southfield, near 9 mile and Evergreen Rd.). This activity occupied the better part of a day. On the following day, I returned to camp, “way far away”. It turned out that nothing happened in the area of our store. As the rioting in the city waned and ended, the clothing items were returned to the store, the windows were unboarded, and life went on as usual. <br /><strong><br />How did these events impact the rest of your life?<br /></strong> <br />These events clearly disabused me of any incorrect notions that race relations in Detroit were good or even intact, certainly not better than anywhere else. I left the U.S. and lived in Israel from 1968-1976, and the whole issue of U.S. race relations became much less salient to me than the immediate issues of safety and security in Israel, where I witnessed from various distances several terrorist bomb explosions and lived through the 1973 war (albeit not on the “front”, though in Israel, the front was not far away, and I lost a brother-in-law and several friends in that war.) So during those years, I admittedly did not pay particular attention to race issues in Detroit or the U.S. in general. I married in Israel and my wife and I returned to the U.S. in early 1976. We lived in Seattle, WA (1976-78) which had an extremely small black minority population. I was therefore surprised to learn how much racism was evident among whites who had little or no contact with black people most of the time. We, and our children, lived in the South for several years, in Durham, NC (1978-1981) when we were both employed at Duke University. During that time, I reached the conclusion that race relations in Detroit and other industrial cities of north were, in fact, worse than those in the South, maybe because the South had undergone forced desegregation – and had come to terms with it, or at least a majority of the white population had. In contrast Detroit and other northern urban areas had not gone through such a process. I also came to believe the depth of the anti-black attitudes of certain ethnic groups in Detroit were held by those whites who had worked hand in hand with black people in the auto plants; when that industry came upon hard times and suffered large layoffs, these whites thought employment of blacks came at their expense.<br /><strong> <br />What changes if any did you notice to the metro Detroit area after 1967?</strong> <br /><br />In the years following the 1967 riots, I was sensitized to the extent of anti-black sentiment in the Jewish community in Detroit, who didn’t have the excuse of the “employment competition” angle, and whose racist views seemed to emanate more from fear (rational or irrational) of black people. I hadn’t felt this as much earlier – maybe because of my age and naiveté. From a distance (Israel from 1968-76; other cities in the U.S. thereafter) with regular visits to Detroit, at least once a year if not more, I noticed increasing racial polarization in the Detroit area, highlighted by continued white flight to the suburbs that effectively depleted Detroit of white residents. This was coupled with what one might call “urban rot” with the city limits. Rightly or wrongly, I feel that part of this was induced or promoted by Coleman Young’s long tenure as mayor of Detroit and what I viewed as his “f--- the whites” attitude. I often felt that had Detroit’s black community had a strong clerical leader (not one of Rev. C.L. Franklin’s ilk) or a black mayor not from the hardscrabble labor movement like Young but from the church i.e., one who shared more views with the Rev. Martin Luther King, race relations in Detroit might not have gone downhill in the way in which they did. <br /><strong><br />You have lived all around the US; did you consider returning to Detroit and/or consciously choose to live elsewhere? If so, how and why?</strong><br /> <br />Other than during a very brief period in 1992, I never gave any thought to returning to live in the Detroit area, certainly not the city itself. The reasons for this were more organic than conscious. I cannot attribute that attitude to race relations in the Detroit area, but rather primarily to specific professional considerations (my profession having transitioned abruptly beginning in the late 1980s from biomedical academic research to patent law specializing in the life sciences). Other than distance from family, I have no regrets about not living in the Detroit area. I’ve lived in the Washington DC area since 1988, an area that is certainly not free from difficult race relations – maybe more difficult than in Detroit. So again, it is clear in my mind that this lack of regrets does not stem from anything related to race issues or connect in any way to the events of July 1967.
Original Format
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Microsoft Word document
Submitter's Name
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Noah Levinson and Sandy Livnat
Submission Date
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07/15/2015
Search Terms
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University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Oak Park
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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Sandy Livnat
Description
An account of the resource
Sandy Livnat was a student at the University of Michigan in July 1967. He was working at a summer camp in northern Oakland County and returned home to help secure the family business in Oak Park.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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07/16/2015
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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document
Language
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en-US
Type
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Text
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Ann Arbor
Detroit Community Members
Looting
Oak Park
University of Michigan