HS: Hello, this is Hannah Sabal. The date is June 18, 2016. I’m here at the Detroit Historical Museum with Bruce Carr for an oral history interview for the Detroit 67 Oral History Project. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
BC: I’m glad to do so.
HS: Can you first start by telling me where and when you were born?
BC: I was born in Tennesee, where my father was born, Christmas day, 1938.
HS: Awesome.
BC: And then our parents moved us to Detroit when I was five years old. I grew up in the Livernois-Finkell area. We were there for nine years. All of my public schooling was through the Detroit Public Schools, from kindergarten through graduation from Cass Tech.
HS: Which elementary and middle schools did you go to?
BC: Clinton elementary, which is no longer in existence, and likewise Post, which is no longer there.
HS: I’m sorry, what was that?
BC: Post Middle School. At that time it was called Post Intermediate School. Then my parents moved us to Royal Oak when I was not quite sixteen, but I had already started at Cass Tech in the printing curriculum, and I told my parents I would like to stay at Cass instead of going to high school in Royal Oak. And the tuition was $256. I said to my parents, “If you’ll let me go to Cass Tech, I’ll pay my own tuition,” out of what I was making as a part time employee bagging groceries at one of the supermarkets. They said, “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, you can.” And so I completed my high school years at Cass Tech, came out in January of ’57.
HS: And why did your parents move from Tennessee to Detroit?
BC: It was the early 1940s, and pure and simple, people were almost on the edge of going broke. Detroit was known as the arsenal of democracy. People from all over Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta and other impoverished parts of the United States would come here, and I’m told it was much easier to get a job than it was to get a house in Detroit at the time, or even an apartment or whatever else. Fortunately, my dad had a friend who lived right behind the house that we bought, close to Livernois and Finkell, so that’s how we ended up being there.
HS: Okay. What did your parents do for a living?
BC: My mother taught in rural schools in Tennessee until they got married, my parents got married. My father was also a teacher in rural schools, and he had a farm of about 110 acres, but again it was just so much more difficult to support a family on their limited earnings, so they came here. Hundreds of thousands of other people did. And US 25, along with several other routes, became known as the Hillbilly Highway because of so many people who came from Appalachia up here. I was in Ypsilanti a few weeks ago, people from the church there were talking about how they had friends and family that came over from Paducah, Kentucky, over on the western side of Kentucky, and there was a bus that ran from Paducah to Detroit and back to Paducah, or vice versa every weekend. Rather common thing. Detroit was essentially a melting pot that brought together people from all different backgrounds, different nationalities. And one of the things that struck me as a five-year-old kid coming to Detroit was the extreme diversity, the nationality diversity. Living in the hills of Tennessee, I never met anybody who was of any recent European heritage. Nobody was Greek, nobody was Polish or anything else like that. There was a small number of people that were African American, but just very, very small. Then we moved to Livernois and Fenkell, I had my first experience of eating baklava because there was a Greek neighbor right behind us. I had the first experience of meeting a Jewish family because there was one right across the street with a youngster same age as me. One of the things that amused me a little bit was when they had parent teacher conferences, some of the parents would go, and they were not able to speak English, so the kids would go and be the interpreters for the parents. I thought they probably had a little inside advantage. They could probably tell the stories the way they wanted it told instead of maybe the way the parents want it told. I didn’t have that advantage.
HS: Now just out of curiosity, in Tennessee with your parents, was it a crop farm?
BC: It was a crop farm, mostly corn. It wasn’t anything big agricultural like they had today. Like almost everybody else around us, everybody did the same thing.
HS: And did your parents continue teaching when they came to Detroit?
BC: No, they did not. My father got a job in 2 or 3 different factories, and then he ended up going to a place called Shedbarsh Foods [6:16 sp??], which was on Dexter avenue, just north of Davison, and he stayed there for 34 years. He could have gotten some credits from Wayne State or some other place and got a certificate to teach, but he chose not to do that. And my mother only taught one day in her life when she got up here. She was a substitute teacher and then she decided she didn’t want to continue. She said it was too hard on her nerves.
HS: Can you tell me a little bit about the neighborhood that you grew up in?
BC: In Detroit?
HS: Yes.
BC: Like I was saying, it was quite multinational. At the time, there were almost zero African Americans. The closest African American community was about a mile, mile and half away. My parents had African American friends through their church, so oftentimes people from the churches that were predominately African American, churches that my parents belonged to, they would get together for social occasions. And there were a few African Americans from the town of Livingston Tennessee, which is the county seat of the county where I was born, and sometimes they would get together. But there were not any African Americans at Clinton or at Post when I was a student there. It was not until I got to Cass Tech that I had any experiences with African American teachers or any significant number of African American students. Some other things about memories of being in Detroit at that time, everything was really close together. The house we lived in was built in the early 1920s, standard 30-feet lots, so they’re all scrunched together. We had a retired Detroit police officer on one side of us, and then on the other side of us, there was a building, three floors, and two recent graduates from U of M, University of Michigan lived in the basement, and he was an architect, then there was a physician on the second floor and a dentist on the third floor. So if we had any medical or dental problems, we didn’t have to go very far. And then Livernois and Fenkell was the crossroads of two major streetcar lines, so they would go clanking and clanking all night long, and it took a little while to get used to that. Everything practically was in walking distance, so we had one car, we didn’t need another one. My mother would easily walk to get her shopping, there were what were called dime stores that would be similar to dollar stores today. Kresge’s was—course the same Kresge that later on became Kmart and the Kresge Foundation—and then Neisner, and Woolworth. Neisner is long gone. Woolworth became famous with the Woolworth Building in New York City. And Kresge’s, like I said, became Kmart. And incidentally, in case you want a little more history, the original Kmart is in Garden City, but there’s no historical marker in front of it.
HS: That’s unfortunate.
BC: I could easily walk to school, and one thing that’s a little bit humorous was that back then, there was a guy that delivered milk, and he had a horse-drawn wagon. And so sometimes I would get a ride to school on his horse-drawn wagon. [Laughter]
HS: That must have been fun.
BC: It was. I remember as a kid, when we would go out to the playground, it seemed like they had the tallest swing sets. Again, when you’re five, six, seven years old, everything looks big. Today, as I was reading, very, very few neighborhoods are walkable. Now there’s a big effort to try to get more walkability in Detroit, and other communities. At that time, you could go anywhere you wanted to go on the bus. Now, that’s another story. People, I thought, were a lot more friendly, they’d sit on their front porch, talk to each other. You don’t have that kind of connection nowadays that was true back then.
HS: All right, so we’re going to jump ahead to 1967. How did you first hear about the events of July of 1967?
BC: Well, first of all, I taught in Detroit Public Schools, starting in 1964. I began teaching at Mackenzie High—no, I’m sorry, ’63—I started teaching at Mackenzie High in ’64. I had a summer internship with the Detroit Urban League close by to here, over at the corner of Mack and John R. I was one of about four or five young teachers who were fortunate to get that. It was under the leadership of Dr. Francis Carnegie, PhD. Very fine gentleman. And then there was a man by the name of Roy Levi Williams, who was just a year or so older than I am. So we became good friends, and Roy lived over close to Clairmount, maybe a little south of Clairmount, and 12th or 14th, one of those. It was just south of the main disturbance area—well, I’ll call it “riot.” When I heard about that by the way of the news media, my first thought was, “How’s he doing?” I had his phone number so I called and he said, “Well, there’s flames all around here, but we’re okay on our block.” And we talked about how some of the neighbors had taken their garden hose and they were spraying water all over the house to try and protect it. That was like, maybe, half a mile south of where the main rioting started at the infamous blind pig. Okay. About half a mile north of there, at the corner of what is now Rosa Parks and 12th street and Webb, a place called World Medical Relief—and I’m wearing one of their shirts at the moment. It’s the largest building in the neighborhood. Seven floors, plus the basement, and it’s built like a fortress. Not intentionally like a fortress, but it was originally built as a storage warehouse for one of the automobile supply companies. Rock solid. National Guardsmen came in and they went up to the top of that building, and while the whole neighborhood was in flames, they were standing on top with their guns and essentially putting out any of the—what shall I call them?—any of the—shall I use the term “insurrectionists?” “Rioters?” Whatever would be most appropriate to say—again it was like the advantage of being on top of a fort when you’ve got other people who are rioting on the ground. I had a responsibility with the Detroit Urban League. They asked me to go take pictures. So that was with a standard 35mm camera. So I was walking all through the area without any weapons, without a police escort, and I was walking right down streets like Linwood; Rosa Parks, when it was 12th; 14th, all around there, taking pictures. And some of the memories that particularly strike me are so many of the people who had their individual businesses, most of whom were Jewish, Jewish shopkeepers, and they were just standing, heartbroken, as their buildings were still smoking from all of the damage. And there were firetrucks from everywhere. Obviously, Detroit Fire Department. All the suburban fire departments. They came from as far as Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Lansing. They came from Ontario. Certainly Windsor, and probably a few other communities not far away. They came from Toledo. Then the national guardsmen were all over the place, in addition to Detroit police. They came from all over the state. When things got worse, after the governor called out the National Guard, and president Johnson called out the 101st airborne from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Essentially, the responsibility of the 101st was to quell the disturbances on the east side, and the National Guard was to take care of the disturbance on the west side. It took about a week before—they were here for about a week, maybe slightly more than a week. I don’t recall the exact dates, I’m sure that’s something you could easily find out. I took these pictures, and I gave them all to the Detroit Urban League. I’m not sure what happened to them after. I don’t have them, I wish I did, otherwise I’d give them to you. But then, several other things happened, like for example, a lot of these guardsmen came in so quickly that they didn’t have a chance to pack socks and underwear. So one of the things I was asked to do was to go to J.L. Hudson’s downtown and I had a letter to authorize me to do this, pick up all the socks and underwear you can. They gave it to me, and I brought them back, and then the National Guardsmen were happy to get that. We were living just south of eight mile, one block south of 8 mile, between Southfield freeway and Evergreen, right next to the athletic field for Henry Ford High School. There was an electrical substation just slightly across the street from us, just barely across the street. They had National Guards there because it was part of the electrical feed, and they didn’t want anything to happen that would cause all the power to go out. So one of the things we’d do sometimes is we’d go over there and take them some sandwiches and other things, and the guardsmen really appreciated it. And I did meet some of the people that were victims. And what was also interesting was returning to teach at Mackenzie that following September and to say the least, there were a lot of stories. There were students who had, in some cases, lived in the area where major damage took place. Mackenzie was on the periphery. We did not have anything immediately in our neighborhood. Central High School, that’s another story. Central High was right in the middle of it, as was Northwestern and a few of the other schools, and of course the elementary and middle schools. Central neighborhood in particular. But many of the students had grandparents or aunts and uncles or they had other family, friends, church connections, people who they knew who were in the middle, where their houses were burned up or seriously damaged. And then I’ve got a friend I know through the rotary that I belong to in Farmington, and he’s a physician, retired physician, and he talked about how he was working at Henry Ford Hospital, and the Lodge freeway was shut down, and the National Guardsmen would come and put him and the other physicians into armored vehicles and they would take them down to Henry Ford Hospital and then they would bring them back at the end of an extended work shift because they didn’t want the physicians to be victimized. It had a major impact. There are some things that were for the good, especially the New Detroit, I’m happy for that. Detroit has in many ways gone through a renaissance for the better. You look out here and you see the new railroad track that’s under construction, and even in the neighborhood where we originally lived, over by Livernois and Finkell, although it’s an old neighborhood, many of the houses are vacant or torn down, there’s some new housing, thanks to a pastor on the same street where we lived, and he was somehow able to get some grant money to go around and buy vacant property, or property that was virtually ready for demolition, where they had been originally 30-foot lots, he combined them into 60-foot lots and get nice new houses with an attached garage and driveway. I’ve been through there several times and from what I can gather, no problems. I’ve got a friend who’s a pastor very, very close by there, and he says that that’s the case.
HS: That’s awesome.
BC: I wish the same thing were true in more places. People always hear about the negatives in Detroit. That’s an example of a success story.
HS: Do you have any other experiences that you wish to share with us about what you saw in 1967 or heard?
BC: I guess I’ve told you most of them, I’ll probably think of some more after I leave here. I know that my family was very concerned for my safety. My wife and I were only married for 2 years at the time, and we didn’t have any children yet. We tried to do what we could to help. I will say that teaching in Detroit did change somewhat, Mackenzie changed. There were a lot of families that moved out of the city following 1967. The Mackenzie neighborhood took a major hit, not because of the rioting itself, but people were just simply afraid. The school population went down, not just there, but all over. What else to say? Like I say, good things have happened. I’m happy about that. I salute everybody. In the words of the city motto, “We shall rise from the ashes.” I think if I didn’t say it exactly right, I came close to it. You’ve got it right out here in front. After the destruction in, 1803, something like that?
HS: 1805.
BC: 1805. Well, I was two years off. Do I get a pass for being that close? [Laughter]
HS: Yes. You mentioned that your family was worried about yours and your wife’s safety. Was your family no longer living in Detroit at that point?
BC: No, they had moved to Royal Oak. They were living in Royal Oak at that time. I also had family members in Tennessee and they were concerned when they heard. The whole country knew about it because it was all over the national media. There are people, unfortunately, who still believe you can’t do anything in Detroit, everything is shot, but I’ve had a lot of out-of-town guests who come and they say, “Well, tell me about Detroit.” And I say, “Okay, you tell me what you want to see and I can probably show you. You wanna see the good, bad, or ugly? I can show you some of each.” And I like to show them places like right here. I like to show them places like where I grew up. And I show them the new houses as well as the old. I show them places like over around Sherwood Forest and U of D. I had a man visiting me from Tanzania, a country in east Africa, last summer, and he wanted to get some medical supplies for medical relief, and he had a little extra time, so we were driving down the Southfield Freeway, and I said, “Let me show you another side of Detroit.” And so we got off and drove through the Rosedale Park neighborhood and he said, “Oh, I didn’t know there was anything like that in Detroit.” These kids were having their little street fair, and they had their own park, they were all having a great time. “Oh, you mean this is Detroit too?” Yes, this is as much Detroit as any other place is. Of course, Belle Isle—oh, the other thing! A story you’ve probably heard about how Belle Isle was closed off, and they were using Belle Isle as a place to hold inmates until their court dates came up. Am I right or wrong on the Belle Isle elephant house? I can’t remember if that’s true or that’s false.
HS: I’m not sure. I’ve heard people say that it was, and I’ve heard people say that it wasn’t.
BC: I can’t remember definitely one way or the other, you’d probably have to look it up on Google and determine. But certainly Belle Isle was closed. I also covered part of the east side for taking pictures with the Urban League. I just wish there were some way of getting those pictures. But you’d have to contact the Detroit Urban League and see if they have any records of them. Another thing that’s not related to 1967, but I had my master’s thesis in history from Wayne, and I wrote my thesis on a topic called, “Negroes in Detroit in the 1890s.” Before the ghetto in Detroit. At that time, the term “negro” was used much more commonly. That was right about the threshold when the term “negro” was fading out, and then “black” was coming in, and now, of course, I say “African American.” I was debating whether to say “negro” or “black,” but “negro” was the more commonly used term at the time, so that’s what I said. But it’s on file across the street at the Burton collection. It’s also on file across the street in the Walter Reuther Library. And I also had another interesting experience when I was writing that. I went over and interviewed a gentleman who had the responsibility of editing the Michigan Chronicle in the 1930s. He lived on the eastside, couple miles from here. I went over to his home, and he had back copies of the newspaper in these big binders and he said that when he was publishing the paper, he would, every week, send a copy to the Detroit Public Library, right there, and the Detroit Library always kept the news, always kept the Free Press, but they would throw away his papers after getting it because they didn’t think it had any historical value. So he was very happy when I got his several bound volumes, put them on a cart, and brought them over. So instead of getting them there, because they threw them away, I gave them to the Reuther collection. They were very glad to get them, so at least they’re in a safe place. I don’t know if they put them on microfilm since, but at least they got them. That’s my one little grudge against the Detroit Public Library.
HS: I want to backtrack just a little bit. You said your family moved out of Detroit into Royal Oak—
BC: In ’54.
HS: ’54. And why did they move out of the city?
BC: Why did they move out of the city? It was largely because of a church. They were particularly interested in a church in Royal Oak and felt it would be a nice place for my sister and I, who was four years younger than me, to grow up in, so I was part of that church until going off to college.
HS: And then you and your wife no longer live in Detroit, correct?
BC: We live in Farmington Hills.
HS: And when did you move out of Detroit?
BC: We moved in ’76.
HS: And why did you move out of the city at that point?
BC: We moved, well I have to be honest and say better schools.
HS: Okay.
BC: We started off at Pitcher school, but both my wife and I are retired educators and we just felt that there were more opportunities for our children in Farmington schools. And I might also add—nothing that’s any secret about that—that many, many, many other African Americans have done the same thing. I have African American neighbors who live next door to me. Few years ago, there was an African American lady who was retired from the Detroit Police who lived two doors away. The church to which my wife and I belong, it has a membership that’s roughly half and half between African American and members of European descent. The flip side, I’m very happy about the fact that an increasingly large number of people who are of European origin are coming to live in Midtown and Downtown Detroit. I was at a special event at 2nd Baptist Church in Detroit, which as you probably know is one year older than the state of Michigan. I was at a special event there not quite a year ago, and I met a biracial couple and the guy was in medical school here at Wayne State. And they said, “We’re looking for a church, we just thought we would stop by, visit your church and see how it is.” I don’t know if they stayed or not, but at least it was nice to meet them. To me, that’s an encouraging sign. As I’m sure you know, about two or three years ago, National Geographic magazine had a special 23 or 24 page article about the resurgence of the neighborhoods of Detroit. Not talking about midtown. Not talking about downtown, or even Corktown—well maybe they mentioned Corktown, I don’t recall, but the neighborhoods of Detroit. I thought that was very hopeful, and some of my friends who are out of town say, “Everything’s going to pot in Detroit!” and I said, “Do you know anything about National Geographic?” “Yeah, we know about it.” “All right, do you get National Geographic? Well check out this particular month, if you don’t get it personally, go to your local library, pull it out, read it there, see what it says, then let me know what you think of the article.” I’m very happy about that. And then, you were asking about the community where I was born. Like I said, I was born on a farm. And the county where I was born has a county seat in Livingston Tennessee and it has a population of about 4,200 people. Only about 6 or 7% of the population of Livingston are African American. They’ve been there since, way over a hundred years. Now, you have a town 100 miles east of Nashville and the population is overwhelmingly white, small Hispanic, but it’s like about 6 or 7% African American. What would you think would be the likelihood of them having an African American mayor?
HS: Probably slim.
BC: His name is Curtis Hayes. He was elected once, twice, and in the last month, he was re-elected for the third time.
HS: Wow.
BC: Every time he gets a bigger margin. Last time he was elected by a two-thirds margin.
HS: Wow, that’s impressive.
BC: So when some of my friends say, what’s going on in Oberyn County, Tennessee? I say, “Do you know anything about Mayor Curtis Hayes?” I’ve met him twice now. Fine guy, and his wife, she is of European descent, he is of African descent. That in itself says something because I remember when I was a kid down there the worst thing that could possibly happen would be for anybody to be biracial. And that was something that was set up here, I mean when I was in high school, I remember my parents thinking that could be the next worst thing to sin itself. That’s one side of the coin. The other side of the coin, you know, Mayor Duggan, the margin by which he was elected. And from what I’ve heard, if he were running for re-election today, he’d probably be in with a landslide.
HS: Probably. Getting back to the riots or disturbance, how do you perceive it? As a riot, rebellion, uprising?
BC: Well first of all, there were a lot of cases—I’ll use the term “riot.” But I guess one of the things that surprised me was that—and I know it happened in 1943, I read the records of that—but one of the things that surprised me was that it could’ve happened sooner. I was thinking, okay, how are we in Detroit so fortunate that it did not take place?
HS: Did you notice any tensions in the city leading up to the summer of ’67?
BC: Not of immediate sense, but just kind of an underlying, “That might be possible” kind of a thing, and particularly after Los Angeles. I’m thinking, thanks to God that we’re not there. And once everybody saw Los Angeles go up in flames and you realize, Detroit, how are we saved? In that sense, I was not surprised—although I was surprised about the immediate thing—and of course the blind pig story. Naturally there have been a lot of changes in the Detroit police department since and I think the police commissioner’s doing a fine job from everything I’ve heard about him. I would consider it an uprising—well sometimes it becomes a hard distinction, like South Africa, when Nelson Mandela led his uprising, or the Civil War. Well, the war’s a war, although I remember when I was a kid, some of the other youngsters down there called it the War of Southern Rebellion or the War of Northern Invasion. Never could see that. When you get a large number of people who basically take the law into their hands, they’re not elected to anything, and they basically say, “Well, we’re going to seize the power.” And then they burn up not only—well, they burned up their own neighborhood, in most cases. Very, very few white homes were burned up, as I recall and from what I read afterwards, very, very few. Businesses, yeah, there were a lot of Jewish businesses. But very, very few homes. When you think about burning up your own neighborhood, that’s certainly a problem. And then of course, a lot of it was caused by flames going from one building to another, particularly with them being so close to each other. I know there have been several books written on the subject as well as scholarly publications. I read two or three of them.
HS: There’s actually a book attached to this project, too, that’s at the publishers right now.
BC: Okay, I’ll be interested in seeing that. Who was the one that wrote the one about four or five years later? There’s been about three or four. You may know more than I on that. Anyway, I don’t know what the grade is on my interview today. Do I get at least a D-?
HS: Oh, definitely. [Laughter] I just have two more questions for you. How do you think the city has changed since the events in ’67?
BC: Well, I referred to some of that already. There has been very major white flight. There has been a much broader increase of metropolitan Detroit. Detroit no longer—when you think of Detroit, I remember as a kid, I’d ride my bicycle from Livernois and Fenkell out to what is now Northland Shopping Center. It was all empty land. Our neighbors, the [unintelligible] had their vegetable gardens out there. They’d ride the Dexter bus and then they’d get off the bus, they’d plant their garden, and then they would come back, and that was in addition to what they put in their backyard. Northland Shopping center, built in 1954, of course it’s now closed. Now, you say what’s Metro Detroit, you’re talking about going as far as Brighton, you’re going up to Clarkston, you’re going to Chesterfield Township, going south to practically Monroe. Well if you want to go official, you’ve got Wayne, Oakland, Livingston County, you know. So the population density is much less and I don’t know hardly anybody except right here in the immediate area who builds their home on a 30-foot lot. And virtually everybody’s got—if they can afford it—they have two cars. I do. We had a simple one-car garage, and we had an alley behind it. Nobody has an alley behind their house anymore. So those are some of the things that have changed. As I mentioned, the neighborhood in which I live is in Farmington Hills. Our school district is very diverse. We’ve got 80 different languages in the district, and we’ve got probably somewhere between 35, 40% African American, maybe slightly more. Dearborn—Orville Hubbard—everybody remembers anything about Orville Hubbard knows that he was number one when it came to racism. Now, there are African Americans that live in Dearborn; I happen to know one. One guy, in particular. Cass Tech got an invitation to go to Washington for Obama’s inauguration, and if I remember right, did seem like Martin Luther King High School did also. One or the other. In order to try and keep more people from leaving the city because of the schools, Renaissance High School was established, and basically that’s why it was put up, on West Outer Drive. And if we lived in Detroit, our kids were high school age, we probably would’ve sent them to Renaissance or Cass Tech, unless they objected. Again, I’m just really happy about some of the positives that are going on. And again, it’s not just here in midtown and downtown. Just down the street here, about a mile, is Ecumenical Theological Seminary in the old Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church. My wife and I were there for graduation three weeks ago. We parked on Edmond street because we had to shoot out of there to get to Grand Rapids for a high school graduation reception immediately after. Anyway, we were there and we were looking across to see the new Hockey Town arena that’s under construction. And I remember when I was a kid at Cass, all those buildings were completely occupied. Then they were abandoned. Now that’s the hottest property that you can find anywhere. There was somebody that wanted to get half a million dollars for a house that had been appraised for about $7,000 only about two or three years earlier.
HS: Oh my gosh.
BC: So that’s an example of some of the changes. And there are people who are white who are moving into the city. Not by a large number, but some. So those are some of the changes that have taken place in recent years. So it’s a mixed bag.
HS: Yeah.
BC: And I’m glad that the Detroit Historical Museum is doing well. At least I hope so.
HS: Oh, yeah. All right, is there anything else you’d like to share with us today?
BC: Well, I appreciate the opportunity of being here and reflecting on some things that I’ve not thought of for a long time.
HS: We appreciate you coming in. [47:20]
JW: Today is July 7, 2016. My name is Julia Westblade. We’re here at the Detroit Historical Society with the Detroit 1967 Project. Would you like to say your name?
MM: Marvin Myers. M-Y-E-R-S.
JW: Thank you and can you tell me where and when you were born?
MM: I was born on November 3, 1932.
JW: Very nice. Were you born here in Detroit?
MM: In Detroit. Women’s Hospital.
JW: Very nice. When you grew up, where did you live in Detroit?
MM: I grew up, we had a house on Brush Street in Detroit. Then we moved in 1942 to Pasadena, which is one block north of where my store was. I lived in that area until I went into the army.
JW: When did you go into the army?
MM: 1953, the Korean War. And I got discharged in 1954, and I was sent to Korea. When I got to Korea, there were still fighting and we landed in Pusan, which is a port, but you couldn’t dock on the port. They didn’t have any docks, so we had to take beach craft to the land. We got on trains and the train right next to us was a Red Cross train and there were tiers of wounded soldiers three deep. Three high. And I thought, oh my god, I’ll be home in two weeks, but nothing happened over there. I was in the 1169th Engineering Corps in Korea. The headquarters company. I ran the PX.
JW: So then, in Detroit, what did your parents do?
MM: My parents. My father had an auto parts store on Caniff in Detroit and while I was in the service he had leased the store out and they moved to Tucson, Arizona. They went to Florida first, and my father had arthritis and it was just a little too humid for them, so they went to Tucson. When I got discharged and came back to the states, they were going to send me to Chicago to get discharged and I told them I wanted to go see my parents first. So I got discharged in San Francisco, and then I went to Tucson, Arizona.
JW: How long were you in Tucson?
MM: I was there probably about a year. Then I moved back to Detroit. Oh, and then I went to pharmacy school at Ferris Institute. I was probably in my senior year and this one particular professor particularly didn’t care for me and he wasn’t giving me good grades so I had to drop out.
JW: Oh, that’s too bad.
MM: But I got a business degree out of it so I was there for four years. Bill of Rights, that paid for it.
JW: Oh, good. The neighborhood where you grew up in Detroit, was that an integrated neighborhood or no?
MM: Basically, Pasadena was more Jewish than anything. Then when my parents sold the house, they had to sell it to – it had started to turn black, and he sold it to a black person.
JW: And that’s when they moved away from Detroit or did they go somewhere else first?
MM: Well, they moved to Florida. They did buy a house around 8 Mile Road. It was a very small house, she said. I had never even seen it because I was in Korea, and from there they sold that and they moved to Florida.
JW: When you moved back to Detroit after living in Tucson –
MM: My maternal mother had passed away when I had just turned five and my father remarried and she had a daughter which was about a year older than me. She had never married and I stayed with them for a while. They had an apartment on Pasadena a bit closer to Dexter. And I had odd jobs when I was going to college. I worked at Good Humour. I was a Fuller Brush Man. I kept myself occupied.
JW: Oh good. When you moved back to Detroit after the war, what area of the city did you live in?
MM: Again, she was living in Pasadena with her husband and they had a rollaway couch and I just sort of slept while I was going to college. Most of the time I was up at Big Rapids.
JW: So is that the area where you were in 1967? Were you still in Pasadena?
MM: No, I got discharged it was probably ‘55, ‘56 in Big Rapids and I was there for about four years.
JW: So then leading up to 1967, did you notice any tension in the city or did you notice that anything was going on?
MM: Well, at one time when I was open, there was merchandise being taken out of the store and I was open seven days a week. I did have somebody helping me out at night and in fact, he worked for Guardian Alarm so I could just see where the merchandise was being depleted and were we making any money. I hired somebody to bring in a lie detector and I told everybody in my help that I was going to take the test, too. And they all refused. So I just told them, “Thanks, I’ll pay you. Goodbye, thanks.” So then the people in the area knew about it, that I was going to give them a lie detectors test, then they all walked out on me. So I did keep a couple people that I knew that was pretty good. Well then, after that, I decided, I’m going to stay there all the time. I closed on Sunday and I closed during the week at seven o’clock which is really unheard of in a liquor store and on Friday and Saturday I stayed open until eleven. That’s what I did. I was there all the time. I had one day off during the week.
JW: And when was this? What year was this? Was this 1967?
MM: That was before the riot.
JW: And where was your store located?
MM: I mean after the riot because I had reopened again. The riot was in ‘67. Probably around early ‘70s I decided. I would even, when the store was closed, I would park across the street with my wife and see if they were taking merchandise with paper bags and stuff like that.
JW: Where was your store located?
MM: Grand Ave [Street] and Linwood.
JW: And when did you open your store?
MM: ‘67.
JW: ‘67?
MM: 1967. I was there one week. I was open Monday and closed Sunday. At that time on Sunday you could only sell liquors, it’s Michigan law, you know beer and wine, from 12 on and people going to church and this and that. That’s when we opened at 12 o’clock and I started to get phone calls. “Get the hell out of there. They’re rioting on 12th Street.” And I walked outside and I saw fires and smoke down Linwood and people were giving me dirty looks that were passing by. And she had the car. There was no cell phones at that time. I had to wait for her. A black gentleman owned the gas station across the street. He came over and said, “Marv, close up. Get your money; put it into a bag and come across the street. There’s nothing going to happen to you.” Which I did. So I closed around three o’clock and then I had to wait for her.
Nothing happened until after I left. We went out to dinner. After dinner I called up the Guardian Alarm and they said—they must have been so busy they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. When I told them who I was and where the store was located, she said, “Oh, you’re okay. Don’t worry about it.” After we finished eating I said I’m going to take a ride down to the store and there was nothing left. You saw the pictures. We just left. I had merchandise in a vestibule leading down to the basement and had boxes piled up. Didn’t even unpack yet. I put everything that I could in the car and drove off. Then we were driving down toward Fenkell and there was a Robinson Furniture Store Warehouse and they had broken into that. People had couches on the cars on their hoods, and the police had them all lined up with their hands on the wall. That was funny. They had chairs on their cars that wasn’t even tied down. Then we went down Fenkell, stopped at a light, a bunch of people were on the corner there and they looked at us and I said, I’m getting the hell out of here, and went through the red light. Get out of there.
JW: You said that the man across the street, the gas station owner across the street was a black man, right? Were most of the other shops in the area, was it pretty well mixed or was there one more –
MM: No, it was all black.
JW: All black. So did you –
MM: And my help was all black. In fact, one of the guys when I first opened, I mean officially, worked for Guardian Alarm and I couldn’t even trust him. At that time I was open seven days a week and we were missing too much merchandise. That’s when I decided to close on Sunday and closed early on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and open late Friday and Saturday. That was that.
JW: What other things did you see in the city? You said they called you, they said there’s riots and you need to get out. Did you see the effects of the riots as you were driving away with your wife later that day?
MM: I saw Robinson Furniture with the couches there and the police were lining everybody up that was trying to drive away against the wall. It was so early during the riot, probably 12th Street really got hit bad. They didn’t burn me out because there were people living upstairs from me otherwise they would have burned me out, too. It was just this little small strip of stores. I was on the corner. There was a shoe store next to me that wasn’t hit that was black-owned. There was a plumbing store and some other stores. They did a good job on me.
JW: Some people describe this event as a riot but other people use other words. How do you describe the events of 1967?
MM: I thought it was a riot. I don’t know, what other words were they using?
JW: Some people call it a rebellion. Some people call it an uprising.
MM: No, it wasn’t a rebellion. It was just a riot that had started on 12th Street and it just accelerated. At that time probably 90 percent of the police force was white and when you raided a blind pig like that, it was all black and that’s what happened. There were just discrepancies between the blacks and the whites, especially the policemen raiding them at 2:30 in the morning.
JW: How long did it take for you to get your store back in order?
MM: In July, probably September or October. At least a good few months. They broke the in [unintelligible]. I had jewelry there that was on consignment. They broke the cases. It was a mess, you can see in the pictures. It was just funny that they didn’t open up where the vestibule was and all that merchandise. They could have just taken all the boxes. Yeah, fun and games.
JW: How do you think that the events of 1967 impacted the city?
MM: Well, my impression is you can’t keep a good man down, so I reopened. I was held up a few times during the time I was open. I was contemplating probably putting in the glass and I just couldn’t see myself working behind a cage for the rest of my life. Then, in probably around 1978 or ‘79 I got shot.
JW: Oh wow.
MM: In a hold up. There was a guard I had in the store on a Saturday night. The two of us were going to go on vacation that Sunday and I called the police department to give me the extra protection while I was gone for a week so two guys came in. They had the guard covered. The other guy comes around the corner, behind the counter, and he starts walking in front of me and I was oblivious of what the guard—that the guard didn’t know anything so I took a bottle of whisky and I hit the guy on the head and I ran around the counter and jumped under—I had a potato chip rack. And they started shooting at me. It hit me twice. One in the arm and one in the leg so that was my vacation in the hospital. And the funny part about it were the police, I guess saw these guys. They were across the street and when they started shooting they just ran out of the store and ran to where their getaway car was, so they were never caught.
JW: That’s too bad. How long did you keep your store open, then?
MM: I had it probably about 13 years. After that, I got rid of the store, sold the store and got rid of my wife. So I killed two birds with one stone. But we did have a son which was good.
JW: Let’s see. What message would you like to leave for future generations about your memories of Detroit before, during, after the events of 1967?
MM: Probably, try to treat people like you would want to be treated. Even now, you can see where blacks, and especially when police arrest them, they pound them on the ground and everything like that and I’m sure they wouldn’t want to be treated like that. That would be my message. Treat people like you would want to be treated. I’m serious.
JW: No, that’s good. I agree. Is there anything you feel that we haven’t discussed yet that should be added to your story?
MM: There was one columnist in the Chronicle that was one of my customers and I got held up and she wrote an article on me-I should have brought it—about how I’m really good to the people that lived around the area and that it was a shame that they had to do this to me. I should have brought it.
JW: You can send it to us. You can email it or something like that if you’d like, yeah.
MM: Okay. I’ll try to find it.
JW: That’s a great legacy.
MM: She was a big columnist for the Chronicle and she wrote an article on me.
JW: That’s great. That’s very great. All right, well, is there anything else you’d like to add?
MM: I think you got about everything.
JW: All right, great. Well, thank you so much for coming in and sitting down to tell us your stories,
MM: I’m glad you asked. I just read the paper and I was just sitting there thinking how it might be interesting.
JW: Well, we appreciate it.
MM: Thank you.
GS: Hello, today is June 29, 2016. My name is Giancarlo Stefanutti, this is on behalf of the Detroit ’67 Oral History Project, and we are in Detroit Michigan, so thank you for sitting down with me today. Can you first start by telling me your name?
NK: My name is Norbert Kidd. K-I-D-D.
GS: Okay Norbert, and where and when were you born?
NK: I was born in Detroit, 1942.
GS: Okay. What neighborhood were you living in?
NK: East Side. Kind of like the central East Side. When I was young I grew up in what was the Denby High School area. Lived there till I was maybe five or six. Then they moved to I guess Grosse Pointe Woods. Lived there and Harper Woods until I was maybe 17, then I moved back to Detroit.
GS: Okay. What did your parents do growing up?
NK: Okay. My mother was a homemaker basically but eventually she became a nurse’s aide at Saint John’s Hospital. My father has a degree in electrical engineering, but ended up, because of things that happened—for example he was working at Henry Ford electrical train thing that was down by Dearborn. The depression ended that—ended his job. He eventually ended up opening a brass and bronze foundry on Bellevue Street in Detroit. Partnership with others, and he basically functioned as a salesperson. He would go around taking the brass castings to various places and taking orders and stuff like that. And he worked till he was, wow—78, 79, something like that.
GS: Wow.
NK: Yeah.
GS: So where did you go to school growing up?
NK: Okay. went through Catholic schools—Saint Joan of Arc Grade School, Notre Dame High School. Graduated from Notre Dame in 1960, tops in the class. Then I went to Wayne State, got a bachelor’s degree in history and education, master’s degree in education, and I really got so many hours beyond that but I never bothered working for a doctor.
GS: So then, what was it like growing up as a child? Was your neighborhood—was it integrated racially?
NK: No. The Far East Side of Detroit was not. From my point of view, there was really not that much neighborhood spirit. As a young, young child, you might have played with the kids next door and that was it. You didn’t venture down the street—this might just been my parents’ way of doing things. As I grew older, it used to be you got to be within sight, you known. And when I went to school, we’d go visit each other’s houses from time to time. But again, if somebody lived six, eight, ten blocks away, no transportation really, we’d find excuses to get together for different things, ride bikes like crazy, stuff like that. I looked today and some of the neighborhood companionship, what’s called, it’s just amazing. It’s so totally different than what I experienced.
GS: So you said you moved to Grosse Pointe?
NK: Grosse Pointe Woods yeah. Really it was like six blocks out of Detroit. And that point it was kind of underdeveloped area really. I mean lots of open woods and lots and stuff. So we moved there. It was interesting my parents, both of them grew up on the West Side. Linwood, 24th Street. For some reason after they were married they just moved all the way to the East Side. That’s a major thing in those days. I mean it was like the East Side and West Side, had to pack a lunch to go to the other side of town. It was a major thing. The freeways were not really there, I can remember when they were first building the Edsel Ford Freeway. It was only open like from Russel to maybe where the Lodge is now. So we had to visit my grandmother, we’d go up to Warren to Russel, go up to Russel and [4:07??]. But that didn’t help much, but you know, with transportation, you didn’t communicate that much.
GS: Right. Do you have any siblings?
NK: What?
GS: Do you have any siblings?
NK: I had a brother, one brother, he was a year and a half younger, he died a couple years ago. And that was about it. We were a very small family. My father had two brothers that really I never saw. My mother had two sisters, they’re both dead, two cousins that have moved out of Detroit. You know, very small family.
GS: So when you moved to Grosse Pointe was that a vastly different community than on the East Side?
NK: I was too young to even notice a difference. It wasn’t the Grosse Pointe of today. You know the people in the neighborhood—there was a barber, a storekeeper, you know, it was not anything of upper middle class at that point. Because we were certainly not upper middle class. We were basically middle class, or maybe even lower middle class, but it didn’t have the prestige it has now. And if anything, since I went to catholic schools, there were a lot of catholic community type people. You know, “Oh, so and so goes to my school,” that sort of thing. I didn’t know Detroit well enough at that point to see a big difference.
GS: Okay. So then you moved back to Detroit when you said you were about 17?
NK: When I was in college, actually just before I graduated, I probably was older than 17, closer to 20, 21.
GS: Okay.
NK: I graduated from Wayne, and it was time to get my own, and I bought into the 1960s way of thinking, education wise, they keep telling us “You got to identify with your students. You have to be one with your students.” And I said “Well if I’m driving 15, 20 minutes, I’m not really one with my students. I need to be somewhere where I can be close to the school.” I hate driving to work, taking forever to get home. So I settled where I am right now. Same place I’ve been—basically within two lots.
GS: Okay.
NK: I went into an apartment building, eventually I had a chance to buy a house with friends of mine from college. So I’m still there. Apartment building’s gone, they’re gone, but I’m there.
GS: So you said you wanted to identify more with the students, so you were teaching at this time?
NK: Well yeah, I was a new teacher. I started teaching in ’64. And, you know, this was a time where—relevance, if you will. How much you understand the lives that your kids are leading, you know, where they shopped, where they socialized, where they this-and-this, you really can’t reach them effectively. And that’s true because I taught with one man who lived in Monroe, he drove all the way into the center of the city every day. He was in Monroe because his wife was a bank manager down there. You know, in terms of any kind of involvement, living as I did, five minutes away from the school, I was able to spend time before school and after school. Weekends, if there was activities I could get involved, I used to take kids out on weekend, you know, just quick trips—airport, Ann Arbor, stuff like that. And the school I taught at was Spain School, Mack and Beaubien, Brewster Projects. And at that point, it was like the kids had not really seen much of the city itself. I could go talking about Wayne State and they were like “That’s over there somewhere isn’t it?” Wayne State right now was surrounding the school, but I’d always go up to Wayne and take a walk around campus. That kind of stuff, you know. So, I had a little bit of freedom to do that sort of thing.
GS: Okay. So when you moved back to Detroit, could you sense any tension within the city or was there some sort of atmosphere change from the last time you were there?
NK: I didn’t really feel any of that tension. When I mover first of all into the apartment building, if there was any tension it was who is this young kid moving in here? Because it was mostly older retirees that had been in that community for a while and here I am, and “What’s he gonna do? This is gonna be the downfall of the building.” But in terms of tension, I heard stories, you know, and read things, and heard about this and that. But personally, I really didn’t pick up on anything to be honest.
GS: Okay. So then, where were you when you first heard about the riot starting?
NK: On my way back from New York City.
GS: Oh okay.
NK: Another teacher and I and my brother and a friend had gone to New York just for like a three day weekend. So we’re coming back, we got on 94, just about like where Flatrock is, and all of a sudden traffic was just stopped. “What’s this?” We turn the radio on and—because AM radio, you really couldn’t get it out in the boondocks—and they were talking about problems in Detroit and fires, and this-and-that, and “This is closed” and “That is closed.” So I got off the freeway, my brother lived in Redford, so I zoomed over there, dropped him off, came back down here, and now the freeway, you know, you could smell smoke and see smoke drifting over everything because it was going right down in the freeway. The teacher with me lived in Highland Park, so I went back up there, and my usual procedure would have been to take Oakland Avenue down here. “No, I’m gonna take John R.” And as I went down John R., I looked to my left down the side streets, and there was like a sheet of flame—a wall of flame. The stores on Oakland were burning. So, that’s when the beginning—I had no idea what the scope of the thing was yet, I just knew there was some terrible thing going on. And with my crazy self, I said “I wanna make sure the school is still there.” So I drove down by Mack and Beaubien, 10, 10:30 at night just to make sure the school was there, went around Woodward a little bit. And, like, there’s a liquor store Erskine and Woodward. And there were flames shooting all over the place, yet there were people running in and out of the broken out windows with liquor, with boxes of things, going across Woodward. And you come up—I got near the Boulevard, there used to be a Crowley’s store there. First it was Demery’s then it was Crowley’s, it’s gone now. It’s near where that railroad station is there. But, “What’s this?” you know. The windows were beautiful. I mean, they had brown paper, and they had this and that, but every single thing was gone. The windows and all the furniture and all the clothes and everything [inaudible], it was like you had a blank picture frame. So at that point I said “Something not right is going on here.” So I got home and, you know, you could hear sirens in the background, you knew things were going on. I got out, I was on the second floor, and windows looked straight up Seward Avenue. And I looked up Seward and I could see—first of all, there was a red glow where Twelfth Street was, all up in the sky was a red glow, and then I could look down Seward and I could see flames shooting all over the place. So, that was kind of like the introduction to the craziness. That was the first evening, and that first evening was kind of surreal because everybody was kind of like—there was a little balcony on this apartment building and a bunch of people just sit out there, kind of watching and listening, sirens, and you’d hear gunfire. I did a lot of that because since there was a curfew during the day, you couldn’t do too much. So evenings you could sit up and just—evenings seemed to be the threatening time if you will. And we’d sit out there and watching and you’d see police cars zooming back and forth, but in terms of anything happening right in that neighborhood at that point, everything seemed to be pretty peaceful.
GS: Were the tenants in you apartment complex, were they panicking, or how were they reacting?
NK: There were a couple of people I know packed up and moved to relatives out in the suburbs or in Northwest Detroit. But most of them were just kind of laid back, you know. They were older people, and they didn’t seem to feel particularly threatened. But the rumors that were flying around for the whole three days, they stopped a busload of people coming in from Chicago to help with the rioters. They’ve been getting secret supplies from here and there, you know, there were all these crazy rumors floating around and people were gullible enough at that point, because of the fear I guess, to believe almost anything. Back in those days, the newspapers would come out with extras. So every three, four hours, a new extra with the latest information came out, because television news in those days was nothing to write home about. So they were keeping up with things but the people I associated with, outside of the three or four people that decided, you know, “We’re getting out of here. We’re taking the dog and we’re going.” But most of us were still—I hate to use the word “interested,” but just see what was gonna happen, you know. I never felt really physically threatened. But others were that were out there in the mix of things.
GS: So did you stay in your building for the rest of the days of the riot?
NK: Oh yeah. Oh yeah yeah yeah. I went out once—actually I went out a couple of times, the store across the street didn’t have any milk or anything. It was closed, it wasn’t even open. So I had to walk up a little ways to get some milk. But one afternoon—the weather was like it is today, sunny, warm—I decided just to go around the city and just zoom around and see what was happening. I took a few pictures, you know, just to document. But, you know, you go down along the Chrysler freeway, you look up in the sky and you see smoke rising here, smoke rising there, four or five different places around the city, you’d see smoke rising. I drove around West Side, West Warren, that area there, there was a lot of stuff going on there, I drove up to—I just circled around, pictures of burned-out houses, burned-out buildings. The weirdest thing was I thought I’d see how close I could get to Twelfth Street, knowing I couldn’t get too close to it. Well I went up Twelfth, and at the Boulevard it was blocked off. Police cars and barricades and they’re directing traffic, but you could look up the street and see smoke and fires still going, but as I’m getting ready to turn right off of Twelfth, these two motorcycles just come zooming right through the barricades, right on down the thing—my brother with his crazy self. [laughter]. Yeah. Yeah.
GS: Wow.
NK: You know, he did things like that. Obviously he survived, but that was about the extent of my going off into different areas. The area where I lived was basically not too, I want to say damaged maybe. The crazy thing was—I think it was that Monday night—again, five or six of us sitting on this balcony just watching things, and this one idiot is eating chips. So when he finishes the bag of chips, what do you do? You blow it up and pop it. Sounded like a gunshot. And you could see people across the street on porches and everything getting up like “Okay, where is it? Where is it?” They were ready. Ready for action, you know, [inaudible] start shooting, thank goodness. It was basically an integrated neighborhood. Not completely, nothing like it is now, but it was integrated. Another thing that happened, one of those nights, about two of three in the morning, all of a sudden, a garage, maybe two blocks away, burst into flames. And you could sit there in this surreal quiet and darkness, and see these flames, no sign of any fire department coming to do anything, and you didn’t know what it was. Is it a house? Is it a garden? What is it? You know, so that was a memorable thing that sticks in my mind. By Tuesday, when the National Guard and the army were called in, you could see tanks rolling up and down Woodward. In fact, the day I was going around taking pictures, I passed some kind of armed vehicle on the freeway, headed west. Kind of unusual to see these big military things rumbling on there. At the corner of Shane and Warren, the park across from Northeastern High School was a camp for the National Guard. And you’d go by there and see these tanks and these supply trucks and everything, and they’re all camped there. That was an unusual sight, to put it that way. You look out the front window and you see a soldier standing on the corner next to the mailbox with a gun, ready for action. The gas station behind me had “soul brother” written on its window. I always thought he was Greek [laughter]. He was. But, you know, a lot of people were kind of shocked at the—there was a motel out on the Lodge freeway in Grand Boulevard, a businessman was in there for a conference visiting Detroit, standing from the window, some sniper from across the freeway killed him. And that guy said “Wow, what’s going on here?” You know, getting closer. Probably the claim to fame might be the Algiers Motel, which was like a block over from me. And I can remember the night because—I can’t say I heard gunfire from the motel, you were always hearing gunfire from everywhere. But all of a sudden, there was this huge police presence. Just racing in and racing in, so we knew something was going on. And that was supposedly where that police officer killed those three guys that were in the motel. So that was something I remembered for sure. Other than that, you know, slowly, stability returned. I was teaching summer program at the school, and another teacher, and she was big on social things etcetera, said she wanted to take some pictures, to take the kids around and show them. So it would’ve been like the next Monday or Tuesday after things had kind of subsided. We went up Twelfth Street, and took a lot of pictures of the burned-out buildings, you know, the wrecked automobiles, the twisted timbers or whatever, and especially that block at Philadelphia and Twelfth. The whole block had been burned. All you saw was the chimneys of these old houses standing. Very unreal sight, so that is related to the riots and that’s memorable too. Other than that, there still was a lot of this—I say suspicion, maybe it’s fear—“What’s going to happen? It’s going to happen again. It’s going to break out.” For months afterwards, you hear a siren in the middle of the night, you think “Oh, we’re going backwards,” you know. Honestly, it took me awhile to get over that syndrome too, because—not that I was afraid, I just didn’t want to have things happen again after we started finding our way out of it. Interesting thing I was really impressed by, during all of this from time to time, students would call me to make sure I was okay. And I thought that was very thoughtful and very nice, you know, kind of something to touch base with in the midst of all this craziness. Other than that, the kids at school would talk about stuff. You know, they felt comfortable talking in front of me, going into a store, takings TVs, taking shoes and clothes, taking food—piles and piles of food. And that made me realize that one of the things—they often say that this riot, some people call it a rebellion, an uprising—
GS: I was about to ask you about that actually.
NK: Yes, yes. Because I didn’t really see the black/ white conflict. It was more an economic thing. I mean, in those days, at least the kids I taught, and that’s the Brewster Projects, there wasn’t much money. The families didn’t really have cars. I don’t know how many kids I’ve taken for road tests in my car because they didn’t have a family car. And if they did, it wasn’t insured. Food, fill up the freezer, you know, when they talk about—the poor people, the poor black people in the city were exploited by retails. I’ve been in grocery stores and you look in and say “What is that?” You know, you see a meat department with those dried up [21:04??] of something, the vegetables look like they came from a Christmas basket, all dried out and, you know. These used furniture stores, there were a lot of them along Twelfth and Long Mack. Some piece of junk, they charge a fortune, and if you can’t pay them, they give you generous terms, where you end up paying five times the cost of the item over time. When I was in college, I used to walk around the city a lot. I had a nine o’clock class, next one at two, I just walked. I walked up and down Twelfth Street five years before this happened, when the old Jewish merchants were still there with pickle barrels out in front, I walked up and down Mack, I really got to know the city. I just enjoyed doing that stuff. So I do think a lot of—you were gonna mention what the terminology is—I don’t see this as a riot. I remember I’ve read about the ’44 riot where there actually was black and white conflict and antagonism. You know, it happened, yes. But I don’t think anybody got shot necessarily just because he was white or he was black in a certain situation—unless it was by the cops. But, you know, looking back on it over 50 years, I keep wondering why. I don’t think there was any one incident. Like in ’44, there was an incident here, and there was a rumor spread that “This happened on Belle Isle. This happened over here.” Turned out not to be particularly true, but that’s what got emotions going. Of course in those years, the city was over-burdened with people. All the workers from the factories living in terrible conditions. Not saying the conditions were that much better in ’67, but there weren’t the social programs that we have now, and there was discrimination in higher discrimination in employment, and maybe this was just the way to let steam off, I don’t know. There are those I’m sure that have a much more militaristic view, I don’t know. This is me, relatively a peaceful person. I consider myself a peaceful person, I would never get involved in riots, conflicts, etcetera like that. But I certainly have feelings for what went on. So, that basically was the week that was.
GS: So how do you see Detroit presently? Do you think it’s improved at all?
NK: Okay, first of all, I absolutely believe in Detroit since I’ve been here all these years in the same neighborhood, which is like six blocks north of the Boulevard. And I think it’s improving, although I’m beginning to see some steps backwards with all the gentrification. I haven’t really heard—well, I hear things, you know, “They’re taking over our territory.” I mean, I’ve been up and down John R. and Brush, after school every day I’d go downtown. I never saw people walking French poodles, skateboarding, you know, it’s a big change. I never dreamed they’d be paying 15 hundred, 18 hundred dollars a month rent, in the Woodward corridor down there. Is it changed? Yes it’s changed. Is it better? It’s too early to tell. If some of the people who move in here are open to communication with those who have lived here, it would be good, if there’s more understanding. If it becomes two separate worlds, it’s not good. And if it really becomes antagonistic, you know, something might happen to drive all these people back on out, and I wonder if they’re waiting for it. There was some controversy within the last couple years about the old Brewster Projects, they tore them down. There’s the Brewster Community Center, which was like the core of that community, it was like home away from home. The kids were at school or at the center. That was it. And Joe Louis trained there, etcetera, etcetera. So, a lady, one of my former students, you know, 35, decided we’re not gonna let them tear that down. So she organized a fight, she got committee, she went downtown, she put me on the committee. I said “What am I doing? I didn’t grow up down here.” “Yeah, we needed an older man.” “Thanks.” [laughter] But she got historical designation for it, so they’re not going to tear it down. I went to the commission with her and I gave my little spiel, you know, I said “This is probably the only building left that was anywhere near Hastings Street.” And that got their attention. It really is, outside of a couple of churches. And then I mentioned the whole history of the thing. It was a—what’s his name? Library man. Carnegie! It was a Carnegie library, long story, long story, became a recreation center. So right now, the mayor said “Okay, we’re gonna open it up for development.” It’s never gonna be a community center, there’s no community. So some of those people wondered what’s he gonna put in there? You know, that’s another interesting issue that might pop up, might not. So I don’t know what to say about the future, it was looking very good. I mean, it seems that especially down here, maybe the university has a lot to do with it too, because university certainly welcomes people of all backgrounds, has activities for young and old, I just would hope that somehow, a new Detroit will emerge that has a real spirit to it.
GS: Alright, is there anything else you’d like to add?
NK: You had asked about my image of Detroit when I was young. And again, like so many others, I saw these factories belching out smoke, you know, this is good. There’s all this productivity, you know, all those auto plants that used to be along Jefferson by Belle Isle, we used to go by there on our way to Belle Isle all the time. That’s over with and you can’t go back. Down on Hudson’s, loved it. But you can’t go back. I was in that building five times a week. I called it my “vertical mall.” You know, but you can’t go back. And that’s the thing that kind of bothers me, these people that wanna go back, and I don’t know exactly if that’s all they’re talking about, they’re talking about “The old days when I was somebody around here,” you know, I worry about that. But things like this project I think are good because you’re gonna have—I’m sure you’ve got a wide range of opinions and ideas, and my little bit, you know, like I say, I didn’t really experience firsthand that much. But I try to be observant, you know. I’m happy I have chance to record them somewhere.
GS: Alright. Well thank you for sitting down with me today.
NK: Pardon me?
GS: Thank you for sitting down with me today. [laughter]
NK: Okay. That’s good.
HS: Hello, my name is Hannah Sabal. I’m here with William Winkel and Joseph—sorry—
JA: Andrzejewski.
HS: Andrzejewski. We are in Westland, Michigan and the date is June 30th, 2016. We are sitting down for an oral history interview for the Detroit 67 Oral History Project. Thank you for sitting down with us today.
JA: What was that?
HS: Thank you for sitting down with us.
JA: Oh, you’re welcome.
HS: Can you tell us where and when you were born?
JA: I was born in General Hospital, Detroit, Michigan, August 21st, 1950.
HS: And where did you grow up?
JA: Detroit.
HS: Was there a name to your neighborhood, where you lived?
JA: Joy Road and Evergreen.
HS: And what was your neighborhood like?
JA: Nice, they were building the houses in ’47, ’48, ’49, and I was built in ’50. It was relatively a new neighborhood.
HS: Was it integrated?
JA: Not at the time, no.
HS: What did your parents do for a living?
JA: My mom and dad both worked at Detroit Gasket down on Burt road, across Schoolcraft. My ma, she worked nights, and my dad was on nights too, I think. It was a long time ago. I remember a little bit around four or five years old, my ma stopped working and it was just my dad. He took a second job while working there, right up on the corner. There was a little stamping place for perforated cardboard, and they didn’t have a safety on the machine. He reached in, machine come down and took his right arm off.
HS: Oh, my god.
JA: That was the year I was born, and the company felt so bad for him that they gave him a lifetime job as a painter. So he was painting, and I don’t know what kind of settlement he got, but he got something because we fixed up the whole basement. My two older sisters had a nice bedroom put in and put in a new furnace and all that stuff.
HS: Where did you go to school?
JA: St. Suzanne’s, for eight years.
HS: And then high school?
JA: My dad died when I was nine years old. And like I said, I had two older sisters; one was six years older, the other was eight years older. So me being the little baby brother, you got blamed for everything and got beat up all the time. Ninth grade my ma sent me to Boysville, to get away from all the girls, as she put it. And then when I came home, I went to Lessinger, and I started to rebel because my ma was not a good mother. I did some bad things, had to go to court, and Judge James H. Lincoln, and my ma and the probation officer—there’s a school in Indiana, Father Gibalt’s School for Boys. They sent me there. It was an ungraded school. I went there, and they give you a test and they place you in the grade. I placed the highest grades—they gave me the highest grades that they had. So I stayed there for one year, and then when I got out, I was a changed, young man. My sister—Caroline, the one six years older—she worked at Harper Hospital, and right away when I got home, I had a job waiting for me at Harper Hospital.
HS: What year did you leave St. Gibalt’s?
JA: June 4th, 1967.
HS: So you were fresh out of school in ’67?
JA: Yes.
HS: And you were working at Harper Hospital?
JA: I was going to Cody for twelfth grade and working—it was a co-op—and working for Harper Hospital.
HS: In what capacity were you working there?
JA: I was an admitting page.
HS: Okay.
JA: So I had to wear crisp, nice shirts, a tie, I had to look nice every day.
HS: Moving into ’67 then, how did you first hear about the disturbance?
JA: I got mixed up in it.
HS: Can you explain that?
JA: Okay. I lived Joy Road and Evergreen. Every day I’d get out of school, I’d take Joy Road bus all the way down to Cadillac Square, then walk to Woodward, take Woodward down to the hospital. On Sundays, it was different. I would have had to take three buses: Joy Road to Grand River, Grand Rvier to—I forget—another bus, down to Cadillac Square. Or, I could walk three-quarters of a mile down to Plymouth Road and take the Plymouth-Clairmount bus, take me right to Grand Circus Park, and walk to Woodward and take the Woodward bus. So on Saturdays and Sundays, if I worked on weekends, I would walk up to Plymouth Road and take the Plymouth-Clairmount bus. But the Plymouth-Clairmount bus at the time, you know—they zig-zagged through all the streets. Well, Twelfth Street was one of the streets that it—and, now let’s see, I could’ve been reading a book for school. I know I wouldn’t’ve been sleeping. On the way back home, I’d have my head against the window, I’d be asleep, but in the morning, I’m not tired. So I was either reading a book or looking out the window, but all of a sudden the bus came to a screeching halt, big noise, and the bus started rocking. There’s a whole gang of people and at the time I didn’t realize what was going on, but it was right in front of this bar that they raided not more than an hour earlier. There was this whole group of people that wanted to just rock and push this bus over. It was maybe four or five people on the bus, and I was one of them. Needless to say, I was a little scared. More than scared. This was, what the hell is happening? It didn’t take long and there was a whole sea of white helmets and shields and the Detroit Police actually surrounded the bus with these shields and were pushing these mobs back because it was growing and growing all the while. People just coming around. The police stormed on the bus—there had to be six of them on the bus—and the driver, one was telling the driver, “Keep inching forward, keep inching forward.” It inched forward and the police came and, “Who are you? Where are you going?” “I’m going to work.” “Where do you work?” “Harper Hospital.” “Okay, you can stay, go to work and don’t leave.” And I went to work and never thought a thing about it until it was like five o’clock, time to get off, and my brother-in-law (him and I, we did not see eye to eye) was sitting out there. “Well, what are you doing here?” “Come to give you a ride home.” “I can take the bus, I don’t need you!” Then I found out, even my boss says, “If you don’t have a way home or you can’t take a bus, we’ll put you up,” and Harper Hospital would put any of their employees up if they needed it. And though I was tempted, my brother-in-law was there. I don’t know if this would be part of it or not, but my sister told me later—and I did not know this at the time—when my brother-in-law was driving me home, instead of getting on the freeway and heading out to the west side, he was driving around all the burning houses and streets. “Ed, what are you doing?!” “Oh, look at that.” My sister told me later he was a fire bug, he loved fires.
HS: Wow.
JA: And he’s driving me through these neighborhoods, and I was more scared then than I was on the bus that morning.
HS: When you were on the bus in the morning and the bus was attacked, about what time of morning was that?
JA: It was between seven and seven-thirty, because I started work at eight o’clock. And I leave my house probably at quarter to seven, take me fifteen minutes to walk up to Plymouth Road, and I had the schedules of the buses because I had to be there, I knew which buses, what time they ran.
HS: And the crowd that attacked the bus: were they black or white or a mixture?
JA: I’m going to say it was a slight mixture. It was mostly all black, but I did see when I looked out, after the police started pushing—I saw a few white heads. Not many, but a few.
HS: What else did you experience after your brother-in-law took you home?
JA: I changed my clothes and I went over to my buddy’s house. He had a pool table, and we started playing pool. We ran out of pop, Pepsi and Coke and whatever we were drinking. So he got his bike out of the garage and he rode me on the handlebars to the corner joint, Evergreen, there was a St. Claire’s gas station that had a pop machine outside, so we stuck our dimes in and we got four bottles of pop. We were on our way back and, “Jerry, there’s a car following us.” He said, “Well, we’re just going home.” All of a sudden they put the siren on, and “Pull over!” “You did it now, you must have gone over the speed limit.” We didn’t think anything of what’s going on. I didn’t watch tv or listen to the radio. I just got off work, changed clothes, go over Jerry’s house.
HS: Looking back on it, when you think about the car following you and they turned the sirens on, do you think that they thought that you were a looter or a rioter?
JA: No, even if anything, we just—like I said, I wasn’t the best kid, but I wasn’t no real bad kid. I just figured, well, what are we doing? Riding in the middle of the street and it’s nighttime or something. And the police told us, “There’s a riot going on, you know there’s a curfew.” So whether we did or not, we didn’t know. I don’t know, gee, I didn’t know. “What are you doing?” “We ran out of pop, we were playing pool and ran out of pop, we’re going back to the house to play some more pool.” So they took our names, just formal stuff like that. And followed us another block and a half to Jerry’s house, watched us go in, and they drove off and said, “You’re spending the night here?” “Oh, yes, yes, yes, I’m spending the night.” And Jerry looks at me, “You ain’t spending the night at my house!” and then when it was time to leave, I left. I just took Dover—the side street—like I normally would, up to Evergreen. I seen a car coming so I ducked in some bushes, waited for the whole street to clear, ran across, and went home.
HS: Did you go back to work the next day or at any other time during the week?
JA: No, I think it was two or three days later, the hospital called and says, “If you can find a way in, okay. If not, don’t worry, your job is secure, blah, blah, this and that.” So I think it was about the fourth day and the bus service was running again, I went back to work.
HS: Was your sister working at all during that week?
JA: No.
HS: Okay.
JA: You know, I don’t remember. I mean, she was married and she lived over up by Vernor on Seacott or something like that. She didn’t drive, but naturally Ed did, so he might have drove her to work. He used to tell me all the time how smart he was and this and that, and I said that’s why I have a nice job making more money than you. He was going to run for congressman and this and that, okay. I’ll be a looter and burner if you’re going to be a congressman, jeez.
HS: The couple days that you were at the hospital working, what was the atmosphere like?
JA: I didn’t so much check it out because my job in admitting—the admitting pages, when they admitted patients, they’d get all the paperwork ready and everything, and I would get the paperwork and I’d go out in the waiting room, I’d call their name, they’d stand up and I would grab their luggage, take them down to the lab. They’d get lab work and while they were there I would come back and get another patient and by the time I took them down, this was ready I’d take this one and their luggage up to their room. That was what I did. Get patients. I was busy but it was fun, it was a lot of exercise—well, I was only sixteen years old, seventeen, so it was nothing. I used to run up and down the steps then. I really didn’t think much about it at the time until I get home and there’s a newspaper or watch the news on TV, but I didn’t do that much because as soon as I got home, I had to get out of there. It was my mother and I. My sisters, as soon as they were of age, they were gone. I couldn’t wait to get out of there because my mother she was, drugs, beer, or whiskey or whatever and she would not leave me alone, and I did not like my mother. I didn’t watch much TV, I just got the hell out of the house.
HS: So leading up to the riots did you notice any tension in the city at all?
JA: Oh yeah. Yeah. At work, too. It was Harper Hospital and we had all walks of life there. And even the employees. But the employees, a lot of the employees were cheerful and I knew a lot of the nurses because I would take patients up to the floors and I would take it to the nurses’ station. I would take the patients to their room, and I’d say, “The nurse will be right in,” and then I would take their paperwork up to the nurses’ station. I didn’t just lay it down, I gotta make sure I handed it to one or two different nurses. You can’t just hand it to anybody. “New patient in 217,” blah, blah, this and that. And I got to know them, they got to know me. We were all friendly. And if we didn’t know each other, I wore the white jacket, so they knew that I was an employee and they had uniforms. We’d nod at each other, but it was no words were ever spoke.
HS: After the riots, did that impact your neighborhood at all?
JA: No. Not then. Not at all. It wasn’t until maybe the eighties, middle eighties that it started getting integrated. [clock chimes]
HS: What changes have you seen in the city since 1967?
JA: I lived in Detroit 42 years of my life. Right now, I wouldn’t walk my down my old neighborhood, but when I moved out—we built this in ’93—I could walk anywhere in my old neighborhood. I was Joy and Evergreen and she was Warren and Southfield. I could walk all the way to her house around there, even through Herman Gardens, and that was mostly black around then. I could walk through there for the short cut, it didn’t bother me. You might get a few people saying something, but if you ignore them and keep going, you’re fine. But that was just a way of life, really.
HS: Why did you move out of the city?
JA: It started getting bad, and you know, this was cheap, compared to…. I had my house on Vaughn that I had grown up and lived on, and she lived over here on Vaughn, so I moved in with her and I rented out my house. Then she said, “Let’s move!” “Okay, where you wanna move?” And she went out and she found houses and just pick one, I don’t want to walk around. I mean, she would walk around and look at houses days at a time. I didn’t want to. I settled on this one, okay, then they started building Millpoint, and these houses here, and in hindsight she wanted, “Let’s forget this one and move in here.” I should’ve moved over here, right here on the corner, them five houses, because this one, the association’s for crap here. We’ve been here since, ’93, ’94. In fact, we sold our house and then we had to pay rent to the people that bought it until they finished building this one. Been here ever since.
HS: Where do you city going, like in its future?
JA: I’m keeping track of it. Kwame Kilpatrick, he said while he was in jail, “The only thing that will fix Detroit is a white mayor.” And Duggan got in there, and I think he’s doing a pretty fair job. And Alexis Wiley is one smart cookie, I remember her being on the news—channel 2 news. They all speak very well of the city. And—not last year, because I put in a new motor in my Corvette last year—but two years before that, I had season tickets for the Tigers, and Kathy and I or her brother and I or my buddies from work would go there, and we had no problem. And then after the ballgame, we’d walk downtown. I never needed to look over my shoulder. I never felt that way. When I worked down there, when I was sixteen, I used to do all my shopping down Woodward. I had a book report, go to bookstores. I had to look nice, so I had to have some nice clothes, all my friends said, “Man, you sure are sharp!” Back then, when I got out of work, I’d have to walk up to Woodward, the professional plaza, and the big parking lot, then the hospital, and I’d have to walk straight down to Woodward. A lot of times, it was dark outside in the winter time and you’d have some winos and that walking up and down Woodward and that, and they’d be yelling and screaming. I didn’t want to be bothered, and I’d walk down the middle of Woodward, in the middle lane, just to stay away from people. Cause if they wanted to come out into traffic, well, I’m sixteen, I could run really fast.
HS: Do you have any advice for future generations regarding the city of Detroit?
JA: Go down! Go down and enjoy yourself. Because if you don’t, if you stay away, it might revert back. Go down, enjoy yourselves. I see the people moving in, I wish I had a bunch of money, I could buy a storefront or whatever, buy something and turn it into lofts or a business. I wouldn’t mind having a little soup and sandwich joint. That would be wonderful, because even when I was taking the bus, you get on from Cadillac Square, you get on the Woodward bus, and you’d pass Hudson’s. Always a booming business, you know, always. Gosh, even Vernor’s was still open down there, and then little by little you passed over the freeway is when—it didn’t start falling to pieces, but you could tell it was just old neighborhoods. Now they’re slowly but surely building everything up. Not doing the neighborhoods as fast as they could, but they need money to do that. They don’t have all the money and I don’t have a whole lot of money. My wife works and I retired.
HS: Do you have any questions, Billy?
WW: Nope.
HS: Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us today, we greatly appreciate it.
[INITIALS OF INTERVIWEE:] MJ
[INTIALS OF INTERVIEWER:] BB
BB: This is Bree Boettner with the Detroit Historical Society Detroit 67 Oral History Project. We’re here at the Detroit Historical Society with Maxine Jones. Thank you so much for sitting down with us today. Can you please tell me where and when you were born?
MJ: March 20, 1941. Detroit, MI.
BB: And where did you live?
MJ: At the time of 67, 4711 Joseph Campau off of Fourth and Joseph Campau. My mother lived at the other end of the block at 4771 Joseph Campau and Hancock, which you find will be significant in this story.
BB: Fantastic. And when you were growing up, before 67, what did your parents do?
MJ: Well, my father worked in a mattress factory. It was called Wolverine Bedding that used to be on Beaubien and Illinois which is a street that does not exist anymore. And my mother, she, at this time, had a community center down on Chene Street off of Farnsworth.
BB: Okay. Did you have any siblings?
MJ: Yes, I have one brother and one sister. I am the middle child.
BB: Would you like to say their names and ages?
MJ: My sister, who is four years younger, is Ingrid Jeter and my brother who is eight years older is Samuel Dorsey.
BB: Fantastic. So in the neighborhood that you grew up in, what schools did you attend?
MJ: Well, basically, I grew up on the - well, I’m an Eastsider. Still an Eastsider. The first I attended was called Balch. It’s over here off of the expressway. It’s now called Golightly. But that was the first school I attended, Balch Elementary School.
BB: And your middle school and high school years?
MJ: My middle school – my favorite – Jefferson Junior High School. It’s still on Fourth and Seven, but they gave it another name. In fact, I know the gentleman, Joe Landy, that purchased the building, and he leases it out, I think as a charter school. I went there from ‘53 to ‘56. Also, another elementary school I went to that does not exist anymore. It was on Willis between Woodward and Cass and it was called Washington Irving School and it was the next thing to a little one room school house.
BB: Wow, that’s fantastic.
MJ: I passed by there and naturally it’s long gone. And for a brief moment when my mother went to the hospital, I went to Trowbridge School that used to be on Forrest over near John R.
BB: So growing up in your area, what was your neighborhood like?
MJ: It was different than it is today saying that the people in the area, they worked together more. If you did something that wasn’t right as a kid, the neighbor told on you, they watched out. It was a poor neighborhood from the Canfield and Beaubien, John R. area I went to, which at that time I went to a St. Leo’s Catholic School on Forrest near Grand River. Everybody watched out for everybody. You didn’t hear about gun violence and even the guys that hung on the corner they had on suits, their hair was done. And my dad had an afterhours place on Erskine and Brush and the rule then was be home before the street lights come on, or at least in front of your house. And even the guys on the corner, they’d see me, they’d call me Little Mac because they called him Mac. And they’d, “Little Mac, you don’t want me to have to take you home now. You get home.” You know, it was much more camaraderie in the neighborhood.
BB: And then bring us up to ‘67. The events leading up to ’67. How were things in the months leading up to that July in the city of Detroit?
MJ: Just normal. At that time, up until about twenty-five years ago, we didn’t lock our doors when we left. Nobody bothered anyone and we had moved a couple of times but primarily – and another school I went to, Northern High School, which is not called Northern anymore. It’s an all girls school on Clairmount or Owens and Woodward. We had a lot of foreign exchange students there, too. It was interesting. Anyway, leading up to it, it was just normal existence. Then I know, too, which is unlike it is now, your corner stores, your businesses, your small grocery stores, your gas stations were all black owned.
BB: Can you state again how old you were and what you were doing working? What kind of job did you have in the city?
MJ: [at the same time] I worked with my mother at her center that she had on Chene and Farnsworth. Just part-time work cause I was raising my kids and at the time I was getting public assistance. Like I said, I was living in the upstairs of a two family flat right there on Joseph Campau. Across the street was Campau Elementary School that does not exist anymore. My mother lived at the other end of the block.
BB: That July, how did you hear about the events when they started?
MJ: We first heard about it on the radio and TV because it started on the West side and, see, I’m over on the East side. We couldn’t believe it when they were showing the pictures in a day or so of everything burning over there on 12th Street, now called Rosa Parks. I was upset because I had some things in the pawnshop over there because 12th Street was a vibrant business. See, what a lot of people don’t understand, the old Hastings Street, 12th Street, the stores and all were primarily ran by Jews and the Jewish people worked with the black community and hired them and some of them even left their businesses to them. And when we saw this burning, it was just unbelievable. Also at the time, here’s a picture of my niece. She was born the 22 of July five days before the riot. She has since deceased. She was very depressed and took her life in 2013 –
BB: Oh, I’m so sorry.
MJ: – but my sister, who was living with my mother, at 4771 Joseph Campau and Hancock, had just birthed her. And we were going crazy trying to figure out where my sister’s husband was, Al. We couldn’t find him anywhere. Now that’s a whole story if you want me to go into that briefly.
BB: Okay, sure.
MJ: Okay, back in those days, when a woman gave birth, they kept them in the hospital, like seven to ten days. Now they herd them out. So Bridget was born the 22nd of July, so this is the 27th, my sister is getting ready to come home in a couple of days and we could not find her husband anywhere and this was their first child. And for those days I was running to morgues, to the morgue, Wayne County Medical Examiner to look at photographs to see if he was in there. People were getting killed. We were calling the police stations, you could not get through the lines were so busy. All of the police stations, their jails were full plus they even had prisoners in the garages of the precinct. That’s how many people were getting arrested. Well we found him. He got in touch with us about a month later. He was way up in Ionia because they had to ship prisoners up there because they had no room for all of them.
BB: Wow. So he did get caught.
MJ: Well, he made the biggest, stupid mistake in life. The rioting and the looting, I’m sorry, I just didn’t participate in that and then you find a lot of the smaller Mom and Pop stores, hey, those people was spending the night in their stores with guns. I talked to people that were stealing liquor. One guy even told me, “Oh, my little boy loves chocolate chip cookies so I got a case of chocolate chip cookies out of the store.” I remember Federal’s Department Store was on Van Dyke and Harper and we drove by there and people were rolling racks of clothes out of the stores because that Van Dyke and Harper area used to be a real nice business area. In fact, they just recently tore down the East Town Theater that was there where we used to go and see movies and see the concerts and different groups. Everyone from Iggy Pop to everybody, okay. That was quite distressing, well, of course we were so worried because we didn’t know where he was. So I’m at home and my mother’s at home and then they declared, I believe, Marshall Law. It was a curfew; you could not go out. Well, the crazy thing was, and here’s the significance of my mother on Hancock and Joseph Campau. The park is still there, it’s called Perrian Park, well, right there was Northeaster High School and the 82nd Airborne commandeered the whole area. So they were there. We saw tanks rolling down Forest, down Chene and different streets. The funny part about it was since the 82nd Airborne was there all of a sudden, every woman in the neighborhood had to take a walk around the park everyday [laughs]. And my mother’s house was right there on the corner so my mother was giving them cookies and we were making Kool-Aid for them. A couple of the young men in the neighborhood were making money shining their boots for them and guys was out – they were housed in Northeastern High School but they had commandeered the school plus the park and that was real interesting.
BB: That sounds like it would have been a hoot.
MJ: Now if you ask me or want to know why I believe the riots started, I know it was a blind pig or after hours joint, whatever you want to call it on 12th and Claimount. But what a lot of people tend to forget at this time in Detroit, one of our nicest mayors ever was Jerome P. Cavanagh and Girardin I believe was the police chief and he had at the time instituted something called STRESS. STRESS was very stressful to everybody because the police were given carte blanche. They could stop and frisk. They could harass you in any kind of way. Being mixed, I had gentleman friends of mine, we were actually stopped in cars by black and white cops, which there was a few black cops then, and their motivation for stopping us was to ask me what I was.
BB: Huh.
MJ: They could do what they wanted to back then. Yeah, they had carte blanche. They could see a young man walking down the street and just throw him down for no reason and it was called stop and frisk plus if you ever look up the STRESS in Detroit you’ll see, it was stressful and people were so against this. It went on for a few years, too, cause it was giving a citizen no rights. They could just do what they wanted to.
BB: How do you label the events of July? Cause you mentioned riots so I just want to clarify for me how you perceive the event in general.
MJ: Well, I perceived it as being bad because where they burned was over there on Twelfth Street was a major black business area, the black and the Jewish community had the stores, and fire doesn’t take names like bullets. It gets whatever it can get and a lot of people lost their homes because while the stores and all were burning, the fire licked over and burned a lot of people’s homes. And that was just terrible. One funny thing, which in a way it wasn’t funny, I was walking on Chene Street, I had went to the store and I saw one guy pushing an upright piano up Chene Street. I was told at the time that people that looted and robbed and maybe got money or jewelry or things like that, especially on the east side in that Harper Van Dyke area, that buckets of money and coins and stuff were buried in the ground. Who knows? They might still be there. But I viewed it as yes it was an uprising and it was against the way people were being treated but it was kind of the wrong thing to do because when you burn your own businesses and your own people’s homes that was pretty bad. Because now the places like downtown, that’s how my brother-in-law got arrested. You weren’t going to go down to stores like Hudson’s, Crawley, Kearns and loot. That was the first place they protected and you weren’t going to go St. Clare Shores or Grosse Point and cause any problems so you burned your own.
BB: Good to know. I was going to ask, in your community, cause you mentioned that you were on the east side, where did your family shop? Where were you guys centrally located in where you shopped, where you entertained yourselves?
MJ: Well, we kind went everywhere. We went in that Harper – Van Dyke area, we’d go downtown. Even then, Highland Park was a nice place to go. We were kind of all over the place. Of course, downtown was the main thing and Hudson’s, oh I remember it so well. We had little neighborhood stores, cleaners, places like that that we went to and your supermarkets weren’t really – they were independent like a lot of them are in Detroit now. Spartan stores are independent. Primarily Middle Eastern. We just went grocery shopping wherever, Hamtramck, wherever.
BB: And then the months following July, after the riot, uprising started and after you finally got your brother-in-law back, how did you see the city change?
MJ: A lot of places that were burned out, like I said, the riots to me began the loss of black owned businesses because some where burned out, some just went out of business. It kind of began a downhill swing. Like I said, I feel the last best mayor we had was Jerome P. Cavanagh and he was the mayor during the riots and he was a really nice guy. And after that, it didn’t do so good and it hasn’t done really good for the past forty years.
BB: Why do you think that is?
MJ: Mismanagement. People taking privilege downtown instead of looking out for the people that live in the city. I live on the Northeast side, I’ve been on Let it Rip at least three times and Charlie Langton, who calls me the “Crazy Lady on the East Side,” and I call him the “Crazy Attorney on Channel 2.” Right now where I live, which is a few blocks from Denby High School, I’ve been there for 41 years. My block on both sides has only one, two, three, four people living on it. And the houses across the street from me have been abandoned about ten years. Eight to ten years, maybe give or take a little bit less, and on my side of the street six to eight years. And I live in fear with an abandoned house next door to me. They finally came after the Channel 2 got after them enough and boarded the house up next to me but my car sits in the driveway and I’m in fear of it catching on fire. And of course, like I said, fire doesn’t pick who it gets. Plus it makes our car insurance, our house insurance, and everything just sky-high. And I take care of my property cause I’ve been in my house 41 years and our zip code, the -05 zip code, used to be the nicest zip code in and around because it was the last, should I say, lily white zip code in the city and it was primarily where your Detroit Police and retired ones lived. Unfortunately, we had a gentleman in the area named Donald Lobsinger who was over the John Birch Society which we know is just another arm of the Ku Klux Klan. One family, right before I moved there in ‘72, I believe because I moved there in ‘74, over on Alma Street had their home burned down because they weren’t wanted there. I won’t even go into the story about me and my kids on Seymour because it was rough. And I’ll tell you this, the first three years we lived there, and we’re a mixed family, every Saturday around noon when they would test the sirens, like for tornados or something, there would be three or four cars driving up and down the street with a dummy of Coleman Young hanging from it and banners on the sides of the cars, “Niggers get out.”
BB: Oh my gosh.
MJ: And we’d wake up, well my house that my lived in on Warren off of Chene, 2256 E. Warren, it caught on fire because those houses down there, and if you notice in Hamtramck all down on that East side part of town, the houses are so close together that the roofs overlap and this was an empty house next door and I was in fear of it and one night while I was in the house with my kids and a friend of mine was helping me fix it up, my one daughter, she kept – we were tiling the floor in the living room. It was a shotgun house. You could stand in front and see straight to the back but it had eleven rooms on one floor. The bedrooms were all on that side next to the house that was empty and I had a real bad feeling about that and my daughter Gabrielle, she kept saying, we had kind of hooked them into their bedrooms so they wouldn’t come out and walk on the glue we were putting the tile down. She kept saying, “Momma, Momma, let me out. There’s something wrong with the house next door.” And I’m like, “Be quiet, you just want to come out.” And she said, “No, Momma, no. Something is wrong.” And I opened the door to fuss at her and I could see the flames roaring at her bedroom window and I went to the next bedroom and opened the door and my two boys, thank God their bunk bed was on this side of the room, ‘cause their window side, their chest of drawers was already burning. And I had to get my kids. That was a horrible situation there. That’s when I moved in the house I am in. I said I will never live in a house again that doesn’t at least have a driveway in between but now I’m put in a situation with an abandoned house next door to me that could catch on fire and that doesn’t mean that someone could deliberately set it, there’s electrical. We’re always getting power – we just had one last week – power outages in that area. Oh yeah, I had to have a whole house beside individual surge protectors because it could just catch on – cause you know a few years ago, over in the Van Dyke and Seven Mile area they had that big fire storm and those houses are old and once they catch, it’s just a tinderbox.
BB: We talked about your views of what happened. Can you explain a little but about how the unrest in July affected your family in the broader picture? You mentioned that Bridget was born then—
MJ: It was scary but we were on the East side so we were not that worried. There was not the abundance of fires on the East side and then we were further out east. It was scary. It affected me because my mother and I both had things in the pawn shop on 12th because we had lived over there previously on – I just had the name in my mind a few minutes ago. It really kind almost doesn’t exist anymore, that street. But 12th Street was a nice place. You could walk up and down, I remember my mother and I would get corned beef sandwiches and a bottle of Stroh’s you know and you could buy anything you wanted and whatnot and nobody bothered anybody. There was bars, there were all kind of little stores and everything and it was just sad to see it go like that.
BB: Next question would be what message would you like to leave for future generations about your memoires of Detroit before, after, and during?
MJ: Well, my message would be to these younger people, wake up. Stop killing each other, murdering really. Murdering children. There is no camaraderie whatsoever. True, the riot was bad but it still expressed a form of camaraderie because of the way the police would treat people and all. It was extreme but it was a form of camaraderie. But now I find the apathy in Detroit is bad. It’s like, well as long as it doesn’t happen to me, I don’t care because I’ve been a community activist and leader on the Northeast side now since ‘93. In the organization I’m over, out of 286 blocks, I can’t get three people that want to help. I can’t get two but everybody wants everything but nobody wants to do nothing. It’s like the old Bella and the Cat Story, do you know about it?
BB: No.
MJ: Aesop’s Fables, do you know about that?
BB: Mm-mm.
MJ: Well, those are old, ancient fables and one of them was called Bella and the Cat. Real quick. There was these mice and they were always getting eaten by the cat and they said, “We’ve got to get a solution to know when this cat is coming so we won’t get ate.” Okay? One of them said, “I’ve got it, we’ll put a bell around his neck and when he comes, we’ll hear the bell and we’ll be able to get away.” But then the situation of who’s going to put the bell around his neck? So it’s the point of it’s good to have ideas but if you’re not acting upon them, it’s wasted and I find that parts of Detroit, like Southwest Detroit, the Hispanic community, yes they work together. And some pockets of the city but no, it’s the apathy and, “Oh I want mine,” or, “I’m going to do my own thing,” and that’s what’s bad.
BB: Well, I don’t have any further questions. Do you have anything you’d like to add to your interview today?
MJ: Well, I thank you for the opportunity.
BB: Oh, thank you. [Laughter]
MJ: I am writing a book on the perspective of being a female and black growing up in the city of Detroit because no one has wrote that. Being 75 years old and remembering all the way back to the age of 4 in detail, I’m doing it. I purchased a new version of Dragon because I hate typing. But yeah, when it comes to the riots, it was scary and it really didn’t solve anything.
BB: There’s still issues.
MJ: Yeah, oh please. Everything started on the downward slide, yeah.
BB: Well, if you think of anything after, please don’t hesitate to contact us. I will give you our contact information after that and if you don’t have anything to add, we will stop this. Thank you so much.
MJ: And thank you.
[TAPE ENDS 00:29:15]
[End of Track 1]
NL: Today is July 17th, 2015. This is the interview of Cecile Jensen by Noah Levinson. We are at the Polish Mission located at Orchard Lake School’s campus in West Bloomfield, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society and the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Cecile, thanks for taking the time to meet with us today. Could you first tell me where and when were you born?
CJ: I was born in Detroit in 1950, at Crittenton Hospital.
NL: Do you recall where that was?
CJ: Well, it was the old one. It was along the expressway and it was the forerunner to the one that’s in Rochester today.
NL: What neighborhood do you first remember living in?
CJ: I only lived in one, for the first 18 years of my life. It was on the west side of Detroit. West Chicago and Wyoming were the cross streets. And when I was growing up, as a Catholic school girl, we would never really ask somebody, “What neighborhood are you from?” We would say, “Which parish are you from?” So that was the way we organized our life, by the parish we were in, and we had an elementary school as well.
NL: Was there a correlation that was understood by most people that certain parishes correspond to certain parts of the city or people just went to different ones they liked for various reasons?
CJ: There was a guidance map throughout the diocese of metro Detroit, so if you lived on certain streets, then there was a designated parish for you to belong to and support.
NL: Were you allowed to support a different one if you chose to, or was it pretty strictly adhered to?
CJ: It was pretty strictly adhered to. We have stories of families who got into a discussion with the pastor because they wanted to go somewhere else and that was being allowed. But this was the fifties, now I think a pastor would be very happy with a new parishioner.
NL: I would think so as well. Can you describe that neighborhood, Chicago and Wyoming, where you were growing up?
CJ: Sure. I think now when we look back, it’s sort of like one of those dream sequences. You could walk up to the grocery store, you could walk up to the drug store. If you went in the other direction on Wyoming, there was a toy store. I was always sent up to the German meat market to go to buy the lunchmeat for the family. There were five kids in our family, and I was sort of like the grocery girl. Get on my bike, and go through the neighborhood. So it was close-knit. Not only did we know our neighbors well, but my aunt and uncle lived around the block, and my grandparents lived two blocks away, and down the street from them was yet another aunt and uncle. So we all congregated in that neighborhood because right after World War II, when the expressway went through, our family homes were condemned, and our family had to resettle. So they had been at, like, Michigan and more into a Polish community when they were growing up. And then after World War II, they condemned the houses so they could put in the expressway, and so a new neighborhood was sought. So there are a lot of Poles in our parish, but there were also Irish folks, and other ethnicities as well.
NL: At that time, to the best of your memory, was the Polish community pretty well-spread around the city of Detroit?
CJ: Yes, the Polish community in metro Detroit really started on the east side. Then it went to the west side, and then eventually to Hamtramck, which people are more familiar with. But the core parishes first started on the east side and the west side.
NL: And when did that—I would be part of that camp, the association between here and Hamtramck, the Polish community, they’re synonymous—when did that transition start happening from the neighborhoods more closer to downtown up toward Hamtramck?
CJ: I would say maybe when the plants opened, so maybe around 1910 or so? When I’m talking about the first parishes, I’m talking about the 1880s, so our seminary was actually part of the very core, first Polish community in Detroit, at Canfield and St. Aubin. So St. Albertus church still stands. There had been our seminary; that building does not stand there anymore. And there was also a mother house for the Polish nuns—the Felician sisters—and that really was like a transplanted village from Europe, and then they transplanted that same type of community into Detroit.
NL: You mentioned that you were one of five growing up. Where were you in the pecking order?
CJ: I am the middle girl, but I’m the fourth of five. So I think when I do my Facebook quizzes, I don’t think that gives me any badge.
NL: And what were your parents’ occupations when you were growing up?
CJ: When I was growing up, my mother was a bookkeeper by trade, or by training. She raised us as a stay-at-home mom, and once it was time to go back into the workforce, she became a controller at Mercy School of Nursing on the boulevard. My father was the first generation born in the United States for his family, and one of the things I love so much, I see one of the documents his mother signed with an X, and then my father became a lawyer for the City of Detroit. So I like to see that progress.
NL: Do you know what type of work, more specifically, he handled for the city of Detroit?
CJ: Yes, condemnation. He would start taking down neighborhoods. They would condemn part of the neighborhood, whether it was for the highway that his own family was impacted by, but also for other areas so they could build factories or thoroughfares, so he went to court a lot, to be able to settle those matters on behalf of the city.
NL: What do you remember about Detroit in general, beyond the neighborhood you grew up in, in the fifties and sixties?
CJ: Well, I thought it was pretty exciting to be able to take my dad to work, because first he was at the city hall, over where Kennedy center is right now, and then eventually he did have an office in the Coleman Young building. We used to call it the city-county building. That was super special. When he would take his daughter to work, and I would get to go into the law offices, I’d get to see all the mimeograph machines, all the high-tech that they were creating things with. And then, I got to go into the City of Detroit Chamber, I got to meet the mayor, I got to meet some of the council people, and that really impressed me, that my father would have that level of access to people. So I really loved going downtown. As we approached the city hall, when I was very young, they still had trolleys in the street, so you would see the little snaps of electricity in the overhead, so that had to be in the early fifties. Then my dad died in 1964, I had said goodbye to him and went to Girl Scout camp, and he died when I was at camp. So for me, my idea of Detroit in the sixties, first of all, cozy neighborhood, excellent going down to the city county building, getting to enjoy everything that was on Woodward, walking, enjoying Freedom Festival with Windsor and Detroit, and then all of a sudden, it started falling apart. Being a Catholic, one of the things that happened was the pope died. Then in the sixties, JFK was assassinated. Then Robert Kennedy was assassinated. And then Martin Luther King was assassinated. It’s like, we’re always in mourning, in the early sixties, we’re in mourning! And my own father’s death, and then the riots! So everything that had a beautiful, strong foundation for me was crumbling.
NL: Speaking of the riots, could you tell me where you were and how you first heard of that in late July 1967?
CJ: I was selling snacks at Tiger Stadium. I was at stand 22, and I wasn’t selling beer—I wasn’t old enough—but we were selling hot dogs, and filling the ketchup, and reconstituting the dry onions, and making sure we had enough for everybody, and it was a pretty exciting day. I didn’t first hear about it, I first smelled it, because I could smell things burning around Tiger Stadium. And then we got the word that the city was burning, and I was with some older women, I didn’t have a car, I relied on them to drive me to work and back, and at first we were kind of panicked, and we thought, “What are we going to do? How are we going to get home?” And so at first, we went, “Why don’t we turn off the freezer and hide in the freezer?” Because, you know, it would warm up pretty quickly, and we would have a pretty good defense, but who would know we were there? So that’s how I first—I smelled it.
NL: And how was your commute home, eventually, that day? How did that take place?
CJ: I talked her into driving—I think there were three or four of us that were all carpooling. And we had to get back to the west side, of course, and so we were taking Grand River, and we started to see all the looting going on—shop windows were being shattered, and people were walking out with washing machines, radios, record players, stereo record players. We saw a lot of that that was going on. We just tried to watch and move forward. I also noticed a car that was next to us, and they were calling so many firemen that there weren’t enough vehicles for them, so these were firemen in full uniform but they were driving around in a private car. So that kind of put the panic in us.
NL: As you saw that looting there on Grand River, were there police, other members of law enforcement starting to help tone down the looting and the violence?
CJ: The only thing that I saw were those firemen that were going by, and I don’t know what their destination was, so no, I did not see any law and order out on the streets.
NL: How did you spend your next few days while the looting and the violence continued?
CJ: I got back home on Orange Lawn and nobody was home. So one of my older brothers was at our family cottage on Lake St. Clair in Canada. Another brother was out of state for his summer job. My widowed mother and my younger sister were also out at the cottage, and then my older sister was at Michigan State. So I gave her a call asking her what she thought I should do. I was most concerned, what if mother and Margot start coming across the bridge? And then end up right in the middle of it? So her advice to me was only tears. She started crying. And I was sort of like, “But you’re in East Lansing, and I’m in Detroit! So actually that day made me start to believe in my own judgement, because I was 17, and I had to try to get a message to my family. I did know that there was one phone—I mean nowadays, what are we going to do? We’re going to text somebody, send it by our smartphone—but at that point, it was a rural beach community, and there was only one permanent resident that had a telephone. So I was trying to find that phone number so I would be able to warn them not to come home. But in hindsight, I found out that they didn’t need me to tell them that because they could see flames across the lake. They could already see the burning that was going on.
NL: You said this was on Lake St. Clair, on the Canadian side. What town or area is that?
CJ: Stony Point. The French is [unknown]. It’s nearby Tillberry, nearby Chatham—well Chatham is pretty far away, but it’s outside Windsor.
NL: Okay. How long did they remain there past what they expected?
CJ: That night, I got ahold of my cousins that lived around the block. And my cousin Gordon said, “You know what, we’re going to all go out to the cottage. We’re going to go to our summer homes, and we’ll do that by going through Port Huron.” So I got to leave the neighborhood shortly thereafter, so I spent a week in Canada, at the cottage.
NL: And you were able to drive from your neighborhood, which was not too far away from the nexus of a lot of the violence—you were able to drive on the expressway out of the city that way without being impeded by the curfews or law enforcement personnel with no-drive orders?
CJ: Right. Well, we left the next day. So a lot of those curfews and patrols, I don’t think, were quite in place yet. Because I did hear additional stories that my older brother that had stayed, kind of went snooping around in the daytime with my grandfather. They would go down to see where the National Guard was at, gawking a little bit. He denies it now. I was telling him I was going to tell that story. “No! No! It had to be another cousin!” But I think that they were able to go out a bit, but I was very grateful that my cousin who was just a couple years older than me would agree to drive us out. I think we used back roads to get up to Port Huron.
NL: How long, approximately, did you stay at the cottage?
CJ: I would say a good week.
NL: What do you remember about coming back, crossing the border, and re-entering the city? What did you notice?
CJ: Looked like a very different place. We were noticing all the boarded up buildings. I think people were a little more fearful as we drove. Myself, I was concerned about my younger sister and my mother as well, because she worked on the boulevard. She worked very close to that area, and I’m not sure how long the nursing school stayed closed. Because they had a running school, but maybe because it was in the summer, maybe they didn’t have a session running at the time.
NL: Do you remember anything unusual about the border crossing on the way back?
CJ: No, that’s a good question. I think we just had the regular questions, you know, like, “Where were you? Where are you going? How long were you there? Do you have any meat in the car?”
NL: Did you feel that your neighborhood was affected—which is to say physically was it affected? Obviously all the residents of Detroit were affected in a number of ways, but the actual neighborhood, was that affected at all by the violence?
CJ: No, not immediately. I didn’t see that any of our storefronts were broken into. I saw that more further toward the stadium and along Grand River, even though Grand River was one of our main thoroughfares. I don’t remember our neighborhood specifically suffering. Eventually it did because there was white flight, because so many people wanted to get out of the neighborhood, and that had already started with people going into the suburbs. But that, I think, did eventually take our neighborhood down.
NL: Can you talk a little bit more about that transition in the neighborhood?
CJ: Yes, I mentioned how my family had to relocate from Detroit, from Michigan and Fullerton—well, Fullerton that was later, but Michigan Avenue and Warren, that kind of area, the Polish parish. So they had to relocate. So in the late forties, they relocated in this west side community, we called in Epiphany parish. That was stable, into the sixties, but then people started moving. They started moving—they now had expressways to get faster, they could communicate on them. Some of the areas of choice were Livonia and Dearborn. Some of my classmates, their families started moving out.
NL: Where did you first live after your family residence where you grew up in?
CJ: I graduated from high school in 1968, and we were still living on Orange Lawn at that time. And then, in the course of the next two years, I went to Michigan State, I was in college, and my mother bought a new home in Troy. And she picked that neighborhood because there was some extended family out there, we were still doing that tradition.
NL: And after your time in East Lansing, where did you live?
CJ: Then I came home for short semesters, but I got married in 1972 and so, we were finishing our education—my husband and I were finishing our educations at Michigan State, so we lived in Lansing and East Lansing, eventually coming back to metro Detroit five years later.
NL: And what part of the metro area did you come to?
CJ: We bunked up at my mom’s house for a little while in Troy, and then we bought our own home in Huntington Woods, and we were there for a number of years. And now—you know, we’re really not the regular American demographic because we really stayed put for a long time—we’re probably in Huntington Woods for fifteen years, and I think we’re surpassing twenty years now in Rochester Hills.
NL: Wow. What do you recall about your time in those neighborhoods? Anything specific?
CJ: Well, I like them both very much. I loved Huntington Woods because it had that old neighborhood feel again. You could walk to the library, you could walk to the doctors, you could walk up to the drug store. We had great neighbors, and everything’s on Woodward. Who doesn’t love Woodward? So Huntington Woods was great, and it was halfway between my husband’s job at a brokerage house in Detroit, and halfway between my job teaching in Rochester Hills. We each left in the morning and went different directions. And then, in Rochester Hills, I’m devoted to that community because I spent thirty years teaching in that school district. And so even today, when I go up to the market, even though I’ve been retired for twelve, thirteen years, I still see my old students. I’m lucky that I still have a sense of community, but it’s a different community. It’s not all those kids I went to school with, but it’s children I schooled.
NL: In the years that you’ve lived in the various cities and suburbs of the metro area, do you frequent the city of Detroit?
CJ: I’m a big fan of the city. In fact, when I had the opportunity to take an early retirement, I thought, “What shall I do?” and I had gotten that genealogy bug very early on in my life. My dad had shown me that document when I was fourteen when I was doing a school project, and they said, “Interview one of your parents about their family history.” So I interviewed him, he showed me these very cool documents, but they’re written in German, and I thought, “But we’re Polish! What’s that all about?” But he died two months later, so that really got me interested. I wanted to start asking questions of aunts, uncles, and grandparents. “How did we end up in Detroit? Why did we end up in Detroit?” I began that when I was very young, and when there was an opportunity to take early retirement, I said, “I’m going to do what I can for Poles in Detroit.” So one of my first projects was doing one of these arcadia pictorial histories and I did that on Detroit’s Palonia, so it was wonderful to go back to the Reuther library at Wayne State and look at their negative morgue and start picking out images that would relate to the polish story. Then after we had that one published, so many people were enthusiastic. “Tell my ancestors’ story! Use my picture!” that we started working on two other books, again related to Detroit. One of the oldest active cemeteries in Detroit, Mt. Elliot Cemetery, and also Mt. Olivet Cemetery. That was great fun—yeah, I do like cemeteries. It was great finding the depth of information and compiling it because everyone had a unique, individual story, and just like you’re doing, you’re going to make a greater whole of everyone’s individual story. So we were able to do that with the arcadia books and I go back to the old neighborhoods—not the safest place to drive around—but yes, I’m still devoted to Detroit. Every fall, the burton collection has a genealogy fair, and we always encourage people to document their Detroit history as well.
NL: The project, the Detroit’s Palonia, that was your first involvement with the Mission here? Or was that a separate group?
CJ: This was before I joined the mission. So it was just the art teacher and history teacher and me coming out, and I saw they didn’t have a title that dealt with Detroit—they had some ethnic groups, they had some sections of Detroit, so I had to write up a proposal, and I worked with a number of colleagues in the genealogy group here in metro Detroit. Ran around, met people at different libraries, took my scanner, made big old .tiff images so they would be published, and then turned all that digital information and all the captions over to Arcadia.
NL: What are your observations of the city in the last fifty years compared to your observations pre-1967?
CJ: I’ve been very lucky that my husband has a good eye for travel. And so, I’ve been able to visit many major cities throughout the world, and I always think, you know, we have the essence of a lot of these other cities right here in Detroit, and I really wish it would shine more. But we have a very interesting history, and I think there are core pieces that are just waiting to be harvested and rejuvenated. I guess that’s one of the benefits of travel, that I see the rough jewel that Detroit is and can be again.
NL: Well put. Could you elaborate a little bit about what you mean by that we here in Detroit have that essence that you see abroad? Could you describe that?
CJ: Well sure, we have a mixture of cultures, we have many different cultures. We can explore different ethnic groups, different food waves, different arts in our community. We have that lively mix that generates a lot of energy. We’re not homogenized. We’re still inviting and we’re still getting a lot of immigrants to come into our community. We might have 21st century minorities now, and the people that came in the 20th century are now assimilated, better assimilated, but that is part of the energy, I think, that will move us forward. And I’m not a Pollyanna.
NL: Why do you think it’s been so difficult then for the city to capitalize on that essence and that hotbed of cultures colliding and making for interesting things?
CJ: Well, we have to talk about some leadership issues that have happened to us in the past. People that would rather redline than look for a way to merge things. Maybe all the communities needed to mature a little bit more, and realize this is a good spot on the mitten to be. We still have the water resources, we still have roadways. I just saw that that one defunct factory by the river has been opened to look like a nature reserve from up north—I think it just opened this week. And that’s a cool thing, look at Belle Isle, as well: what a beautiful sanctuary for everybody as well, with the Botanical Gardens, with the aquarium there, and some of my other colleagues and I, we were remembering when there was a petting zoo there as well. That has been, why can’t it be revived? I mean 21st century people want that in their lives, as well as 20th century people.
NL: Absolutely. Where do you live now?
CJ: I live in Rochester Hills.
NL: Still in Rochester Hills. Are you working here in West Bloomfield, regularly, every day?
CJ: I’m here three days a week. My Monday-Wednesday-Friday.
NL: Do you notice a difference in the ability or just the end result of people living in the Oakland, Macomb, suburban communities collaborating together for the types of projects that you do here, is that any different than collaborating with people in the city?
CJ: I would have to say yes, because one thing, we’re one ethnic group here on campus. So there’s a demographic that’s going to come here. But I will say that the prep school does have a number of Asian students as well, we have black students here. Our Chaldean neighbors are sending their boys here. We have a mix at the high school, at the prep school. I would say we probably don’t—we’re not going to necessarily avail ourselves to the ethnic mix that you’re going to find if you go in Detroit. And maybe you have to go to Dearborn for some of that, but let’s also think about the beauty of going to Eastern market, because that’s a pretty nice level field for everyone, I’d say.
NL: For your personal life, what has been the largest lasting impact of the events of July 1967?
CJ: Well, as a teenager, it was a turning point where I couldn’t find an adult to give me direction, and I had to rely on whatever I had been instructed throughout my life to make some decisions about how to stay safe. And then, watching the neighborhood kind of dissolve. That was sad. And it’s only in the last few years because of Facebook that I have actually found elementary school friends! Because everybody scattered! And I tell people, what’s very interesting is that I cannot go back to my grandparent’s parish in Detroit, I cannot go back to my parents’, and I cannot go back to mine but ironically, I can go back to all four of my ancestral villages in Poland, and they’ve been in existence for 750 years. And you would think it would be the exact opposite, you would say, “How can you go back to anything in Poland? They’ve had two major wars!” And yet, I have been able to trace back to 1690 of my European heritage, but no vestiges, really. And that’s why, we actually think of ourselves—Poland talks about a nest, that you want to be in your group, your community, so we actually say, we’re the Polish nest for the metro Detroit because your parishes are gone, or they’ve merged, they’ve vanished, but you can come back here and look at our shelves, and find your history books, find vintage photos, and find someone to tell your story to.
NL: I had just a couple other questions. Backtracking a little bit in our conversation, that day at Tiger stadium, you mentioned the smell as what really stood out to you. What do you remember visually? I’m wondering, was there enough knowledge of the events of that time, do you remember the crowd? There were maybe almost 50,000 people there that day. Was there a big reaction in the crowd?
CJ: There wasn’t, no. I don’t even remember an announcement being made, that it’s time to leave the stadium. I don’t think they swept the stadium of people. I would have to go back and do a little research on that. But I think people just left at the end of the game, and then we were there cleaning up and realized what’s happened. That’s a good point, I would really have to go back and read a news report about, “It’s a great day for a Tiger game!” and see what’s written up that way.
NL: For the events of that day, that week, July 1967, historians and people who lived through it are often calling it a riot, the Detroit Riots of 1967, the Twelfth Street Riots. In your estimation, in your experience is that the most accurate word to describe the events of that week?
CJ: That was our vernacular at that time. That’s how we spoke about it. “Upheaval,” “Crisis,” “Cataclysmic event,” all of those would be good, because it did have that huge of an impact on the tri-county area. Because where did a lot of these people go? They went into Oakland County, or they went into Macomb County, and left the neighborhoods behind.
NL: Lastly, if you could leave a general message for the city of Detroit, going forward on what is soon to be the fiftieth anniversary of these events, what might that be?
CJ: Might be a turning point to change the tide. Might be a day to remember and say, “Well, let’s see what we can go forward with.” Not forgetting our history, but talking about those good elements we do have, I mean a rich history. Look at the flag of Detroit. You have the British influence, you have the French influence, you have the American. We have a lot to talk about. We have a lot of things to be pleased about. Maybe a little more positive and a whole lot less negative.
NL: Well, thank you so much for sharing your stories and memories with us. Is there anything else that we did not touch on that you would like to share?
CJ: I think I told you earlier today of the sad news report I was watching. They said, “Alert! The police have never found a 500-pound pig in the basement in metro Detroit! But now we have.” So there was all day coverage of trying to get this poor porker out of the basement that had two feet of refuse around his feet and the staircase was gone from the basement, there was only a ladder. Unfortunately it was the home of a hoarder who had died like a week before. So I’m watching it, and they say west side Detroit, and I go, “Oooh, I’m going to watch this!” And they go and say, Orange Lawn, I’m like, “Oh my!” And then they show the visuals, and I’m looking at the Shuckle’s house, which was our next-door neighbors in Detroit, and I actually felt very, very sad, not only for the pig, but to see that that now is the condition of my old neighborhood. It was a very sad feeling. Everybody else is like, “The pig! The pig!” and when I saw the video, it’s like, “That’s the Shuckle’s house, that’s the lot our home stood on, that’s where the McClays lived,” and I don’t know what to make of it, but it’s like, what an ending to that neighborhood.
NL: Could you see your house at any parts of that report?
CJ: Our home is not standing anymore, but I could see the neighbors on the other side. I mean, I could tell everybody’s house. I could still recognize their homes and then all of a sudden, I started getting text messages from friends: “What do you now about Orange Lawn? What do you know about the pig?” and the happy ending is that the pig was removed safely and is now at a shelter, a barn, shelter-barn for animals outside Monroe.
NL: Now with that behind us, the city of Detroit can finally move forward, I think. Thanks for sharing your time and your stories with us today, Cecile.
CJ: My pleasure. Thank you.
NL: Today is July 25, 2015. This is the interview of J. Harold Stone by Noah Levinson. We are at the Detroit Historical Museum in Detroit, Michigan and this interview is for the Detroit historical society and the Detroit 1967 project. Harold, could you first tell me where and when you were born?
HS: I was born December the 24, 1936, Detroit Michigan.
NL: And what neighborhood were you living in when you were first growing up?
HS: Well, close to Conant Gardens in Detroit. The Mitchel Nevada area, Joseph Campau Nevada, that area, North East Detroit.
NL: How long did you live in that neighborhood?
HS: Oh god, until I was in my late twenties.
NL: Can you describe what the neighborhood was like growing up?
HS: Growing up it was a pretty nice neighborhood. We had a couple of doctors living on the street, a judge was on the street, and a state representative lived there. It was pretty nice for that time.
NL: Was it a diverse neighborhood?
HS: Yes it was. Mostly when I was growing up it was mostly Polish, in fact and in fact one of my oldest friends, a guy by the name of Carl [Skinechiney ?], I still see, I’ve known him since I was about four or five years old. Every year we meet down in Florida in fact. And we have dinner and this sort of thing. Yep.
NL: Were there many African American families in the neighborhood?
HS: Yeah, yeah. It was fifty/fifty. There were -- the Polish were there, there were Syrians, Greeks, Yugoslavians, Romanians, and there were a lot of people there after the Second World War that were refugees and they had the tattoos on their arms and that sort of thing.
NL: Where did you move after Conant Gardens? Where did you live?
HS: I moved. It was still in Detroit a place called Ranier Hamilton. It was a cooperative apartment over on Byron and Web.
NL: How did you make the decision to move?
HS: Well I got married and I couldn’t stay at home any longer [Laughter] so I had to get out.
NL: That makes sense [laughter]. Where were you living in Detroit in 1967?
HS: I was living at the Ranier Hamilton on Byron and Webb.
NL: OK. Could you describe the diversity in your building or even in your neighborhood there?
HS: Well the Ranier Hamilton was sort of an experiment and it was a cooperative, one of the few cooperatives built in the city of Detroit, not built, but rehabbed in the city. And it was diverse in that there were both white and black living there and in fact that was one of the problems that we faced during the '67 riots. Because we got word that because it was diverse that we were going to be attacked. Okay, so we had to be on guard.
NL: Because it was integrated?
HS: Because it was integrated and what I ended up doing was a lot people came to my door saying “What should we do? What can we do?” and so I had to form a guard duty and we took turns walking around and guarding the place. It was interesting that few of us had guns because we were protecting ourselves. One of the guys brought a bow and arrow; that was the best he could do. And we ended up on the roof of this building. And we’re up there with guns and bow and arrows and all of the sudden a helicopter flies over and they turn the light on us. That search light is so bright. It’s just unbelievable.
NL: I’m guessing it was low flying?
HS: Very low flying. And so we said the best thing we could do is get the hell out of here (Laughter). And we went back down into the building.
NL: Did you feel safe inside the building?
HS: Well we felt safe except that you could hear the machine gun fire all night long. And it got so bad at one point that my wife and I actually had to take the mattress off the bed and get down behind the bricks because we were afraid of the gun fire.
NL: From your understanding or your personal experience what was the role of the relationship between the police and the community of city of Detroit? Or maybe the fractured relationship in allowing for such civil unrest to take place?
HS: You know I really can’t answer that. I really don’t know. I never had very much interaction with the police. I always felt yes we were oppressed that I believed. I remember one night me and three of my friends were coming home from the show just driving down Davison and the police stopped us, pulled us over made us get out of the car, we’re all standing there with our hands up in the air being searched and this one cop was searching a friend of mine and he felt what he thought was a knife. And he pulled out the knife and he smiled and he said, “I got you”. And the knife didn’t have a blade in it. And the cop said “Damn,” and he let us go. As we’re standing there I look up and I see my mother and father drive by. And so I said “Oh my God, what are they going to say?” So I get home that night and they said “Oh, you’ll never guess what we saw: a bunch of hoodlums being searched up on Davison and Goddard.” [laughter] And I said “Mom that was us. That was me.” So that was that story.
NL: Had you ever felt limited or oppressed in where you could find housing or find work living in Detroit?
HS: I wasn’t really concerned about housing at that time. Work was always a problem I felt, but I was always guy that was seen the first black in a position and that was a lot of pressure on me. In fact, one place I went and I took the test and after the test they checked it and the manager said I’m not going to hire you, because you scored too high on the test. I couldn’t believe that. I went home I told my wife and she said “I can’t believe it”. Two weeks later this manager called me back and he said I need to interview you again. So when I went down to do the interview he said “Home office said I have to hire you” Okay. So I was hired, he said “but I don’t think you’re going to stay.” And he was right, because I stayed there for about three months and I got another job.
NL: Was the fact that the other job was better?
HS: The other job was better. One of the things about this job that I scored high on, they offered me a couple of different territories. It was a sales job and they said, “You can have either Highland Park or Gross Pointe.” I picked Gross Pointe and the manager couldn’t figure out why I would pick Gross Pointe. What I didn’t tell him then was that for five years I was a mail man in Gross Pointe, so I knew the area cold. Alright and so when he asked I said, “Well, tell you what, if you can tell me the difference in ownership between black and white in Highland Park verses Gross Pointe, then I’ll tell you why I picked Gross Pointe.” He couldn’t tell me and I never told him that I had been a mail man in Gross Pointe and I knew the area cold.
NL: Do you have any other specific recollection about that week in July 1967?
HS: Well other than lying in bed listening to machine gun fire, no that’s about it. I had a lot of film also that I took and I looked for it today, but I couldn’t find it. I’ve got about 400 feet of film.
NL: Wow. Can you talk about what the neighborhood was like, in the aftermath, once the fires had been put out and the looting had stopped and things like that?
HS: Well, let me put it this way. We watched an A&P store burn to the ground. Literally watched it burn to the ground. So the next day after we watched this, one of my neighbors who happened to be white suggested we go out and buy some food because the grocery store was gone. So we ended up going out to Taylor Michigan to a Great Scott super market. So we bought the food and my buddy said, “Well, Harold you needed me to get out to Taylor to get the food,” and I said “Yes but you need me to get back into the city.”
NL: Did you feel that the police response and the presence of the armed forces and the National Guard was that necessary and was it effective in keeping the damage contained?
HS: I think it was necessary, but I think it was a bit of overkill, because I could hear -- and I knew -- they were using .50 caliber machine guns in the city of Detroit and there was a house on LaSalle [Street] near the Boulevard that had big pop marks in the brick from the .50 caliber machine gun fire. I think that was definitely overkill and I lived close to Central High School and they had all of the army vehicles parked there, the tanks, the armed personnel carriers, the jeeps, the trucks, everything was there. So I think it was overkill.
NL: What do you think possessed citizens, mostly just ordinary citizens, to do all that looting and arson and such?
HS: Can’t answer that. I don’t know. I really don’t know it’s not something that I would have done. Alright, but people take advantage. Everyone takes advantage of a situation like that you know? And Detroit was the one place that they said was an integrated riot. The looting was integrated. There were white people looting. There were black people looting.
NL: Did you know people who partook in that?
HS: No. Not at all.
NL: Was it happening near your building on Webb?
HS: No. No looting. Just that A&P burning down, that’s all.
NL: Where was the next place that you lived after that building?
HS: Moved out to Roseville, Michigan.
NL: About when?
HS: Moved out there in 1968. And I integrated a housing complex out there. And it was very, very interesting moving in, because as we were moving in, all of the people were looking at us. The curtains were open, the doors were open, and people were standing out there looking at us. Actually looking at us move in. So the last thing that I took in were my guns. And when my guns came off the truck all the windows closed and the doors closed and that was it, but it turned out pretty good and we lived out there for about five years.
NL: You say they were "looking." Could you elaborate?
HS: Trying to intimidate. Because like I said we were integrating that particular place. Back in 1967, '65, '64 there was a company here called the FCH services, the Foundation for Cooperative Housing. And they were building co-ops, developing co-ops and building them. In the suburbs they were developing a lot of them. None of them were integrated. Not a one. They built some rehabs in the city of Detroit, but none of them were new construction except for downtown Detroit. You had Nicolet, Joliet, LaSalle. These were all co-ops. God, there’s about eight of them down there. Let’s see. Martin Luther King is one. These were all developed in Section 213 and Section 221 D3 of the National Housing Act of 1968. In the suburbs, like I said, none of them were integrated and the one we integrated was New England Townhouses which was located in Roseville, Michigan.
NL: What crossroads did you say?
HS: That would be Frazho and Gratiot.
NL: Could you describe your motivation for doing that -- or in other words was integrating that housing, was that a purposeful move on your part or was the reasons for moving there separate?
HS: the reason for moving was that I wanted a better place to live. That’s all.
NL: Was it closer to work or anything?
HS: No. It wasn’t closer to work. The company I had worked for managed the place and it was a place that I knew some other people who lived there, so that where I picked to move into.
NL: Did you encounter a lot of racism and intimidation from your neighbors?
HS: No intimidation. No one spoke to us at first, but I had a couple of neighbors who came over and actually introduced themselves and they were very nice and very supportive for the period of time we lived there, which was five years. I ended up playing on their baseball team and I was the only black person in the whole Roseville league playing baseball. And it was fun, it was fun after I got there and did some things.
NL: Were other neighborhoods in Roseville integrated at that time?
HS: here was one area in Roseville that was integrated and I think it was a small black section of about two blocks that had been there I guess since about the 1940s.
NL: You said you moved out there in ‘68. How much of a factor was the riots of ‘67 in choosing to move?
HS: Everything.
NL: Everything?
HS: Everything yes.
NL: Was that a conclusion that you reached by the end of the summer of ‘67 do you think?
HS: Well there was two problems the one is that we lived through the riots and we had to go through all the things that were involved in the riots. Secondarily the unit I was living in, there was some damage to that unit. Not from the riot or anything, but just construction problems. And we moved out because we couldn’t get it fixed.
NL: So there was actually a physical force?
HS: A physical force. We needed to move. And I picked New England Townhouses.
NL: Roseville just seemed like a nice community to live in?
HS: Exactly.
NL: And it proved to be ultimately?
HS: Yes.
NL: Where did you live after that?
HS: After that we bought a home in the Golf club Subdivision in Detroit.
NL: Where is that exactly?
HS: Seven Mile and Livernois area.
NL: I see. U of D [University of Detroit]?
HS: U of D. That’s it.
NL: Could you tell me about living in that neighborhood?
HS: I picked that are because it was integrated and there were people of all races moving into that area at that time. So that’s why I picked it. I felt that Detroit was going to come back and that was one of the reason why I picked that area. I also sat on a committee for New Detroit. And that was another reason why I picked that area. Because I thought it would be interesting.
NL: I see. Can you talk a little bit more about your involvement with New Detroit?
HS: I really don’t remember that much about it except that we helped develop a program for Wayne County Community College dealing with apartment maintenance.
NL: Could you share with me your thoughts on Detroit Public Schools over the years? Did you go to Detroit Public Schools?
HS: Yes I did.
NL: I’m curious especially to hear about your experience as a student there, but then also if you were a parent. I don’t know exactly when your kids were growing up if they would have been in Roseville or Detroit. But could you talk about the school system in your experience?
HS: My experience in the Detroit Public School system was good. I went to Courville Elementary School and I went to Pershing. And when I went to Pershing it was mostly white. My mother also graduated from Pershing High School back in the thirties. I thought it was good. When we moved back to Detroit, my son was five years old just getting ready to start school and my daughter was two, I think it was okay. So they both went to Hampton Elementary School and my son went to Mumford. From there I moved to Novi, Michigan.
NL: So your kids spent some time in Detroit Schools and some in Novi?
HS: My daughter spent time in Novi.
NL: Okay and refresh, what years are we talking about now when they were I guess in high school or I guess in middle school?
HS: Well, we moved back to Detroit in 1973 we were there until about 1985. From there we went to Bellville and my daughter went to Bellville High School. And then from there we went to Novi.
NK: What were your opinions as the parents in the seventies and eighties on the style of schooling and the quality of education at that point?
HS: Where we were at Hampton, it was still very good. Had a lot of community involvement. The parents were involved, so it was good.
NL: So the neighborhood in general was a pretty close knit?
HS: Exactly. Exactly.
NK: But other parts of the city, other school districts within the city had already started to fall into [unintelligible] education at that point?
HS: I think so. Yes.
NL: Or it's what the state of the schools are like today. Do you still live in Novi?
HS: No we live in Canton now. I’m in Canton.
NL: That’s right. You guys have moved around a lot.
HS: [Laughter] No. Not really.
NL: No?
HS: Well there’s one thing I didn’t mention. There was a divorce involved in there, so that’s one of the reasons.
NL: Okay. Sure. I’m going to back track a little bit first. Do you have any recollections; you would have been pretty young, but of the 1943 Riots in the city?
HS: I really don’t have any recollection, but I do remember that one day, when I was going to Courville, the riots were going on and I went to school and there were only three people in my class who showed up to my class that showed up to school that day.
NL: Wow.
HS: Three. Now that’s my only recollection of the riots.
NL: The teachers were there? But you just had nearly empty classrooms?
HS: The teachers were there, but the students weren’t. Right.
NL: Do you remember anything that you parents or friends and relatives were talking about what was going on at that point?
HS: Yeah, but I don’t have any clear memories of it. None.
NL: Got you. What is your recollection of Downtown Detroit as you were growing up and through the fiftie and sixties?
HS: Oh it was great. Great. J.L Hudson’s, the tweflth story at Christmas time. All the toys and everything. It was great. Fantastic. I loved it.
NL: And do you today here in the last couple decades. Do you spend much time downtown in the city?
HS: No. Not that much.
NL: Okay. How would you characterize that this time on your more recent visits to the city?
HS: I think it’s coming back you can see a lot of activity in downtown Detroit, a lot of activity, especially Greektown. It’s full and I have to say it; mostly white folk are down there.
NL: (Laughter)
HS: (Laughter) And it’s interesting seeing it coming back. And I enjoy that.
NL: I do too. It’s nice to be a part of that. Hopefully to be a part of that.
HS: There is one thing I would like to add.
NL: Please.
HS: When we lived in Novi, my daughter and I. She came home after about two days in school. She came home and said, “Dad I can’t take it,” because there was only eight black kids maybe four in the whole school. Okay. Only four in the whole school and she was having a real hard time with that. And I said “Well, Dayna, you got to do it. You got to do it, because this is part of my job.” So she went through it, but she caught a lot of hell at Novi for a long, long time, but she also developed some lifelong friends while she was there, and some that she still deals with today. And she graduated in 1990.
NL: So the Novi community was overwhelmingly white then?
HS: Oh yeah. When I went to vote everyone sort of stopped. Like the clock stopped, time stopped, and they watched me as I walked through.
NL: Was that the same in Bellville and Canton as well?
HS: Not so much in Bellville, and not really in Canton, because Canton really is diverse, really diverse. Not like Novi was in 1987.
NL: Have you ever with the different areas that you have lived in, have you ever considered moving back into the city from the suburbs?
HS: No. No, because I’ve done that. I was born in Detroit. I moved to the suburbs, I’ve lived in a couple of the suburbs, I’ve moved back to Detroit and I’m in Canton.
NL: Do you think that the events of July 1967, can those effects be seen in the city still today? Not just the city, but the surroundings; the Metro.
HS: I don’t see it.
NL: No?
HS: No. I really don’t except for white flight, okay but you also have black flight, because so many black people moved out of the city also.
NL: Right. Was that happening at the same time do you think, or was that later?
HS: That was later. I mean I was one of the more likely some of the first people to move out in 1968. Okay, so that when I think it started.
NL: Do you have any other memories of 1967 that you want to share with us today.
HS: No not really.
NL: Okay. Well thank you so much for coming in today and sharing your stories with us.
HS: No problem. You’re welcome. Take care.
**NL: Today is August 3, 2015. This is the interview of Renee Giles by Noah Levinson. We are in Renee Giles home in Detroit, Michigan and this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society and the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Renee, could you please first tell me where and when you were born?
RG: I was born in Detroit Michigan, April 30, 1956.
NL: What neighborhood do you first remember living in when you were growing up?
RG: I would say on Burlingame.
NL: Do you know near what other streets?
RG: Burlingame and Dexter.
NL: And how long did you live there for?
RG: We lived there for approximately—probably three years.
NL: So that’s in Northwest Detroit. Did you live in any other neighborhoods of Detroit when you were growing up?
RG: Yes, we stayed on Fourteenth Street, and that was between Virginia Park and West Euclid.
NL: So also Northwest Detroit.
RL: On the west side.
NL: On the west side. So, what can you tell me about your memories of those neighborhoods when you were young, growing up in the 50s and 60s?
RL: On Burlingame, it was just fun. A lot of kids on the block, everybody just having fun, riding bikes. Parents looking out for other children; you now, as they say now, it takes a village to raise a child? That’s what they did back then. When I was still living on Burlingame, my father’s brother, he stayed on the corner of Burlingame. So it was like everybody was still close together, you know, during that time. And we ran from his house to a neighbor’s house to our friend’s house, so it was just nice back then. Then we moved on Fourteenth Street. That street, it was OK. It was different, you know? It was more traffic because we stayed on the main street. And the schools, they wasn’t far, because I went to Thurgood Elementary and I also went to Hutchins Junior High School during that time. And that was basically it for staying there, but I do remember across the street from us, well, category [kitty-corner?] from us across the street, it was like some older guys would stay there. And my father, he worked at Ford Motor Company during that time. And since he had more girls, it was like he knew he couldn’t live there for a long time. That’s when we moved over this way. He bought the house down the street from where we at now.
NL: Where was that at?
RG: 19318 Birwood.
NL: Oh! Right on Birwood, too.
RG: Yes, the next block.
NL: And when was that you moved to this neighborhood?
RG: We moved down in 1970.
NL: 1970
RG: Valentine’s Day. That was my mother’s Valentine’s present.
NL: Pretty nice present.
RG: Yes.
NL: You said your dad worked at Ford. What kind of work did he do?
RG: He worked in the steel department at Ford Motor Company at River Rouge. I remember that. But one thing I did like, I never will forget: My father every Saturday, he would leave money on the dresser. He told my mother to take me and my oldest sister on the bus to show us how to get downtown and back. So she did that. And every Saturday he left money on the dresser for us to go shopping. So that was fun.
NL: Can you tell me about some of your memories? What part of town would you go shopping in? What stores?
RG: Oh, downtown. We went to Lerner’s, back then. And also, J.L. Hudson’s, back then. [laughing] And Whitney’s. There was a Whitney’s store on Woodward also.
NL: And, what do you remember about—what did that look like or sound or feel like when you were downtown?
RG: Beautiful. Ooh, downtown, everything—it was just people everywhere; I would say it was like Chicago. The way Chicago is now. That’s how downtown Detroit was. People everywhere. All the stores was open. No vacant buildings. You know, you can go from one store to another store. All different shops: stockings or wigs, everything. Everything was just so nice downtown back then.
NL: What kind of work did your mom do?
RG: My mother, she didn’t work. She stayed home with us during that time.
NL: Can you tell me a little bit more about the neighborhoods that you were growing up in on the west side and Northwest Detroit. When you were living there, was it mostly black families in the neighborhood? Was there a mix of people to some degree?
RG: No, all blacks, I do remember that. And those are the two neighborhoods basically I kinda do remember, that I can really talk about, you know. And it was just really, yeah, all black neighborhood for those two.
NL: And was that the case in your schools, too?
RG: The schools? Yes.
NL: So, in 1967, you were living on Fourteenth Street. Is that right?
RG: Yes.
NL: Ok, can you tell me, Fourteenth Street and what?
RG: Ok, Fourteenth Street is just like Seven Mile, okay, a main street. And it would be like Birwood and the next street there were the two side streets. They would be Virginia Park and West Euclid. That’s how we lived. The street behind us was Twelfth Street. Okay?
NL: Gotcha. Can you tell me about you first heard about or how you first noticed the disturbance on Twelfth Street?
RG: Me and my sister—we are 11 months apart–we walked to the store on Twelfth Street. And as we was coming back home, we was coming down West Euclid. And it was a lot of people outside just screaming and yelling, and we was like, we didn’t know what was happening. So we just continued to start walking and—I never will forget, it was a little three-wheel—a tricycle on the ground. This guy picked it up. It was a checkered cab driver, and he took the tricycle and he just was banging, breaking all the windows out in the cab. And the guy, he was a white guy that was inside and he was just all cut up. And me and my sister just looked at each other and we ran home. And my mother told us we needed to stay in the house. And so, you could just hear people outside. Just a lot of noise. And then, about a few days later, the National Guards came and we had to lay on the floor in our bedrooms. And my father told us do not go to the windows at all and look out, period, at all, at night time, do not look out. And one day, one of the National Guards came and he knocked on the door and they told us we had to leave our house. It was too dangerous where we was at, because we was too close to Twelfth Street, right then. So, it was six of us. There were six kids and then my mother and father. So, during that time my father didn’t have a car, so we got up and went to the closest relative's house, which was my mother’s cousin. She stayed on West Grand Boulevard. So we all walked there and the first night everything was fine, you know. The second night my mother was sitting outside with one of my sisters, the younger sisters. She had to be like one, no, less than one. A few months, I would say about eight or nine months. They was sitting outside. It was hot. A car came by and shot at them. The bullet missed them. It went inside the brick wall. So after that, we left there. My uncle came and got us. He stayed on West Philadelphia, off of Linwood. He came and picked us up, we went over to his house. And we stayed there. And over there, it was like those two family flats, okay. So, you can hear everything that’s shooting at night you know and everything. It was real bad, I mean, real bad. And you could see during the day people was looting. They had TVs, furniture, walking down the street and everything. So this one particular day, it was a gas station on Linwood and Philadelphia, on the corner. And it caught on fire somehow. I don’t know if someone started the fire there or whatever, but it was on fire. And the first house next to it coming down the block, the fire jumped over that house and burnt down all the rest of the houses in a row. Now, in the middle of that block, we was on the opposite side of the street and we can see how the fire is just burning all these houses down, one after one.
NL: Just keeps spreading.
RG: Just keeps spreading. You know, the fire department, they couldn’t come out. And this one particular house, the roof was like this [gestures], it was about to collapse. But the man that stayed upstairs, he was in a wheelchair and he couldn’t come down. But we didn’t know that he was in a wheelchair at that time, so it was people in the neighborhood, they knew he was in a wheelchair. And they was hollering whatever his name, you know, I don’t know his name. But they were hollering that he was in the house and he was in a wheelchair, he wasn’t able to come down the steps. My father ran inside. I told my father, “Don’t go in!” because I’m looking at the roof about to collapse, and I’m hollering and screaming, telling him don’t go inside. And my father went inside and brought him out and saved his life. And as soon as they made it out, the roof came down. But it was like 10 houses burned down in a row.
NL: Wow.
RG: Sure did
NL: That’s incredible. Did your father continue any kind of relationship with that man after that?
RG: No. He just brought him down to safety and that was that. And so then after a while everything had calmed down and we was able to go back home. Then in 1970, that’s when my father moved and bought the house down the street and brought us out of that neighborhood.
NL: How long do you think it was that you were out of your house before you got back to Fourteenth Street?
RG: Probably about, I’d say five days.
NL: Okay, and there was no damage to your house?
RG: No.
NL: What about your neighbors on the block?
RG: No, because the National Guards were on our street. You could hear the tanks before we left. We could hear the tanks when we laid on the floor. You could hear the tanks coming down the street: boom-boom-boom-boom-boom, like that. They were so heavy. They were on our street. That’s why there was no damage or anything to our house. Because that’s what they was like, on every block.
NL: Do you remember anything else specific about when the National Guard came to your door and talked to your dad and said you guys need to move out of here right now?
RG: That’s the only thing I remember is that when he came, he told my father “Be sure to tell your kids do not look out the windows at night.” That’s what he said the first day that he came. And the next time he came was when he said we had to leave because things was getting real bad.
NL: Okay. Did they help you at all when you were moving to your relative’s house or they just say, “You need to go.”
RG: They just said we had to go. And that’s what we did.
NL: And by the time you got back, were all the National Guard and the tanks gone already?
RG: Uh-huh. Everything had basically calmed down.
NL: What do you remember—actually, first, so I know you had the order from the National Guard and from your dad to not to look out the window. Did you ever sneak a peek?
RG: Oh no! The way the shooting was over there, you could hear all the shooting and it was just terrible. You wouldn’t dare look out the window.
NL: Okay. It was all around the clock?
RG: Yes. It was just shooting, especially at night time. You just can hear it, especially at night time just shooting everywhere. So you dared yourself to look out that window. And we just made sure we was on the floor. We made our pallets and laid on the floor every night until we left there.
NL: What do you remember that next week after you’re back in your house on Fourteenth Street, the next time you went around the neighborhood, what did you notice?
RG: A lot of things was destroyed. I mean, it really looked bad. Twelfth Street really looked bad. Really, like, Fourteenth Street? I guess because it was basically houses, like the duplexes on that street, it really wasn’t bad like that. But Twelfth Street, bcause they had a lot of stores and everything, that was the hardest hit of the neighborhood, was Twelfth Street.
NL: Was there still any fires or looting or gunfire at that point?
RG: No.
NL: It was all safe?
RG: Everything was settled down then.
NL: And then you stayed living in that neighborhood for almost three years after that? Can you talk about what was the neighborhood like after all of that?
RG: You know, basically, it went back to the same. It’s just that the buildings were burned down or everything was just tore up on Twelfth Street. People was trying to cleanup over there, but basically everything just went back to normal. We went back to school, people went back to work. You know, trying to get their lives back together and that was basically it.
NL: Do you remember, in three years that you were still living there, had they started rebuilding any new things on Twelfth Street?
RG: Oh no. No. Everything was still burnt down. Nothing was rebuilt.
NL: And then, you were in middle school by the time you moved to this neighborhood here, is that right?
RG: Yes.
NL: And you went to high school around here as well?
RG: Yes. Mumford High School.
NL: Mumford High School. Can you tell me about your experience in high school?
RG: Oh, yes. Oh, I loved it over here, when we moved here. It was like a whole different environment over here, when we first moved in 1970. Mumford? Just wonderful. The teachers was nice, principal, you know. They made sure that you learnt. I just really enjoyed myself there at Mumford.
NL: Was it an integrated school at that point?
RG: There was some whites still there, during that time. Not a whole lot, but there were some. It was still majority African Americans, but it worked. There was still some whites there.
NL: Did you know anyone personally who took part in any of the looting and thievery in 1967?
RG: No. [laughing]
NL: Do you still – today, 2015 – do you go back and visit downtown or your old neighborhood very often?
RG: You know, this is what I did. I took my children over there so they could see where I lived at and grew up at, and just to show them the different houses I had stayed in. And that was basically it, you know. Nothing too much. But really, to really drive down Twelfth Street since I’ve really been over here? No.
NL: What about downtown?
RG: Downtown? I’ve been downtown and it’s not like it used be. It’s a few stores still open, but not like it was. I don’t even shop down there anymore because it’s not even enough stores open down there.
NL: So where do you go to shop instead?
RG: I go to Fairlane or Oakland Mall.
NL: Does anything besides shopping—I guess you do shopping elsewhere. Is there any other things you do when you are downtown?
RG: I go to Hart Plaza. It’s beautiful there.
NL: Does Hart Plaza is still feel or look the same that it did when you were growing up?
RG: Oh no. It’s much better now, especially with the walk? You know it’s beautiful now. I love how it is now downtown. It’s like it’s more relaxed downtown at Hart Plaza.
NL: Do you see the city continuing to make those kind of improvements to bring people downtown?
RG: Oh, yes! I really do. You see what Dan Gilbert is doing. He’s making that railroad or whatever on Woodward?
NL: Sure. Right in front of the museum.
RG: Yes, yeah my daughter works for him. So, this—Downtown is really going to be nice. I think in time, I think that people are going to buy more business downtown, on Woodward, to bring more business back there, you know. I think it’s going to happen in time. It’s gonna be the old downtown it used to be back in the 60s.
NL: That would be the dream, I think. Thinking back again to 1967: I know you were young then, but did you think at the time – or even now, looking back –what are your thoughts about what caused all of that to happen? All of the violence?
RG: From what I was told by my parents and what I was told by older people, they said that on that night, early in the morning on Twelfth Street – and I think it was Twelfth and Tuxedo [Clairmount] – but it was a blind pig, which they call an after hour joint. And the police went in; they said it was all white police officers went in, and they threw some black girls down the steps. And that’s what started the race riot during that time. That’s what I was told.
NL: Do you have any thoughts about how—because that’s what started it all, for sure, but everything that was happening really spread around these different parts of the city. Did you have an inkling as to why it got so big?
RG: No, I didn’t. I never understood that. Because it seems like it just would have stayed there, but it went everywhere.
NL: Yeah. Some people that we’ve talked to have talked about discrimination by the Detroit police at that time, you know, racial discrimination and profiling. Is that something you ever remember experiencing when you were growing up?
RG: No, maybe because I was too young, you know? My parents, I would say – they wouldn’t allow me to just wander off. I would never be by myself anyway. It was like me and my sister might walk to the store and come back, but that was basically it. We was always around the house.
NL: So you had good trust in police officers at that time, growing up?
RG: To be truthful, yes! Because I didn’t have any other reason not to. To me, it was like, I didn’t know about black or white, or a race thing or whatever until it was told to me after the riot. But I had trust in all police officers. It was, like, they were there to help me if I needed help, you know. That’s how I looked at it.
NL: Did you see – once you were out of your house and you were at your relatives’ houses, did you see a lot of police and National Guard and fire interacting with people to help calm the riots?
RG: No, none. Basically, my father he didn’t allow us, from my uncle’s house once we got there, because things were so bad, we basically stayed in front of the house. We wasn’t allowed to go on Linwood where all of the looting—there probably was police officers down there, or whatever, or National Guards, but we wasn’t allowed to go down there at all. We was just in one place, in front of the house. The only thing we saw was people coming with furniture, TVs, you know, stuff like that they were taking into their house. And then we just saw when all the houses burnt down in a row.
NL: Can you tell me about the picture of your aunt?
RG: Oh, yes. My auntie – a very sweet person, very sweet, you know. But she meant everything she said; she was firm. [laughing] I had asked her about—this is my second time seeing that, I had saw it once was before, but it was a very long time ago, and I asked her and she had told me, that she—I guess she was trying to bring her bed down, you know, just her and her husband. And my niece, when my niece was younger then, and she just was tired of bringing stuff down from upstairs—because back then the steps was steep, going up like that. And she said she just rested. She just was tired, and somehow they took her picture.
NL: You don’t know who took the picture, then?
RG: No.
NL: To clarify for the listeners, there is a picture that ended up being of Renee’s aunt, lying on a mattress, and that was shared around Facebook and that’s how she first found out about the project.
RG: Yes, and her name was Emily Jane [unclear]
NL: What neighborhood was she living in?
RG: On Linwood.
NL: Okay, so she was right in your neighborhood when you were growing up, pretty close.
RG: Well, she was close by. I would say from my house to where she was at, no more than 15 to 20 minutes away, from Fourteenth Street to Linwood. But she was close to her brother’s house, the house we had to go to and live at during the riot. But as I said, she lived above the restaurant that she was working at, or running –manager or whatever you want to call it she was doing then for someone. And she lived upstairs.
NL: Do you remember the name of the restaurant?
RG: No, I don’t remember the name of it, but that’s where she worked at. She worked downstairs from her apartment.
NL: Did it stay intact and keep running after the riots?
RG: Oh, no. That was tore down also.
NL: Do you remember, during that week—so you and your siblings were staying put under strict orders – were the adults coming and going from the house, though? Were they going to work, anybody?
RG: No. It was just: no work, no school, everything was just shut down, everybody was home.
NL: What about getting food and things, in the house?
RG: If you didn’t have food in your house then, that was it, because -- My uncle and my father, they didn’t go out to the stores. It was just too bad. But it happened so my uncle had food and he had a freezer also, so there was enough to hold us over.
NL: So you didn’t have to worry about that.
RG: No, we didn’t have to worry about it.
NL: That’s fortunate.
RG: Because if you didn’t have any food, that means you gotta be out there in the looting and in the grocery market, because there was nobody really that you could give the money to. That’s how bad it was.
NL: So the only way would have been to take the food. To just take it.
RG: [talking over each other] Yes, take it, right.
NL: Fascinating times. Is there anything else you’d like to share with us today?
RG: Well really, you know, I just hope and pray that Detroit never have a riot like they did in ’67. Because to be truthful, and I also told my children, if that ever happens, I will have to leave Michigan. Because it’s impossible to rebuild after something like that. Look how long it’s taking to rebuild from the ’67 riot, from Twelfth Street, Linwood, you know, a lot of things still probably aren’t up completely from where they were then. So, I just hope that Detroit stays on that forward, positive move that they’re trying to do now, because a riot is something that Detroit definitely doesn’t need. At all.
NL: Would you like to see that same area on the west side rebuilt, or do you think it’s better or easier for Detroit to focus on rebuilding downtown and other neighborhoods?
RG: Oh no. You know what? I think they should rebuild over there and downtown, you know, all different areas of Detroit. They need to go around and rebuild different places. Because people still have to live in different areas.
NL: How do you think we can get people involved to do that, because the city does not have much funds, unfortunately, to do those kinds of projects.
RG: And you know what, and that’s the thing. A lot of people will not get involved in doing any type of development to bring Detroit up like that, you know, because the first thing they will say [is that] the city has the money. Just like the roads, they feel the city has the money. Because we already voted no for the roads, because they felt the city has the money. So to rebuild Detroit, they wouldn’t do it. Because they figure, “I’m not going to waste my time doing that because downtown they have the money to do it.”
NL: Is there anything else you care to add?
RG: No, that’s basically it.
NL: Alright, well thank you so much for sharing your stories and memories with us today, Renee.
RG: Okay, thank you so much.
**LW: Today is August 12, 2015 this is the interview of Jim Demres by Lily Wilson. We are in Royal Oak, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society and the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Jim, can you start by telling me where and when you were born?
JD: Born at Harper Hospital in Detroit Michigan on June 21, 1955.
LW: And what neighborhood did you grow up in?
JD: On the east side of Detroit. Street name or no?
LW: Sure.
JD: 9345 Courville which is right at I-94 and Whittier. Kind of far Eastside. The next city over is Harper Woods just tells you how far east over we were.
LW: Okay. And what did your parents do for a living?
JD: My mother was—she called herself a domestic engineer but she was a good homemaker. My dad was a fireman for 39-and-a-half years. And also installed custom drapery on the side as most fireman can have a second job with their schedule. He worked for Rabauds R-A-B-A-U-D-S Drapery in Grosse Pointe doing custom installation of drapery on his day off. But his fulltime job was the Detroit Fire Department.
LW: And what address was his station at?
JD: No, see every three to four years you move around. But the main station that he worked at for the longest time was at Lakepoint and Whittier which was about eight blocks from our home. I got a picture of the engine house I can offer to you. But most of the fire stations didn’t go by address they went by cross streets. And this was at Lakepoint and Whittier.
LW: Okay. Lakepoint and Whittier.
JD: Yeah, Lakepoint and Whittier.
LW: And that was also on the east side.
JD: That was on the east side too.
LW: Very near your house.
JD: But it’s not out of the question—he probably worked at 14 to 20 different stations depending on where they needed staff at the time. He’d move all over the city depending on where they needed him to go.
LW: So in July of 1967 how old were you?
JD: I would have been 12 years old.
LW: And what do you remember about your dad working that summer?
JD: Well, ’67 was the year of the riots in the city of Detroit. And probably—call it the most memorable but the worst part about '67 was they worked long shifts they had few days off and my mother was worried because he was gone so much. But at that point he was stationed at, there’s another cross street, Manistique and Warren. M-A-N-I-S-T-I-Q-U-E. Manistique and Warren which was a little further, a little closer to downtown Detroit but it had a big enough area where they housed half-tracks and jeeps and other artillery that they used during the riots. That’s where all the firemen were stationed that was one of the main outposts on that side of the city. But that’s where—you ask about 1967—it was a summer of a lot of worry for my mother, sitting on the front porch, early curfews, a lot of noises, a lot of restrictions and purchasing gas specifically going to the gas station with a can. You couldn’t get a can of gas for your lawnmower. You literally had to bring your lawn mower to the gas station to put gas in it because they found that people were getting gallons of gas an making Molotov Cocktails to throw at the firemen and the policemen that were trying to bring some order back to the city. But there was a lot of unrest. A lot of people were angry and there was certainly more racial tension than you could imagine going on at the time with the n-word being used by a lot of people. So if there wasn’t unrest in our community before ’67 summer, there was then. And a lot of it was being blamed on the reason I believe the riots got started in the first place, it was just the racial tension and it came to a big head and one day it exploded. So ’67 for me, ’67 that summer it was not like any other summer. My mother was—probably the worst summer of her life was waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the—we had a scanner at that time too, quite archaic to today’s standards but she listened to every fire call that came in and we’d watch the news and it was a lot of scary stuff. I wish I had better adjectives. But I know my mother was not happy. And my dad—a lot of the firemen and policemen were not familiar with that type of a job to have to put out fires and then lookout for gunshots and other things being thrown at them while they’re trying to put out fires.
LW: So what did your dad tell you then about—either then or when you got older what did your dad tell you about working during that time?
JD: Well the riots it was—you had your life to fear for more than just flames and smoke because that was their biggest fear as a fireman was to not be burnt or not to suffocate. But on the fire trucks he said his biggest fear was being shot because there was bullets flying everywhere. He had a guy from the National Guard and there was guys from the Army and they’d ride right on the truck with them with rifles, semi-automatic rifles, they were ready to shoot. And there were some times when they were going through and they had actually to shoot some warning shots to get some of the vandals off the streets and some of the people who were trying to stop the fire department from doing their job of putting out the fires because they were having more fun I guess watching the city burn down than it was—I guess the people that they were fighting were trying to make a statement about how unhappy they were about the racial tensions. And a lot of this is I guess influenced by what I’ve read. But back to my dad, my dad was very tired. There were stretches he’d work for 36 hours without a break and I guess the only comforting thing was we went over to Manistique and Warren once and visited over there. And the one guy that had a—I mentioned earlier about a Barney Automatic Rifle, a B-A-R—this guy had a rifle that, even though I’d watched episodes of Combat and The Gallant Men, I never saw a rifle like this. But he says, “Don’t worry nothing’s going to happen to your dad as long as I’m here.” So it brought my mother some comfort that he was on the truck with them. But just being shot I guess, just being shot, getting off the truck being out in the open and having people throw firebombs, shoot at them, sticks, stones, rocks, whatever they could find just to interrupt anyone who was trying to bring back any law and order or put out fires in the city. They would resist any of those efforts by whatever way they could. And when I say “they” I mean the ones that were shooting back at the police, the ones that were throwing bricks back at the fire department.
LW: Some fire department employees have told us that they carried guns? That the firefighters actually carried guns?
JD: My dad had a Browning Automatic. He had a handgun he carried, for his own—with him.
LW: During ’67?
JD: Yes, he bought it specifically, in fact I don’t know how he bought it but he bought it right around that time with—he had a shotgun. He owned a shotgun and he owned a--the brand name is Browning but it’s a small handgun and he carried that with him while he was there just for his own—we didn’t find out about that ‘til years later that dad had a gun.
LW: Okay. Okay, so he did carry a gun. Now was he only at the Warren and Manistique station during July of ’67 or was that his—
JD: Occasionally he’d be stationed there during times that the riots weren’t going on. [dog barks] It wasn’t uncommon for firemen to work in different places. To be pulled from one station to another that was not an uncommon practice. So he was over there several times. He rotated from different fire stations depending on where they needed people. And as you move up through the ranks, as you move up through the ranks, certainly as a sergeant, lieutenant or a battalion chief, you tend to move around even more.
LW: Okay. So it wasn’t uncommon then for him to be at that particular station but was it more central to riot activity?
JD: Yeah. Warren and Mack were good streets, were good direct routes to the downtown area.
LW: Sure.
JD: That’s why they chose Manistique and Warren. And it had an enormous play field across the street from the playground, baseball diamonds that they used for all the artillery and all the jeeps and everything else was there, police cars, it was like a giant parking lot, it looked like a warzone but it was a parking lot at the same time.
LW: What did your dad look like when he came home in addition to being tired?
JD: Tired, dirty. You can imagine fire stations were made to have four or five guys that work there shower. When you had like 80 to 100 guys working around the clock there wasn’t a lot of time to shower. When you were told that you could go home generally you grabbed your hat and got in the car and took off. So he found himself coming home tired, some days full of soot, some days hair disheveled, although he was very thin on top. But you could see that he was tired—his eyes were tired, the way he carried himself was tired and the only thing nice was the fact that he was out of danger when he came home and he was able to stay home for usually no more than 12 hours then you’re back on the job again—during the riots. Most firemen they get 24 on 24 off but they were only off for 12 hours and they had to go back.
LW: Okay. What was your dad’s name?
JD: George John—same last name, Demres.
LW: And when was he born?
JD: December 26, 1929.
LW: And when did he die?
JD: September 20, 2000.
LW: And how long did he work—you said 39 years?
JD: 39-and-a-half years, yup. He retired as a battalion chief. The ranking pretty much went to firefighter, to sergeant, to lieutenant, to chief to battalion chief to commander. So he was just one step below commander.
LW: I see.
JD: That’s pretty good. Becuse my mother’s dad was also a fireman and he retired as a battalion chief too. So we have a lot of firemen in the family. Anyway, but that was a good ranking to retire with and he thought it was a good pension to retire with.
LW: Is there anything else that you can remember about July of ’67 that you want to share?
JD: Well, you could hear the explosions. In later years we could hear the hydroplanes on the Detroit River. But at that time we could actually hear pops and booms of bombs going off and things blowing up. One time we even thought we could hear gunshots as hard as that is to believe. It was amazing how much less traffic there was everywhere, how much the news was covering, how close the community came together. You know, my grandmother and all the friends were coming down because they knew my dad was a fireman and it brought the community a little closer together. “What’s going on? What’s going on? We don’t see it all on the news. What’s George have to say about all this?”
LW: Right.
JD: So he had a good pick on—he had a good story on what was happening. I recall just sitting on the porch an awful lot. My mother was so protective she wanted us to sit on the porch we couldn’t even go down to the sidewalk for gosh sakes because she was afraid somebody would drive by. But as over cautious as she was I think it was all because she was very nervous about my dad being down in the middle of all of that. Because I think the firemen and the policemen both had a lot at stake.
LW: Well, thank you.
JD: You’re welcome.
LW: Thanks for remembering about your dad. Appreciate it.
**NL: This is the interview of Shirley Schmidt by Noah Levinson and Lily Wilson. Today is July 9, 2015. We are in Sanilac County in the home of Shirley Schmidt right on Lake Huron, and this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society and the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Shirley, could you first tell me where and when you were born?
SS: I was born January 1, 1941 at Parkside Apartments, which is on Conner, near Detroit City Airport. It was a home birth.
NL: And where did you live when you were first growing up?
SS: When I was very young, we lived at Parkside. I don't think we moved – I don't remember moving from any place except from there to Harper and Van Dyke area on Burns. My grandparents had bought, or they had built, a home and we moved there. It was an income with an upstairs that had one bedroom and downstairs there was two.
NL: How many people lived in the house with you?
SS: There was my mother, my dad, myself, my two grandparents at the beginning.
NL: Tell me what you remember about that neighborhood at the time you were growing up.
SS: It was a wonderful neighborhood. It was a mixed neighborhood. The man two doors down was German, and my best girlfriend was an Italian. The young man across the street was a good friend of my brother's and I'm not quite sure which he was. He had a darker, swarthy complexion. He might have been someone from Croatia, but they were basically European, from what I can gather, of all the people that moved in there. And it was friendly. It was fun. You sat on the front porch. You talked to people. It was great.
NL: So, you described it as a “mixed neighborhood.” Do you feel that these different families and different people knew that they still had – seemed like everybody had their strong particular national identity –
SS: Oh, yeah.
NL: – or whatever ethnic identity of significance they had?
SS: Yes, they did. They had big families and they were probably within, I would say, a couple miles because when they got together, it never took long for people to come and they would have parties in their back yard and be on their front porches. When Halloween came, my mother would send just my brother and myself out and we'd use pillowcases and we'd walk the streets and we'd go all the way down from ours, which was probably half a mile from Van Dyke and we'd walk the streets, fill the pillowcases – god, I hated it when people gave us apples. It made it so heavy. My mother loved it because she used them for cooking. But we could go in the bars. The drunks would give you a quarter. We walked down to a Better-Made potato chip store. The Eastwood Theater was down there and we were just by ourselves, and all the kids were. There were a few parents, but most of the time it was just you went around and you went home and no problems.
NL: Do you remember there also being non-white families or children in the neighborhood?
SS: One family moved in on the street in the back of us, and I can't remember if that was Iroquois or not. But they moved into a small house. Yeah. That was probably in ‘50, ‘52, in that area.
NL: Can you tell me about your schools that you went to?
SS: The original school I went to was Stevens Elementary and it was a great school. We had the safety patrol helping across streets and it was probably half a mile from home, and we would walk down the street and get to school. There were no school buses. It was a multiracial school because I had blacks in my classes. We all played together. We didn't after school. We didn't because they lived in one direction and I lived in another, but we were friends. There was no hesitation on standing up for someone if they were a different color. It didn't make any difference. It was just, everyone was – we were kids. That was it.
NL: So you didn't have any sense whether that was the norm or not for that time in Detroit?
NL: Whether most schools fit that description?
SS: I don't know. I thought so. I mean, when you're in a school and everyone's –you know, we're all getting along really well, you think everybody does it.
NL: Where did the black children live? You said they lived in a different direction of the school, so do you know what neighborhood that would have been?
SS: No, I don't because after school you just head on home. Mom was waiting. Dinner was waiting. We had homework to do. But everybody walked so it had to be within walking distance. I wouldn't think that people would live more than half a mile/mile from the school for kids to walk.
NL: Did you ever get any impression that any of your teachers treated white or black students differently?
SS: No.
NL: Good.
SS: No. There was nothing. Spelling bees–whatever. Whoever was sharp enough to spell the words, and you stood against the wall and you spelled until you couldn't spell it and you sat down. No one was picked on. No one said, Okay, I'll skip them. Everyone was the same.
NL: Where were you living in July of 1967?
SS: I was married and I was living in East Detroit.
NL: Okay. Do you remember what street?
SS: Yes. It was on Holland, between Kelly and Wilmont, one block south of Nine Mile Road.
NL: Can you describe just what that neighborhood was like at the time?
SS: Predominately Italian Americans and they owned fruit stores. They had family get-togethers. The lady next door was like a grandmother to my kids and she was Italian. She spoke very little English. Well, I guess she did, but you couldn't understand her. Her accent was really heavy. But I would say in that area it was predominately Italian Americans.
NL: Do you identify as Italian as well?
SS: No. I'm not – I'm Polish.
NL: Okay.
SS: Polish, German, American.
NL: How do you remember first hearing about the civil disturbance at Twelfth Street?
SS: My husband at that time was a firefighter for East Detroit and he called home and said, “There are riots happening in Detroit. They're asking us – they're sending us down. Could you please bring my gun?” So, I walked up there with the kids and – no. I just had my son at that time. I walked up there with my son. I was pregnant with my daughter. And I took his gun to him and the guys took them in case they needed protection on their own. They were too busy fighting fires, but if something happened, they would be able to at least protect themselves because it sounded probably much worse than it was. I don't know if you realize that, but the media has a tendency to over-exaggerate many times and blow things up so that you go, “What? Oh, my god!” When really, it's, “Oh. That's too bad.” So I took him his – saw him up there. We came back home and that night, after I put my son to bed, I sat on our front porch, which faced Detroit and my neighbor across the street was also pregnant and she came and sat with me. We were on a little glider and we looked at the sky as it turned redder and redder over Detroit. You could see that over the tops of the houses.
NL: How long do you remember your husband being out working on the shift before you saw him the next time?
SS: I think he came home late the next day. So he was down there – by the time they went down – and it was still light when I walked down, so it had to probably been about five or six o'clock, and his shift ended at eight the next morning. And I think he came home fairly quickly after the shift, so he was down there one day totally.
NL: And how was that for you? So you were at home with a small child and pregnant with one more?
SS: Yeah.
NL: How was that being home alone under the circumstances without him?
SS: I was fine. I was more concerned about him because I knew it was dangerous down there and the way they said with the National Guard coming in and I just had to think, well, I hope they're watching over the guys as they're down there. But for myself, I was fine.
NL: How many other times or shifts did he have down in the city that week?
SS: That was the only one. We were to start vacation the next day, so when he came home, he said, “We're still going. They seem to have things kind of under control.” At least I think that's what he told me because we packed up the car and we went camping for a week.
NL: Do you remember what day of the week that would’ve been? The riots started over the weekend, so if he was there the first day, maybe Monday?
SS: I would think probably Monday is when he came home and we packed the stuff up. We kind of were wondering if they were going to call him to fill in again, but nobody called, and so we packed up and left and went on our vacation.
NL: What do you remember about that vacation?
SS: We camped at a place and I believe it was the one that was up near Grayling, Grayling Roscommon area. It was a nice little place. They had a lake, I had Doug, my son, and it was fine, we had a good time. We usually went to a place where there was no electricity. It was primitive camping.
NL: Did you have radio?
SS: Primitive camping, no electricity.
NL: I didn’t know if you had a transistor or—
SS: No we didn’t. No, no.
NL: And how long did that trip last?
SS: A week. We came home the next Saturday or Sunday.
NL: Okay. So can you describe coming back into the city that next week? What did you notice?
SS: I don’t remember noticing anything, so I don’t think there was anything out of the ordinary. And he went to work the day after we got back, and that was it. It was life as usual.
NL: What was the next thing or the next time you read or heard about something regarding the riots or their aftermath?
SS: It was in the newspaper. The daily newspaper after we got back. We read those and I don’t think we got a newspaper while we were on our camping trip because you were just by yourself out in nature. But when we came home and you read about all the things that were happening, or had happened, he told me that they were told that the Ramona Theatre and one other place—Wards, Montgomery Wards at Seven Mile and Gratiot, both of them—because that was further up than Ramona. When he was down at the riots, he was told, I believe, that they were burning. When we came back and we looked, and we were wondering, what’s happened down there? How much different is it? And we found that those reports weren’t right.
NL: Do you remember a changing or a different atmosphere in your neighborhood at that time, after you got back from that trip?
SS: Not in the neighborhood. I just know that Ron wasn’t too excited to go down there. Of course, we didn’t really go down at that time. I started going down with my kids later on, when they were old enough to enjoy what I was taking them to.
NL: So, like, when would that have been, approximately?
SS: My daughter was probably—she was born in ’67, and she was about seven years old, and my son was about ten. I would drag them down there to the DIA [Detroit Institute of Arts] and we’d go to Emily’s, and Belle Isle, places like that, or over to Windsor.
NL: What do you remember about those parts of the city? So this is, we’re talking late seventies it sounds like, so about a decade after?
SS: Mid to late seventies.
NL: Can you describe your memories of the city at that time?
SS: Lots of burned houses. That’s the worst part. You know, if something happens and then they have to leave, the buildings stand there and they’re gutted and that; that’s the worst part of all. And they stood there for the longest time. It wasn’t just when I was taking my children down. When I remarried and my husband came here from Germany, we would go down and I’d want him to go by the house that I lived in as a child on Burns, and I’d say, “Here, let’s go check it out.” And I do have some pictures of when we lived there, and the last picture I took was back in 2008, but in between there he took me by, and to see the street just dissipate before your eyes. House by house, it disappeared. If they weren’t disappeared, they should’ve been taken down. To see the fact that the scandal with Kwame and what he didn’t do with the money to help the people who lived in Detroit, they had to live in neighborhoods like that. It was horrible. I just couldn’t believe that that could happen.
NL: When did you first move out of the metro Detroit area?
SS: Would you consider Center Line out of the metro Detroit area?
NL: No, I mean, that’s a suburb of Detroit. I meant more like where we are now, up on Lake Huron. When did you first leave the immediate metro Detroit area?
SS: We moved up here—
NL: Up to the thumb.
SS: Up to the thumb—we moved here permanently in 2002. Before that we had started to build this house. My ex-husband and I had purchased the property back in 1980, and after we got divorced, I met my current husband, and Ron had put it up for sale. And Utz loved it. He decided to move here from Germany and the first thing he said was, “Let’s buy it.” So we bought it from my first husband, and we kept it and then we said, we want to retire up here. So he designed a house around the furnishings and our hobbies, and we had the old place torn down, and every time we got some money we did something. First was the basement, then was the outer portions, and then we lived in it with nothing except walls: no toilet, no plumbing. You have to go out in the lake for showers, and every time we got any money, we did something to finish the house. It took until—we started the house in 1990, I believe it was, and it’s pretty much finished now, but we moved up here in 2002 when it was basically kind of like this.
NL: It sounds like a little bit more of a desire to move to this neck of the woods than specifically moving out of the city?
SS: Yeah. It’s amazing, it’s beautiful up here. And we have so much to offer. But there are very few people of color who come up here, and it’s not because anybody would be against them, because everybody’s friendly to anyone. We have some parks, and there’s a camping ground south of us. And I notice when – I deliver a little local newspaper, and when I took it in last year, there were people—black people—who were coming and renting the little cabins there or camping there and I was so excited. And I was hoping that they come to our museum because it’s an interesting thing to go to. I don’t know if they ever did, because I’m not there all the time, just most of the time.
NL: Are there any factors, that you know of, in the area here that make it hard for black communities in larger numbers to mobilize and move to this area?
SS: If you live here, most of the time, you’re a farmer. The houses on the lake, for the most part, are cottages and they’re places of weekend retreats for most people, second homes for most people until they decide, wow, it’s really nice, I want to retire, and some don’t last that long. But if you live here, most of the people are farmers. That’s what we do up here.
NL: So there’s not an enormous year-round population up here then?
SS: No.
NL: When you’re here in the middle of winter, how many people would you speculate are here in town?
SS: Within two miles, there are two, four, seven, ten people that live within a mile, not including us. Including us, it would be twelve people. And then the farmland starts. It’s pretty desolate. You have to really enjoy watching the lake in all weathers, solitude, and have hobbies.
NL: But you still go down to Detroit fairly frequently?
SS: Oh, yeah.
NL: Can you tell me about your more recent experiences of going back to visit the city since you moved out to the thumb area?
SS: The last time we were down there was an exhibit at the DIA [Detroit Institute of Arts] and I believe it was a Van Gogh exhibit—no no, I’m sorry it was Monet. I wanted to see that. We have some friends in Oxford, so we went down and spent the night with them, and then the four of us went down and went to that. We’ve been down to the Detroit Historical Museum, I can’t remember the last exhibit. Was it the eating? The Detroit Eats exhibit? So we drove down for that. It’s a little difficult now what with Woodward being torn up to try and navigate, but I said, “No, I think we can go one block further west then cut south and then get to it around the back streets.” We haven’t been to Belle Isle this year. Last year we went two or three times, because it’s another great venue. We’ve gone on tours with the Detroit Historical Museum. When people come from Germany, one of the things we like to do is take them down and show them the different buildings. Like the Fisher Building. They get out of their car and they’re kind of looking around because it’s not the best looking around there, and then you take them in the building and they just lose any objection to being down there because the beauty of the different places just overcomes any qualms you have.
NL: What do you notice or feel differently about seeing the city, seeing the places in the city these days compared to different points when you were raising your kids or when you were growing up yourself in that area?
SS: I don’t understand, can you reword that?
NL: What changes do you notice in the city from now compared to when you were growing up or when you were raising your children?
SS: When I was growing up, my dad had a car, but we walked everywhere and we took street cars. Public transportation was extremely good. Buses were around, but not that much. The streetcars were fantastic. They were always on time and you can fit lots of people, you could jump on and off. It was really great. In fact my brother, when you talk to him, one of the things he told me later on, and I didn’t know at nine years old, he’d hop on the street car and he’d go to Belle Isle and fish. Spend the day down there. Now how many nine year olds nowadays would go so many miles—and it had to have been at least ten miles to get from our house down to Belle Isle—with his fishing rod and go down there and fish? And that was something that you could do. And Eastern Market—I haven’t been down there in probably about five years, but I think it’s a great place to go. It’s really helping. I notice that there are more people and a lot of younger people that are moving into some of the buildings that were abandoned and they’re turning them into lofts. But they’re almost all white. If we go to dinner, if we go to events downtown, they’re mostly white. Where all the black people to enjoy what they have down there? I don’t see them participating as much. I find that sad. And I’d hate to be called racist, and when people say, “Oh, the whites, they don’t care about us,” but we go down there but where are you?
NL: Do you have any ideas why that might be or what the city can do differently to help promote better diversity at these events in the city?
SS: The events are there. They’re there for everybody. I think the black people have to get over their anger at whites, and I don’t know why they’re so mad at us. My grandparents, on my father’s side, came from Germany. He came with nothing. My grandmother and him, they came on steerage on different boats. They knew nobody, and they made their way to Buffalo, New York. Eventually he got here. He worked in factories doing things that nobody nowadays would like to do, but he did until he had enough money for a house. My mother’s people came in 1854—well, actually before that, I have the deed of their land—up here to the thumb with nothing. The settlers had nothing. And they had to clear 40 acres of land with trees and stumps, build a house—that they probably didn’t know how to build out of logs—and farm. My husband’s writing a book on the settlers up here. Most of the people that he’s writing about are Germans who came and settled here. They were weavers, they were tailors, and they worked in grocery stores and that. They had to come here and learn how to do anything to survive. We had nothing to do with that. Most people here now had nothing to do with slavery. So why are they afraid of us? Because that’s what it seems like to me, to be angered and afraid. And I don’t know why.
LW: What was your ex-husband’s name?
SS: Ron Subjeck.
LW: I just had a couple questions about when he came back from working that weekend during July of ’67. When he came home and you were going on vacation, do you remember him telling you about any of the things that he had seen that weekend?
SS: He did say that he was glad that I had taken the gun down to him because when they were fighting one of the fires in the back of a store, there were some young guys that came back there, and they looked like they were ready to start some trouble with the guys. So he kind of made a motion like he was going to pull something out of his jacket and they left. But other than that, he said, “They’re crazy down there!” I think they said they were throwing bottles at them. “They were trying to fight us off and we’re down there trying to save their stores, and they don’t want to be saved! They want to burn everything down!”
LW: Was he frustrated? Angry? What was your read on his emotions?
SS: I would think he was probably both, frustrated and angry. He says, “Let’s get out of here. We’re going camping, let’s go.” And so we went.
LW: So we’re looking at pictures at your house, the house that you grew up in, 6713 Burns. Your grandpa built this house?
SS: He had it built. I’ve got the deed some place up in my papers, too.
LW: And we’re looking at pictures of your family—your grandma and grandpa, and your dad and his brother, and you and your cousins—standing out in front of the house, then we’re looking at a picture from 2008 that you and your husband took—
SS: My current husband.
LW: Your current husband, not Ron. You took these in 2008. Do you blame what happened in 1967 for the deterioration of this house that your family lived in for so many years?
SS: I don’t blame it on it, I’m just sad to see that the deterioration has happened. This was almost the only house left on the block. The thing that I see with some of these houses: when the people moved out, and the poor people moved in, I don’t think they know how to take care of a house. I think they were used to having someone provide housing, or they might have lived in an apartment, but they wouldn't have known a thing about how to replace a broken windowpane or how to change a water heater. And in this house that we lived in, it was a huge old coal furnace. It was like an octopus downstairs. We had a coal bin where the coal man used to bring coal and drop it through, and it was like a chute and he would fill it with coal. What would these people have known about coal? Where would they have gotten the money to buy coal? And if a faucet broke, or anything, I don’t think the people who took over—the older neighborhoods that started to fall apart because they were so old—knew what to do to upkeep them. That you have to paint, or else your wood dies. It makes a big difference. I don’t know who’s supposed to teach them. Are they supposed to go out and try to find out themselves? I have no idea. It’s a sad situation.
LW: What year did your family sell this house?
SS: We moved out in 1954. My grandmother still lived upstairs, and she lived there for another four or five years until she became — a point where she needed someone to take care of her. Then we moved her out.
LW: Who lived downstairs?
SS: You know, I don’t know. They must have rented it to someone, but I don’t know. I don’t remember.
LW: So your grandmother essentially owned it until she could no longer take care of herself. And that would have been the late fifties.
SS: Yeah.
LW: So looking at these pictures of your family and where you grew up, what does it feel like for you now, going back? We’ve talked about how it’s deteriorated, but how does that feel for you looking at these pictures and then looking at pictures of the house today?
SS: Just very disappointed and sad, that this has happened to the city. They’re working on the gardens, and they’ve got a lot of green space. I’ve looked at some of the videos and that that are out there. But what are you going to do if you have one house, by itself, with maybe one or two acres or empty land around it? And then another house with that amount of land. Do you take and consolidate the people in those houses in one area? They don’t want to leave their homes. So how are you going to go ahead and fill the void between the places where people are? I don’t know who’s going to figure that out. That’s a really drastic thing to do.
NL: The ultimate question of the city for probably, like, 30 years now, at least.
SS: Yeah.
NL: No city has ever really been built up to look like that before.
SS: No. It hasn’t. You’ve got a population that can’t afford to move anyplace else. If you had the money where you could build a housing area and then tell the people, “We will give you X amount of dollars for your home and move you,” that would be something that might be possible if people would go. But then what do you do with all the extra space that’s going to be left? You’d almost have to shrink Detroit down considerably. I don’t know what the answer to something like that is. You know?
NL: Me neither. I have one other question. So you were born in 1941. In 1943 there was also a riot in Detroit that was known as the “Detroit Riots” until the ones in ’67 occurred. Obviously you were very small. Do you remember hearing anything about that ’43 riot from relatives, from parents when you were growing up?
SS: No, no my parents never, I never heard them talk about anything like that. My grandfather and grandmother would have been in this house on Burns at the time, I don’t remember anyone talking about it. So how big was it?
NL: Not as considerable as ‘67. We’ve not researched it as much, but in ’67, ’67 it just kept spreading, the area of looting and burning and things like that. That did not happen, so the city was not scarred to the same effect in ’43 as it was in ’67, I think. I mean, I don’t think the National Guard was called in in ’43, or the Army, for example, or Air Force I should say.
SS: Maybe it was contained in a certain portion of the city?
NL: Exactly, it was contained, it didn’t spread as much, and I think that city was just not – it was before the biggest population boom, I think, too, so there were less people to be affected.
SS: It could be.
LW: And in ’43, it’s widely regarded as an actual race riot, whereas 1967, using the term “riot” has become a bit more controversial. So, I’m curious what you think about calling what happened in 1967 when you were living in Detroit and your now-ex-husband was a firefighter. Do you think that it was race related in ’67?
SS: You know, I can’t answer that for sure. I’ve been watching some of the programs on TV, and how it started because of a blind pig operation. I’m not saying that the police are angels, because it didn’t seem to be. It looked like someone was just—they went too far in doing something. And the people that were in there said they were tired of being pushed around. You know, were they pushed around for years and years? Who’s going to know? And then it started like that. I don’t think it started as a race thing so much, just as anger and they thought that something should have been kept open when it was against the law to keep it open. The police could’ve maybe turned a blind eye for a while, but it just carried on, everything out of proportion. One person hits one, the other says, “Hey look at him man, he’s a white guy, and he’s beating him!” Who knows? And then, a lot of people say in their own minds, “Oh man, let’s go see what’s in that store, well it’s happening, I can take what I want.” It just got out of control, and I don’t know if it was all based on race. I think it was based on a lot of other things.
LW: Thank you so much. Is there anything else you’d like to add to the record?
SS: I don’t think so, except if you can talk to my ex-husband, I’m sure he can add a lot, and he’s got a couple firefighters that you can get.
NL: I think we’re talking to him next week. Thanks so much for sharing your time and memories with us.
SS: Oh, thanks.
**