OC: Oliver Cole.
JW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. Can you start by telling me where and when you were born?
OC: I was born in 1951 in Henderson, Kentucky.
JW: Alright and when did you or your family move up to Detroit?
OC: We came to Detroit July 1, 1965.
JW: Alright and what brought you to Detroit?
OC: Came with my mom, had nowhere else to go.
JW: Why did your mom come up to Detroit?
OC: She was looking for different work. She had a brother that lived here, so that made it easier for her to transition.
JW: And what were your initial impressions of the city –
OC: I’m sorry?
JW: What were your impressions of the city moving up here as a young teenager?
OC: Holy smokes. Scared to death. From coming from a small town, never saw this many people in one place, one time. Stunned and shocked. At that time, Detroit was the fourth largest city in the United States, so there was a lot of people. Lot of – and had no idea a place like that could be this big- coming from where I came.
JW: When you first moved up in 1965, what neighborhood did you go to?
OC: We were staying with my uncle who lived out on Baylor Street, which is south of Six Mile and Puritan between- Baylor Street between Six Mile and Puritan.
JW: Did you stay there for a while?
OC: Stayed there from July 1 until almost the start of the school year, which would’ve been fall of 1965. Because I think I went to Webber the first year, finished up at Webber.
JW: Where did you go from there?
OC: Cass. Cass Tech. I think. I started at Cass Tech. Went to Webber in 1965. Let’s see I was 15 when I got here, 15-16. Probably started at Cass at 16.
JW: And then when you and your mom moved out from your uncle’s house, did you stay in that neighborhood?
OC: No, we stayed in – that’s where we came. Moved to Scotten. 6064 Scotten, I’ll never forget it.
JW: [Laughs] And what was that neighborhood like?
OC: That neighborhood was a nice neighborhood. I won’t say upper-middle class. It was renting. It had a lot of two-family rental homes: wooden frame homes, a couple of brick homes. West side of Detroit, north of McGraw, west of Grand River, south of Tireman. Just a neighborhood.
JW: Was it an integrated neighborhood?
OC: I beg your pardon?
JW: Was it an integrated neighborhood?
OC: I’m trying to think. Probably. Didn’t really pay- the racial makeup of the city at that time, I didn’t really pay that much attention to it. No. Because on Tireman, this was- you’ve got to remember, this was before, what freeway is that over there? 96? This was before 96 even was built. So, I had a paper route along Tireman Avenue and the Boulevard. So, that was quote, unquote “a well-to-do neighborhood.” So, it was quite- I think it was integrated pretty good back then.
JW: Did you primarily stay in that neighborhood, or did you like to go around the city?
OC: We went everywhere. From that neighborhood, we used to ride our bikes out to Rouge Park. It seemed like it would take forever to get down there. I used to take the- what was it- the Hamilton bus. It used to go from – picked it up on Lodge Freeway, would go south to Downtown. I never knew how far north it went because I never took anything further on it. But then I found out the Hamilton bus actually went from the old bus depot downtown all the way out to Northland. So, it was a pretty twisting, turning route that it took. Interesting route when you looked at it on a map.
JW: As you were moving around the city, did you notice any tension in the city?
OC: Uh-uh. The only tension was that the Tigers had just got eliminated from contention. Didn’t make the playoffs, or I don’t know what happened that year, ’67. They were up and coming, but they didn’t quite make it. I think that’s what the focus on – remember I’m 16 or 17 years old – 16 years old at that time. I’m just getting out.
JW: So, you said you moved here with your mom. Do you have any siblings?
OC: Yes, a younger brother came. I came here in the summer. He came here at the end of summer. So, we both started school at Webber Junior High, which was on Tireman in the – we were walking distance from where we lived.
JW: What kind of profession did your mom have?
OC: She worked. First she worked for the telephone company. She was an operator. Then she got a job as a receptionist, which I don’t know what she did, at Herman Kiefer [Hospital].
JW: So then, going into the summer of 1967, so you’re about 17 years old. What do you remember from that summer?
OC: Actually, I think I was 16. Because 17 would- 1951 to 1967- yeah 16. Don’t remember much. I mean I cannot remember like - First of all, I never went down on Twelfth Street, which was only like four blocks, because there was always a stigma about, “Don’t go on Twelfth Street.” So, I never went on Twelfth Street.
JW: What do you think made – why was there that stigma?
OC: Oh well, shoot! There was always something going on, on Twelfth Street. Nothing that a 16-year-old at that time in Detroit should ever be involved in. I wasn’t in any kind of illegal gambling, didn’t have any need for prostitutes, couldn’t buy liquor, I didn’t shop that much, so there was no reason for me to be going on Twelfth Street. Plus, you were told not to go on Twelfth Street, so just didn’t go on Twelfth Street.
JW: So, where – how did you first hear about what was going on, on the week of July 23?
OC: Well, you could see it and feel it. You knew something was going on because so many police cars were around. Then, you heard the news reports about the Algiers Motel on Virginia Park. You knew there was something going on, but information didn’t get out until way later on, you found out, “Oh this is what happened.” So, that was one thing. Then, you find out it really happened from a blind pig raid on Twelfth and Collingwood [Clairmount], which was a good distance from where we were, about a mile. But, word- there’s no social media, there’s no internet, and there was no cell-phones, but this information spread quickly across the city. I have no idea how so many people got wind of it so quickly. [pointing outside] There goes a little trolley.
JW: So, what do you remember from that week?
OC: I’m trying to think what date it is? I think it started on a Thursday?
JW: It started on a Sunday.
OC: Sunday, okay. That’s right; that explains a lot. Obviously, it must have started Sunday, early Sunday morning. I think we went to church which was around the corner from us. So, the news hadn’t hit us yet, we hadn’t see anything. I think the first time you get notice of something, “Oh, there’s a house on fire.” Then its – because you’re looking at smoke, “Oh, there’s a lot of houses on fire. Wow, the whole strip is on fire.” So, your curiosity wants to make you go and investigate. That’s when you find out, “Oh this is something – something else going on.” Fire trucks are constantly going, night and day. Then the police are going constantly, night and day. You don’t realize what’s happening because at 16 years old, not this – a 16-year-old today would be on social media. They’d have Twitter, they’d have Snapchat, all these things. They’d be in communication a lot faster, a lot sooner, than we were at 16 at that age. I didn’t have a phone. My mom had a phone. So, there was nobody for me to call, and nobody to call me. Probably, she probably knew more than what I did – I hope she did, and probably just kept it from me. Just said, “You don’t need to know.”
JW: So, when you first saw the smoke and everything, did you go investigate or did you stay in your house?
OC: Oh, no, no no. I’d say, “What’s happening over there?” “Nothing. [Laughs] Stay here.” You got to remember, a 16-year-old boy, man, whatever you want to call it at that age and that era in Detroit would have done exactly what his parents told him to do. It wouldn’t be like today where you tell him don’t do something, “Okay I’m going.” And, you’re talking about a single woman raising kids, totally different then than it is now.
JW: So, did your mom and your younger brother stay home that week, too?
OC: It was just my younger brother. If she told one of us and both of us to stay home, we both stayed home. That was it. There was no chance – it wasn’t because of our upbringing and where we came from, it was unheard of to be, as they say “Boy, don’t give me not back talk!” It was unheard of to talk back to your parents. It just wasn’t – it’s just something we wouldn’t do.
JW: Did your mom stay home that week, or [talking simultaneously] did she have to go to work?
OC: [Talking simultaneously] No, she had to go to work every single day. Didn’t miss a day’s work and was never late. She kept that to herself, and she – I’m trying to think – I think she had a car then. Yeah, she had a car then. So, she got to work every single day. Never –
JW: And, so you said Twelfth Street was about four blocks away from where you lived?
OC: No, Twelfth Street was four blocks away from where she worked.
JW: From where she worked, okay.
OC: Oh, I’m sorry. Started on Scotten, we moved to Hazelwood two years later.
JW: Oh, okay.
OC: So, Hazelwood is where – I’m getting my getting my streets mixed up. On Scotten we were nowhere near Twelfth Street. We were on the west side – near west side of Detroit. We would have to drive – shoot – or walk or bike a half hour to get to Twelfth Street. Where my mom worked at Herman Keifer [Hospital] was four blocks from Twelfth Street. So, once again: Don’t go on Twelfth Street. There wasn’t any sense in going on Twelfth Street.
JW: And so then, as – when the National Guard was called in, did that increase the anxiety in the city for you or did that make things a little more reassuring?
OC: A lot of 1967, for me, was the knowledge of it came after, years after maybe five, maybe ten years after. I never knew about the snipers because I never saw any or heard any. It wasn’t until after the fact that you find out, oh 43 people were killed or some amount of numbers. There was snipers shooting. The only thing I can attest to seeing with my eyes: the devastation of the buildings, the commercial buildings because I was able to go up on Grand River and from the Boulevard north on Grand River, stores were just being looted, Cancellation Shoes, all the department stores and appliance stores were looted. There was a, what would be called a party store, drug store around the corner from my house at West Grand Boulevard and McGraw. Totally destroyed. I had just been in the store the day before and I saw all of the man’s products and small personal deodorant, things like that just strewn about on the ground and right next to it was a fire station. I had a buddy of mine that lived two houses up from that, so we used to cut through each other’s backyards to get to each other’s houses. And his mom and dad had him quarantined. He said, “Well, you’ve got to go home because this is what happening down here.” So, I couldn’t come over and play. That’s when it affected me.
JW: Did you see the National Guard then or was it just –
OC: I saw the tracks of the tanks, but I saw the Jeeps. That was the first time I’ve ever seen a Jeep with a .50 caliber machine gun. Didn’t know what it was at the time. Didn’t know what caliber it was but it was a Jeep. And it was soldiers, people in – it didn’t matter to me “National Guard,” to me it was the army and it was just shocking to see that in an American city. You saw it on television, you watched the news, you saw it in other places. This was something happening in, at that time, the fourth largest city in the country. And there was a disbelief, a disassociation; I’m thinking to myself, “This would never happen in Henderson, Kentucky and here it is happening in Detroit, Michigan.” Probably ignorance was bliss because if I had known how dangerous the situation was for me walking around on the sidewalk, I probably never would have been out there. But I didn’t know. That’s part of God looking out for you because I was too naïve to know how dangerous a situation it really was. I didn’t know about people sniping I didn’t know about the police being trigger happy. I was a young, black man-boy walking along the street. Would’ve been another statistic. So, just by the grace of God, nothing happened to me and I got home.
JW: When did the danger of the week begin to set in?
OC: When was the what?
JW: When did the danger, that you now associate with that week, when did that begin to set in?
OC: Because it’s after the fact, it’s like if – I guess the only way to describe it is you’re at the airport and a plane crashed but you’re not on it. You feel for the people there and you’re at the airport and you’re ready to fly or you’ve just flown in. But it didn’t happen to you but you can sort of emphasize with, “Gee,” I’ll say it again, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” The only thing I guess I can relate it to, the day after the plane Flight 91 or 93 or whatever it was that crashed out here at Metro [Detroit Metropolitan Airport] twenty-some years ago, I had just got from Japan. It was like phew. I don’t know. It was one of those things were, after the fact, when you sit down and read – a caveat of this, they just filed a movie here. 1967. Katheryn Bigelow [Detroit, 2017] I was an extra in that movie. I played one of the group of men arrested and we were – they filmed this at the Tenth Precinct and that’s where they actually brought these people in the night of the disturbance – and it was interesting watching the recreation, that chaos, because they were the police and how they responded and how we were supposed to be acting and pretending. So, that’s about as close as I came to it. They bloodied our faces up and put makeup on us to make it look like we had been dragged and beaten because apparently there was a lot of it going on. Now, poetic license, who knows? I wasn’t an actual survivor of it, but I played one on the TV.
JW: Oh wow, oh, that’s fun. That’s interesting.
OC: We’ll see how much I get cut.
JW: Do you think that that week and everything that happened, do you think that that affected your opinion of the city or the way you viewed the city?
OC: I moved into the city on July 1, 1965 and I’ve never moved out. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I never ran, I never hid. I bought and sold real estate. The kids grew up here. I’ve never had a problem with living in Detroit. So, to me, no, it didn’t affect me. I saw the changes in other people. I saw the changes in attitude toward Detroit long before Cleveland became the joke of the nation, Detroit was. I don’t like the term “Reinventing Detroit.” I don’t like that definition that we’re getting now because we’re looking out and seeing trolleys go up and down paved roads. Woodward was always a busy street. In fact, it was busy – in fact, we had streetcars on it before. So, streetcars now doesn’t make Woodward any better or worse that it was when I came here in ’65 because trolleys were running up and down the street then. As a matter of fact, when they dug up this road, they hit the tracks. They could have probably used them. This building – the Detroit Institute of Arts was there, Wayne State was here. It’s bigger now. This building was here. I say the biggest change in Detroit from then to now is you didn’t have the number of vacant houses and properties and that has nothing to do with the riots. The riots burned down commercial areas; they didn’t burn down neighborhoods. That’s the biggest misconception. Neighborhoods weren’t touched. But commercial strips were hit and hit hard. Grand River, Gratiot, McGraw. Any place where you had businesses, they were hit hard. But the actual neighborhoods were not touched. As much as people would like to believe that this caused the neighborhoods to – no, what happened was after the businesses left, the people left. Then that cycle of – and I’ve never seen it anywhere else in the country and I’ve been all over. I’ve seen vacant houses, I’ve seen a lot places with vacant – but there’s some sort of mentality, and maybe it’s in the water here, where people feel they need to tear up a vacant house and that’s what exacerbated the decline of the neighborhoods. Had nothing to do with the riots. The riots took the businesses out, the mom and pop shops. Took them out. What we used to have, like I said, Cancellations, B.Siegels, stuff like that. Livernois decimated because then the insurance companies significantly raised the rates for insurance in Detroit on just about every business and the people couldn’t afford it. And white flight, those people who own those businesses didn’t want to risk coming down to work in them every day for fear – can’t blame them – for fear of getting shot, stabbed, killed, run over, raped, robbed. There’s a lot of anger and frustration. Almost quietly you have the same frustration now. It’s amazing how it doesn’t take much. Thank God we don’t have soccer matches here because there seems to be an underlying current in soccer matches to go and explode. You don’t have that in football, baseball, or hockey. But soccer is expected to get the crowd involved, be hooligans. The problems they have over in London and England and all places where they play soccer especially, in the southern hemisphere they take that stuff way beyond us. But there’s always underlying powder keg of frustration in the general people. People who have felt they have been marginalized. Talk about a lot of things about disrespect. People feel they have been disrespected. The last election cycle was nothing but a big thumbs up, screw you to the entire country. We’ve been disrespected; we’re not going to take it anymore. And you see the results. That’s one way. That’s one reaction. The other reaction is to get angry. This country’s loaded with people with guns. One of the things they did, they suspended sales of gasoline. You couldn’t go to the gas station and get a container of gasoline. If you didn’t put it in your car, you couldn’t buy gasoline during that period because they didn’t want people buying gasoline. So, you have people feeling marginalized, people feeling like you’re not listening to them, complaints are falling on deaf ears. To fuel that, we’ve got an arsenal of weapons. It’s hot. Something about the scientific study that 93 degrees seems to be a breaking point for people. Once it crosses that, their minds start to get really anxious about things. Long hot summer, frustrations, economic frustrations, political frustrations, social frustrations, people just frustrated for whatever reason. They want to blame somebody and they can’t pin a finger on somebody so they strike out. Throughout my life I’ve never felt that towards anything or anyone. I’ve accepted responsibilities for my own mistakes but that’s the way I was raised. And so, justified? Absolutely not. No, absolutely not. Even if it was responding to a police raid on a blind pig – and there was a lot of – back then, Detroit was almost like an occupied camp. You could find one or two black police officers, maybe, so it was an army of white males you could find one or two black police officers, maybe, so it was an army of white males – there weren’t any white women – an army of white males like an occupying police force. STRESS [Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets], that came up. It was a definite resentment toward the police department. And it didn’t – now that’s something that I did experience. We used to have back then, it used to be called the Big Four and it was four officers – it was a regular uniformed, patrol officer – all white. A uniformed, patrol officer drove the car. It was a – I think we had Chrysler cars back then, too. It was afforded three plain-clothes officers. They used to slink low in the car and ride around. It was called cruise control. And their job was to go out, bust heads. That was their job. And everybody called then The Big Four. People terrified of them. They’d roll down the street and people scatter. And the car use to be always slunk down in the back, that’s because in that trunk they had a complete arsenal. Bullet-proof vests, helmets, machine guns. I mean machine guns. They were ready for war. And it was known, you didn’t mess with the Big Four; the Big Four messed with you. So that’s a precursor to this –
JW: You said you had a run-in with them?
OC: Hmm?
JW: You said had a run-in with them? Or you just felt the presence?
OC: Oh, I knew not to have a run-in with them. But I had a run-in with the STRESS people. Because back then, if you – fast-forward to next year I was driving a car so even after the riots there was a lot of – the police department, it wasn’t until Coleman Young – that’s how Coleman Young got elected mayor. He promised the number one thing is not have the police busting your head, cracking your door, pulling you over. This was a common occurrence in Detroit. If you were a young, black male, the police would pull you over in a heartbeat. Doing something or not, just driving. They used to call it “Driving While Black,” this was “Walking While Black.” You got harassed by the police department. So, there was a natural resentment for that. It hadn’t affected me until later on. So maybe for somebody that was 19 or 20. Also got to think about something else: this was the start of – yeah 1966, the start of the Vietnam War. So, a lot of people getting drafted, so they had to create an available pool of people that couldn’t get work so that would have to enlist and drafted and go to Vietnam. So, it wasn’t until you get older and see the handsprings, the political pulling, and the puppeteering that you understand why there was such discontent on the street because it’s necessary to feed into this machine so that you can – General Motors at that time – so they can sell M-16s. They made the rifles that wouldn’t work in the sand. And a lot of guys over there got killed because the rifles jammed. And fortunately for me, I didn’t have to go.
JW: Oh, good,
OC: But my brother and my cousins. So, you’re on a city level, you’re on a neighborhood level living and you’re totally unaware of the expanding circle of events that are international in some cases that are well beyond your control, but yes, they come back to affect you living in that little, small, two-and-three blocks and you don’t even see it. You’re such on a small ant level, you don’t even see how manipulated you are until you get out, until you read, until you educate yourself, and you learn. Then you see it bolster. This cause and effected this, this, this, and that and finally it gets down to you and you say, “Okay, I understand how the game is played now worldwide. It’s an eyeopener when you wake up. Unfortunately, we have probably two or three generations out here that haven’t woke up. They’re still disassociated with how the world works and how that something happening on the other side of the world in China can affect them walking down the street here. They have no clue as to how connected it is. They think, “It doesn’t bother me.” It does. It really does.
JW: So, I’ve heard you use the term riot a few times. Is that the word you use to describe it because we’ve heard a couple other terms as well?
OC: Well, “Insurrection.” An insurrection sounds like something that happens in South America. We’re going to go out and rise up against – an insurrection is you rise up against an oppressive machine. So, who do we rise up against? Didn’t rise up against the political structure. “Civil Disobedience,” that’s a polite way of saying it, but once again, that implies that you’re civilly disobedient to a structure, to a power structure. Going out and burning down a neighborhood business that didn’t cheat you, had nothing against you, but because now you have [air ?] and opportunity, that’s a riot. Because it wasn’t – there was not – it wasn’t like we were to do this to take over City Hall or take over the state government. It wasn’t an uprising against the city of Detroit or the state of Michigan – or even smaller, the county of Wayne. It was – that’s the definition of a riot: It’s a mob that acts violently and strikes out at whatever is near. Nobody rioted across Eight Mile Road. Nobody rioted west of Telegraph or east of Alter Road. They didn’t go over to Windsor and riot. It was specifically confined to the city of Detroit and a very small area. I mean, I think somewhere on Seven Mile somebody said, Oh, they’re burning stuff here, we’ll burn this place up. But that was rare, it was really confined to a very localized area. I mean, somebody will come and say, Oh, yeah, they burned the house down next to me. No, that was somebody that was in the neighborhood. It had nothing to do with the riot. And I don’t think, except for the first night or maybe the first day, I don’t think you had that many people – I cannot – because I cannot recall that many people out in the street in a mob situation going up and down the street. Because I came out in the daytime and I saw the destruction. I went home and went to sleep because of the curfew. So, I wouldn’t come out at night anyway. You see the after affects. I didn’t hear anything, I slept soundly, I didn’t hear anything. Nobody woke me up in the night with gunshots and stuff like that, I didn’t hear anything, I slept soundly. Wake up the next day and see another puff of smoke over here. Go around the block and they tore up this and that. Other than that, I didn’t see anything.
JW: Are you optimistic for the state of the city moving forward?
CO: Oh, I’ve always been optimistic. If you’re not optimistic, then you leave. I would have left a long time ago. If you’re not optimistic, you quit. You stop messing with it. You give it up. And I said, that’s another one of the mistakes about the city. The city never stopped evolving. It never stopped moving forward because even during that stretch, people still stayed. They still paid their taxes, they still cut their grass, they still raised their kids, they still did everything that normal human beings do. Even while you’re losing a million people that have decided on their own to leave. I’m president of our neighborhood association. I can tell you, these people have been in their houses for 30 or 40 years. They didn’t leave. They didn’t move. They didn’t quit. They went to work whatever job they had during this period. They coached Little League. The guy across the street is coaching baseball and has been coaching baseball for 30 years. We dealt with it. It was another thing that had to be dealt with and done and did it change? It definitely changed the political structure in Detroit and it changed the political structure in Detroit for the next 50 years because they elected Coleman Young and until Mike Duggen, Boom! We had black folk in positions of authority and power. Something that prior to that you never had. Couldn’t get – you couldn’t almost get – it was always, woah, we got a black person on the council. So, these things happen but then again, you had a city where one million people left so that city, by default, became a majority black city. It wasn’t that black people weren’t already here because black people left, too. Southfield was populated by black people, or it is now. But you had a contingency of folk that just left so the city was left with black residents. It wasn’t that we just came in and took over; we maintained. We kept all the lights on – no pun included but we kept all the lights on. The city functioned. The city existed. The city kept going. It didn’t just all of a sudden Detroit, Michigan disappeared from the map. It was always here. We won a sports championship the next year in 1968. We won three basketball championships during that period of time. We won Stanley Cups. The entire thing kept going, the city kept functioning. It did not disappear. We attracted new residents. People like me grew up, participated in the process, put down roots, made more people. Nothing changed. It’s the perception that something happened and it really didn’t. I think it’s like certain parts of nature have naturally occurring forest fires that have to occur to regrow and rebirth the area. In some small way, violently as it was, the riots had to – and it wasn’t the first riot Detroit ever had. It was not. It had to do that. But it had to be enough of a gut-punch to regrow and recycle the city for the next 50, 60 years. Maybe even 100. Right now, it’s getting – the city got another gut-punch with the quote unquote “bankruptcy” and every now and then you have to gut-punch society to make it move forward. The gut-punch in 1967 was the riots. The gut-punch in 2014 was the bankruptcy. All of these things have to happen – New York City went bankrupt. Cleveland went bankrupt. We’re not the first city to go bankrupt. So, you have to have a guy-punch to move a large organization because it’s like the Titanic, “Oh there’s the iceberg, we ain’t turning. It’s getting closer, we’re not going to turn. Oops, we hit it. Oh, damn, now we should have turned.” It sort of takes that. You don’t want to live through too many of them but you have to realize that you’re in a unique position because you can see where that – now you can see green grass where brown grass used to be. You appreciate that green grass now because you saw the brown grass before. And some visionaries can tell you, Hey you better do something or this grass is going to turn brown. Oh I don’t care about that and the ground turns brown. So now you have to come in and work hard to get it back to being green. Hopefully people and society and entities from labor, government, and the philanthropic people can see, let’s not let ourselves get to where we need powder kegs and gut-punches to make us change and adapt. That’s hard because some people are so entrenched that they can’t see that change is coming and therefore they won’t change. That’s not comfortable. I hope for gosh sakes that we won’t have to have a climactic gut-punch for us to realize that global warming is absolutely real. And it seems like that’s what it’s going to take. It’s going to take that meteor hitting the earth for us to wake up and we’ll be just like the dinosaurs: extinct. Detroit didn’t go extinct. What we had are small meteors hit and knock out an entire underbelly that once lived here and thrived. It didn’t knock out the crime because the crime has been here since 1920. The Purple Gang was running up and down. Those are the people that Al Capone hired for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. They came from Detroit. So, did it change, yes. But it should change. You can’t have something happen like that and go back to what you had. In that case it was good because it forced the change. It forced a change and forced an acknowledgment that something is wrong. And people have been trying and conniving and trying to keep some of it going on and then there’s been another group that trying to right the wrong and figure out how to get it done. Even today, it’s still going on. People are trying to hold on to – and that’s power. People are very reluctant to share people. If people share power a lot more easily, things like this would never get to the point. That’s what it really is. Somebody has something, they’re not going to share it, and they expect you to keep living you are while they live like they do. It’s never going to work in any society.
JW: Are there any other memories from that summer that you would like to share?
CO: Other than that, it’s – I survived it. Truthfully, until July comes around and oh, it’s the anniversary of the riot. Is it 50 years? Yeah 50 years. It’s not something that I get up every day and think about because I’m not associated with anything to do with it. It’s not something I get up everyday and, oh my gosh I remember the riot!” Maybe if I had been one of the relatives of the 43 people that were killed or if someone had died that was close to me, then it would have a different meaning to me. My wife knows people whose parents were shot and I don’t know anybody that was shot or killed but she does. So, for them, that’s something they live with every single day, I don’t. A party store around the corner from where I used to live burned down or was destroyed. It’s something else now. I don’t go to it one way or the other so I have no connection to – today when I’m going to Twelfth Street, it’s because I’m going the Motown Museum and I cross Twelfth Street. I have no concept of Twelfth Street or related or Twelfth and Collingwood [Clairmount] or any of these things. It doesn’t register with me because I don’t have a perfect connection to it. I knew it happened. I was in the city, but, thank God, nobody I knew personally got harmed so it’s not an everyday I’ve got to live with this every single day about the riots are here or it’s the anniversary of something happened to somebody that I loved. It would be different – I don’t know if you have anybody that actually lost somebody in the riot but their story would be totally different than mine.
JW: Well, thank you so much for coming in and sitting down. We really appreciate it.
CO: No problem. Thank you. Take care and good luck.
RB: Rosilyn Stearns Brown.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
RB: Thank you for asking.
WW: Would you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
RB: Okay, I was born September 7, 1946, in Detroit.
WW: Did you grow up in the city?
RB: Yes.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?
RB: Well, first we lived on the east side near the market, and then we moved to the west side of Detroit, in the Joy Road, West Grand Boulevard area. On the east side, we were across from the Eastern Market.
WW: What year did you move to the west side?
RB: 1953.
WW: What prompted the move to the west side?
RB: My mother wanted a better neighborhood, because at that time, on the east side, where we were—particularly, by the Eastern Market—it was kind of rough. There was a lot of fighting was going on and so she wanted to be in a safer neighborhood, so we moved to the west side.
WW: Can you tell me about that west side neighborhood? What was it like?
RB: It was nice, because we had a lot of businesses. Black-owned businesses in the neighborhood. You didn't have to leave the neighborhood to do too much, because everything that you needed was right there in the neighborhood. We had bowling alleys, we had grocery stores. We had cleaning, we had a black pharmacy that was right on the corner, on Blaine and Linwood, and then - well, on Gladstone and Linwood - and then right on the corner of Carter, where we lived - we lived on Carter between Linwood and Lawton - and right on the corner there was a black doctor. So, a lot of things were in the neighborhood that we could take advantage of. So, it was really nice then.
WW: So, the area was a predominantly black neighborhood then?
RB: At first it wasn't. When we first moved there in 1953, it was like half and half. And then, of course, the white people started moving out, and more black people moved in.
WW: When you first moved there, did you feel comfortable in the neighborhood?
RB: Yeah. Because everybody got along. My block, in particular, was like a family block. A lot of the people - everybody knew everybody, and everybody got along with everybody, and we had fruit trees in almost everybody's yard, and it was really nice. It was a good experience growing up there.
WW: As you're growing up, through the 1950s, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood or did you venture around the city?
RB: No. Basically, because you didn't have cars, so people then - a lot of people didn't have cars, so you had to take the bus everywhere you wanted to go. And so we basically just stayed in the neighborhood unless you had some special activity going on where you needed to get on the bus and go, or if you need to get on the bus to go to work. Because then a lot of the traveling was done by bus.
WW: Are there any memories you'd like to share from growing up in that neighborhood?
RB: Oh yeah. We had a lot of fun, because my dad - he's in the Negro League, and he's in the Baseball Hall of Fame, because he played in the Negro League. And so we played baseball - because my dad didn't have any sons, and so he had two daughters - me and my sister - so we had to learn how to play baseball. And we did, and we played with the kids in the neighborhood. And we did a lot of stuff - not like now, with the cell phones and stuff, that's ruined the kids, always saying they're bored. But we were never bored. You know, we had a lot to do with the baseball - we were playing that almost as much as we could. And then we played hopscotch, and a lot of other games, like board games, like Monopoly and Scrabble and card games and stuff. There was a lot of activity going on. And we participated in all of that. And so it was a lot of fun.
My mother bought us a bike one time, and she was sorry she did [laughter] because we traveled anywhere on those bikes and if the other kids didn't have bikes, we just doubled up and went where we wanted to. One time, I remember, we got our bikes and everybody said "Let's go to Belle Isle!" And we were like - we didn't know where Belle Isle was, so we asked our parents and they told us, so here we go. Twelve kids - there was about thirty of us - and we had to double up on the bikes. We rode all the way from Carter and Linwood to Belle Isle [laughter] and back. We never did that again. But our parents were happy because when we came home we all fell out. The kids were real quiet that day. They didn't have to worry about us. And like I said, our neighborhood was nice. It was really nice. Everybody got along together. There weren't a lot of problems. You hear about all the killings and stuff, but none of that was going on. And we had apartment buildings. Everybody had paper routes - the kids, that's what you did then. You had a paper route. Of course, we didn't like delivering the papers to the apartment buildings, but - because you know, you had to go to every apartment - and we tried not to do that, but. Yeah, I have a lot of fond memories about that, because we did a lot of things and we were involved in a lot of things, and it was nice.
And our neighbors - they - when we first got there - they were mostly - it was half and half, caucasian and blacks, and we all got along. And we had fruit trees - we had one guy that had a cherry - he had cherry trees in his backyard - and I mean, his whole backyard was full of cherry trees. And you had to - when you went in his backyard you had to kind of lean down, because you were taller than the trees. And we would go in his yard and eat his cherries and he would get mad, and he'd come out and threaten us so we'd take off running. [laughter] But we went back, you know, to get the cherries. And we had a mulberry tree in our yard, and two peach trees. That whole block had all kinds of fruit trees, and I don't know what happened to them. But it's not like that now. But with our block, and the entire neighborhood, it was like where they say, "it takes a village to raise a child," that's what was happening then. Because if you did anything, you weren't just worried about your parents, you were worried about the neighbors, because they had permission from the parents to, you know, chastise you if it was necessary.
And then you were in double trouble, because not only were you going to get it from your parents, but you were going to get it from the neighbors too. So - and that worked with the caucasians, because they did the same thing. All of us had the same attitudes as far as behavior and keeping the kids doing what they were supposed to do, and keeping them in line. And since my mother was a teacher, you know, we got that too, so - that was - that was good.
WW: Going into the early sixties, were you aware of the Civil Rights movement, what was going on across the country?
RB: Oh yeah. I was a teenager then, when that started. We marched with Martin Luther King, when he marched down Woodward and had the black and white gloves on, and that was a wonderful experience because you had all those people together - was like three or four hundred people - marching down the street. We didn't have any problems. You know, everybody was getting along. Everybody was there for the same purpose, and it wasn't just blacks, it was all types of ethnic groups that came and joined us in that march. And I was a teenager then - I think I was sixteen - yeah. And we just had - it was amazing. I love things like that. And it was peaceful. We didn't have to worry about anybody shooting and fighting and all of that. None of that happened. It was a very peaceful thing. And I wish more people could have been involved in that, because that changed the whole perspective on life - to see people come together like that in a large group. And then you know, everybody got along.
WW: What do you mean by, it was three or four hundred people?
RB: Oh, I'm sorry, it's not. It was more than that. It was over a hundred thousand people marching together. I'm sorry. That was my mistake.
WW: No problem. I was thrown off by that.
RB: Yeah. I'm seventy. That was a long time ago. [laughter]
WW: So now, going into the later part of the 1960s, what did you do after you graduated high school?
RB: I went to college. And I got married, and I was working, because my marriage wasn't working out, so I had to pursue another career. I first started working at the Post Office, and then I went to - it was Michigan Bell then - and then they changed to Ameritech and I ended up retiring from Ameritech after 27 years working with them. But - yeah, but we were still part of the Civil Rights movement. There was a lot of civil unrest, and then what happened in '67- I was actually in that.
WW: Before we get to that, real quick - just a couple quick questions before that. Did you anticipate any violence that summer? Did you see that something could happen?
RB: No. We were caught totally by surprise.
WW: And then, where were you living then?
RB: On the west side. I was on Carter between Linwood and Lawton.
WW: Oh. Still at your parents' house then?
RB: Mm hm.
WW: Okay. Just to check. How did you first hear about what was going on, on Twelfth Street?
RB: Some of my neighbors came running down the street, and they said "Oh!" they said, "you guys better get out of the neighborhood because they're tearing up the neighborhood." And I'm like, what? And they said "yeah." Because then, I think - I was 21 years old then. And they said, you know, they were passing the word around, they were telling everybody because that particular day, we had all moved our - we had to park our cars on Linwood because they were cleaning the streets, and when they cleaned the streets, you know, they would put signs up to tell you don't park there, because they were coming by and cleaning the streets. Well, all of our neighbors' cars were parked on Linwood or on other streets, so that we could let them come and clean the streets. And then, before that, the gas station that was right on the corner of Pingree and Linwood, they had just come in and filled the tanks for the gas station. And that was one of the businesses that was there, and that was a big business then, because that was one of the closest gas stations in the neighborhood and they got a lot of business.
We were caught totally by surprise with that, and people were running around. They were excited, and then had a lot of panic in their eyes, because they didn't know what happened - because this started on Twelfth Street. And we were like three blocks from Twelfth Street, and then it was coming towards our - it was headed in our direction, because it went from Twelfth Street all the way to Grand River, and so we were right in the middle of all of that.
WW: What was your next step? How did you -
RB: Well, I went out to see what was going on. A lot of other people didn't - they stayed in the house because some of the people were afraid to go out, because they thought something was going to happen. And they really didn't know what was happening, because nothing like this had ever happened in Detroit before. Because it was a very peaceful neighborhood, you know, we never had anything like this happen. And so I went up on the corner to see exactly what was going on and I saw people I knew, and I saw people looting, and most of the stuff that they had was liquor, you know, they were really concerned about that - they were going to stores and taking all the liquor out, and they would set the place on fire.
And I was standing right on the corner, and right across the street from me was a carpet place, and that was on the corner of Linwood and Blaine, and there right next to the carpet store was the gas station. And I saw a friend of mine come up, and he had a Molotov cocktail and he had another friend with him that had a Molotov cocktail in his hand, and they were getting ready to light it. I said, what are you guys getting ready to do? And they said "oh, we're going to set this place on fire!" And I said, for what? And they said "Because. You know what happened on Twelfth Street." And I said, but that's no reason to burn down the buildings. You're in your own neighborhood! I said, why - if you're going to tear something up, why don't you go to St. Clair Shores or Grosse Pointe? Why are you tearing up your own neighborhood? I said, do you know what's going to happen after that? After you guys get drunk, and you get sober, I said, what's going to happen? What are you going to do then? "Oh, you just an Uncle Tom nigger." I say, excuse me? And then they took the cocktails and they just threw them in the carpet place. And of course, that was the wrong thing to do, because with those gas tanks just being filled up, the whole gas station blew up. And the fire trucks came in, you know, to put out the fire, but they wouldn't let the fire trucks put out the fire. They were throwing bricks and stones, and bottles at them. Anything that they could pick up that was heavy - to make a point. And so the fire trucks couldn't stay, because they were risking their lives coming down there to put out the fire.
And then, there was - right across the alley from the gas station was houses, on Pingree, and then on Blaine. And the fire - the lady in the first house that was right off the alley, she said she saw that and she had to pray to God, because she said she knew she didn't have time to get out of the house. And so she just laid on the floor. And the fire miraculously skipped her house, and burned down all of that - all the houses that were on her side of the street, and then it went around the corner, to Blaine, and burned up all of the houses on those two blocks. And that was - it was horrible - and I had to run and tell my neighbors when I saw the fire - I ran and told the neighbors, I said okay, you guys better go up there and get your cars, because they're setting fire to the gas station. It's going to blow any minute now. And so everybody started running to get their cars and when the fire first started, the heat was so intense that I went to get my car, and I burned my hand trying to open the car door so I could get in and move the car, because I was afraid my car was going to blow up too. And we got there just - everybody got there in time to move their car, so none of the cars were destroyed. But when we saw all those houses burning, that was just horrific. And we all went to other places - I had an aunt that lived closer to the Boulevard, so we drove the car down there and we went and stayed there.
But while I was standing on the corner talking to these guys, one guy came up to me and he - he had a whole - he had about two cases of Johnnie Walker Red - and he came up to me, he said, "yeah, you ought to go in here and get some of that stuff." I said, I'm not a drunk. I said, why would I just want to get liquor? And he said "because it's so good." And I said, no, I said, you're ruining the neighborhood. He said "oh, you're an Uncle Tom nigger." So he took the cases of liquor and he put them down on the street, and he was getting ready to hit me. But I saw his glance when I turned around to see what he was looking at. My boyfriend had pulled up, and he was standing behind me, and he was kind of a tall guy. He didn't look like a guy who could be messed with, so he turned around, he just looked at me. "Yeah, you're an Uncle Tom nigger." And then he just picked up the liquor and kept running. And I was like, how are they - I was thinking to myself - what a waste. We're tearing up our own neighborhood. And I said, and after this is all over, what are people going to do?
Because then, people didn't have cars. You know, they had to take the bus everywhere. Everything was right there in our neighborhood, and I was thinking, why would you want to do this? I could understand that we had some civil unrest, but that wasn't the way to solve the problem. That just made things worse.
WW: What did you do next?
RB: Well, after the riot was over, we went to my aunt's house. And then after everything started calming down, we - everybody, of course, was talking about it, and then we're trying to figure out, what were we going to do? Because now the neighborhood was messed up, and now we were going to have to recover from this. And I didn't see any way of us recovering, because this was - here we were, the neighborhood was exactly what we needed, we had everything at our fingertips, and then I felt so sorry, because we had a manufacturing company that was right there on the corner, and they would hire people from the neighborhood. So you didn't even have to leave the neighborhood to get a job, because the businesses were right there. And they would hire people from the neighborhood to get those jobs.
So now, not only did you tear up the neighborhood, but now you've created a situation where the job opportunities weren't going to be that great, because now you're going to have to go even further to get a job, than what you had before. So if you had problems then, now you really - you just added to your situation. And I couldn't understand why they wanted to loot the buildings, because that serves no purpose. You know, you just tore up the neighborhood. And there was really no reason for that. There was a better way to solve that problem than what I saw happening, and I was just really disgusted with the whole thing.
And then - being called by my friends, an Uncle Tom nigger? That really hurt. That really hurt.
WW: Was your house threatened by fire?
RB: No. No, it didn't, though. The fire just went almost two blocks, on Pingree and Blaine, and it went around the corner. It started on Pingree and then it went around, like in an "L" shape, and went around the corner to Blaine. And now that's a playground.
WW: Did you have any interactions with the Detroit Police Department or the National Guard during that week?
RB: No, but we heard about the stuff that happened at the Algiers. I knew some people that were staying in that motel, because that was the motel where some of the people - you know, there was prostitution, a lot of illegal activity was going on there, and I knew some of the people that were involved in that, and they were horrified about the guys getting shot, and so that - that added to the problems that we were having and to know that that was happening to people that I knew - that was horrific. That was a terrible feeling.
WW: Who did you know?
RB: I knew one of the guys that was at the motel and he was staying there. Okay - I'd rather not name names right now, but one of the guys that I knew - he was a pimp - you know, he was doing some illegal activity, and - but that was the only way he could make a living because he was a felon, he had been in and out of jail all his life, and so that's what he was doing, basically, to survive. And he actually saw the police came up - then they had a unit of police officers that were called the Big Four, and they drove around in these black cars, and there was four of them, and most of them were caucasians, and they were driving around in the neighborhood. And after the riots, well, during the riots - they were driving around - and they were just pulling people over for no reason - black people - and they were doing horrible things to them. They were getting beat, and they were handcuffing them and throwing them on the ground, and stomping them, and doing all kinds of things to the guys, just because.
And - and we never understood that. But that added to the civil unrest, because before then, our neighborhood was basically a peaceful and quiet neighborhood, and people were having fun and enjoying living together. And then after this happened, it was just a mess.
WW: How do you refer to what took place in '67? Do you see it as a riot? Rebellion? Uprising?
RB: You know, I've thought about that a lot. And I can understand why it started, but I just didn't like the way they handled that. I always thought that we could have done that in a better way, because violence is not the answer. Violence just creates more violence. And it creates more heartache and trouble. And like, what they did to our neighborhood - and I get teary-eyed when I talk about this - because I was right in the middle of it. And I saw people's lives being devastated because of what happened.
Because here you are, you have a lot of poor people in the neighborhood. And instead of people working together, it was like everybody was just concerned about looting, and getting what they could get out of it - instead of actually trying to figure out, how can we solve this problem without tearing up the neighborhood and destroying people's lives. Because a lot of people's lives were destroyed by that. Because we just added - the riots just added to the homeless situation and it just added to the economic destruction that was already happening. So, it just really made things worse. I didn't see anything positive coming out of that.
WW: Are there any other stories you'd like to add from your experiences that week?
RB: Well, like I said, our neighborhood - particularly our block - was a family block. And now - we weren't affected as much by the riots as some of the other people that were actually had their homes destroyed and had their businesses torn up. We had one guy that tried to come back - we had a black pharmacist that was right on the corner of Blaine and Linwood, and he tried to come back and renew the business that he had there, because then he moved on Joy Road and Linwood, and he tried to keep a business started there, but there was a lot of - he kept - people kept breaking in his shop and he just decided okay, I'm going to have to leave, because it's not going to work anymore. Because the whole attitude had changed. The riots changed people's attitudes about how to live and what they wanted to do, and after that we had - started having a lot of problems - especially with the Big Four, because the Big Four was coming in, and they were just destroying people. I mean, you know, there was no reason for them to do what they do. I like the idea that they were there to protect, but it was like - they weren't just protecting. They were just - they were out of control. And so we were glad when they stopped having the Four.
But it was good in a sense, for the protection issue, but afterwards when they started just pulling people over for no reason, that was wrong.
WW: Did you and your family think about leaving the neighborhood afterwards?
RB: Oh no. Because we knew - you know things are going to happen, and we've been black all our lives, so you expect to have some civil unrest because of certain situation, because we know there's a double standard. You know, white people get treated differently than black people do, and that's something that has not changed. It's better than what it was, but because of the riot, you know, that added to some of the frustration other ethnic groups were feeling, and they tried to stereotype black people to say, well, you know, we're just no good, and we're just a violent bunch of people.
And so that added to the stereotypes that they already had developed about black people. So - but as far as our neighborhood, especially on the street that I was on, that didn't interfere with us too much because we were like a family, on that block. We looked out for each other and we helped take care of the kids, and some of the businesses came back and we were able to, you know, participate in those things. But the riot really changed the way people lived, and it wasn't a good change.
WW: Coming up to the present for a couple final questions. What do you think of the state of the city today?
RB: I like what's happening. There's a lot going on. There are new businesses coming in, and looks like Detroit is on its way to being renovated and coming back to be one of the greatest cities in the country, because that's what we were. And we've got a lot of history here, and with Motown and that, we'd like to keep the legacy going, because - with the abandoned houses, that's a real serious problem and it hasn't been taken care of. And the city has received money to do that, but they're not doing - I don't know where the money is, but they're not doing what they said they were supposed to do, and we still have a lot of abandoned houses, so that needs to be - that's a situation that needs to be taken care of.
And nothing - it looks like nothing's being done about that. But I like, especially, what's going on in this area. But they need to concentrate more now on the neighborhoods and getting these abandoned houses out of the way.
And we still have problems contacting the city officials about things that need to be done in the neighborhoods, because, like, where I'm living, I'm at Cityside Townhomes, and the landlords are taking advantage of the renovations, because they're increasing the rent every year. And like where I am, the rent - what we're paying for rent - I'm paying a thousand dollars a month, and that doesn't include utilities. But what I'm paying for is not worth it, because the building that I'm living in - the stuff is old, and it's cheap - so the landlords are taking advantage of what's going on in Detroit as far as having people come back to the city.
But I like what's happening with Belle Isle, because that's one of my favorite places. I love Belle Isle. When I was working on my degrees I would go there and do my homework, and it was so nice. Because there's something about the water that just, you know, gives you peace. And you can get a lot done. I got a lot of my homework done there. So Belle Isle has been one of my favorite places, because my mother, when she was pregnant with me and my sister, my dad said whenever he came home, he said if he didn't see her, because they didn't live too far - I think they lived about three or four blocks from Belle Isle - he said if he came home and didn't see her, he knew that's where she was. And sure enough - so I think that's where I got my liking Belle Isle. [laughter]
But there are a lot of good things going on, but we still have problems that have not been addressed, like with the abandoned houses, and with the rent going up every year, and there's no reason for the rent going up because they're not renovating the places and making them worth what we're paying for.
And - and the insurance issue. Detroit is being red-lined. And they used to ask us, well do you live north of Schaefer or south of Schaefer. Well, it didn't make any difference, because one time I called and I said I was north of Schaefer and they gave me a price. And then the next time I called I said I was south of Schaefer - they gave me the same price. So that tells you right there, that we're just being red-lined. Nobody's paying as much as we're paying. We're paying almost as much for insurance as we pay for our house.
And that's why you have a lot of people now, when they had the Driver Responsibility law, which they said changed, but it didn't change. What they did, they just changed the name. You have a lot of people driving without insurance because they can't afford it. It's because between me paying my house note, or me paying for insurance, I'm going to pay my house note, because I have to have a place to live. I can't live in my car. So I'm going to drive - I'm just going to hope that I don't get pulled over by the police. And if I get pulled over then I just have to pay the ticket. Which would be a lot cheaper than me paying for five hundred dollars a month for insurance. Because my sister lives in Auburn Hills and she has Triple A full coverage. Triple A Plus, and she's only paying $800 a year. I'm living in Detroit and I'm paying $2400 a year for the same coverage. So explain that. There's no explanation for that.
So we have some serious issues. Then we have a lot of homeless people and nobody seems to be addressing that issue. And we have enough money that we shouldn't have - nobody should be homeless. And especially people that have worked all their lives, and all of a sudden they found out - because of technology, they no longer have jobs. You know, that's hurtful, and I hate seeing homeless people, and I try to help out as much as I can, because I can only imagine. A lot of people are living from paycheck to paycheck, and they're only one paycheck away from being homeless. That's a terrible feeling, especially if you worked all your life and you're thinking, you know, you're working so that you can have a better life, and then all of a sudden the hammer gets lowered and now you're out of a job. So those are the types of things we need to be concerned about. We need to get back to a village raising a child. If we all that attitude, then some of these issues would be resolved.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
SF: Shevon Fowler.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
SF: Oh, you’re welcome.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
SF: I was born here in Detroit in 1956 at Herman Kiefer Hospital.
WW: Did you grow up in the city?
SF: I did.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?
SF: I grew up mainly in Virginia Park.
WW: What street did you grow up on?
SF: Virginia Park [laughter].
WW: Growing up in Virginia Park, what was it like?
SF: Actually, Virginia Park was a really lively, bucolic-type place. It felt like a safe neighborhood to me. I had lots of friends, there were lots of kids, I had teachers that were my neighbors. It was mainly a working class neighborhood.
WW: During this time, Virginia Park was integrated, right?
SF: Yes.
WW: Are there any stories you would like to share from growing up in Virginia Park? Like, did you play in the alleys with your friends, play in the streets? What were some typical things you did growing up?
SF: Well, the girls, you know, played hopscotch and jump rope and we played lots of games like “What time is it, Mr. Fox?” We rode our bikes. We would often leave Virginia Park, ride our bikes up to LaSalle Park and basically, that was it. You know, we went to school, we had friends after school and listened to music.
WW: What did your parents do for a living?
SF: Well, my father worked construction, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom.
WW: Growing up, and you rode your bike, did you go anywhere beside LaSalle Park? Did you take it around the city? You were still young then.
SF: No, I was only allowed to go from Fourteenth to Twelfth Street on my own. But in a group, you know, we went further.
WW: Going into the summer of ’67, do you remember how you first heard about what was going on?
SF: I do. They said it started, like, on a late Sunday night or something.
WW: Early Sunday morning, so Saturday night, Sunday morning.
SF: Right, right. Well, we weren't allowed to go outside in the summertime until after twelve o’clock. It was just kind of a family thing, and so at twelve o’clock, I got my bike out and I rode from one corner to the next corner, and I was coming down the street, I noticed there were crowds of people at the corner. So I wanted to know why they were there, so I rode my bike right into the crowd, and I sat there and watched the riot on my bike.
WW: So you went to the corner on Twelfth?
SF: I went to the corner on Twelfth, and there was just absolute chaos, but there were, you know, crowds of people just standing and watching, you know. I didn't feel any danger or anything, because, you know, there were lots of adults, there was some kids, and I was on my bike.
WW: Do you remember what you were thinking when you saw this?
SF: I didn't know what was going on and why this was happening. I remember as I sat on my bike, the cleaners was on fire, and you know, people were running, people were looting, and then suddenly, the cleaners just blew up. It was just a ball of fire, and that was the cleaners on Twelfth and Euclid, so I could see it from where I was.
WW: What did you do after that?
SF: Well, after that, I was in the crowd just looking, just sitting on my bike, and then suddenly my father tapped me on the shoulder, and turned around and said, “Turn around, let’s go home.”
WW: I was just about to ask you if you ever told your parents that you were there [laughter].
SF: No, they know that that was my route. I was only allowed to go to that corner, so I was well within my area.
WW: Do you remember on the way back to your house if your father said anything to you about what was going on?
SF: He didn’t, but he had a sense of urgency.
WW: So, after you got back home, what was the mood like in your house?
SF: There was nothing really different, you know. I remember him saying, “Oh, they're tearing up the city,” this kind of thing, but back down at that corner, you couldn't tell anything. Everything was happening at the end of the block where I was.
WW: Could you see a lot of smoke toward your house?
SF: I did see a lot of smoke when I sat on the porch, because Linwood was also burning.
WW: How did the rest of that week play out for you?
SF: Well, I remember that week we got the National Guard, and two of them were stationed right in front of our house. You know, they were on each corner, and I lived on the corner house. I remember my dad taking them chairs to sit in and my mother fixing them sandwiches, and then the block club brought them lemonade, because they just looked terrified. They were young, you know, well, to me then, of course, they were old people, because they were about twenty [laughter]. But they were young and they were white and they just looked terrified. Later in the week we did have a sniper that would, I guess, shoot at them, and so we had to take cover and all of this. I remember seeing tanks coming down the street, and I had never seen a tank before except on Combat!, the TV show. I was just amazed at how big they were. The lights went out that week, because of all the fires and you know, the wires being down. So, this church gave out ice so that people could save their food. I remember coming here to get food with my mother.
WW: Do you remember being afraid in seeing all this going on? Or was it like, above you?
SF: Well, I wasn't really that afraid, because, in fact I wasn't afraid at all, cause my father was the type of guy, I just felt like he could take care of anything, and I just wasn't afraid.
WW: So as this is wrapping up, do you remember if your parents talked about leaving the neighborhood?
SF: No, they did not.
WW: Did they continue to live in the city, then?
SF: Yes.
WW: Are there any other stories you’d like to share from either growing up in this time, or ’67?
SF: Well, it was a fun time, you know? Carefree. That’s about it, I didn't see anybody get hurt or anything like that. But I did see a lot of people, one of my girlfriend’s father, he had looted a whole can of popsicles and ice cream cones and he was just passing them out in the streets. I do remember that [laughter].
WW: Couple just follow-up questions. How do you refer to ’67? Do you see it as a riot, do you see it as a rebellion, uprising?
SF: All of the above. Because I remember what the police were like in our neighborhood.
WW: What were the police like?
SF: Well, they had a special squad, it was called the Big Four, and they were plain-clothed, they were in unmarked cars, and they would get out and beat people for absolutely nothing. You know, just walking down the street. I remember that.
WW: Thank you.
SF: Okay!
WW: Oh, just two more quick questions. How do you feel about the state of the city today?
SF: I’m really excited about the state of the city. It is coming back, I always felt that it would. I live downtown, but I have property other places, and the city is just really, really, it’s so lively. I didn't think that it would come back after Hudson’s left, you know, because being downtown when Hudson’s was here, it was like being in New York, and then after that, it became like being in a ghost town, and now it’s back. Midtown, I went to Cass, so I’ve seen the whole transition of the corridor, and I’m really excited about it.
WW: So you’re optimistic for the city moving forward?
SF: Oh, I am, I am.
WW: Thank you so much.
SF: Alright.
In this interview, Buchanan discusses his experiences growing up primarily in Virginia Park during the 1960s. He notes the escalated police presence in the community, and details several anecdotes of police brutality he experienced as a child. During the unrest, his mother was transported to and from work by the police and National Guard, once in an armored personnel carrier. He recalls the events in great detail, remembering the smell of burning buildings “everywhere” and the constant police sirens which sounded like “wailing.” Buchanan discusses the importance of Twelfth Street as a site of black economic self-sufficiency, which he claims no longer exists, and will not exist in the near future despite the revitalization of Midtown and Downtown Detroit.
WW: Hello. Today is December 13, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Detroit, Michigan. I am sitting down with Mr. Darryle Buchanan. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
DB: Thank you for having me.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
DB: I was born in Detroit on July 28, 1955 at Women’s Hospital, which is now Hutzel Hospital.
WW: Did you grow up in the city?
DB: Yes I did.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?
DB: I lived in several neighborhoods. When I was born, my father was in the military, so my mother–single woman, 20 years old, she was living with relatives–at one point we lived down on Hastings and Canfield. It was kind of interesting going back and remembering that because that whole area has been replaced by I-75. We lived there for a moment, and for the most part though I remember growing up on the Northeast Side in Conant Gardens, that’s where I first started school. We moved from there to Highland Park, which I absolutely loved living in Highland Park. My parents divorced and we moved onto Virginia Park which probably is where I would say where I grew up.
WW: What were some of the differences between those neighborhoods? Do you remember them being staunchly different or kind of along the same lines?
DB: Highland Park was probably the most different of any of the communities that I lived in. It was very integrated, and very viable in those days because Chrysler Headquarters was still in Highland Park, and a lot of management and executives lived in Highland Park. I would actually see them walking to and from work everyday. It was interesting because even at lunchtime, they would leave, go home, have lunch, and then go back. It was just a very different time. This was the early Sixties, ’61 to’63 is when we were living there.
WW: Are there any other memories you’d like to share from growing up in either Virginia Park or in Conant Gardens?
DB: In Highland Park, I was eight years old, and we were practicing for my first communion. I was raised Catholic.
WW: Uh-hm.
DB: I went to Blessed Sacrament, which is not too far, Belmont, where we were in Highland Park. During the rehearsal, I remember one of the nuns running into the church and telling us all to get on our knees and pray, that the president had just been killed. That was something that you never forget, I don’t care what age you are, I was eight years old, and that’s a day that I remember like yesterday.
WW: Wow.
DB: Especially being Catholic, all of the excitement around having a Catholic president, what he meant to that. In that time period, that was the thing that stuck out most to me.
WW: Wow.
DB: Funny thing: you know how little boys are, especially back in the early Sixties, we’re just coming out of World War II and Korea, we all had army helmets and guns and we played war and did all that stuff. You don’t really know the difference between ethnicities or anything like that. Going to a Catholic School, you have a lot of Chaldeans, a lot of Filipinos as well as white and black students, and I had this one Filipino friend, and we were all just kids, we weren’t shy, you know, we’re walking down the street and he said he was talking about, “What are we going to do? What’s going to happen to us?” Then he said, “What if the Japanese attack us?” All the little boys looked at him like, “What are you worried about?” you know? Because we didn’t make distinctions, we just know that he looked Asian, and that was it. We just said, “You should be okay.” That’s the most memorable thing about that time for me.
WW: Uh-hm. Given the diverse community that you grew up in, both in your neighborhood and at your school, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhoods growing up or did you venture around the city? And if so, did you feel comfortable venturing around the city?
DB: That’s the one thing that caused me a lot of problems when I was a little boy: I had wanderlust. I just, for whatever reason, I had no problem walking around the city, catching the bus around the city.
On the east side and west side of Woodward, streets have different names. I knew that my favorite cousin lived on Glynn, and Glynn is Belmont, where I went to school, on the other side. So I just happened to look over there one day, and seriously, I was about seven years old, Friday afternoon, I looked over there and I said, “Glynn? My cousin lives on Glynn.’ So I just started walking down Glynn, and I walked down Glynn all the way, got to the expressway, had to go around, come back on the other side and keep going down Glynn. Eventually, I got to my cousin’s house and walked in and they were sitting down getting ready to have late lunch, so I sat down and next thing I know it’s Friday evening and we’re just running around playing, and my mom is panicking, she’s calling looking for me, and my aunt was like, “What are you talking about? He’s sitting at the table with us right now.” That’s just how it was for me. It was just an adventure. I just loved growing up then. It was a different time. It was just easy just to get around. I mean a seven year old on the bus? I’m talking about getting on the DSR [Department of Street Railways] bus and you can’t event imagine, people worry about their kids getting on school buses now, let alone getting on DOT [Department of Transportation] buses. East side/west side, and it’s funny because even now my sons are always asking me, “Dad, how do you know this?” I say, “I grew up here. I know everything about Detroit.”
WW: [Laughter.]
DB: Just drop me off and I guarantee you I can find my way back home. It was a good time, a very different time.
WW: Growing up, do you remember any tension growing in the city? Either economic, racial – ?
DB: Until I moved on Virginia Park, I never really noticed anything. I was friends with, as I said, Filipino kids, Chaldean kids, white kids, I would go to their house, we would visit with each other. I didn’t notice anything different until I moved onto Virginia Park. Then some stark realities started to set in for me that I wasn’t ready for but I lived through and it was just a stark difference going from one environment to the other. Not to say that it was bad, it was just different.
WW: Would you mind elaborating on some of those differences?
DB: Well, one, just the number of people that lived in the community. We moved in with my father’s parents, and they owned a two-family flat on Virginia Park, and right next-door was an apartment building, and up and down the street, there were all two-family flats, multi-level and multi-unit dwellings. So small apartments, big apartments, four units, and that kind of thing. So there were way more people living in that area than I had seen either growing up in Conant Gardens or in Highland Park. But it was good, a whole lot more people to play with for sure, and a whole lot more people to get into trouble with as well.
Along with that, I noticed differences just in poverty rates and things like that. I had really never seen people that were struggling financially, families struggling. It wasn’t like I separated myself from them, they were my friends so it was no distinction in terms of me versus them or income or those kinds of things, but I did notice just the difference there.
The other thing that I noticed was the police presence that was in that community. I barely ever saw the police before in my life until I moved over there. And then it was just a regular occurrence, seeing police. You know, I think my first time being involved with the police or the police saying anything to me, we were little boys, we found a pack of cigarettes and we’re running around trying to find matches so we could light them up. We were in the alley–because we used to play in the alleys, the alleys were actually pretty nice to play in then–and then these police rolled up on us, and, “Hey, what are you doing?” and started chasing us because we were smoking cigarettes. I was scared, for sure, but couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. It’s like why go to those extremes when you could have just as easily said, “Put those down” or “Give them to me” and they’ll throw them away? But to chase us, I thought it was a little bit extreme. So, just from that aspect, I noticed there was a difference from being a little boy kind of naïve growing up in Highland Park, now I’m a young man–not even young man yet, I’m still nine, ten years old growing up over there. All of the sudden, I started seeing that it’s a little different over here.
WW: Going into ’67, were you still living on Virginia Park?
DB: Yeah, yeah. I actually, from ’63 until adulthood, that’s where I lived. Grade school, high school, and college, that was the base for me living there. So yeah, in ’67 I was right there. I actually, I turned 12 that week. I turned 12 that week. It’s one of those things that you’ll–like the assassination, this is burned in my memory. Sights, smells, sounds, things I just, I have flashbacks of them.
WW: Where in Virginia Park where you?
DB: Right on Virginia Park between Twelfth and Fourteenth Street. Yeah, right at the epicenter. Our house was – it now is on the corner of Fourteenth because they tore down the apartment building that was next-door. So I got to see and feel the entirety, the intensity of the whole event.
WW: Did you and your family go onto Twelfth Street at all growing up? Was that your main thoroughfare?
DB: When I first moved over there my mom was telling me, “Now, we’re moving to a different neighborhood, you stay off of Twelfth Street.” You know that’s the worst thing you can tell a little boy, what not to do, because I started going on Twelfth Street. I didn’t have a choice really because the school I went to, St. Agnes, was right on the corner of South La Salle Gardens and Twelfth Street. It didn’t make sense to walk all the way back to Fourteenth a lot of days when I can just walk right down Twelfth to Virginia Park and come home.
I’m going to tell you, man, there were so many things that I saw, it was just alive. It was alive. There were stores, there were theatres, there were restaurants, I mean, it was a fully self-contained area. There was no reason for you to ever leave that neighborhood to do anything. Just think about on my block, on Virginia Park, just Twelfth Street between Virginia Park and Seward: just in that strip, in my block, there was Dr. Maben’s Pharmacy, there was Hope Brothers’ Barber Shop, there was Fishman’s Hardware, there was the Chit Chat Lounge, there was a beauty shop in there, but then there was Picnic Barbeque, and then there was actually a dairy on the corner where we would go and buy milkshakes, Boston Coolers, ice cream, all that, and then a market on the opposite corner right there. There was no reason to ever have to leave the neighborhood to do anything. You could just go up and down Twelfth Street: clothing stores, you name it, gas stations, everything right there. I thought it was probably the best time of my life in terms of growing up and being able to see life from every aspect. There were church people, there were hustlers, there were regular, everyday folks, families, just doing what they do. It was – economically, there was a way for everybody to do something, make some money. I remember as a little kid–just because of the way the neighborhood was, the people that lived there, I was a little boy that never, never had to go without money. All I had to do was walk down the street and just ring the doorbell: need somebody to pull your weeds, cut your grass, shovel snow? I would even make money just walking up to the store and I’d ask people, “I’m going to the store, you need anything?” And they would say, “Yeah, bring me back whatever.” And I’d bring it back, and they’d give me a nickel, a dime, or whatever. That was good money. If you had a quarter back then, you could buy a pop and a bag of chips. For a little boy, that was good. I saw jitneys, I don’t know if you know what a jitney is, but a jitney is, they’re the original Uber drivers. So you go to the market and not everybody had a car, and so the jitneys would see you shopping, and a lot of them just had regular folks and would see you coming, and say, “I got you on your way out.” No problem. So they would load up your groceries, take you to your house, unload them, and go back to the market and get the next one. When I saw the Uber thing, I said, “Seriously? That’s nothing but a jitney. That’s wild.”
WW: How did you first hear about what was going on on Twelfth Street that night on July 23?
DB: Well I told you I went to Catholic School. At St. Agnes, I was an altar boy, a safety patrol boy, I did all that stuff, right? So, throughout the summer, you still had a schedule as an altar boy and I remember getting up to do 8 o’clock mass and my mother was an emergency room tech at Henry Ford Hospital. So she knew I was getting up to go, and I was actually up and ironing my cassock. So I was up ironing, and I could hear activity, and I said, “Man, wow, people are partying early today.” I could smell some smoke, and I was thinking people are barbequing or something. So when my mom called, she said, “You’re not going to church this morning,” I said, “Mom, I have to. What are you talking about?” She said, “There’s a riot going on on Twelfth Street and you’re not going to be able to get to the church anyway, so just stay, I’ll be home in a minute.”
Immediately, I went out to the front porch, and I noticed that all the noise that I was hearing was people milling about and going up and down the street. The looting really hadn’t started yet, but it was just a matter of time before all that broke out. My grandparents were there, we woke, and then we were just on the porch for the most part just looking up and down the street, neighbors milling about, talking about what was going on. Then my mother came home in a police car, and I was like, this is interesting she always caught the bus. But I guess bus service was disrupted, so the police brought her home in a car.
Now, my social consciousness is starting to come about, and by the age of 11, now I’m about to turn 12, and it concerned me seeing my mother in a police car because now I’m trying to get a feel for what’s going on up there but then seeing the police bringing my mother home, I was worried about how the people in the neighborhood were going to see our family because later, as my parents, my grandparents got away – well I got away from them, and of course you know I went right up to Twelfth Street just to watch everything. It was really something to see. It was really something to see. So many people so angry all at once. But I understood what was going on, because, as I told you, I had been dealing with this whole police presence for quite some time. What I’m saying is when you grow up in that neighborhood, you learn to play cops and niggers when you are young. The story about the cigarettes, that was typical of the kind of things that happened to us in that neighborhood.
For the older guys, I could see that it was even worse. There were guys that were teenagers that I saw growing up, and I just thought they were the coolest guys in the world; they used to wear their crisscross sweaters and their mohair slacks and their gypsy split shoes–that’s how they dressed going to high school. I was like, “Man, when I grow up, I want to be just like them.” Well, in the interim, a lot of those guys ended up going to Vietnam, and so they’re coming back from Vietnam about the same time that this is going on and they weren’t the same. They weren’t the cool people that I knew when I was little. They were dark, they were disturbed. You could tell something was wrong with them. They’re in the mix now too, coming home to have to deal with those same conditions. I remember seeing a guy that lived in the apartments that I told you were next-door to us, and just hearing all that going on that night, he just clicked into survival mode, and I saw him with his gear on jumping out the side window of the first floor of the apartment. I don’t know where he went, and I don’t think I ever saw him again. But I just remember seeing that and I was thinking, “Man, this is way worse than anything I could have ever imagined.” All that happening at the same time that we have this police presence in our neighborhood, and naturally knowing all these things, we’re now wearing naturals and we’re talking about Black Power.
I remember my mom used to, I said she worked at midnight, so in the daytime, she would sleep and certain things had to be done, and she would put me on the bus to go–and I mean, again, you know, it’s no big deal – go downtown, pay the Hudson’s bill, pay the light bill, take these light bulbs and exchange the light bulbs–that’s when light bulbs were actually free. That was part of my growing up, that was my responsibility as the oldest boy in a single-parent household. Inevitably, every time when I’d catch the Fenkell bus, they’d either be somebody from the Nation of Islam, or somebody from the Black Panther Party who would be there talking to me, telling me, “Young Brother, this is how you need to conduct yourself. And when you’re stopped by the police, you need to know how to answer, how to respond. You need to know these things in order to survive. Young Brother, do not wear your hair so long, you won’t be able to escape the pigs. Don’t wear bellbottom pants and do not wear platform shoes, you will not be able to get away.” These are things that were engrained in us as little boys in that neighborhood. Then, when I would have a conversation with somebody form the Nation of Islam and they started talking to me about how I should I take care of my body, and how I should eat, and how I should dress, and how I conduct myself in public. It was a different time in that I really feel like most of the young men of my generation, we were kind of raised up to be soldiers in terms of the Civil Rights Movement and just all of the turmoil of those times. This was all just a part of that. So seeing my mom get out of that police car caused me a little bit of concern.
That night, we’re now moving into where the National Guard and the Federal Troops were coming in, and there was basically martial law, so the curfew, lights out, and at night, they came and picked my mother up again to go to work but this time they picked her up in an unmarked police car, I had never seen one of those before. Totally blacked out, no insignia on it whatsoever, and when they came and knocked on the door, and she left out with them. They left and they didn’t even turn on the lights in the car and I mean they shot down Virginia Park so fast, it was kind of shocking to see.
You look at all that and my concern now is how’s that going to be taken in the neighborhood, how are they going to feel about us? Because I had seen black businesses on the corner of Virginia Park and Twelfth Street was Dr. Maben, he was a pharmacist, and I couldn’t believe that they actually broke into Dr. Maben’s drugstore and looted it because it was a black business. So right then I knew that black, white, Jewish, whatever, none of that mattered right now. That’s just how out of control the situation was. So my concern for my mother was real. Okay?
Then you add to that, the next morning when they brought her back, she came home – this armored personnel carrier came down my street ‘ding, ding, ding, ding,’ it’s like making this noise and you can’t help but notice that, right? So I run to see what is all that, and the thing pops up, the soldier pops out, and here comes my mom, popping up out of this armored personnel carrier, like, “Okay, thank you,” came on in the house, and I was like, this is unbelievable, totally unbelievable. But I think because most of the people in my neighborhood knew my mother and my grandmother. They were both nurses, and they just knew them as healers, so I don’t think that they looked at them as being compliant with them. They’re just healers, that’s what they do. We didn’t really have a concern, but I’m 11, I don’t know that.
WW: After your first trip up to Twelfth Street, did you go back at all, or did you, after what you saw the first times, did you stay hunkered down at your house?
DB: You couldn’t keep me off of Twelfth Street, and I just kept going back. Each time I went back, there was less and less of Twelfth Street than I remembered. I actually saw a building, and if you’ve ever seen a building on fire, the building’s on fire, when it collapses, there’s this rush of cool air that comes out of the basement–because remember this is in July, so you’re thinking everything is just hot–but when the building collapsed, you can actually feel this cool air rush all the way across the street. So I’m standing on the corner of Virginia Park and Twelfth and this cleaners was on the opposite side of Twelfth Street, and when that building collapsed it was weird. I actually saw rats running out of the building on fire down the street. I saw some things that day, I saw some things. Just the smell of the burning building, and then it was just everywhere; that smell was everywhere.
One thing that I always think about is back in those days, the police sirens now, they kind of give you like a ‘whoop-whoop’ kind of sound, back then it was like a long drawn out ‘wwrrrr-wrrrrr’ and normally you would hear it and it would be a police car, fire truck or something going by and that was it, but it was constant, it never stopped. It was like a constant drone of sirens that just never went away. After a while, it just started to sound like wailing, like crying. It’s almost like the city was dying and it’s that crying sound that you heard. It was eerie, you can’t forget it, you never forget that. The worst thing is that, as I said, it was probably the most vibrant neighborhood community and then it wasn’t. It was like it just died, and it never, ever came back. There’s been attempts trying to rebuild. I know my grandfather was part of the Virginia Park Association, and they put in a Community Center and a little shopping area right there, and that was a source of pride, but it was nowhere near as robust as Twelfth Street was on its own.
WW: That week, was your house threatened by fire at all?
DB: No. We were far enough away from Twelfth Street that there was really no–and there were no fires on my block. The buildings were looted, but none of them were set on fire.
WW: Oh.
DB: The fire I was telling you about was across Twelfth Street, so it was between Twelfth and Woodrow Wilson. So it wasn’t on my side. Actually, that was separated because it was a trailer rental lot that was next-door to it, so when it burned, it just kind of burned on its own, separate from anybody’s community. There may have been a house that was behind it, that was I think it was singed, and I think it may have had some fire damage, but on my side of Virginia Park, nothing really happened. So, no, there was no threat of any fire.
The one thing that I did see a lot, was a lot of just the police presence more so. Living next-door to that apartment building was interesting because on the roof there was an antenna on the roof, with everything blacked out, the lights out. I woke up to the entire apartment building being surrounded by state troopers and federal troopers and they all had their guns drawn pointing at the top of the apartment building. There was a state trooper in our backyard that was next to a tree that was in the yard, and he had the gun drawn on the top of the building, and I remember crawling all the way to the window and peeking up and trying to see, look up there, and the guy looked over and he said, “Get out of that window”. I got away from the window and crawled back. We slept in my grandparents’ dining room that entire week under her dining room table. There’s no air conditioning, so the windows are up, so you see and hear everything that’s going on, so when that happened, I immediately started running toward the windows to see what was going on. That’s another one of those things that you don’t forget.
WW: Were you, granted you were really young, did you understand what it meant for the National Guard to be coming in?
DB: Well, I knew that–
WW: Or did you see them any differently as you saw the police?
DB: Well, yeah I did. As I got older, then I found out that there was a huge difference between where I was and other portions of the city. See where I was, on the west side, we were at the epicenter of everything; I mean Virginia Park is only like five blocks from Clairmount, where it originated, and so the federal troops were the ones that came there. Now the interesting thing about them is that they don’t spook easy, man. I mean, they would talk to us. They were stationed on the corner, and we would just go and stand there and talk to them and the guy would talk to us; he was just mellowed out. He wasn’t in Vietnam, and I’m sure he’d been there, so he wasn’t sweating this very much. I just remember sitting there, talking to him, he took his helmet off, put it on the ground, and he sat on his helmet, and we just sat there talking to the guy. Just mellow. Now, what I heard is that my cousins lived on the east side, and they said the guys that they were dealing with were nothing like that. Now, I didn’t know at that time that that’s where the National Guard was, so those are Reserves that are pulled up and these guys are being called up to duty and being put into this situation; they’re coming from wherever in the state of Michigan and they just, they didn’t know, whereas the federal guys they were like, “This is not a big deal.” I mean it’s a big deal, but they’ve seen worse, just the way they responded was totally different. I did know that there was a level of seriousness and concern for safety and everything else, but I didn’t feel like these guys were a threat, like something was going to happen. If anything, I felt like they were going to stop things from happening. And it did, it did really settle things down in the neighborhood for the most part. And then it just seemed like from there, it spread out from where we were–which it had to do because they had to calm that area down first –but it spread out the other areas of the city, and I think that’s what prolonged the whole rebellion.
WW: Awesome segue: how do you refer to what happened in ’67? Do you see it as a rebellion?
DB: When I was younger like everybody else, we called it a ‘riot,’ and as I got older, I started to understand it more, because, as I was telling you, the confrontations that we had with police, and actually confrontations Ihad with the police made me change my opinion about it, that it wasn’t a riot. Because typically when you think about a riot, you’re looking at people going after each other. In ’43, people were going after each other, okay? In ’67, nobody was attacking anybody. They were against the police and there was some economic tensions that were going on so people were looting, stealing, doing all that, but it wasn’t like people were being attacked. No specific group was targeted, so it couldn’t really be a riot in the classic definition of a riot because there were no groups going at each other other than people going after a system that was very oppressive for the people in my neighborhood, myself included.
I remember once my mother, when she did get a car, she got this Olds 88 which was like a tank, I think it was like a ’66, just an absolute tank. She picked me up from basketball practice, and my brother and sister were in the car. She said, “Stay in the car.” This is right on the Boulevard and Twelfth where there was a Cunningham’s and an A&P. She said, “Stay in the car, I’ll be right back.” I said, “Okay.” She gets out, and I’m coming from basketball practice, I’m thinking, “I’m cramping, I need to stretch,” I got out the car. And when I got out the car, my brother and sister locked the door, so now we’re playing. I opened the door, so I jumped on the bumper of this tank and I’m jumping up and down on the bumper and I’m telling my brother, I’m yelling, “Open the door! Open the door!” They’re laughing, saying, “We’re not going to let you in! We’re not!” I didn’t notice out the corner of my eye that an unmarked police car had pulled up on me while I’m jumping up and down on this car. I turned and looked, and it’s The Big Four. They got out, and they started walking toward me, and this is when my Black Panther training kicked in, and I’m standing there and talking to them and I had my hands where they could see my hands and I’m telling them, “What’s the problem, officer?” So this one cop walked up and grabbed me by the lapels of my coat–this is how small I was and how big this guy was–he picked me up by the lapels of my coat, my feet were dangling, and he was shaking me, and he was saying, “Where’s your knife?” I said, “Officer I don’t have a knife. Why are we doing this? I haven’t violated any rules, I’m playing with my brother and sister. What have I done, officer?” I’m just trying to humanize this whole thing, I’m not, “Where’s your knife? Where’s your knife?” My mom came out of the market, she has on her work clothes and she looked at them, and they looked at her: they knew each other. Remember, she was an emergency room tech. These cops had brought in some young men before, and she recognized them. The words that started coming out of my mother’s mouth right then, I couldn’t believe it. The officer looked over there at her, they eased me down back on the ground, got back in the car and drove off. So I was standing in that parking lot, looking at their car pulling off, I was like, whoa. Then I looked over at my mother, and I started thinking, “I think I want to go with those police officers.” That’s just how it was. I was playing.
I was a little boy playing with his brother and sister, and my brother and sister, they’re in the car, now they’re crying, it’s a mess, and it’s for no reason whatsoever. Because a little boy was playing in the parking lot. That’s just the kind of stuff that was going on until it got to the level of S.T.R.E.S.S. [Stop The Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets] – and this is after the riot but the riots didn’t stop that. If anything, it intensified it. Those are the issues that we had to deal with, that I had to deal with, from the age of eight ’til the age of 18 when I left and went away to college. Those are the things that were going on. So, looking back, I can’t say that it was a riot, it was a rebellion. Because being a rebellion, it did result in some changes being made. The Big Four, S.T.R.E.S.S., all of that, they were abolished, and it had to be, otherwise, we would’ve lived in constant fear of the police. We just didn’t have a good relationship with the police department in my neighborhood. It was not, it was not a riot, it was a revolt; it was us saying to the system, “Get off our backs.”
WW: Earlier you said children of your generation were raised to be soldiers. Do you think that was a benefit?
DB: It should have been. It should have been. I say that because we were raised with a certain consciousness about what we were supposed to be doing to advance the civil rights movement. The doors opened wide, opportunity started coming our way, and I was up at MSU [Michigan State University] and there were more black students at MSU at that time than they’d ever had. Clifton Wharton was the president then, and there was intentional work on recruiting and graduating black students through MSU. So when I say that the doors opened wide and the opportunities came, we got caught up in the me-ism of that time. When I look at a lot of the things that go on, and what’s happened since then, I really feel the personal responsibility that it was my generation that dropped the ball on this because we were raised with a certain mindset, a certain consciousness, and then we bought into the me-ism of the Nineties and the corporate life and all of those things. We forgot about the movement. I jokingly say to people all the time, “We went from ‘It’s Nation-time’ to ‘Hey baby, what’s your sign?’” We weren’t doing what we were prepared to do in terms of community building. Yeah, we were successful, corporately, and things like that, but we took our eye off of how we got there, and how we got there is that those in front of us, when they paved the way, they made sure that they brought us in behind and said, “Okay, this is what you need to do.” That didn’t happen. So that generation of young men who started to fill prisons and get caught up in all of the drug trade and all of those things, those are my sons. These are my grandchildren that I’m working now trying to save. That’s why I do what I do, and it’s more, not personally failing, I mean I’ve got two sons who are doing exceptionally well, but overall we forgot what we were supposed to be doing. Yeah, there were challenges, but there’ve always been challenges. There are challenges now. What are you going to do? So that’s my motivation when I get up in the morning: just to remember that I was called upon to do something, and how do I do that now?
WW: Very nice. Is there anything else, any other stories you’d like to share from either that week before we move on, just to go past it?
DB: I had never seen that kind of madness before in my life in terms of it just seemed like there was everybody just kind of lost their compassion, they lost their soul. To just go and just destroy property like that, especially–I mean I was standing in front of Dr. Maben’s Pharmacy, and I was begging people, I was crying, I was like, “What are you doing? Dr. Maben is a black man. What are you doing? He serves our community.” But the madness overtook everything, and it destroyed which was once a very viable, strong, black community. Strong in terms of, we weren’t quite there politically, but economically, for the most part, we were self-sufficient.
My uncle, when I was talking about Hastings earlier, he was a pharmacist. When I was a little boy, I used to think all the time about my family was rich, I just thought we were the richest people on earth because my Uncle Smitty was a pharmacist, my Uncle Joe down the street was a barber, he had his own barber shop, and my Uncle Clement was a mechanic and he ran his little mechanic shop out the back of Digg’s Funeral Home. Diggs, they had a funeral home that was around the corner on Canfield, but in the back, my uncle said, “Hey, let me rent that out, and I can fix cars back there and I’ll fix you cars.” They were like, “Cool.” That’s what he did. But the one I loved the most was my Uncle Bunch, and I didn’t know Uncle Bunch delivered coal in the winter and ice in the summer and he picked up junk but Uncle Bunch had a horse, and for a little boy, a horse is like the coolest thing in the world; I just used to think, “Uncle Bunch has a horse.”
So I saw all of that, and then I also saw, when I-75 came through there and it just wiped out all of that. Then we moved into the other areas, onto Twelfth Street and then like that, and then I watched how just the madness made us destroy our own economy. It just changed a lot of things; I think it changed our own perceptions about who we are. And it was really nobody that could stand up and speak in a way to help understand what we were doing, and how that was going to impact us.
So, here we are, 50 years later, we’re seeing a resurgence here, Midtown, downtown. Twelfth Street’s not coming back. Anybody that lived on there and saw that, they know what I’m talking about. Just being over there, you didn’t have to go anywhere else. Northland was like an overnight trip as far as I was concerned. There was no reason to go to Northland, didn’t have to. We were totally self-sufficient. We don’t have that anymore, we don’t have that self-sufficiency. Our neighborhoods are dominated by other people who – I’m not blaming anybody, it’s the way it is but we don’t have a viable black economy anymore, not like we had then. When I was talking about Dr. Maben and my uncle, they were pharmacists, there was a group of black pharmacists who would get together and have fundraising events, big dinner dances, those kinds of things – they were real big back then – and they raised funds, they had scholarships and all kinds of things. There’s no black pharmacist group like that now. So a lot of those things don’t exist anymore since 1967. That was kind of, when I talked about that wailing, those sirens, truly was the death of our community and our economy. It just kind of cast us out to the winds.
So we see that now, and it’s like we casts dispersions on people who live on the other side of Eight Mile and all these kind of things, and it’s like we’re caught up in things that had nothing to do with how do we bring back what we once had? How do we do that? So if I want to leave on anything, that’s probably it. That’s my biggest concern because now I have two sons who are capable, they’re educated–I mean my oldest son graduated in four years from college, and he’s working, my youngest son is about to graduate from college–in these times, a lot of people say, “Well, that’s it, I’ve done it,” but I haven’t. Because there’s so many young men that they interface that need the same opportunities, that need to be able to do the same things. How do we make sure that we do that? Not to the detriment of anybody else, that’s not what I’m saying.
WW: Uh-hm.
DB: I’m talking about me, just like anybody else would be concerned with themselves.
WW: Thanks so much for sitting down with me today, I really appreciate it.
DB: It was a pleasure, man.
WW: Thank you so much.
WW: Hello, today is August 17, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. And I am joined by
BA: Buddy Atchoo.
MD: Michael Dickow: D-I-C-K-O-W.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. What years did the two of you come to Detroit? Were you born here?
MD: No. We weren’t.
BA: You want to ask one at a time?
WW: One at a time.
BA: Yeah, one at a time.
MD: Me, I was born in Iraq, North of Iraq, __________?.
WW: And what year did you come here?
MD: ’59.
WW: What brought you here?
MD: I’m sorry?
WW: Why did you come?
MD: I came here, my brother was here and I came too. I heard about United States, and I came. When I came. First person came of all the brother and sister: it was me, come from Iraq.
BA: I came in 1947 as an exchange student to study engineering, and that’s why I came. When I finished, I was really in love with the country, so I married my own people–which, she was born here–and I stayed. Then I brought my parents and my sisters, the whole family.
WW: What was your first impression of Detroit?
BA: Honestly, my impression was– I was not upset but in disbelief because the home I had in Baghdad was much better than the house I came here to. I thought the homes would be big [laughter], so that was my impression.
WW: What was your impression?
MD: I came here, I love it. I prayed to God that explain if I go down that, I would appreciate to come here. Because I heard about it and I came here and I loved it, everyday I was in United States, everyday. The greatest country in the world. The freedom’s country in the world. How could you beat that? No country in the world, no.
WW: And when you came here, what neighborhood did you move into? Where did you live?
MD: I live in Tuxedo and Hamilton.
BA: No, when you first came.
MD: First came?
BA: You stayed with your brother, didn’t you, or?
MD: Yeah, I stayed with my brother for a couple, three, four months, and my wife came. My kids, they came in ’62, so we had an apartment at that time. After a couple of years, my brother moved to different house, I took his house on Tuxedo and Hamilton.
WW: Buddy, where did you live when you moved here?
BA: First, I stayed with my cousin, and after that, I rented a room by the University of Detroit. That’s where I attended college.
WW: And, when the two of you came, did you find the city welcoming?
BA: At that time, yes. It was more than welcoming, like you are not afraid, not worried.
WW: Uh-hm.
BA: Of course, you know, the transportation was good. Even when I used to work at Chevrolet here on Axel, I used to take a Woodward streetcar, then take a transfer, and go all the way to the East Side. And I used to work midnight shift. You see when you are a third year engineering University of Detroit, you work three months and you study three months. I used to wait sometimes 45 minutes, an hour, way on the East Side, never been bothered, never occurred to me one day somebody’s going to bother me. The difference was, later on, unimaginable for me.
WW: Did you find the city welcoming?
MD: Yeah. I work with my brother’s store, called Consumers’ Fruit Market. From the end of ’59 I work there until we bought–me and my partner–we bought the store, Consumer’s, ’63 until ’75 I stay there. And all the riot and all that’s happened, burning up, I stay there until ’75.
WW: Where was that store located?
MD: Blaine and Twelfth, Consumer Food Market.
WW: How long did you stay at Chrysler, you said?
BA: No, GM [General Motors].
WW: Oh, GM, sorry.
BA: I worked for Chevrolet Gear and Axel, and go back to school, then I worked for Douglas and Lomison Company (??) in Detroit twice – I used to go back to school and then they would hire me again.
WW: Going into the 1960s in Detroit, you had just bought your store, you were working in the city, did you sense any growing tension in the city at all, or was the city still the same welcoming place it was?
BA: To me, it was the same, tell you the truth.
MD: As far as I’m concerned. I stayed there. I do not remember, on Twelfth Street, which is the, at that time, Twelfth Street was peril (??). But I stayed I stayed there until the riot came out in ’67. They burned the whole street about a mile from my store. They just stayed at the front of my store, nobody touch.
WW: In 1967, were the two of you still living in Detroit?
BA: When I got married, I lived in Detroit for like six months then I moved to Highland Park in an apartment. And then later on, I bought a house in Highland Park. We opened up in 1957, the biggest independent supermarket in the city of Detroit on Brush and Brewster –it was the whole block. 2900 Brush–I remember. We had about 35 employees.
WW: Was this a family venture?
BA: We were five partners. Yes, I mean if you–cousins and friends, you know, but we were five partners. We bought a body (??) company, and then bought – it was on Brewster – and then bought on Brush, apartment building, and tore both of them down, and built a brand new building. 13,500 square feet. At that time, A&P was the biggest, and all these–like Kroger–all their stores were 8500 square feet. So we were almost double the size of their stores.
WW: What made you want to go from engineering to owning a supermarket?
BA: The reason, I tell you honestly: I could have worked for Chrysler at the time, $600 a month for a graduate engineer. Now, you know, we are born–like my dad–in business. We have a saying that when you work for a salary, you have few walnuts numbered, but when you work in business, there’s no limit, especially over here.
WW: Uh-hm.
BA: So, we had to take a chance by doing this, and I figured, if we succeed, fine. If we don’t, I can always go back and get a job. [Laughter.] The name of the store was Big Dipper, on Brush and Brewster–it was a whole block from Brush all the way to Beaubien.
WW: At each of your stores, who were your clientele? Were they primarily black residents of Detroit or white Detroiters?
BA: At that time, I would say about 85 percent were black, and about 15 percent white.
MD: When I was at Twelfth Street, it was 95-98 black, 2 percent white.
WW: With people coming into your store, did you sense any tension in the community?
MD: Me, no.
BA: What do you mean by that, what tension?
WW: Were your customers and purchasing from your store, were they comfortable with you being white, or was there any antagonism?
BA: There was nothing of the sort. They only thing they were interested in was in price and service, and we offered them that.
WW: Uh-hm.
BA: And that’s why we used to do a big amount of business. Support five families.
WW: Uh-hm. And did you continue to own your store in ’67?
BA: Yes. What happened, the day of the riot, see, we used to work like two weeks and then take one day off, Sunday. So that Sunday, it was the two partners worked together, and that Sunday, when I came, usually there would be people lining up waiting for us to open the store. I drove: there’s nobody. I was shocked, “What’s going on?” You know? I don’t know. So we opened the store, and the business was not there either. So I was wondering what happened, you know? Then, around twelve o’clock, one of the partners called and said, “Are you okay? Is there anything wrong there?” I said, “No, why, what’s happening?” He said, “They are burning Twelfth Street.”
MD: My street.
BA: So, then, later on, we usually used to close at 5 o’clock. So they said, “We don’t want you to stay there.” We closed at either two o’clock or three o’clock, and then left. At night, that night, they burned the store.
WW: Before you left, did you take anything with you, in case the store did burn?
BA: No. It never occurred in my mind that it would be burnt.
WW: Your store on Twelfth, being so close, were you there that day?
MD: I’m sorry?
WW: Were you there that Sunday?
MD: I closed Saturday night, the store. The first time I left Monday and checked, I put them in the safe that night. I never did that before. Somehow I put it in the safe and I left. I got up, well I was up, five-six o’clock, and I heard Twelfth Street is burned. I called one of my brothers, police, George Wallace I called him, he says, “You stay home. Don’t you come out here.” They burned 10-15 stores, left to right. Nobody touched my store. But they took everything: all the groceries, meat, whatever there is. And they took safe, they took it out in the street and they broke it. I ask him, I said, “You took the cash, give me the checks. You cannot cash the checks.”
We built again, I have insurance, they pay for it all. I opened until ’75, I was there by myself. Even my store.
WW: Right after your store got looted, did you think, “I’m done here,” or did you immediately start planning to rebuild?
MD: ’75 the city took the street. They wanted the street, they called it Rosa Parks Boulevard. I’m sure you heard about it, it still is, same name now. And I never lived there. I don’t know how the street now, since ’75.
WW: In ’67 when your store was looted did you immediately plan to rebuild it or did you think about going somewhere else?
MD: No, the people took everything out of the store. Then, after one week, it was clear everything was okay, we call insurance company, they give us the money, and we open just like normal. I stayed there until ’68 when Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. There happened a riot in my store too. That time was very danger[ous]. I used to have one worker, I told him, “Take me home or take me somewhere.” I stay in a pickup car and I sleep there until I moved from that last street. He took me somewhere, you know. But really nobody bothered me. I just did that because I want to make sure everything’s okay. And they broke just our windows, that’s all they did. They don’t touch everything else. Two days I went and open the store until ’75. The city took over, they said we’re going to widen the street. Everything was okay. I used to love there, I used to go there without thinking anything damage, anything. I used to open the store by myself in the street, which was ____________ (??), even police was scared to walk that street. Nobody touch me, nobody say anything. I appreciate what they did there because I used to treat them like myself and better. They ask me $10 and I give them $5, and I give them $1. I never turned nobody down.
BA: After we were burned down, we had intentions of rebuilding. It took us two years because restrictions and all that. So what we did, we made the store smaller, and we built three stores next door, so we made it like a shopping center. At the time, we borrowed money from the federal government as a disaster loan. Three percent paid in 25 years, so that’s how we built back again.
Then, during these two years, the partners each–you got to survive, you have families, you have kids, you know–so each went on his own way for a while ’til we build the store. Then even after we build the store, we did like we used to go, I would go Monday, my other partner would go Tuesday, the other one go–for a while, you cannot run the store like that. You have to be there to know what’s gong on. Because I go there, I don’t know what the hell’s going on–what they did, what they ordered. So what we did, we leased it, to a guy named Bob Coverson. He was with PUSH, Jesse Jackson, you know, PUSH: People whatever.
US: People United for Self-Help.
BA: Yeah, yeah. Because never, they used to say, well you are employing your cousins, your– well of course! Every cousin that came to this country, my cousin, my partner’s cousin, of course you give them a job. But the majority of our workers were black. So, after this happened, so we figure well, we will lease it to a black man, and even when he went to get groceries to fill up the store–you need about $50,000–the wholesale people will not give them a penny. So we have to co-sign for him to get the groceries. Two years later, he went broke. So we took the store back, and we ran it for a while, then we sold it to a Chaldean and actually we owned the building, the fixtures–the only thing the guy who leased it from us, it was a lease. He had to bring his own merchandise.
WW: Was there any talk amongst you and your partners about whether or not the rebuild or just to move away?
BA: No, no. See, like I told you, we used to do big business. Five families used to live like a king. We built homes in the suburbs. But, we worked hard. We were there 8 to 10 hours a day, every single day. Only day off you could take, two weeks, one Sunday off. So we were on top of it, each of the partners took one department and managed that department. We used to take care of it. I used to work, take care of the produce department. I would be there at 4-5 o’clock in Eastern Market to buy vegetables and stuff, then I come to the store, I had a driver with a tuck, then I go to the Terminal, Produce Terminal, where they get stuff from all over the United States. We all worked hard. And we never left unless everything was okay: you mopped the floors so when you come the second day, you open the store, and you are in business.
WW: Did either of you feel any bitterness after ’67 because of the fact that your stores were looted, and yours was burned?
BA: Of course. I mean if I tell you different, it’s not true. Sure, we had remorse. But you blame it on few people because the majority of our customers, they used to love us. We were there 11 years, never been held up, never had any problems, like real problem. The only thing they used to break the windows at night. So what we did, one side, we took all the windows and we break them. We had no, no any serious problems. Of course you catch this guy stealing or this guy this, but other than that. As a matter of fact, our manager was a black woman, one of the most trusted person. That’s why we leased it to this Bob Coverson, but he couldn’t make it.
MD: I used to work 70 hours a week. Me and my partner, we took part in it (??), because we start, we have family. We started from zero and God help us and we work very hard and me and partner, my partner he was so hard worker, he was one of the best, he was butcher, he was everything. He did everything. Much better than me, to be honest with you. But I was just talking to the people, be nice with the people, and thank God we’re still here. I don’t have no problem. They hold up the whole street, maybe mile, two miles from us, nobody touch me, nobody say one word to me, nobody, nobody. You can’t believe that. The place I was, nobody harmed me, nobody.
WW: After ’67, did you open up a new store?
MD: No, I was -
WW: Er not ’67, sorry ’75.
MD: No. I close it because they took it over, and I went I bought a store in Royal Oak for five years, four years, and after that we went to Pontiac, we bought big store over there. Trucks, there was a pharmacy in it, everything in it, meat and all that, and we stayed there until ’96 and we sold it. That was retirement, thank God.
WW: How do the two of you feel about Detroit today? Do you see the same problems that affected us in ’67 affecting us today?
BA: In my opinion, Detroit will recover provided they have security. When you go downtown, or anywhere, when you walk and you are afraid, of course you’re not going to go. But, the only time the city is going be flourish is when you have security. Like, my granddaughter is getting married in October. She’s going to get married at DIA [Detroit Institute of Arts], the reception is going to be there. So, it’s a shame. When I first came, I used to go downtown 10 o’clock, 12 o’clock, one o’clock in the morning, people walking, going, what they call window shopping or whatever, and it never occurred in your mind that somebody’s going to attack you. There was nothing of the sort. You were free, you did everything, whatever you want to go, restaurant, bar, whatever. Never bothered, nobody bothered you. So that’s my opinion. Unless there’s security, it’s going to be – You know, when I first came, the population was almost two million people. What is it today? It should have been five million. Like you take any other big cities, they doubled and tripled. Now, instead of maintaining, we went down. Now it’s less than three quarters of a million.
Everywhere you go, like, my granddaughter bought a house in Grosse Pointe, and the first time we want to go there, we went and they have this navigator and they took us through Detroit; honest to God I’ve never seen so many abandoned homes, so many burned homes. Unbelievable. You get scared. And we are driving. Tell you the truth, you don’t know. It’s a shame. I’ll be honest, it’s a shame.
WW: Is there anything else the two of you would like to speak about today?
MD: I’m sorry?
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
MD: I don’t know what more you want to ask. You have any more questions?
WW: Nope, pretty good. Thank you so much for sitting down with me, I greatly appreciate it.
MD: Thank you very much.
BA: Okay.
MD: Thank you.
WW: Hello, my name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am in Detroit, Michigan, and I am joined by John R. Eddings. Thank you so much for coming in with me and sitting down with me today.
JE: My pleasure.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when you were born?
JE: I was born in Corinth, Mississippi in 1943.
WW: What brought your family to Detroit from Mississippi?
JE: My father came up here after the war. Got a job in one of the parts plants, and we followed him in 1950 and been here ever since.
WW: Coming here as such a young child, what was your first impression of the city?
JE: Well, Corinth, although it was the county seat, it was a very small town. You knew almost everybody. Here, Detroit was just a big, bustling city and it was not at all intimidating, though. I’ve always thought about Detroit as a big, friendly country town. If you want to get to know your neighbors, you can; if you don’t, that’s okay too.
WW: When your family moved here, what neighborhood did you live in?
JE: Right there, right next to the original Olympia Stadium at McGraw and Grand River.
WW: When you moved into that neighborhood, was it integrated?
JE: Yes, I’d say about 50, 60% black, maybe 30, 40% white.
WW: Would you like to share any memories you have of growing up in that neighborhood?
JE: The one thing that stands out is that is a neighborhood that you find these days. In other words, no matter where I went—and I consider the neighborhood as about six blocks by six blocks, because that’s as far as we were allowed to wander. Anybody in that area, if you did something wrong, they could discipline you. None of this, “Don’t lay hands on my kid.” Then you got another one when you got home. So you were constantly supervised, although it may not have been obvious. Also, if you were at somebody’s house and it was time to eat, you ate. It was what I call a true neighborhood.
WW: So you said you weren’t allowed to wander past those six blocks?
JE: No, we had parameters. There were a lot of—the streetlights couldn’t beat you home; you could only go so far; if you were going to go beyond that, you had to come home and get permission because parents wanted to know where you were, who you were with, where you were going, and why you had to go. Just wanting to go wasn’t an option.
WW: Growing up, what schools did you go to?
JE: I started off with Esther Brook Elementary, which has now been replaced by another school right there at Linwood—I’m sorry, Monroe and Linwood. From there I went to Patton Gale [??], and from there I went to Tappan Junior High, and from there to Northwestern High School. Then I went to college in Virginia.
WW: What years did you go to college in Virginia?
JE: 1961 to ’65, with the Hampton University.
WW: After you finished your time at university, did you come back to Detroit?
JE: Oh yeah, there was never any question. I didn’t go through any job interviews when I graduated because I knew I was coming back home.
WW: During that time that you were away and you came back, when you came back, did you notice any significant changes in the city? Any more tension?
JE: Initially, no, but you could see it start to build. I remember the old Hastings Street, okay. I remember the urban renewal that wiped out Hastings and forced everybody to 12th Street. To me, that’s about the time the resentment started because the only people who appeared to be displaced were black folks. They called it urban renewal, but urban renewal for who? It wasn’t for the black folks.
WW: What neighborhood did you move into when you came back to the city?
JE: We were living on Buena Vista, that’s near Davison and Linwood. We stayed there until I got engaged and eventually got married.
WW: When did you get married?
JE: 1968.
WW: Going back to your six block parameter, after you came back, did you explore the city?
JE: Oh, yeah, we would go ride the bus, that was a big entertainment. I think it only was about ten or fifteen cents. We would go ride the bus, go to the movie theatres, but that was the extent of the exploring unless we were going to visit somebody. There weren’t things where you would get on the bus and decide to go all the way to the east side to see what was there because it was sort of an unwritten rule. Woodward was sort of the dividing line. There were east siders, and there were west siders. Unless you got forced together, you just didn’t mix.
WW: Are there any other memories you’d like to share before we start talking about ’67?
JE: It was a time of innocence. I mean, nobody worried. I mean, the worst thing you got into was a fist fight. People didn’t even have knives on them. Those fights were over in a few seconds and then you went off being buddies. There weren’t any long-term grudges. It was just a total time of innocence, I think.
WW: Were you still living over by Linwood in ’67?
JE: Oh, was I! I lived on Pingree and Linwood in ’67, right by where those houses burned down.
WW: How did you first hear what was going on on Sunday morning?
JE: It’s really kind of weird. My fiancée then—my wife now—she had talked me into going to church with her. I believe in religion, but I’m not a big churchgoer. And at the church, people were talking about the raid the previous night. And there was some talk—believe it or not, there was some talk about trouble. We were going on a picnic that day, so we just ignored it and focused on our picnic. About four or five o’clock, we’re on our way back, and as we got closer to the city, we started seeing the smoke. When we got at Livernois and Grand River, the cops had it blocked off. But I knew the back roads. We got around that. I took her home, then I went home so I drove down Dexter, I drove down Linwood. I saw people looting on Dexter; I saw people standing outside stores with these big rifles protecting their property. I mean, it was—at that time, there wasn’t much fire. A few fires, not much, it was mostly looting going on at that time. Same thing over on Linwood. The thing that amazed me—and I tell everybody this and they don’t know if they remember it, I had good eyesight then—I have never seen so many cars with out-of-state plates. I mean, almost every car you saw—Indiana, Illinois, Ohio license plates. That’s one thing that really struck me. The next day—and that was just like a start-up. The next day there was a gas station on the corner of Pingree and Linwood. Don’t know how it caught on fire; some people say it was an accident, some people say it was a firebomb, but anyway, it blew up, and when it blew up, it jumped over about nine houses with flames over there on Pingree, set the one on fire and the fire came back, so about nine or ten houses were burned down. They never rebuilt. There’s a park there now. I lived across the street, third house off of Linwood. The heat was so intense! The tires—we lived upstairs, my aunt lived downstairs—the tires on my aunt’s car melted in the driveway. No firemen came, but now we start to see the military vehicle. But they never came on the side streets; they rode up and down Linwood, shooting at everything that moved on Linwood. But the firemen didn’t come for, god, hours. When they finally came, they couldn’t get any water pressure, so the houses just kept burning. The thing about it is at the time we were worried, but not necessarily frightened. I don’t know if we were in shock or what it is, but it wasn’t one of those things where there’s terror, fear. We were worried about the house catching on fire and a whole lot of other things, but not too much about personal safety because all the action seemed to be, it seemed to be elsewhere. By now we’re listening to the radio, we’re hearing about the trouble on the east side. TVs not working, so you don’t know, but all we saw was National Guard, up and down Linwood, up and down Linwood. At that time I was working for the city of Detroit, so two days later, I went back to work. Went through police barricades, they didn’t stop me. Went to work, came home. In the meantime, there was different flare-ups going around the city, I understand, but there was certain groups that were trying to calm, put some calm on the masses. It’s my understanding that Martha Jean “The Queen” was instrumental in doing that, in trying to get people to become more rational. A couple of times when I went through the police barricades, I did not have any problems. Then, we started piling in my car and taking a survey, and we went down to Dexter, Grand River, Boulevard area. We saw where Charles Furniture had been looted. By this time, there are bricks all over the streets where there had been other trouble. The streets were littered with bricks. It was just—I took hundreds of pictures. I don’t know where they are now. Black and white pictures. At that point, it started to seem like it wasn’t real, and you started thinking with a war-like mentality. It was—I’m not sure. It’s just one of those things where you look back and you wonder, did we really live through that? And the answer is, yeah. Now, in nighttime, when the shooting got really bad, we slept on the floor beneath the windows. You know, it’s brick and the window’s up here? We slept beneath, but all this time, there was no panic; there was no fear. After things got quiet is where the real—for lack of a better word, the real anger leveled out, as far as I was concerned. I’ve never forgiven them for this here. During the fire across the street, because the heat was so strong, our shingles started smoking, so we got one of the kids to climb up there with the water house and they sort of trickled water all over the shingles. I’m saying that to bring the other part—after everything was gone and everything, the roof was in bad shape, so we called the insurance company, Traveler’s, at that time, the red umbrella. They denied our claim. “Contributory Negligence.” They said, “You can’t prove the roof would’ve caught on fire, therefore if you hadn’t wet the roof down, you wouldn’t have had this problem, and yada yada.” I’ve never forgiven them for that. Then they turn around and cancelled us, of course. More than what may have led up to it, people got screwed afterwards more than prior.
WW: What do you think led to it?
JE: I have a theory, I don’t know if it’s true or not. I think people in general had reached the point—first of all, there were several groups. I think there was always a small group of troublemakers waiting for an opportunity to do something. But people in general had gotten to the point where the frustration level more than the anger level was incredibly high. One thing I’ve learned: when you have a situation that’s going to evoke some anger, you need a pressure release point. You need somebody that you can talk to, appeal to, or whatever. Black folks didn’t have anybody like that. So it kept boiling. So this was a blow-off of all that frustration and everything. I think it had to do with the urban renewal. You see, I won’t stand for all black folks, but let me tell you my philosophy. If you’re a racist and you don’t want to mingle with me, that’s okay. Just be honest about it. Don’t give me that smiling face and then stab me in the back, because we ain’t got to mix. At one point, Detroit was like that. While it was openly like that, everybody tolerated everybody else, you follow me? You may not have been treated fairly, but you knew what to expect under certain circumstances, so you dealt with it. When it became submerged and hidden, that’s when the problems really got bad. People basically took advantage of the black community. I don’t know if we’re ever going to get over it. This time now is probably more polarized, now, than just before the riot because right now, in five years, if you don’t own your home, you’re not going to be able to afford to live in this city. Just not. If you don’t own your property, you’re not going to be able to buy it in five years. It’s still that—I call it the rolling urban renewal. They started with Black Bottom, went up Hastings, went up 12th Street, you know. As they took those areas, other than the freeway, they didn’t put anything there immediately through it. Grand River is a good example. If they had really wanted to do something, they’d have run that freeway straight out Grand River. Not a block over Grand River. That’s one reason I had to move one place because my house would’ve been freeway. In many ways, it appeared as though it was a push-back. That they were just going to push the black folks out farther and farther and farther. Now, when you push us out farther, the other neighborhoods, like where I moved when I got married, I think there were—this is [unintelligible], I’m sorry, Mercy. I’m sorry, Marygrove. Right there at Wyoming and Puritan. When I first moved there, I think there were two or three black families in that block. In two years, all the white folks were gone. In two years, all gone. It’s just one block. It’s gonna sound crude, but bear with me. That rebellion was a necessary evil. A necessary evil strictly as an attention-getter. For example, in my opinion, if Malcolm X did not exist, nobody would’ve messed with Dr. Martin Luther King. He would’ve been an extreme radical. You’ve got to have something to compare to. You’ve got to give people a choice. Presidential election we’ve got right now is the same example. Neither one is acceptable, but you have to make a choice. If there’s only one person there, then people think if they make a choice they get nothing. The rebellion was an attention-getter. Unfortunately, the people that we elect didn’t follow through on all of their promises. It’s like once they’re elected, they became more interested in what was in it for themselves. People who should be elected don’t want to bother with politics. That’s my say.
WW: Well, my next question was going to be, how do you refer to what happened in ’67? But you refer to it as a rebellion, and that is exactly why. Did you see the city in a different light afterwards?
JE: Oh, yeah. I worked for the city. I was amazed at how many white folks were shocked that it happened. They just couldn’t comprehend it because I think they’ve never been that angry. They’ve never been in those situations that cause that type of anger. It was an attention-getter.
WW: Given that you were so close to the violence and saw the arson firsthand, did you ever say to yourself, “I need to get out of this city?”
JE: No, no. Not once. Still don’t. Now my daughter’s out of town, and she’s yanking my chain, but that’s the only thing that would ever make me leave.
WW: You mentioned it earlier that the city is more polarized than ever. Do you think the shadow of the events of ’67 still hang over the city and the metro area?
JE: In some people’s minds, yes, okay, and maybe it does, honestly I don’t know. In a couple years, most of the people who were involved in ’67 are gonna be dead, so it really boils down to what are they telling their kids and grandkids.
WW: Very true. Moving past ’67, then, are you optimistic for the state of the city today?
JE: In what way, for the city, or for the black folks in the city?
WW: Both.
JE: Okay, for the city, I’m optimistic, very optimistic. For the black folks in the city, I’m not so optimistic because I don’t think they’re going to get an opportunity to get their fair share. It’s all about, these days, money and political influence. Right now, black folks don’t have it. When Coleman Young was mayor, he turned out the vote. The only reason Detroit got anything out of the riots was because Mayor Young could turn out the vote. John Engler when he was running, said he didn’t need Detroit because Detroit had stopped voting since Mayor Young had left office, he didn’t need Detroit, and he was right. In fact, in every administration since then, Detroit has gotten less and less and less influence because we don’t vote! The vote right now is the only thing you got to get somebody’s attention. You don’t use it, you’re not going to have it. Speeches and all that, nuh-uh. That don’t work. Are we going to get the vote back? I don’t know. We had a succession of mayors. Dennis Archer was a nice guy, but he was the worst mayor Detroit ever had. Kwame was a thief, but he was only allowed to get away with what he did because of what Dennis did. Dennis Archer came in, and—we work for a bureaucratic organization. Most bureaucratic organizations will have their procedures set up. They’ll spend $1,000 to keep you from stealing $1. Dennis came in and said, “Oh, my people aren’t going to steal,” so he got rid of all the checks and balances. What he failed to realize is he wasn’t going to be mayor forever. So Kwame comes, Kwame says, “Nobody’s gonna say anything, I’ll steal some more.” All the checks and balances—if the checks and balances had been left in place, Kwame would have been in jail in six months. Or he wouldn’t have been stealing because he knew he couldn’t get away with it. But like I say, people do not—particular politicians do not fully understand what I call unintended consequences. They do not look long way. You look to the next election, they don’t look long way.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
JE: No, I’ve talked more than I was supposed to talk.
WW: Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me, I greatly appreciate it.
JE: My pleasure.
WW: Hello, today is August 16, my name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit '67 Oral History Project. We are in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and I am sitting down with -
RA: Ron Acho.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
RA: My pleasure.
WW: Can you please tell me, where and when were you born?
RA: Yes. I was born in Baghdad, Iraq, on December 18, 1945.
WW: How did your family come to Detroit?
RA: My father had wanted to come to America to escape, basically, discrimination in Iraq, because Iraq was predominately Muslim, and the Christians, for the most part, were treated as second-class citizens, and so he wanted to leave the country, and his older brother, Joe, came to America in 1928, and he told him about all the opportunities. And so he applied to come to America shortly after that. Anywhere from fourteen to nineteen years he waited, in order to be able to come to America, and eventually he did.
WW: Wow.
RA: And then, a year later, he sent for my mom, my brother Andy, and my sister Margaret and I, and we came here on Thanksgiving Day in 1949, which is why Thanksgiving Day is the most important day of the year in our family.
WW: And that year was 1949?
RA: Mm hm.
WW: Did you come to Detroit immediately?
RA: Yes, mm hm, we did.
WW: Why did your father pick Detroit?
RA: Well, he picked Detroit because there were other Chaldeans here, especially his brother, but the story of how Chaldeans came to Detroit is kind of odd, because they really weren't going to come to Detroit - it turned out to be a mistake. I think they were going to go to Chicago. But they wound up being in Detroit and then Henry Ford advertised the five-dollar-a-day job, and so it became a great draw, except Chaldeans couldn't work in the plants because they were all farmers and merchants. So they really couldn't survive in a plant. So that's why you never saw a Chaldean work in a plant.
WW: Do you remember what your first impression of the city was, as a child?
RA: It - yes, I do, because I was born in, essentially, a rural-type setting, and there weren't a lot of people, and they're all homogeneous - they're all people who look like you, and, you know, you had family around you, because that's one thing that Chaldeans do. They gravitate toward family. So basically you lived around family, and that's who you saw, and your whole life consisted of a few blocks. But when I came to Detroit, I couldn't believe what I saw because it was so big, and then you saw cars, and - it was just - it was overwhelming. And part of it, too, you didn't know the language, so it's like being put on a planet, okay, that you really don't know anything about. And so it was very overwhelming.
WW: What neighborhood did you move into?
RA: Well, we lived in a few places. The first place, we lived with some family for a week or two - we - we slept on the floor. You know, they let us, I mean, they took care of us. Then my dad sublet a flat on Virginia Park and Hamilton. My whole life consisted almost of Hamilton Avenue, I'll tell you that in a minute. And we lived above a movie theater, called Virginia Park Movie Theater, which would be near Midtown. And we lived there for a few months, then one day I came home and all our possessions - meager ones - were on the street. We were evicted. And what happened is that the man that my father paid - who had the lease - didn't pay the landlord. So we were evicted, so I saw my mother in the street, crying. It was pretty traumatic.
Then we wound up moving to a - we stayed, again, with family for a couple days. Then we had a flat for a little while on Hamilton near Milwaukee, and we lived there for a while. And then we wound up moving, on Hamilton and Burlingame - there's a reason for that - and then years later moved three blocks away, to Hamilton and Tuxedo. The reason is, my dad didn't drive. He never drove. So he took the bus. So you take the Hamilton bus, and then the Dexter bus to our store. So that's why we always lived near Hamilton, until, you know, years later. So.
WW: Given that you couldn't speak the language, did you feel comfortable when you came to the city?
RA: No. In fact, something unusual happened that wouldn't happen today. I remember this, even though it happened sixty-six years ago. We went to register me for kindergarten. My dad takes me in to the school - Fairbanks Elementary - and the woman asked him, what is your son's name? He said "______." She said "what?" "______" "Oh, no, no, no, no. You can't call him that. You have to give him an American name."
So my father says to me in Chaldean, "what do you want to be called?" Well, I didn't know English! You know, I don't know! So he looked up in the air and says "Ronnie. Call him Ronnie." No - he asked me, "Is Ronnie okay?" Okay. He says, "Call him Ronnie." That's how I got my name.
So, do you want me to just tell you a little story?
WW: Go right ahead.
RA: So, you have to understand something. Chaldeans are very hard workers, okay? When we came to America, my brother, mother, sister, and I - all we had was a trunk, with our things in it. Just one trunk, for four people. That was it. So we were poor, no question about it. Poor by any standard. My father worked for my Uncle Joe, who had a store, and he and my younger uncle, who came with him, who wound up living with us, worked there for a couple of years, then they bought a store called Hamway Supermarket, in 1951. They worked seven days a week, sixteen, seventeen-hour days. For years. They - we wound up being somewhat prosperous, which is why, when the riots occurred in '67 - and my uncle didn't believe in insurance - so we had very little. The insurance we had did not even cover the money we owed on the inventory. So here you have a store - we didn't own the building - we had fixtures and inventory - and the riots took everything away. So we went from poor, to somewhat prosperous, to poor again. All within the span of one day.
So the experience always left an indelible mark on me, and still to this day.
WW: Growing up in the city, did you travel around, or did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood?
RA: No, no. We, no. You didn't do that. I mean, you stayed in your neighborhood, and that's something else. The thing that changed Detroit more than anything else - more than the riots - are the expressways. Because what happened is - we had neighborhoods - like Mary would know - we lived in neighborhoods. And you had family around you, you had neighbors, you knew your neighbors. And you took the bus wherever you went. The furthest you went was wherever the bus would take you. So you stayed in those areas. It wasn't until the car became more prevalent, we had the expressways, that you then wound up driving. But my family never took a vacation. So it isn't like we went anywhere. So it was a very confined, you know, area that we stayed in. Work, or school, home, school, work. Back and forth. Home-school-work. And that was it. Three things. That's what you did.
WW: Growing up throughout the 1950's, did you see the city changing?
RA: Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. I remember Detroit in its heyday. Detroit was the fifth-largest city. It had over two million people. You could do to Detroit, downtown, you'd have trouble walking down Woodward, because there were so many people. And what happened, again, we talked about the expressways, right? I mean this is my philosophy.
[Break in the recording here?]
AR: Yeah, we can continue, go ahead.
WW: [Unintelligible.]
RA: So anyway, Detroit was a wonderful, wonderful city. It had the Detroit Historical Society, had the Institute of Art, had a great library. Belle Isle - I mean, Detroit was wonderful. Now, for people like us - we really didn't go to those places, particularly, because we worked. I mean, we're - we're country people. But living in Detroit meant that you had freedom, you had opportunities, which you did not have in the old country, okay. In fact, I'll tell you a story of my father.
Every single day in the store - every day - he'd hold up a banana. He said "you know, Ronnie, what this is?" Yes, baba, it's a banana. "You know, in the old country, only the rich could eat a banana. Here in America, you can have a banana every day." And finally one day I said, baba, why do you keep telling me - you keep telling me. He said, "I want you to remember how lucky you are to be here. To have the opportunity to be in America, where you can do whatever you want. You can be successful. You don't get that." So he ingrained upon us, the fact that we were lucky to be in America, which is why immigrants, I think, appreciate America more than people who have lived here their whole lives.
That may not necessarily be true, but at least from the immigrants that I see, they appreciate the opportunities. So yes, Detroit was phenomenal. Did I see the changes? Yes. I saw the changes beginning with the expressways, because more people started living in the suburbs. And they then built - which you may not be familiar with - Northland. Northland was the first enclosed mall in America, as I recall.
So what happened is, a lot of well-to-do people started moving to Oak Park, and then Southfield, okay. And what happened is, they left their homes. And a lot of the people who were ethnic, especially, took very good care of their homes. A lot of people moved in from the south. Did not have the same work ethic, didn't have the same pride in their homes. So you could begin seeing a deterioration in the neighborhoods. That was one. Two, the tax base diminished, because you had people moving out. Third, there was an increase in crime. Detroit really was not a crime-ridden city. It wasn't until the changes.
So then, starting in - probably early sixties - you started seeing crime. Now, what happened then, is you had the Detroit Police Department putting things in place like STRESS, and the Big Four. Well, it turns out that they were viewed as targeting African Americans. And that's how Coleman Young eventually became mayor, saying that it was a racist police department. Remember, this was in the sixties, okay.
And so, as a consequence, there was a lot of discontent. The other thing, too, remember, was the auto industry has its ups and downs, okay. When people are off work, there's financial problems. And you wound up finding more unemployment. More unemployment, more crime, more people leaving the city. As you had the people leave the city, you had more problems. Then Detroit did away with the residency requirement for their police. Used to have police living in Detroit. That ended. So as a result, every - virtually every Detroit police offer that I knew - moved outside of the city. So then you didn't have that off-duty presence.
So it kept - it kept multiplying. It kept getting worse, and worse, and worse. A hundred Chaldeans have been murdered in their stores. I've known fifty of them. Some of them friends, relatives. So how many people know fifty people who have been murdered, okay. So Detroit became a problem because of crime, and because people moved to the suburbs. You had your flagship department store, one of the biggest in America, close. So you then had no anchor in downtown Detroit. All the businesses moved out, and up until several years ago, downtown Detroit was a ghost town. Absolutely a ghost town. I wouldn't even take people from out of town downtown.
So you saw a deterioration of the city. You also had a polarizing figure in Coleman Young. I knew the mayor. I knew him on a personal basis. But he was a polarizing figure. So the more he agitated, the more white people left. And it also created more discontent. He had his reasons for being upset, for things that happened to him. But the problem is, as the leader of the city, he did not help the city in that regard. So - getting - do you want to get to the riot down?
WW: I was just about to ask you. Did your family continue living in Detroit throughout the sixties?
RA: No. Because, I told you about the increase in crime - and the expressway made it easy to go to Southfield, especially when my sister got beat up, okay. My mother said "No, we can't live here." We actually lived in Highland Park, which is right across the street from Detroit. But the two were similar. In fact, in '59, Highland Park was selected as one of the ten most beautiful cities in America. But by 1964, it had so much crime that we left. So that's why we moved out.
WW: Why did your family pick Southfield?
RA: Because there were other Chaldeans there. Because Chaldeans, believe it or not, tended to follow the Jewish people. They would - the Jewish people moved to Oak Park and Southfield. And the Chaldeans have an affinity for the Jewish people. There are so many similarities. That's why, when you hear about conflicts in the middle east, that's foreign to Chaldeans, because Chaldeans love the Jewish people, and Jewish people have been very supportive.
In fact, the man who owned our store, the building, couldn't have been a nicer landlord. He was Jewish. So Southfield was the new suburb, and it was also close to Detroit, because it was the town next to Detroit. So we just take the expressway and we could go to the store.
WW: How did you first hear what was going on in July?
RA: I got a call at home, saying, "Ronnie, be careful, there's some problems on 12th Street. There's some burning." Now, 12th Street was not really close to us. It was a couple miles away - I mean, it wasn't something that immediately caused me concern.
WW: By "close to us" do you mean to your home?
RA: To our store. Our store. So I go into the store that morning, and there's no - no news about this, nothing reported. In fact, I was told it was purposely not reported, okay, so as not to get people anxious. But what happened is, I saw the smoke started to come closer. And then at one point - our store wasn't very far from Grand Boulevard and Grand River. And there was a fire at Grand Boulevard and Grand River, at a furniture store. I think it was called Charles Furniture, as I recall.
And so then I became alarmed, then. Called my brother Andy. I said Andy, you oughta get down here because I'm concerned. So as things began to heat up, we put tobacco - the cigarettes - and money in our car. Then I saw two guys with torches coming down the street. Yeah. Just like out of a movie, like a Frankenstein movie - there were two guys with torches, walking towards us. Now they're only like a block away - I mean, where are they going? They weren't - they weren't torching any houses, and there were no other stores or buildings, other than ours. So we got out quickly - had my butcher knife.
And then customers started to call us. And they were essentially telling us what was going on . "They're breaking your windows, they're doing this, they're doing that." They actually burned our store three times. They couldn't get it the first time, they couldn't get it the second time, but they got it the third time.
WW: When you say they didn't get it the first or second time - the store just didn't catch on fire?
RA: No, it caught fire - but it didn't burn down.
WW: Okay.
RA: And there was a lot of looting. Now there's something else too, that was controversial. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh gave a do not shoot order. As a result there was widespread looting and you'd see National Guard doing nothing. For the first few days. So it was an open invitation.
WW: How did your parents react to what was going on?
RA: What do you think? Devastated. It was what my father worked his whole life for. He had nothing now. I mean, you - you have to understand. When you're poor, you appreciate whatever you get, okay. Whether it's a pen, a book, whatever it is, you appreciate it. Then you built up a store. It becomes very successful. And then someone takes it away from you.
And it wasn't our customers - our customers who were African American were wonderful. They treated us well. In fact, some of them even offered to give us some money, okay. I mean, that's the kind of people we had. So when they talk about the race riots, and they refer to African Americans, I don't view it that way. Not at all. I view it as insurrectionists, anarchists, who may have happened to be African American, but were not representative of the African American community. They certainly weren't representing the African American community that I knew. People I went to school with, people I - I worked with. Not at all. These were people that used their anger to promote a violence. You know, it's a justification for what they did. So my father was extremely depressed, and I was bitter, frankly. I was angry with God. How could you allow this to happen? And, again, letting people do whatever they want with no police action. None. None. If someone breaks into your house, and you know it, and the police know it, and they don't do anything, how do you feel? And they take everything you own. Everything.
WW: Did your family immediately - what was your first reaction? Just to abandon the store, or to rebuild?
RA: Well, we wanted to rebuild, but we had cheap rent, because the building was old. This building was probably built in the thirties, okay. It was called Hamway Supermarket, but you'd laugh today, because it was about twice the size of a Seven Eleven. So it wasn't a supermarket, but in the thirties and forties, it was, because they had fresh meat, produce. The landlord said "I will build, but I can't charge you the same rent, because I have to build this new building." So we couldn't afford the rent. And we didn't have any insurance money, because the ten thousand we had paid off some of the creditors.
See, what we used to do in the store business, you would pay for your groceries the week after you got them. Like for instance, we would get bread twice a week. On a Monday and a Thursday, okay. Sometimes three times - but just so - Monday and Thursday. The Monday bread you didn't pay for. When they came in with the Thursday bread, you paid for Monday's bread. And then the following Monday, you paid for Thursday's bread. Same thing for all the other groceries. Some you paid right away, okay, that's different. Like the fresh meat you had to pay for right away.
But a lot of the food, you got on credit, so you would pay a week later. We had a lot of inventory, but we owed a lot of money. So that was never an option.
WW: What did your family do afterwards?
RA: Well, struggled. What happened is, in fact, turn that off for a second - by the way, that judge just died.
WW: Were you and your brother able to salvage anything else from the store?
RA: No. And the problem is, once you have a fire, you have smoke damage, so there's always a risk of contamination, so we - we salvaged nothing. Nope. You asked what we did -
WW: No, no -
RA: For money. I'll tell you. What happened is, I had to get a job. And I got a job at Ford, thanks to my brother Andy. He made an introduction, he helped me get this job. But I didn't have a degree, and this job required a degree. And this is where the good comes out. Like I say, I was very angry with God, because I wanted to have a chain of supermarkets. That's what I wanted, and I knew I'd make a good living, because I was good at the grocery business. And that's all I knew. Anyway, so they said to me, "we're going to hire you, but you've got to go back to college and get a degree. You don't have a degree."
Well, the day I went, I met my love of my life, my future wife, and my cousin Mary down there. If I didn't lose the store, I had no intention of going back to college - none at all. I only had like a year, a year and a half, that's all. I wasn't going to go back. They required me to go back. Well, what happened is, I met her in the cafeteria line. She was behind me, she caught my eye - and then we wound up dating, and became married. And last week was forty-seven years. On top of that, because I was at Ford, I had employment, and I had six promotions in eight years. And I won three awards, and I graduated summa cum laude from college. And then law school, I did well, which Ford paid for.
Well, I wound up becoming a lawyer and I have six offices now. And had we not lost the store I would have never met my wife, never married her, and would never have become an attorney. I had no dreams of becoming a lawyer. So it was the best day and the worst day of my life, at the same time.
WW: You speak about how bitter your family was. Did you avoid coming to the city after that?
RA: No, no. Again - this was not about race. People keep saying "the race riots." Yes, there were people that were African American and vented, okay - but that doesn't mean it was about race, because the stores that were torched were not stores that gouged people, they weren't stores that mistreated - in fact, most of the stores re-opened, and they re-opened to the same customers. If they were not good people, why would they re-open, and why would the people shop there? The African American community has been very supportive of the Chaldean community.
Now I also played on an all-black baseball team for five years, okay. So this business about race is really over-done, okay. I mean, you can talk about the police shootings, and there's a whole gamut of things. The reality is, the riots were spawned from a variety of things, and it isn't because it was strictly people of color. That really isn't it. I don't believe it. Never have.
WW: Backtracking -
RA: But there is discrimination; it goes both ways. There are white people who discriminate and there are black people who discriminate. People are people - that's what you have to look at. Not a class of people. Mary and I are Chaldean, but are we representative of all the Chaldeans? No. There are some that might be better - although I don't think so, Mary - but there'd be some that aren't as nice. So you have to look at people individually, and not as a class.
WW: Backtracking, really quick, because I skipped a question.
RA: I sound like I'm lecturing, I don't mean to do that.
WW: Did you or any of your family members sense anything coming that summer, in July?
RA: No. No. There was a problem with unemployment, okay, and there was a problem with people leaving the city - things like that - but no, not a sense that there's going to be something occurring, no. No.
WW: Are you optimistic for the city today?
RA: Well, yeah. I mean, if you'd asked me ten years ago it would be a different answer, but the answer is yes. First of all, most everything comes in a cycle, okay. The automobile industry is a perfect example. Wall Street's an example. Real estate's an example. Detroit was going to come back - it was just a question of when. Now, thanks to the Ford family, thanks to Mike Ilitch, thanks to Dan Gilbert, it hastened the renaissance of the city. And having good mayors, like Dave Bing, Mayor Duggan, who's excellent.
So the right things are happening and you can see it, because major parts of the city - downtown, midtown, Corktown - are all very strong. It's a matter of transferring that growth and vitality into the neighborhoods. The crime is still - crime and education are still the two major problems, and Detroit doesn't have the money. It really needs three times as many police it has. It really does.
And education - if you don't get that straightened out, people are not going to want to have their kids here. You see the explosion in downtown Detroit, but they're all young people. Not with families.
So those are two issues that I'm confident that the mayor and the legislature will do the things necessary. So I'm very, very high on the city - I own a duplex in Detroit. I've looked for other properties - not to flip - I mean, my wife Rita has always been a champion for Detroit. In fact, we were going to buy the Ransom Gillis mansion, okay. We didn't get it, but she wanted it, and the reality is, because she wanted - not for money - she wanted to fix it up, and have it as a testament to the grandkids to see what the grandparents did, for Detroit.
So the answer is yes, unequivocally.
WW: Well, is there anything else you'd like to share today?
RA: Well, first of all, I appreciate the opportunity. I think this is a very noble project. I don't think people really grasped what happened. The - you have to look at the totality of the years - of the fifty years, and the twenty years before sixty-seven - not twenty years, ten years - where things occurred. And again, I know the expressway sounds like it's silly, but - it's just some other thing. Because Detroit didn't have - also didn't have mass transportation, which is another problem. Had they not built the expressways, and continued with mass transportation, Detroit would have not had all these things occur. So things change, and what it is - you evolve, and you deal with it.
And the city is - and I think the whole secret is really jobs. That you cannot have high unemployment and have as many children out of wedlock. It's a major problem, and people don't talk about it, but the numbers I hear are staggering, in Detroit.
Chaldeans - which I'm proud to say I am one - were blessed to have a strong family structure, starting with the grandparents - not the parents - the grandparents. Then the parents. Then the children, because when children have parents and grandparents, they have a strength and a support.
Part of the reason the Chaldeans are so successful is that they work hard, but there's another component, that is not typical. They help each other in the community. Like my uncle helped my dad. But also people like Mike George, and his father - other Chaldeans loaned money to my dad and uncle. Then my dad and uncle did the same thing for others, and they brought people from the old country to work for them, for us. So you had all of that support, which is what people need, okay.
Life is hard, and if you don't have the direction and you don't have the support, it makes it very, very hard, you know. So I'm optimistic that things have turned in Detroit. The Chaldeans are an instrumental part of that, too. You have to understand. Chaldeans have so many stores in Detroit, and they help the community, because they do things for those neighborhoods, okay. You could - you should really talk to some of the other people, and that is why Detroit will get stronger, because of the Chaldean influence.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I really appreciate it.
RA: You're welcome. I enjoyed it. Enjoyed it.
GS: Hello, today is July 15, 2016. My name is Giancarlo Stefanutti. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project and we are in Detroit, Michigan and I am sitting with Gerald Charbenneau. Thank you for sitting down with me today. Where were you born?
GC: I was born in Marshall, Minnesota in 1941.
GS: Okay. When did you move to Detroit.
GC: Oh, it was in 1966.
GS: Oh, okay.
GC: I grew up. I moved from Marshall to Oregon.
GS: Gotcha.
GC: Portland, Oregon. My dad worked in the shipyards.
GS: When did you move to Oregon?
GC: 1944.
GS: What was it like growing up in Oregon?
GC: It was pretty cool but I come from a working class family. My mother and father didn’t’ finish the sixth grade. My dad was a welder and my mother was an egg handler. I grew pretty much in public housing and then we finally bought a home when I was a freshman in high school or something like that. And even though I didn’t have any strong consciousness about my social class, it wasn’t a big issue, looking back I sort of see it as it is. I grew up there. I went to high school there. I decided I was an athlete; I played baseball and basketball varsity team. I was a good athlete. Pretty normal – I got voted to be the most typical of my senior class which ticked me off because I hated that idea but I got voted it. I wanted to be the, what did they call it, the person that was most witty but didn’t get it. My best friend got that and it ticked me off.
So anyway I graduated from high school and then I decided that I worked for a year to get some money and then I decided to go to college. I went to Portland State University and I majored in Political Science and minored in History and I graduated from there in 1964 and then I joined the Peace Corps. I went from Portland State to the Peace Corps. That summer I graduated in June and I went into the Peace Corps in August or September or something like that. I was sent to Columbia, South America. I was there 22 months. I had a three month training in LA and then we went on. From there I went on to Columbia and then I was there for 22 months and I worked as a – we had a program of organizing co-ops, cooperatives in Columbia so there were 38, 39 of us that went down and we went to different sites in Columbia so I was there for 22 months organizing consumer co-ops, marketing co-ops and things like that.
GS: That’s awesome. Just thinking about your community in Oregon, was it a very racially integrated community?
GC: No. No. un-uh. It was predominantly almost 99% white. And then the high school I went to was about the same. Clackamas High School is where I graduated from so there was hardly any diversity except for social class and gender, of course, but that was about it. The first time I encountered it, I used to read about things and I knew about African Americans but they were like in North Portland. I lived in a suburb of North Portland on the south side. I knew that there was a group that lived in – I had no awareness until I got into university but then I didn’t – I used to walk down the street. Portland State is right downtown like Wayne State so I would park and I’d walk down the main streets of Portland to get to Portland State and I would run into – they were doing urban renewal and I was one of those guys that would stand there and “This is great, this is wonderful.” It was exciting. And then I got involved with Mock United Nations and there were a lot of Africans in the program at Portland State University so I hung out with them a lot my junior and senior year. Probably the biggest thing that happened to me was to listen, to go see Martin Luther King, Jr. and listen to a speech by him which I found very inspiring and very motivating, got me going. But then I went into the Peace Corps because I was really into the idea that John F. Kennedy’s “Don’t ask what your country can do for you” bit. “Ask what you can do for your country” so I went ahead on that one. Some of my friends went to the South and Civil Rights but I went into the Peace Corps. Those couple guys went down there. So that was my first experience until I actually – well not really, in the Peace Corps I got transferred to a state or they call it a province in Columbia. When I got off the plane, I realized it was like 95% black so I spend twelve months in this city that was predominantly – and I worked primarily with black Columbians and then I realized that they were brought over about the same time to mine the mines for the Spanish and stuff like that. So that was my first direct contact with the black community.
GS: You said you moved to Detroit in ‘66. This was because of the Peace Corps or?
GC: Yeah, I got out in, I think, May or June of ‘66 and I when I got out I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and I’m the kind of person that just sort of falls into things and someone said “You’d be a good social worker,” and I’m going “What the hell is that?” We never saw one in Clackamas you know, like “What is that?” So I decided to follow through because I found out that there were three social work programs in the country that had a community development program. Community organization and community development and so I applied and Wayne State accepted me and gave me a little stipend and I loved to travel, of course, so I came out here and that was in ‘66. I came out here and moved into my – there was a little place on Alexandrine and Woodward. It’s right in the middle of gentrification right now and that’s where I first lived.
GS: How was that community compared to the community in Portland?
GC: Totally different.
GS: Totally different.
GC: I’ve always described myself as this little hick from Clackamas, Oregon who got dumped into Detroit, Michigan. You know, I got off the train at the depot and life was totally different for me. It was more rural where I grew up sort of semi-suburban world, public housing and things like that. It was just totally different and so I had a huge adjustment trying to get used to Detroit and living here. When I first moved here and fortunately I knew some of the people from the School of Social Work graduate program, they were very nice and found me that place to live and I made friends and little by little I got more adjusted to Detroit ‘cause I had that Peace Corps kind of philosophy where it’s always the same. You live and work in a neighborhood and the Peace Corps was like you don’t go down there and stay in a nice place where all the Gringos live. You go live with people and you try to be a native. “Go native” is a term that was used. That’s how I was here, too. I got involved. The program itself, I was in the community organization sequence of the Social Work graduate school. That was a pretty diverse group of guys and women so that was pretty good. Then I got placed on the John R and Adams down at the Central Methodist Church and I worked as a community organizer in the area of John R. Woodward East they called it. I can give you a history of the Cass Corridor but – I’ve been trying to do some history of that. Then I had a more direct encounter but my background in the Peace Corps really helped me to get involved and negotiate all of that ‘cause I just had the basic respect for all people. I don’t know where that came from so much but I had it so it didn’t make any difference to me. So I lived in that area of Cass Corridor and I worked just a few blocks away and then I was working with grassroots. We used to hang out in barber shops and numbers houses and bars and stuff like that and I was working with community groups and trying to organize tenants in some of those buildings. That was the beginning of gentrification and keep them in their buildings and things like that. We were trying to build a community organization that had enough power to resist that kind of thing. So that was my first contact and then I got very involved in all of that civil rights. I got very involved and marched with Dr. King in Chicago and Nashville and wherever. Washington, D.C. and the peace movement. I was also very active.
GS: So was your community in Detroit, the actual neighborhood, it was more integrated racially than Portland?
GC: Oh yeah. The one down in the Cass Corridor? Yeah, it was but there still was at that time in the late sixties, there were still a lot of white people there but they were mostly elderly and had been there for a long time and they were members of the major churches in the neighborhood. That Catholic Church, St. Patrick’s and Cass Methodist Church and places like that. So it was predominantly white. People who had this idea it wasn’t didn’t realize who was living there, of course. They painting it all like everything down in the inner city.
GS: You moved in ‘66 and you were only there for a year before the riot but could you sense, did you get an impression that there was any social tension within the city?
GC: Oh yeah, with my job, well that was sort of afterwards, I think. I was totally aware of it and very involved in it. In our classrooms we had African American teachers and we were really introduced to all of that kind of stuff and the conflicts that happen. The kind of discrimination and police brutality, all of those issues, we were really aware of it. That’s why I liked the program I was in because they really, really did focus in on that and direct us as social workers into that particular understanding of what’s going on in the city with race relations and things like that. And I used to feel more comfortable down here than I did in the suburbs. I felt safer, I said, well when I got mugged down here I know who’s going it but when I’m out there, I can’t tell if you steal my wallet. They do it more indirectly, like rich people just take your money. That’s aside.
GS: Where were you when you first heard that the riot had broken out?
GC: I had been hired, it was in between my first and second year of the social work graduate school and I had been hired by this organization called The Churches on the East Side for Social Action and they were a group of churches on the near East Side, east of Woodward and the center was like East Grand Boulevard around Lafayette. I don’t know if you know the area but it’s north of Belle Isle. Between Belle Isle and Mack on East Grand Boulevard. They wanted me to run this program, this youth action program that they had put together so they hired me to run it. It was an amazing program. It had about sixteen young people, probably 16 to 18, and it was mixed. It was black and white so it was cool. They had set it up so that these kids, we all lived together in one of these homes on East Grand Boulevard, they rented it for us and they went daily to work in the neighborhood to the churches and ran youth groups and youth activities and things like that. Recreational primarily. So that’s where we were on East Grand Boulevard just a little bit south of Mack Avenue. In between that and Vernor, I think it was in between and that’s where we were when it broke out.
GS: How did you hear about it?
GC: We heard about it through the TV and the radio.
GS: How was everybody reacting?
GC: We were very frightened and as the evening progressed, we were worried about if it was going to come our way and then what would happen and so as time progressed we got more and more frightened and the younger people especially so we all went upstairs to the attic of the building. I don’t know if that was good or bad. We went up there and stayed and we listened and we listened to the radio and we could hear, I remember hearing shots and then we could hear the shots come closer and closer and closer and as that happened we got more and more frightened. And then we would hear yelling and screaming and fire engines and stuff outside and we would look out the windows, primarily down East Grand Boulevard south to Lafayette and see people with grocery carts full of stuff. They were looting stores and stuff like that pushing grocery carts full of stuff up and down the streets. Eventually we went to sleep and then we woke up the next morning to tanks driving down the street right in front of us. That was totally like – totally floored us. All of a sudden these tanks were coming up and down the street and East Grand Boulevard which is a couple miles away from 12th Street in that way. And wow, that was frightening. And so finally we realized it was safe enough to go about our business so we resumed our work and that kind of thing. I never really went – I lived in the Cass Corridor right down the street here but I wasn’t living at home in my apartment. That would have been a little closer with a little more activity but I know that I couldn’t get around so I had to stay. They had the roads blocked off by police and state police and National Guard and US Army and all that stuff when that finally happened.
GS: When the National Guard and everyone else, the Army, came in, did you feel more relieved or were you more concerned?
GC: I was more concerned. I really wasn’t relieved. I really didn’t – at the time I didn’t really believe – I understood the police brutality and the nature of discrimination and things like that that were happening to black people so I wondered, especially brought in all these white people from the suburbs and other state police and the US Army and I’m going like, how are they going to deal with this? Are they going to use violence and really do a harsh way of doing it or are they really going to try to stop it and protect the lives of all of the people? So no, we were more concerned.
GS: Immediately after the riot, could you sense any change in the city apart from the destruction that was had? Any social change?
GC: Interestingly enough, yeah, there was. For example, they really got involved in and around the area where it started on 12th and began to tear down those buildings and started building new homes around in that area and that was primarily in my mind as I recall it where it started. They really wanted to fix up that place pretty quickly and that happened. And then over longer term, we had programs, social programs like New Detroit came into existence at that time right after that and that was a coalition of very, very influential people in Metro Detroit to try to begin to do some things to create social change in Detroit. And that was one of the outcomes of the whole process. My theory on it is that it takes something like that when people in power get threatened and all of a sudden they throw out these crumbs like New Detroit and some of these model cities some of these bigger programs, national programs, local programs, state programs. And so they started emphasizing that and so there’s more interest in it and more resources available and things of that kind. Over time, because I graduated with my Master’s degree and then came back a few months later and got a job as a community organizer down in Detroit. I work at a church and I ended up working with the elderly and got a cooperative building for them and a lot of those things we were doing in that neighborhood, organizing pennies. it was predominantly white still then. We were able to take advantage of some of those programs, state and federal programs and local programs to help do some of our community development projects in the Cass Corridor. It was slightly helpful but my basic insight was that what it takes to make the power structure do something and it took something like what happened to do that, to scare – I say they get threatened so they think better do something.
GS: A lot of people have different words to describe the riots. People say riot but other people say uprising or rebellion. Do you have another word for it that you would call it apart from a riot?
GC: Yes, I refer to it as a rebellion. I’ve always done that and in my teaching all the time we do, the classes sometimes go into things like that and students always use the term riot. I generally just stop and say, okay, I refer to it as a rebellion and explain to them why because it really bothered me. When I was here during the riot and particularly in the midst of it and then a lot of post-riot stuff, I listened – I was very tuned into a lot of black militants and as much as you could, the press, the social media and the press, their narrative was always based on the idea of riot. Well, the militants made me aware that it was much more a rebellion than a riot and there are arguments for that and I always bought into that that there’s a history to it and there’s a discontent that was in the city of Detroit and there was all this oppression that was going on in terms of police brutality. They used to have these squads that were very well known. They’d send around these squads of four and they had a lot of other things like that that would go around and engage black people very viciously and things like that. So that got brought up and then the discrimination, micro discrimination, macro discrimination. So people were really, really angry and so it took a little spark like raiding that blind pig. That’s all it took for it to erupt and so to me, it took on a rebellion and the bottom line is that by calling it a riot, I think you just reinforce the race society that black people are violent and just do things that are self-destructive and this just shows you that they don’t have the ability to pull themselves together. It just reinforces that idea that there’s no meaning to it and it had a lot of meaning for African Americans. The narrative that I found in the press and every place else was pretty much dominated by whites and black militants you had to go a ways. And there were some incidents like the Algiers Motel, I’m sure you’ve heard about that, which reinforce that idea of police brutality. So what do you expect for people that are living under those conditions since slavery. You just get tired. It was a hot night and people were like I’ve had it. BAM. So I think it was more of a rebellion. It always bother me why they referred to it – I thought it just sort of demeaned everything going on in Detroit. That’s my main point when I think about 1967. I was hoping I would be able to tell you that.
GS: Thinking about Detroit in present day, what are your opinions about the city?
GC: Wow, that it’s amazing. I’m totally amazed by – the other day we were down, we went to this over in North End, do you know where that is, because there’s urban farming and some activities there. I don’t know much about that because when I lived here down the street, I was very provincial. So we went over there to some community event and they were presenting some of the activities that they were involved in, urban farming and things like that. I was very – As I was driving in to park there right off of East Grand Boulevard and Oakland Avenue in that area, I couldn’t believe all these white, young people were riding around on their bikes and coming to this. I’m going Wow, that’s pretty amazing. And then when I go downtown, I love the River Walk and the Undercut and we spend a lot of time at the DIA [Detroit Institute of Arts], the Dally in the Alley. Whenever we get a chance, I live way out in the boonies and it’s a pain in the neck. I come down here because there’s nothing going on out there so I see a lot of stuff going on. A lot more, I call it more of “us” down there. White people. And wherever I go I see that as a positive thing and I’m very tuned into gentrification. We study it in sociology a lot and that process and seeing what’s happening in the Cass Corridor, now called Midtown. That’s why I’m trying to do some history of the Cass Corridor because the tossing out all of that history. When I was working down there, there would be these suburbanites that would come down like, Plum Street and they would try to get something going like that, get something happening. They’d put up this restaurants or this other thing and try to get suburban kids down and hang out there Fridays and Saturdays. Two or three of these things happened while I was down there. They didn’t quite catch hold but now it has. I don’t know what the tipping point is; I sort of study that. I always wonder what – North End, to me, is in the early process of gentrification, just beginning. I wonder what the tipping point is going to be, or if it’s going to be like it happened in Cass Corridor because when I was organizing, they were already starting stuff. They were trying to extend the hospital complex, then from the North, Wayne State University was coming down into the Cass Corridor. From the east it was the medical center, from the South was downtown coming up that way and then little by little, we were battling with them. For example, Wayne State was one of the most vicious groups because they would come in and buy a house on Cass Avenue down a little bit south from where their buildings were and then they would renovate it and then kick out the tenants. That was my job, our job was to try to organize them to try to prevent that from happening because they would fix it up and then of course they would raise the rent. At the time, the poor people couldn’t afford it so they were forced out little by little. That’s why we got the co-op; the idea the co-op would be that the people that lived there owned it. So it was the community ownership thing that they would own it and they wouldn’t have these absentee landlords that would just sell them out. But that’s when it started way back then. My daughter lately she’ll, “Dad, I was reading about Midtown. Weren’t you organizing that?” And I’d go, “No, actually, Lisa,” I said, “If I were down there, I’d probably be resisting it.” She goes, “ugh.” But it’s good in many ways. So good in so many ways. It’s not a simple black and white situation. What’s happening is good, the construction and the new things and the buildings and the new people coming down there. The issue for me is what happens to the poor people and what happens with them and how does – when I was at North End at this, it’s called One Mile but there was like – I kept asking them to what extent do you have community involvement and how are local people involved in your program? They introduced me to this woman who ran this local urban farm. It’s a community based urban farm right up the street so I talked with her for a long time. I know that they’re trying to do that with the hockey arena; there’s the big issue about community betterment developing a policy whereby these projects would have to include X amount, 10-20% of the money toward bettering the community and helping the people that live there have affordable housing and stuff like that. It’s a mixed bag but overall it’s a good thing. I just think that in one way they’ve done what they’ve always done: move the problem out. Not solve it, they just move it out to someplace out. I remember that they used to be downtown; there would be a lot of poor, skid row. And then they moved it over to Michigan Avenue. Then they moved up when they wanted to do something to Michigan Avenue they all moved up into the Cass Corridor. Now it’s all moved out again and I don’t have time to come down and study where – I wish I did have the resources and time. My university wants us to teach. It’s a mixed bag. It bothers me though; this is connected to the rebellion issue. Remember the Belle Isle issue? Whether the state should take it over or lease it? The big debate, even liberals like myself and colleagues and stuff were supporting the state to take it over and I was opposed to it. And then I ran into this guy at this conference at Marygrove and he was from New York and Shuman. And he ran the Shuman Center and he made this argument that the liberals are joining in when we support turning Belle Isle over to the state then what we’re saying is reinforcing this idea that black people can’t do it. That’s what worries me is this very basic idea that things keep happening. And now to what extent do local people get involved in gentrification and things like that. Because that idea is so powerful, empowerment of the people themselves. We did that when we did the housing co-op. We made sure, and it took us two years. Demonstrations and pickets to get the major construction companies to include black people in their construction and to have the whole thing run by the local people. That was big battle. That’s still the main issue for me of what’s going on in the city and it just bothers me that it’s overall it’s good what is happening but at the same time it’s not really solving the problem in my opinion. It’s just pushing it aside and moving it down and it’s just going to create more difficulties down the road.
GS: Anything else you’d like to add?
GC: I wanted to give you these two articles for reference. For example, this article having to do with revealing – the title is Revealing the Roots of a Riot. I think the key is that when I was trained in graduate school, you go to the roots of the problem and so that’s what I was attracted to and the black militants were, in my opinion, giving out the roots of it that kind of talks a little bit about it. And then here’s the basic question in this other article and it basically speaks to it. Basically what I’ve been saying probably more coherent. I don’t know. In case you – and that’s sort of what I use to pump my brain and my memory and stuff like that. When I get going, it comes back and it’s like getting on a bicycle.
GS: Okay, well thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
GC: Oh, it was my pleasure.
GS: Hello, today is June 29th, 2016. We are in Detroit, Michigan. My name is Giancarlo Stefanutti and this is for the Detroit 67 Oral History Project. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
AC: You’re welcome.
GS: Can you first tell me your names?
ME: My name is Muriel Earl.
AC: My name is Albert Colbard.
GS: Could you tell me where and when you two were born?
ME: I was born in Detroit, Michigan, 1948, February the 10th.
AC: I was born in Detroit, Michigan, May 10th, 1950.
GS: Okay. Where in Detroit did you two grow up?
ME: On Clairmount, between 12th and Woodrow Wilson.
AC: Same spot. Even though my family wasn’t originally from the east side. We moved east when she was 5 and I was 3.
GS: You moved from the east side when you were five?
AC: She was five. I was three.
GS: Were there any other particular reasons why you guys moved?
AC: Just better situation. At that time it was my parents and my grandparents.
GS: What did your parents do?
AC: My father worked for the DPW. My mother was a stay-at-home mom for a little while. I’m the youngest of seven kids, five boys, two girls, including this young lady right here. She’s the sister just above me.
GS: Oh, okay. What was childhood like? Was it just kind of normal? Playing with your friends?
ME: Happy, happy childhood.
AC: It was a happy childhood. As I said, I’m the youngest, and so forth. I don’t remember a lot of things when we first moved over there. Somewhere that sticks in my memory really started kicking in. It was a beautiful neighborhood. Trees and, I started to bring some pictures, but if you’re doing an interview, don’t make no difference, but it was a happy childhood.
GS: Awesome.
AC: She has a better memory of it.
ME: Lots of kids in the neighborhood.
AC: Lots of people.
ME: Lots of people.
AC: Lots of businesses.
ME: Lots of traffic down Clairmount.
AC: Lots of traffic down 12th. We were right off the corner of 12th and Clairmount, seven blocks—no, seven houses.
ME: Seven houses.
AC: Seven houses off of the corner. Seven houses, then an alley, then a business in fact, Buddy’s BBQ, then 12th Street.
GS: That’s a pretty busy area.
AC: It was a very busy area.
ME: Yes.
AC: It was a thriving neighborhood when we moved over there. Businesses from the next block over, Atkinson all the way down to West Grand Boulevard.
GS: Was it a racially integrated neighborhood?
AC: Yes, when we first moved over there, it was a Jewish neighborhood, and it was slowly becoming more black. But once again, she has a better memory about how it was when we first got there.
ME: Yeah, but gradually the Jewish people started to move out, and it became a black neighborhood.
AC: Predominantly black.
ME: Yeah, predominantly black. But we had two houses where the people were hangers-on, from the Jewish race or [unintelligible].
AC: Mr. [unintelligible] was Jewish on the, couple of houses down the street from us. And then the house on the—
ME: Remember the guy with the big belly down by Audrey—
AC: By Audrey Dunright, yeah. Okay, him. Then on the next block over was the Jewish shelter.
ME: Yes.
AC: Remember there was a Jewish shelter? Two houses that sat next to each other and these guys, as kids, they reminded us more of refugees. The odd-looking clothes, and so forth. They didn’t speak complete English. Broken English. You could tell a lot of times, when they spoke, they spoke in the, I’m going to say the Jewish manner and so forth. But it was an integrated neighborhood for a little while. Very busy. We had business up and down the block. Just up and down the block. I told my sister, I want you guys—this is a picture of the riot, but you can see all the different—
ME: That’s just when it started, when we were milling around.
GS: Wow, that’s crazy. Where did you two go to school, growing up?
AC: Crossman elementary.
ME: Hudson’s Junior High.
AC: And then Northern High School.
GS: Okay. How were those experiences?
ME: They were good.
AC: They were good. I think they were just normal as any school could be. Growing up and so forth, you had the, for lack of a better word, the good kids, the bad kids, the older kids, the younger kids. As she said in the beginning, we had immense amount of numbers of families in the neighborhood, almost on top of each other. Almost all the houses were two-family dwellings. Almost. But most of them were two-family dwellings, so we had a lot of people in the neighborhood.
ME: We had quite a few apartment buildings—
AC: Yeah, apartment buildings and so forth—
ME: It was two bedrooms, on the next block from us—
AC: Between Woodrow Wilson and Byron, and they were just dotted throughout the neighborhood itself. Not so much our block, our block from 12th to Woodrow Wilson, all the family dwellings from Woodrow Wilson to Byron, you had a few apartment buildings. And in between Byron and Hamilton, there was no apartment buildings, all family dwellings and so forth. Then the next block, had an apartment or two. So it was different apartments. On the next block from us, a few four-family flats, a couple of apartment buildings, so it was like that almost throughout the entire neighborhood.
ME: And these apartment buildings were huge.
AC: Huge, a lot of people.
ME: Huge apartment.
GS: Wow. Did your siblings go to the same school?
AC: Not all of them, but some of them from the—my oldest sister, my oldest brother, and my middle brother all went to Central High school. I forgot which high school Fred went to. That’s our second oldest brother. But the last three, my brother Marlin, my sister and myself, we all three went to the same schools.
GS: Moving towards the early ‘60s, could you sense any growing tension in the city? Was there some sort of change in the atmosphere that you could sense?
ME: I wanted to say that I don’t know what year it started, but the riot started like in LA. We were conscious of that. Now my self, I never thought it would reach Detroit.
AC: My experience goes back to about ’62. She would’ve been 15, I would’ve been 12. And my middle brother had a friend of his, and his friend’s name was Albert. My name is Albert. So that was kind of a connection, he was always nice to me. In ’62, late one night, I don’t know what was happening, but he ran from the police along this—Herman Kiefer Hospital, on a street called Byron. And there’s a dark street, and the story we were told is that he was shot in the back of the head. The graphics was, back of the head, came out his eye. I remember his name was Albert and he was a really good friend of my middle brother. That for me was the beginning of me paying more attention to what was going on. You started hearing, you know, more things of black people getting beat up by the police or things happening within the black neighborhood. And I think I started paying more attention—one of the words that hit me back then were blind pigs. After-hour joints. As I started progressing and getting older, not much older than 12, I realized that it was one right across the alley from us. Never knew what it was. I just always thought that the man that owned that place just partied every night, and especially hard on the weekend. But that’s what it was. It was after-hours, an after-hour place. We were told at one time that at least once a year, they raided his house. But all the rest of the time during the year they left him alone. The same thing was going on. That made no sense to me. Just being young, I really couldn’t put it into what was happening, but I really realized that something was wrong with that. Every morning, people would go to his house to buy liquor—except they didn’t sell liquor on Sundays back then—but they would go to his house early in the morning to buy liquor from him. His place would be open all night long. Sometimes we would be in bed and we’d still hear the music playing.
ME: Yeah, he had a jukebox, right in the middle of his living room.
AC: A jukebox. You could hear it playing. He was a very nice guy. His name was Mr. Rory. He would take us on one of the holidays—
ME: Fourth of July.
AC: Fourth of July, he would take us down to the Eastern Market, and he would buy, 12, 15 watermelons, and give them out to the people in the neighborhood. Just being nice. He was something else, he was truly something else, but that’s another story. It was just, you know, he was a nice guy. We grew up with his kids—matter of fact, we’ve just seen his stepson about two weeks ago, and we got a chance to stop and talk to him, you know, just different people. I’ll go back to ’62 again, that was the beginning of my consciousness of what was going on. You started hearing more often, you would see the cars stopped on 12th Street by the police. You’d hear about people who got roughed up by the police for one reason or another. To say that I see it really happen, you heard about it more than you would really see it, but every now and then you’d see the different cars. It was just stories throughout the neighborhood. That was a thriving, unbelievable neighborhood. It was fun during the day, but very dangerous at night.
GS: Wow.
ME: They had police cars, four officers to a car, and they were called The Big Four. They drove around the neighborhood, and they gave some people grief. I looked at them as bad, not good. I thought they used to sort of pick on people.
GS: Your parents and the general community, were they always kind of nervous or unsure with the police before ’62 or was it really after this story about your brother’s friend being shot in the back of the head?
AC: I could never say that they were nervous. I’ll be honest, giving that I put them on a pedestal. My father wasn’t a very nervous person, so forth. He was a very cool, collected type of guy. But I remember when I was growing up, we got the speech about how to handle yourself if you were stopped by the police, and so forth. As I said, I was 12 years old; I never did anything to get stopped by the police other than, you know, they would ride by and give you the look and so forth. But my brothers, being older than I was, that was a different thing. You hear about how they may have been chased up off the corner, something like that. I couldn’t say, not a huge amount of stories from them about how they were roughed up by the police and so forth. My sister and I were joking not too long ago, and we told the story to each other about how one time my older brother got drunk and he was in a store, and the people that owned the store called the police on him. Well, honestly, the police were nice enough to bring him home. Evidently he told them where he lived and they brought him home and so forth. They brought him home, and my mother told them, “Bring him in.” They put him right there and so forth. So it wasn’t like they did anything to him, not that we know of. You get little stories like that, but then you get the other stories of how you heard somebody else got beat up or jailed or they stood on his neck or something like that. I’ll say it again, being the youngest, I didn’t see a heck of a whole lot of it, because I was in the house, on the porch at that curfew time the way my parents told me. But my brothers, they were a good seven, nine, ten years older than me, so if I’m twelve years older, 22, 21, and 19.
GS: Wow.
AC: In this way, it was a very great neighborhood because we grew up with neighbors who looked out for us, neighbors who told on you if you did something, neighbors who was able to, I’m not gonna say beat you, but accost you and bring you home and so forth. It was a very decent neighborhood. It was great. As you get older, so forth, a few things change here and there. As we got older, you can see the changes come about. You can see them come about.
ME: Then, I’m trying to think what year—was it the drugs that—
AC: That helped change that? Yes. I think I heard about as a kid, you see somebody and you wonder, why’s this person sitting on the ground, nodded out like whatever? But it don’t hit you, you think he’s just sleeping, he’s drunk even, whatever. But slowly but surely you started hearing the thing about the drugs. Even the drug houses. It started changing. Some of the people who you thought were really nice people at one time, now you can see that attitude about them changing. A house or two getting broke in.
GS: Moving towards the riot, where were you two when you first heard about the riot?
AC: At home in the bed.
ME: Our older brother came in and he woke my mother and myself up—well, he tried to wake him up too—
AC: And I wouldn’t get up.
ME: But he said, “There’s a crowd milling around the intersection of 12th and Clairmount.” We looked down there, and they were milling around, and it just started to grow bigger. It started with about thirty people, and then it grew to sixty, a hundred, and then, I mean, it was just, the whole intersection was full of people.
AC: We have to stay, to start off with, we stayed half a block from where it started. If you look at this picture here, at the end of this picture, going this way, is where we stayed. See where it stays the drug store? [unintelligible name]’s Drugs? That’s the corner of Clairmount and 12th. We stayed seven houses off that corner. So when that happened and my brother came, as she said, he told them about it, and I refused to get up because I’m asleep.
ME: It was around 3:30 in the morning.
AC: And I was sleeping, I didn’t want to get up. They went outside and they seen it, and after a while I get out of the bed, I could hear the noise, people’s voices. I finally got up, put on some pants. I remember walking to the front door, and I looked to the front door, it was people standing there on the sidewalks, looking down to where they were. My mother and my sister on the steps and sidewalks and people talking to each other, “What’s going on?” As I walked down the porch, I looked that way. By this time, the crowd had gotten bigger. She said it was lighter when they first got out there. It was bigger when I got out there. And you could see—and it was still dark, but slowly the sun started coming up, and you could see all these people up and down, and you can hear the voices.
ME: You could hear the voices, and as the day went on, if you looked down to Hamilton one way, you could see police cars just sitting there, not doing anything. Because the people hadn’t really gotten started yet. On the other end, at Linwood, you could see police cars down there, just sitting.
AC: Just sitting.
ME: So, I don’t know if it was about noon, or a little later, they started breaking in the stores.
AC: Actually, they started throwing stuff at the police first, and if you move forward in time—we didn’t know why the police left—but we’d always heard that they were given orders to just move out of the neighborhood. As they moved out of the neighborhood, the looting started taking place and you could see all the people up there. I’ll be honest, she was 19, I was 17. My mom grabbed me in the collar and said, “If you leave off this porch, I’ll raise hell.” Being scared of my momma made me stand there, so my job was just to protect the house. But you can see all the people—a lot of people, not all of them—going towards 12th and Clairmount, and whatever was going on, was going on. You could see the police cars pull in, then everybody was scattered, then they would pull back out, and it would start all over again.
ME: As the day went on—cause I stayed on the porch the whole day, because I couldn’t believe what was going on—and as the day went on, we saw very strange sights, like people going down the streets with washing machines—
AC: Couches—
ME: Couches—
AC: Televisions, big bags of groceries, and you wondered, what is going on? You started to hear from different people in the neighborhood that they were breaking into the stores. They were now breaking into the stores. Looting, as they say. They were breaking into the stores. It just went on. As I said, the police would show up, the people would run; they would pull back out, and everybody would start all over again. It was something to see. I remember as a kid—she mentioned how the riot in California, Watts, California, was about 1965. And I can remember watching that on television, and in some ways it was almost the same way: the police would show up, everybody would run. You’d see them breaking in, the police would jump out their cars and arrest a few people here and there, pull them away. People breaking in and come back again to start doing the same thing, over and over. From my vision, from standing on the porch with my mom, standing in the front yard, looking, that’s the way it looked to us. We kept seeing almost the same thing. That’s the way I was seeing it.
ME: This one guy that I know, he stopped in front of the house because my grandmother wouldn’t let anybody come up on the porch. He had a brown bag, paper bag, and he opened it up, and it was brimming to the top with jewelry: watches, and rings—
AC: Chains—
ME: He hit the pawnshops that were on 12th. It wasn’t exciting or anything to me. I was just totally amazed to see what these people were doing. I had one brother that was in the thick of it. Did Frank go up there?
AC: Frank and Fred, yeah. They’re our older brothers. They didn’t live at home anymore. They came to check on the house, to make sure we were all right in the house and so forth, and then they went to go do what they’re doing.
[phone rings]
They would actually come back to the house and give us tidbits of information on what was going on up there, and so forth. I can remember my brother told me, “I’ll be right back, but go open the back door.” I had no idea why he wanted me to open the back door, so I go to the back door, and I go back out to the front, and I’m seeing what’s going on and so forth, and he come running to the side of the house, waving at me. I cut through the house. I said, “I opened the door,” and he said, “Come downstairs.” We all came in, he had a couple leather coats and some other stuff. I went, “Oh, my god.” But he would tell us the stories of what was happening, who he ran into, who went down. We saw people cutting through the alley carrying couches, carrying chairs, carrying dinette sets, refrigerators. This one guy had a refrigerator on a dolly. On a dolly! It was, I’m going to agree with her, it wasn’t fun, but it was amazing, and kind of shocking, the things that you said. I told my friends when we were growing up. Something inside of me really wanted to go up there, but I had more fear of the little lady at the house than I did to go up there and see what was happening. Honestly, we got a good view of a lot of things that were going on other than the natural of it. You could see people going by, the police and all that. I didn’t want to be involved in that part right there.
ME: The next day was the real horror story, because they started to burn. What did they burn?
AC: The first thing was this place that says Byzan’s Sales Company. It was a furniture store, and they sold a lot of things. That’s the first thing they set on fire. We couldn’t say why. Like a lot of merchants that were on 12th Street, they gave a lot of credit to a lot of people. I’m not saying that don’t make them an angel, or to set them on a table, pedestal, or whatever, but they gave a lot of credit to a lot of people. Everybody was not with them burning them up, whatever happened. I couldn’t begin to tell you what happened. Maybe some of the older people, so forth, could tell you. But that was the first place they started burning up. From that point, that point on, it just got horrible.
ME: Bigger and bigger. That’s when I got scared. I was scared when they started to burn.
AC: It burned, and that had been a furniture store, but it was a blaze. It almost looked like the blaze you see on television, when you watch the forest fires. Hot blaze. The strangest thing was that you had embers that were burning, and the wind was blowing, so it was taking the embers down the block. I had to get up on top of the house with the water hose and wet the roof down so the embers wouldn’t get on top of the roof. That’s the way it was. It got worse because it went from one side of the street—this is the side of the street that we stayed on—it went from this side of the street to that side of the street. As she just said, now it got really, really serious. Because then you have the fire department coming to put the fires out, and somebody started shooting at the fire department. They would leave and just let something burn.
ME: Then we got calls from relatives that live in different places in the city, and they were rioting too. I don’t know how it got word to them, but it just seemed like the whole city was burning.
AC: We had a brother, my brother right above her, he was in the military in Italy. And he read a newspaper in Italy—because he could speak a little bit of Italian—and it says, “Detroit burns to the ground.” He was constantly trying to call home, constantly. That was on a Sunday, when the riots started. He tried to get to us that following Sunday?
ME: It was a long time.
AC: A long time, a week before—he was worried, he was over in Italy and just reading, “Detroit burns down to the ground.” That’s what he said the newspaper was saying and so forth. It was unbelievable. It was something that you go through that you’ll never, ever forget in your life.
ME: Then—I’m trying to think—about the third day, they called in the National Guard, so now we’ve got all these soldiers, you know, all around, trying to get some sense of order or something. At night, when we would go to bed, it sounded like machine guns shooting up and down the alleys around there.
AC: What that was was they actually did shoot. They came down the alleys and shot out all the streetlights. You remember in mama’s bedroom? We were in my mother’s bedroom, in the back of the house, and we had to lay on the floor because we didn’t know if they were shooting in the houses or whatever, but they were shooting out all the lights that were in the alleys. The lights that were on the streets. This way, they can’t be seen because now you got sniper fire from the people, I should say. From the people, there was sniper fire, and they were ordered to shoot out all the lights. You couldn’t be able to see them. It was horrifying. It got to be worse and worse, and from day one, we thought maybe this was going to last just a day. The next three to four days got worse. You kept getting the stories, people who were burned out. One of the ladies I went to junior high school with, she stayed down at Euclid and 12th. Two houses off the corner. Those two houses got burned—
ME: Four.
AC: Yeah, four houses off the corner. I can remember them, that the story that was told when we got back to junior high school was that they had to hold this young lady down because she thought her brother was in the house. He was actually in the back of the house on the other side of the house. She thought he was in the house, and it just got worse. A lot of the places that we used to say we could go in as kids, as teenagers, now were burned down. Not every one of them, but the majority of them, a lot of them were burned down. The fact that now you hear this shooting from the police, the National Guard, you hear the sporadic shots of people shooting back at them, so you do best to lay on the floor. We had to lay on the floor. We slept on the floor.
GS: When the National Guard came in, did you and your parents feel a sense of relief or not because it was more shooting?
ME: No.
AL: None whatsoever.
ME: Especially when they started shooting up and down the alleys and things.
AL: You had thought that something would happen or some kind of order would come in, but it wasn’t. It was like they came to protect the property, not the people.
GS: Moving towards post-riot, the post-riot period, how do you feel that Detroit changed atmospherically after that? Did it change atmospherically, do you think?
ME: Yes, I think it changed.
AL: I don’t think it did.
ME: You don’t think it changed?
AL: Nope. One of the things that happened, there was still that sense of unbelief, that sense of nothing really changed. One of the things that happened in the city was, even though there were jobs in the factories, there was no jobs in the city. It’s no different than when you stop and say, anybody can’t go to college. So some people can get a job. It was either a job or college, and there was nothing in-between. Either you got a good job at the factory or you went to college. But the things in-between, such as working at liquor stores, working, there was really nothing like that to take. They had no—I don’t even know if summer jobs were a big thing for kids back then—but we know in the suburbs, a lot of the kids in the suburbs had summer jobs. There were no summer jobs in the city of Detroit.
ME: I felt like the atmosphere changed because the people were stupid. They burned down their own neighborhood, which served them, like the stores all up and down 12th. They destroyed it. The first time I saw it, I was on a bus coming home from work—because I went back to work on, I believe it was Thursday—and when I saw how horrible it looked, I could not believe it. I couldn’t believe it! There was just narrow steel—
AL: It’s like going back to see your house, and your house is burned down. That was your neighborhood. No different than anybody. You had pride in your neighborhood. I can say, as much as I—it was a love-hate relationship for me, for that neighborhood. I loved it because it was busy, there were so many things to do. I hated it because you see the things rolling downhill and it wasn’t being taken care of. You hear these stories about the police were getting kickbacks for this, or they weren’t doing anything, some people will say, “Well that’s them. Let them do what they’re doing.” You can see that little parable of so, what are the young people supposed to do? I wasn’t asking nobody or telling nobody to raise us up different than my parents were trying to raise us, but the authorities, the people in charge, it just felt like they didn’t care. As long as it happened down there, and it stayed down there. It was no different. You hear the stories again that the National Guard, where was it—8 Mile? Where was it on 8 Mile where we used to go?
ME: State fair.
AL: State Fair, it was at the State Fair Grounds. It was there at the State Fair Grounds that was one of their holding spots. They stayed there. And they really stayed there because they didn’t want you to go across 8 Mile. They didn’t want anything to go across 8 Mile. They blocked off a certain part of Woodward going downtown because they didn’t want you to go downtown. Hence for me saying they protected the property and not the people. That’s not the people.
ME: And they killed people, too.
AL: You heard a lot of stories of things going on. I was never there to see it happen. One of my good friends that I grew up with was caught up in a situation not too far away. Two of his friends got killed. Not in front of him, but the same two people that walked into this place with him. Five of them, only three of them walked out. They found them murdered. But the last time they seen these two other guys, they were with the police. You hear a lot of stories. I can’t confirm not a one of them, but you hear a lot of stories of things that went on. It just didn’t have a explanation.
ME: I can confirm that four young men that I went to high school with, they were killed in this Algiers—
AL: That’s what I was talking about. The Algiers Motel.
ME: On Woodward. I went to school with those poor guys.
AL: One of the guys that walked out, I was in elementary school all the way through high school with him. He was one of the guys that walked out, but he said when they made them leave, they walked out with nothing but their underwear on, because they made them take off their clothes and everything. He said it was the most scared he’s ever been in his life. This guy turned out to be later on in life, he was part of a very popular singing group not only in Detroit, but throughout the country. It was a group called The Dramatics. Guy named Ron Banks, he was one of the lead singers. I grew up with this guy, and he was one of the ones that was in the Motel at that time.
GS: It’s crazy.
AL: It is when you stop and think about it. I don’t think it did great because to me they’re back on the same track that they were. Building downtown, but doing nothing for the neighborhoods. Letting the neighborhoods sporadically get a little bit of this, and downtown get all of that. I understand that it takes a whole neighborhood to build the neighborhood, but you have to have people with jobs. Everybody can’t live off of welfare or the unemployment for so long. You have to build something so that people can have jobs, can have things no different. The thing, to me, the thing with the minimum wage. Today’s age, you can’t make a living off of $7.50 an hour, $9 an hour. If you’re one person, you maybe can live off of it, but if you’re a parent, a mother, a single mother, a father with a family, you can’t live off of anything like that. And it’s happening all over again. You would think that we’d have learned or something, but you can see it happen all over again. There’s construction everywhere, but where’s that construction leading to? From there back downtown. From downtown, to just so far.
GS: Was there anything else you would like to add?
ME: Today, I see young people, especially, that don’t care. They don’t care about their neighborhoods, about going to school, and I say they were taught—I mean, they weren’t taught to have manners or anything. They follow their parents through the system on welfare. They have no pride about themselves.
AL: My father taught us that you make mistakes, but you learn from your mistakes so that you won’t do the same thing over and over and over again. I can see the same mistakes being made over and over and over again. It’s the same thing. The schools that we went to, I can’t call them bad schools. I learned. I loved school, elementary school to high school, high school to my couple years in college. I love school. But as she just said, there’s no emphasis on the parenting. There’s no emphasis on the schools. It’s almost like the schools are babysitters. Honestly, when you stop and look at it a little bit, back in our days, that’s what they were then, also. Not all of them, but just some of them, because it got to the same things. Teachers thought they were being taken advantage of. They were just kids. You shouldn’t have to have a teacher to teach your kids about manners. That’s something you shouldn’t have at all. You shouldn’t have a teacher that has to bring toilet paper or paper towel to a school. That’s something that now the system is supposed to take care of or whatever. There’s something wrong with these not being addressed, and it’s going back to the same thing again. The suburbs are thriving and the inner city is dying.
GS: Well, thank you for sitting down with me today.
AL: You’re welcome.
NL: Today is June 25th, 2015. This is the interview of Leala Griffith by Noah Levinson. We are at 25960 York Road in Royal Oak, Michigan, and this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society and the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Leala, could you first tell me where and when you were born?
LG: I was born in Midway, Alabama. February 10th, 1944.
NL: When did you first move to Michigan?
LG: I moved to Michigan in August of ’62.
NL: And you went right to the Detroit area?
LG: Yes.
NL: How did you decide to move and why Detroit?
LG: I decided to move because of better jobs. I thought maybe I’ll find a better job here in Detroit. And I moved here with friends.
NL: Did you find work soon after you moved?
LG: I did.
NL: What kind of work was that?
LG: I was babysitting.
NL: For lots of different people or—?
LG: Lots of different people.
NL: What neighborhood of Detroit were you living in when you first got here?
LG: When I first got here, I was living on Warren and 33rd Street.
NL: Is that east or west side?
LG: West.
NL: Where were you living in July 1967?
LG: Joy Road between Dexter and Linwood.
NL: So that’s also the west side?
LG: Yes, it is.
NL: What’s your first memory of hearing about the violence on 12th Street?
LG: Well, it was one Sunday morning, my cousin called me. She told me that there was a fire on 12th Street. We had never looked out the window or anything so we looked out the window and all we could see was smoke. It was very frightening. Then we start calling friends, family, to see if they was okay or had they heard or what was going on, because we didn’t know what was going on. Later we found out that, what did they call it, looting? On 12th Street.
NL: Were any of your friends or people you were talking to around there when that happened or they went soon after? To the area where the fires and looting started.
LG: Did they go there?
NL: Yeah.
LG: No.
NL: About how far is that? Was that just a couple miles away from your house?
LG: Yes.
NL: But you could still see the smoke?
LG: I could see the smoke as we looked out the window, you could see the smoke.
NL: There were about four or five days where the looting and fires and shooting and things just continued. What do you remember as that week went on? Especially about your neighborhood.
LG: My neighborhood. Later on that evening, the next day, all I could see, you know, was just looting at night and fires getting closer to me. I was afraid, I actually know what to do, so I stayed in my apartment. I really didn’t even go outside. We did go out the first day because there was a store across the street to get some milk and bread to live on. Stayed in the apartment.
NL: For that whole week?
LG: Yeah, four days.
NL: Were you still doing babysitting at this point? Or where were you working?
LG: I was working in Palmer Park, Hamilton and 7 Mile, I think.
NL: Okay. You just told the family that you weren’t coming to work that week?
LG: Exactly.
NL: I think most people were doing things like that.
LG: As a matter of fact, they wanted me to come with them because it wasn’t as bad.
NL: Right, it was much further north.
LG: Right, but I couldn’t take the chance.
NL: You didn’t want to be outside just for that trip up to Palmer Park?
LG: Right, exactly.
NL: I see. Do you remember seeing—you said there was looting going on in the neighborhood—do you remember what kinds of things people were taking?
LG: Oh, goodness. Furniture, the grocery stores—there were three stores—food, baskets of food, and this was all night long. There was a laundry, Queen Quality, I believe. They took stuff from there. All sorts of stuff.
NL: Did you talk to anybody who was looting or who was arrested?
LG: No.
NL: No? Did you remember thinking or did you have any thoughts about why were people doing this?
LG: I did, I did. To me, I was surprised because as afraid as I was, we still weren’t safe. Why were they taking this stuff and where were they going with it? Didn’t ask anybody anything, because like I said, I’m still looking out the window.
NL: Right. One of the many things that led to these events in July is that there are a lot of unfair and discriminatory practices in Detroit specifically affecting black people. Do you think that that is something that led to this civil unrest, or do you think it was separate?
LG: That I really don’t know. I just don’t know. I’ve heard different, you know, but I don’t know why it started.
NL: The neighborhood that you were living in there, the Joy Road, one. How would you describe that neighborhood? Was it an integrated neighborhood or was it separate?
LG: It was all black. But it was a nice neighborhood at that time.
NL: Do you remember feeling or hearing about from friends or family or people about that type of discrimination, either by the police or in regards to housing or starting your own business?
LG: Repeat.
NL: At that time, in the ‘60s—even before ’67—but in the ‘60s, after you arrived in Detroit, do you remember feeling that there was discrimination against black people in the city? Either by the police or by housing development teams and real estate?
LG: I’m sure there was some, but I can’t—like I said, I never bought a house or anything.
NL: Along the same lines as the questions I was asking, did it feel similar to where you were living in Alabama before, or was it much different?
LG: It was much different from where I came from.
NL: Can you describe the difference a little bit.
LG: It was just more freedom. Like I said, you could get a job and, you know, it was better.
NL: So in Alabama it was hard to find work?
LG: Yeah.
NL: Even as babysitting?
LG: Oh, no type like that. I did agricultural work.
NL: Life was pretty segregated at that point?
LG: In Alabama, yes. It was opening up some, but it was still. That about the time of Dr. King, you know.
NL: Right. You’ve lived in Detroit since the ‘60s, since you moved here? Have you been back to visit Alabama much?
LG: Of course.
NL: When you look at how that’s developed, how Detroit has changed since then—I mean, everything is always changing, obviously, so Alabama too—do you see it following similar trajectories? Right now, 2015, are they more at the same place or does it still feel like there’s more opportunities here than there are in Alabama.
LG: I can’t say that I think. The opportunities are there. I have sisters there, and cousins, and they’re doing well with jobs and houses. Everybody’s got their own homes.
NL: Are they still in the same city roughly?
LG: Same city, same area.
NL: You said that’s Midway. What part of the state is that?
LG: Like Montgomery, Alabama.
NL: So in the middle of the state, sort of?
LG: Yeah, sort of like that.
NL: All right. Coming back to Detroit. After that main week of violence in July, the National Guard had been in, there was military. First, what do you remember about seeing that and what do you remember about the next week when you felt comfortable going outside and going back to work. Can you describe what that was like, you know, going around different parts of the city and in your neighborhood?
LG: Well, after that, the only thing you see is just the sadness of it. All the destruction and stuff, you know how things were torn down, it was just a different city after the riot. It wasn’t the same, everywhere you went, in my part of it.
NL: Is there any specific thing that you saw, maybe a building or a store or something like that, that was like a strong visual in your memory, something that stands out in your mind about making you think, oh, wow, things are different in the city than they were before?
LG: Well, I think I got the question right. More of an opportunity you said?
NL: You said, coming up on that next week, you said pretty matter-of-factly, “Things were different in the city.” Is there any specific thing that you remember seeing that made you think or feel that way? Or specific moments when you were walking around that made you think, oh wow, things are different in the city?
LG: Just like I said, all the stores.
NL: So all of it taken together?
LG: Yeah.
NL: Did a lot of people in your community, in your world there, your friends and family, did they start moving out of the city at that point or moving to the neighborhoods?
LG: Yes, they did.
NL: Did you ever think about trying to move out of the city or to another part of the city?
LG: No, I did not.
NL: I’m curious. Could you talk more about that? Because a lot of people were worried or they felt things were unsafe for any number of reasons. People started leaving the city and that still goes on today. What has kept you from feeling that way, that you wanted to stay in the city all these years?
LG: I guess, there’s really no else I want to live unless I go back to Alabama, and I don’t want to go back there so I just chose to stay here.
NL: Have you moved around in a lot of different parts of the city since then?
LG: A couple moves, in Detroit.
NL: Which other neighborhoods have you lived in since the ‘60s?
LG: I lived on Globe off Livernois. The rest of them were right in the same area, because I lived at Elmhurst and Linwood, Cortland and Dexter, so I lived in that neighborhood around thirty years. I think I made just a couple moves, around the corner or whatever. Then I moved to downtown where I am now. Jefferson and the Boulevard.
NL: East or west?
LG: East.
NL: I know that, but it’s just for the recording. Do you remember Jerry Cavanagh, who was the mayor of Detroit in the ‘60s? I think he would have just become mayor when you first moved here.
LG: Yeah.
NL: Do you remember many things about him or what you felt about him?
LG: I don’t even really remember him.
NL: What about the other—not just mayors, but people in leadership since then, throughout the ‘70s? Roman Gribbs, Coleman Young?
LG: Coleman Young, I remember him. He was in a long time.
NL: Right. Do you remember much about them or what you thought about how they were running things in the city?
LG: Well at one point, he was doing a good job.
NL: Coleman Young?
LG: Coleman Young. He kind of helped black people out as well. Job-wise and all of that, housing. Where I live now, he built those for senior citizens at these councils.
NL: I want to know your thoughts more generally speaking about Detroit, not just the main downtown, but also the other different sort of epicenters of businesses and things over time. Can you tell me first what do you remember about things looking like when you were here in 1962? Can you describe what it felt like walking around the city and where you would like to go?
LG: Beautiful. Downtown was beautiful. I went every Saturday, stores everywhere, beautiful. I looked forward to it every Saturday. Now there’s nothing there. You’ve got to go to malls. Detroit was beautiful when I came here.
NL: Are there specific things that you felt were the most beautiful? Certain streets or certain buildings or neighborhood?
LG: Dexter, Joy Road and Dexter, that was a beautiful neighborhood. And back then, I think most of the Jews lived up in there.
NL: I think that’s not too far from where my dad grew up.
LG: We lived further down where the black people all lived. That was like 33rd and—
[16:31]
NL: We are back for track two with Leala Griffith. Leala, you were talking a moment ago about downtown in the ‘60s when you first arrived here. I want to know your thoughts about downtown since then and what are your favorite parts of the city nowadays?
LG: Like I said, I don’t have a favorite. I don’t go downtown. Just no favorite. I like where I am, where I live.
NL: Can you talk about that for a moment?
LG: Well, it’s near Belle Isle and I go fishing down there. It’s pretty.
NL: You go onto belle isle?
LG: Yeah, I cross Jefferson and go down and fish.
NL: I have one last question for you, and that is this project is about 1967, the rioting that happened in the city in July. A lot of people use the word “riot” to describe what happened. Some people prefer that term, some historical books use it, some people don’t’ like that term. Do you think that’s accurate? Did it feel like rioting at the time, or would you refer to it using some other word?
LG: At the time it happened?
NL: At the time it happened, yeah.
LG: Yeah, I think so.
NL: Looking back at it now, nearly fifty years after, does it still feel like it was rioting? Is that the most accurate word to use?
LG: I don’t know about now.
NL: What else might you call it if you had to call it something else?
LG: What would I call it? I wouldn’t call it a riot. Maybe just people trying to get what they wanted in Detroit, jobs and houses and stuff. Does that make sense?
NL: Sure. Sounds like some people we talked to refer to it as civil unrest.
LG: What was it?
NL: Civil unrest.
LG: Unrest?
NL: Yeah, unrest like restless with the atmosphere. That sort of sounds to me like what you were describing before. Is there anything else you’d like to add to our recording today?
LG: No, Noah. Thank you.
NL: Thank you very much for joining us this afternoon on behalf of the Detroit Historical Society, and have a great afternoon!
LG: Thank you very much.
[02:49]
[TIME STAMP END OF INTERVIEW 16:31 + 02:49]
[End of Track 1]
GS: Hello, today is July 5, 2016. We are in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit 67 Oral History Project. My name is Giancarlo Stefanutti and I’m with Nita Hadley today. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
NH: You’re welcome dear.
GS: Okay, where and when were you born?
NH: I was born October the seventh, 1955 in Mount Clemens, Michigan.
GS: Okay, so do you have any sibling?
NH: Yes, it’s seven of us, sisters and brothers. I have four sisters and I have three brothers, one is deceased.
GS: Oh wow. What did you parents do?
NH: Well, my father, he worked for General Motors Auto Company in Pontiac, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom.
GS: Okay. So what was your neighborhood like? Was it racially integrated?
NH: Well, when we first moved in the neighborhood, we lived in the vicinity—it was one block over from East Grand Boulevard, we lived on Helen Street, between Vernor and Charlevoix. And when we first moved there, it was in the early ‘60s, because I went to elementary school not in that area first, I went into elementary school—I’m trying to think of where was it—we were in Dubois, a school called Duffield, and then we moved after my dad had got the job and we moved over to this new area and I started elementary school there at a school called Barry. During that time, the neighborhood was mixed. We had about half and half. There were Italian people living in the neighborhood, Greek people, black people, it was fairly mixed. But as the years went on, people that were not black were moving away, and more black people were moving into the area.
GS: Was your school you went to integrated or no?
NH: I started first grade at Barry and when I started there, it was a mixed group of children there when I started elementary school. The school was fairly mixed. It was like, maybe, three-fourths black by then though, and about one-fourth other groups of people.
GS: Did your siblings go to the same school?
NH: Yes we all went to the same school; we all went to Barry Elementary, started school there then we all went to Butzel Junior High, and then I went to King, Martin Luther King High School.
GS: What was your childhood like? Was it just kind of a normal childhood growing up?
NH: Well, I had a great time because I went to school, waited for summer vacation, had a great time on summer vacation, we had the same kind of rules most kids did. You know, you had to be home by a certain time, you played within the neighborhood. We looked forward to the summer because the summer time, there were a lot of things to do. The school always was open for summer recreation during the summer, and we would go to another school that was down the street from us that was called Marcy in the summer, and they would have a bus come and pick up all the kids and take us to day camp. And the day camp, they would bus us and take us to a camp that was in River Rouge, and we would go swimming there because the other schools didn’t have, we didn’t have swimming pools, and so we went out there. We would sometimes do a two week camp that busses would come and meet the school, they’d take us to another camp for about a week camp that was called Green Pastures. And then if we didn’t do that, we stayed so close to Belle Isle Park, we’d walk to Belle Isle because we stayed just that close because Boulevard was one block over from us and we would all get together so kids and stuff and we would walk to Belle Isle. We would go there for bike riding, fishing, canoeing, and just a day at the park.
GS: Nice. I’m sorry, where did you say you moved again? From Mount Clemens?
NH: Well, I was born in Mount Clemens, then my family had moved—during the time I guessed they used to call it the “Black Bottom” area, and they lived on a street called Duffield, then I went to elementary school over there, and by the time I started like first grade, we moved over into the area Helen.
GS: Helen.
NH: Yeah, Helen. The street between Vernor and Charlevoix.
GS: So then, kind of moving towards the early sixties, could you sense any tensions growing within the city, or no?
NH: Well, at the time I was only eleven when all this started happening, but at the time I was growing up, everything went, from the way I looked at, you know, seemed alright. I just noticed that some of my friends that weren’t black friends were moving away, they were moving. But other families were moving in, most the families that moved in, they were larger families like ours. They had quite a few kids, you know, like maybe three or four, five kids. Most of the men, fathers, worked at the auto plants, and mostly all the moms were stay-at-home moms. And we had a block club, we used to have a thing every May that was called The May Festival, where all the houses were judged on how nice you kept your yard up. You got a prize and everything, they used to block off the streets for us in the summer time too and they used to have a thing come around where you could swim called the Swim-mobile, and they would block the streets off and bring this big thing where you could swim in it and it was called Swim-mobile. And then as time’s going on, a lot of these things that we were doing activity-wise, they stopped. The Swim-mobile wasn’t coming as much anymore, so we start the day camp thing, but everything still looked the same to me. We never had any problems, we walked to the store without any problems, and back then, kids just went and did everything together. No problems.
GS: Okay. Where were you when you first heard about the riot then in 1967?
NH: Well, actually, it was the day after the riots happened, it was on the news. In the morning, I know my mom was worried about my dad, because he worked the afternoon/late shift and he worked in Pontiac and he had to get home, back to Detroit, and she was worried because at the time, it wasn’t on our side of town, but she was still worried about him. We watched a lot on television and at the time, we had relatives visiting with us that were here for the first time from California when it happened. And we had heard about years before, few years before, they had riots in California, and this was a couple years later and now it was like, we were having a riot, and we were just looking at the news, watching with my mom the next day. And everything in the neighborhood seemed, in our area, still seemed fine.
GS: So the rioters were kind of away from your neighborhood?
NH: Right, because we heard the riots where we were on the East Side of Detroit. And these riots had happened on the West Side, but my mom was worried about other relatives because they lived over in that area. I heard them conversing on the telephone, they were saying that everybody lost their mind, they weren’t able to get to us, so I watched my mom’s reaction. My dad did make it home, and then they didn’t let kids around adults talking, so they—“Go outside and play,” and that’s what we were doing outside, playing. And then, we noticed all the neighbors going back and forth to each other, talking on each other’s porches and everything, and I remember my dad discussing with the other neighbor that lived next door, they were the Whites, that was their name, the White family. And Mr. White and my dad were talking and he was saying “Are we gonna be able to work, still?” Because they both worked at auto plants. He worked at Chrysler, my dad worked at Pontiac with GM. And later on in the evening that night, it’s like, you start hearing explosions, and it lit up all around us like toward Mack Avenue, was like maybe a few blocks over. And behind us, you started smelling smoke, and as usual, kids now we’re, “Go down into the basement, adults are talking.” And we were down there, and they were looking at television, and next thing you know, other neighbors were there knocking on our door and they’re outside talking and everything, and my mom was wondering about my dad going to work, and he did go to work. But it was a problem that happened—I remember we were discussing because like, by then, we didn’t know it until like, two or three days later—all this is still going on. There’s no police around, but we’re just seeing all these fires happening. You can’t see actually where they’re burning at. My mom, she would always send us—my dad, he drove a Rambler Station wagon, and that was the only vehicle we had, so she would always send us kids up to Mack Avenue and on Mount Elliot and different places, the shops. She’d give us a list, and we would pick up certain things, put them in the wagon, bring them home. We would go to the bakery, go to the meat market, to the grocery store, to the pharmacy, everything, and she wasn’t letting us do that this day, and that was unusual, because we always would do that. She said “You can’t go.”
GS: Oh wow.
NH: And in the meantime, we’re getting these calls, she’s talking to my cousins that are with us from California. I hear she’s on the phone talking and they wanna talk to their moms to let them know they’re alright and everything, because they’re also I guess watching on TV where they are and what’s unfolding, she said “Well, we really don’t know what’s happened over this way, we started smelling smoke and see fires, and it looked like it’s coming our way. But I haven’t let the kids, leave the block.” And they couldn’t stay on the phone long, because long distance costs a lot of money. And my father, I remember when he came home that evening and he had a hard time getting home because by then—I don’t know if the next day or the third day, National Guards were there, that’s I guess what they called them then, and we noticed that jeeps were coming down the area, guys were walking the block and everything, with guns and up and down the Boulevard and then, my dad was talking about how they had set up a station at the school at the corner, Mack and the Boulevard, a school that was called Eastern High School at that time, and they had set up camp there, and there were tanks up there. We actually saw tanks and jeeps and everything riding around, and we were informed, that there’s a thing—we knew about our curfew with being kids, we had to be home at a certain time—if there’s a curfew for everybody, and we couldn’t go anywhere. And it spoiled our summer, because we as kids, we wanted to go to Belle Isle, we wanted to go to our rec center, we wanted to go, to day camp, but we were just confined to just right in front of the house. And at night time, my mom would have us all go to the basement, because we heard noises, and they said there was shooting, you could hear all types of shooting and by then, it was so much fire and smoke surrounding us because later we found out that they had burnt down everything on Mack and they had burned down things on Jefferson, and we’re so like in the middle of this, where our blocks are located and everything had gotten burnt on Mount Elliot, that was behind us, and it got pretty scary for us, as kids, because we actually didn’t understand what a riot was, all we knew was that we couldn’t go anywhere and there were a lot of fires everywhere around us. And my mom and dad were—the first time I’ve seen my parents—I could tell they were scared. And of course, that scared us, and I remember my mom and dad discussing—the thing, he had to have a written permit to come in and out from work, back and forth in the city. I think that they gave it to him at work, showing that he could come back, because they were telling people that, you couldn’t come in and out of certain areas, and he had to go all the way to Pontiac. And he also, at the time, started—he had the station wagon, I remember he had loads of food and different stuff when he would come back and give stuff to neighbors and stuff, because no one could go out and buy anything. We had a corner store that was on Vernor, and they were owned by some Italian people, and they were very good to everybody. They would let you buy stuff and pay for it later, and I remember that my dad and a lot of people got together to protect the guy’s store, and said “We’re going to take care of Al’s store. We’re not going to let anybody, burn or mess with his store.” But Al himself was limited on what he could get because he couldn’t get in and out. He stayed there. I remember a lot of the guys, my dad and other neighbors went there and sat, and protected his store, and after about four days—four or five days, we didn’t see the sky lighting up with fires or anything, but we were told that curfews were lifted, but actually it wasn’t, for a lot of people in the area, because when we went out, my dad, we’d try to go and do things, the National Guard were still there, and there was nothing to go to because they did—after a few days, we took a drive in the area and it was just devastating because our grocery stores were gone, the pharmacy was gone, and some of the churches were burnt, and everyplace we shopped and did business at in the area was gone. Mack Avenue was just devastated, there was nothing left. And people were still going in and out of storefronts, getting things out of there, and I think a lot of it might have been out of necessity because some of them probably was—and, I’m just saying from my viewpoint—there was no stores left, so people were going in stores that were already broken in, getting food and canned foods and different things. And my mom said, “No, nobody in our house is going to be doing that,” because they were still shooting people for doing it. And it was a bad summer for us kids, it’s like we only could listen to what was being said, but it was a nightmare because like, you walked down—everything you knew that was familiar was gone. It was just gone. The drug store, and we used to go to the drug store on Mount Elliot, the hardware store was gone, the dry-cleaners, the grocery stores, meat market, and everything was just burnt and gone. To this day it’s still gone. It never came back. One of the places that we used to go to, a little restaurant, we’d walk up there after we’d shopped and get us a hamburger or stop and get some ice cream, or soda, all those places were gone. And then my mom and dad said, “Well, maybe we can go get something at Easter Market,” because on the weekends, we as a family would all get together in the station wagon, we would go to Eastern Market and shop, for vegetables and things. And because prices were cheaper, you could buy in bulk, we were a lot of kids, we were a big family. And it was sort of sad because like, when we went to Eastern Market even, most of the vendors didn’t show up, because they were scare to come down. And so a lot of vendors, there wasn’t a lot you could even buy at Eastern Market because the vendors that were selling the produce stuff didn’t even want to come.
And it’s sort of sad because like, all these things that happened, like you see right now the neighborhood still never came back, and it was always so nice because these people that we shopped with and stuff, they knew us kids, they knew us by name, and a lot of them were white. Italians, Jewish people, most the people that owned the businesses were white people. But, it was sad to see that—we wouldn’t see them again, they wouldn’t see us. We didn’t understand, but everything that we knew that was familiar wasn’t there anymore.
GS: So, after the riot, you said a lot of these shops were burned down, what was the general atmosphere in Detroit like?
NH: A lot of sadness. A lot of people seemed very depressed. We did more television watching than ever because there was always something on the news and we never watched a lot of TV. Only weekends and stuff, we watched television, on Saturday and Sunday—Saturday morning and stuff, but we weren’t big TV watchers back then. But the TV was always on, and we were watching all the things and the news were showing all the different homes and all the different area that were burnt out and gone, and they were reporting on how many people were shot and killed and they visually showed a lot of people that were—I saw people that were lined up on the news at gunpoint against walls and things and it looked like it was the army, like it was war. And we know what war is, and it just looked like it was war going on in our area. And I didn’t know what to make of that because this is America, we’re not at war, what’s going on. But it seemed like it was war because there were tanks and jeeps and men with guns and army in uniforms. And these were just regular people that once upon a time were my neighbors. I didn’t know them personally, but these people I see all the time in my community, at gunpoint lined up buildings, and on the news. I didn’t know why.
GS: It’s crazy.
NH: Yeah.
GS: So moving forward to Detroit now, what are you opinions of the city at present day?
NH: Well, I recently moved from the city. I always lived in the city, I moved about three and a half years ago. I lived over in the vicinity of Harper and Vandyke and it was our family home, my mom and dad since then had been years had divorced everything, and this was my mother’s home, and she had passed and I had taken the home and I lived there for like nineteen years in that house after she had passed, raised my child there. I had to leave because the neighborhood had changed so much. They had closed down the high school that I went to in the area—it was Kettering High School closed up, and they had closed up the junior high school, they tore down the elementary school, the theatre was gone. That whole area was changing, all the stores that used to be—the drug store wasn’t there anymore, there used to be a United Shirts there, it was like everything that was there that was available was leaving, and the homes were being, you know. As soon as somebody moved out of a home, junkers would come in there and destroy it and take everything out of homes. We still had a block club even there, and it’s like one, two blocks in the area are block be nice. Everybody owned their homes, took care of their problems, but then you go two blocks over and it looks like you’re in a warzone, little Beirut. You know, you’re surrounding the perimeter of your neighborhood, where everything is demolished, and homes are vacant and overgrown, weeds everywhere and businesses are gone and everything’s just getting empty. And I’m by myself, I don’t drive, and I’d catch the bus and all of a sudden they’re no street lights anymore everywhere, the kids are out there catching the bus stops—the school’s not there anymore, and you see posters up in different gas station areas where women are missing, up and down Harper Avenue, it was known as like, you see suburbanites come and getting off the Smart Bus at Harper and Vandyke because that area become a drug zone all around, nothing sold but crack cocaine. You see prostitutes up and down, you couldn’t even walk to the store and the gas station that area, me thinking I was trying to go to work, but they’re stopping, thinking I’m a woman prostituting myself, because prostitutes are all up and down there early in the morning, and late at night, and crack. People are on crack and my family told me that “You have to leave. You know, you can’t stay here anymore, Mom. It’s just not safe for you.” But I hated leaving my home, my neighbors, we were all, close. We would get a bus together and every year take—they still do it to this day because I didn’t go on the trip—they still get two buses together and take the whole neighborhood to Cedar Point. But outside around, it’s just you can’t live there anymore, it’s just dangerous. And I moved and I moved into an apartment. I moved all the way in Saint Claire Shores. My daughter lives in East [unintelligible] Village and my other—sisters live near Harper Woods. Everybody, we all moved out of the city practically, and I don’t like apartment living. I miss my neighbors, I miss my garden, I miss a house. And right now, what’s happening is that the areas downtown, I see them reviving a lot downtown and everything, but the city itself where I just left is just going all to hell. And that’s all over Detroit. You got two, three blocks where people are still keeping up their homes and things, but you got other blocks where it’s just horrible, it’s just scary what’s going on in other areas, and it’s still like that all over the city. And a lot of black families, they’re moving into the suburban areas now because in the three years that I’ve been living where I’m at, I’ve seen a lot of change, because like, there’s a Kroger grocery store near me and it used to be racially mixed with a lot of people going into the grocery store. But I see the change. I see the people that used to be in the neighborhood that I left in the grocery store now. And that’s because a lot of the stores out there aren’t available and a lot of them moved out toward my way. A lot of people now live in Harper Woods, which is just next door to Saint Claire Shores and a lot of people are living in Saint Claire Shores now too, in apartment buildings and homes and things, and it’s just changed. It’s just like they said before, it’s the urban flight. You can see it happening. Everything’s becoming black out in the suburban areas. All my friends, now they live in Warren Michigan, or they live in Saint Claire Shores, or they live in Sterling Heights—some of them—and they live in Harper Woods. And all the young people I know, friends of my daughters and everything, they’re moving downtown, in the Midtown area. You feel like you’re not included right now—at least I feel—downtown Detroit because like, I’ve always worked Downtown. I worked for the Fox Theatre, and I worked the Music Hall, and right now I do office cleaning at the D.A. Building, and I see like we would stop at certain restaurants in the morning, I’d get a breakfast burrito at this one particular store called Grillworks, and it used to cost me $2.95. It’s the same place now, same food, $4.95. For the same breakfast burrito. But everything that you used to eat down there, back when I was working at the Fox and Music Hall, you could throw a bowling ball down Woodward Avenue. The only time you would see white people really come down there was if they were going to a hockey game, or to one of the games of baseball. I go to Eastern Market now and it’s like, “What Eastern Market is this?” It’s so cultured now, they have everything going on at Eastern Market now. But prices have changed. A little bit unaffordable, a lot of things downtown for a lot—I love all the new stuff that’s going on. But, I’ve seen actual things happen. Like a lot of people that worked downtown, they’re in maintenance, they clean a lot of these buildings and stuff, and most of them are black. And you can see the difference when, like, when they have the security and stuff around, they almost make you feel like you don’t belong there. There’s some particular person, someone in general, if you go downtown, you look on a lot of buildings down here, some graffiti person writes notation all over the city that says “Vote N.C.P.” If you look, it’s everywhere. And we know what it means—it means “No colored people” downtown, and it’s graffitied on a whole lot of stuff. It’s “Vote for no C.P downtown.”
GS: Wow.
NH: And it’s graffitied everywhere. And the people that clean up know that’s what it—this graffiti person is doing this everywhere. I know Mr. Gilbert, he’s got a lot of surveillance going on, I wish they find out who’s doing that, because it’s everywhere. And it’s actually funny that you can see the racial divide in downtown everywhere because, like, there’s the transit center on one side, on the corner where I catch my bus at. On the other side of the street is where the Smart Buses come. And the Smart Buses take—a lot of people still live in suburban areas and they take the bus in an out of the city instead of paying for parking, and on this side, you can see black people standing over 40, 50 deep sometimes, waiting on buses. Smart Buses always on time, I’ll ride a Smart Bus now, because I live in Saint Claire Shores. Bus is always on time, and all on this side is white people leaving, a few black people going to catch the bus, and it’s like you can just see the divide. And when they have different things that happen down there, like if there’s special events going on downtown, we used to go downtown to all the Waterfront events used to be free at Hart Plaza. Everything would be free in the summer. You have to pay for everything now. All the summer events, when they do the river thing, the fireworks are still free but if you want to do river walk events, you have to pay to get into that. I even heard on the radio our soul music rib festival that they do every year, you’re going to have to pay for that. I was here when that techno festival first started, it used to be free, now you pay two or three hundred dollars a day to go to that thing.
GS: I paid 70 bucks to go to it actually it was way too much money!
NH: It used to be free!
GS: Yup.
NH: I used to go, it used to be free! So one way that downtown is not inclusive, because everything is priced where you can’t afford it. Really, you can’t afford it to be downtown if you’re black, certain districts the way you used to be, because—it was a relief that Belle Isle even, you just went to Belle Isle. But they weren’t taking care of it. People didn’t appreciate Belle Isle anymore. And if they’d had more security and things out there and ran it the way they should, they could’ve stopped a lot of things that were happening at Belle Isle before the state took it over, because nobody was policing young people out there at the island. I love the way that it’s clean out there now and everything, but you have to pay. And it makes you feel like everything we used to do, and you didn’t have to pay for, don’t group everybody into like, everybody’s bad, and everything’s going to happen, but it feels like you’re not wanted down there. You just don’t feel like you’re wanted down there, “Just do your job and leave.” Because a lot of people go out to lunch and they go out in groups, you just see this constant presence of the special security and everything. You know, pulling people over, too many in the car, you’re a certain color down there, and it’s embarrassing to see that they make them get out of the car, and it’s almost like the way it was back in the sixties because “Too many of you in the area and we don’t know going on with you. Let’s see and stop you and—” They’re just in the car going to lunch or something, and they’re getting pulled over by the security, the security on the bikes. And it’s like they have what they call the transit police down at the transit center, and it’s my opinion, that the transit police are just there to keep you down there in that transit area. If they don’t do what they’re supposed to do in that transit area, they let everything go on there as long as you keep it down in that area. Because there are people down there, they’re selling drugs in that transit area, every kind of thing is going on over there. And the only time the real police seem to show up is when they’ve done something stupid, somebody’s gotten shot. Like a few weeks ago, somebody got shot. They made the police presence known in that area because they’re shooting for a few days, then they disappeared again. And I heard those guys get paid, like, they sit there and they get paid like 16, 15, 18, dollars an hour, and they don’t do anything. They just walk around or sit in their office and stuff, and they have guns, they have licenses to carry guns but they don’t stop anything.
GS: Wow.
NH: They’re just like “Keep it down this way, and we alright in this perimeter.”
GS: Well is there anything else you’d like to add?
NH: Well, right now, I love the way things look downtown. I really do. I just wish that people wouldn’t judge, because someone’s color when you’re downtown and everybody’s black or something’s going to be doing something bad or up to no good, because I always enjoyed before everybody came down—when Campus Martius first was open, I’d bring my grandchildren down here to watch the movies, on the theatre screen, when it was mostly black people coming down, because there weren’t a lot of white people coming down because they weren’t working down here as much, they didn’t live down here. But now, when I come down here doing these things, they look at you like you don’t belong here now, and I was doing this before you were coming down here. But you get that feeling. I went down to lunch and met my daughter—she works down here too—and I met her for lunch, and we walked over to Campus Martius, and the area we used to go where they set up the beach area at and everything, they made it, like, “Oh, you can’t sit over on this area and this area unless you’re going to be buying food,” which is high end food. It’s the summer time, you’re not going to pay five dollars. Some people will pay five dollars for a French fry, a pack of French fries to sit over in that area, but they made that area where they know some folks are not going to pay five dollars so “If we make this price, you won’t be able to sit up over in this area of Campus Martius by the beach, in these chairs.” Because we got something from the food truck and we went over there, because we already sat anywhere down there. We went there the other week to sit in this area, “Oh, you can’t sit over here, unless you’re buying food from this particular place at this area, so you can’t sit over here.” Feeling not inclusive, you know what I’m saying? I hope it doesn’t stay that way because we’re not going anywhere. We just want to enjoy just like you and just don’t judge everybody the same, because I’ve lived here, and I’ve stayed—I love this city and I’ve always been here, and I like to partake, I enjoy things Downtown, you know? But in my opinion, if it keeps on going on this way, it can happen again. I can see it, because I saw it, and it can happen again. And I’m not the only one that feels this way.
GS: Well thank you for sitting down with me today.
NH: Thank you.