JC: Today is Monday, October 12th, 2015. We are at Rocky’s Family Dining here in Westland, Michigan and I’m speaking with Kenneth Hafeli, Ken?
KH: Ken.
JC: Ken Hafeli, who lived in Detroit, grew up in Detroit in the 1960s.
KH: Correct.
JC: Thank you very much, Ken for sitting down with me today.
KH: You’re welcome. This will be fun.
JC: Okay [laughter]. I wanted to start out with a little bit of background information. If you could give me a little bit about where you grew up in Detroit, maybe where you lived in July of 1967. Do you remember your street address?
KH: [Unclear] I was born in Detroit, June 6, 1952 and I lived on the same street, Rolyat (R-O-L-Y-A-T) for the first 26 years. First at 8181 Rolyat, then when I was nine months old, we moved to 8055 Rolyat. Both houses were built by my grandfather, when he had a truck farm at Seven Mile and Outer Drive and Van Dyke and that became the Hafeli subdivision in about 1915. He built most of the houses on Rolyat and the street next to it, Sirron. He also sold property to the Archdiocese, well it was the Diocese of Detroit back then, and the church I grew up at was Our Lady Queen of Heaven, was four houses away from our house. He sold five acres to the Diocese to make the church. The church opened in 1929. That’s kind of — well, I went to grade school at Our Lady Queen of Heaven, High School at De La Salle in Detroit when it was still out by City Airport, and after that I went off to college. I moved out of Detroit in 1979 when I got married.
JC: What did your father do?
KH: My dad was a federal employee. He worked at the Detroit Tank Arsenal from 1952 to 1982. He also owned a gas station which was right on the corner of the street that I lived at. The gas station was razed in 1970 and replaced by a restaurant in 1972 where I worked as a dishwater and a short order cook for about two years.
JC: In ’72?
KH: Yes, actually not even that long, about a year.
JC: What do you remember, let’s backup, before we get to 1967. What do you remember about growing up in Detroit in the 1960s, the early-mid 1960s, as a young man, a teenager? Do you have any recollections of what that?
KH: It was a lot different. I mentioned going to church right down the street. There were 57 houses on Rolyat. I would guess 50 of them were Catholic and attended church at Queen of Heaven. We had six masses on Sunday, so our house was always blocked in every Sunday until about 2 o’clock when the 12:45 mass ended. Definitely a white neighborhood; the nearest black neighborhood would have been south of Six Mile, which is a mile and half away from us. Every day during the summer we went to Lipke Pool. There was four swimming periods, each about an hour and half long, with an hour break in-between so they could clean the pool, and we there probably from 9 o’clock in the morning until 7 o’clock at night. Our parents always knew where we were, because we were at the pool, or playing baseball.
JC: Or, playing baseball, I remember you telling that story.
KH: So, then we always had place on the corner, across Outer Drive and Conner, which we, my brothers and his friends, had dubbed “Eagle’s Nest” many, many years earlier and if we weren’t swimming at Lipke Pool, we were playing army and there would be six or seven of us out there. The place was pitted with foxholes and you couldn’t walk without danger of falling in something, some booby trap or some sort. That was right across from Holy Cross Hospital, which is no longer — the hospital is still there, but it’s not what it was when we were kids. The same thing for our street was about the same for the streets on either side of us. It was an area called “Polish Grosse Pointe.”
JC: Polish Grosse Pointe?
KH: Polish Grosse Pointe, because it was where all the affluent Polish lawyers and doctors all lived before they could afford to move to the real Grosse Pointe. It was part of the Van Dyke/Seven Mile area. I know you want me to tell the story of Northeast Detroit Polacks versus the Warren Hillbillies, we were a half-mile from Warren, so at Lipke Park there was softball games occasionally between groups from both sides of Eight Mile. The stigma of Eight Mile wasn’t the same in the 1960s as it was later.
JC: I’d like to come back to that too, later when we talk about—
KH: Sure, although when Coleman Young was elected in 1974 he did, that’s when the Eight Mile stigma really began. It was a very quiet neighborhood. Everybody had their windows open in the summertime, no one had air conditioning, you could walk from one end of the street to the other and never miss a pitch on the baseball game because all of the windows were open and Ernie Harwell’s voice was coming through every window down the street. And we were on our bikes all day long, if we weren’t swimming. When the streetlights came on, the neighborhood got really quiet because everybody went home. Detroit back then was so much different, people — when I went to De La Salle, I hitchhiked every day. I would walk from our house about a mile to my friend’s house and we would stand on the corner of Outer Drive and Seven Mile Road and hitchhike to get to De La Salle, which was like three miles down the road. Well Outer Drive turned into Conner and it was right across from the airport. We were fortunate that we got picked up by the same people all the time, so we never felt threatened by anybody and then on the way back we would have to walk about two blocks to where Outer Drive again turned into Conner. Conner went straight and Outer Drive came off from the right and there was a stop sign, because people would have to stop and it made it easier from them to pick us up.
[Noise from the restaurant staff]
JC: Okay, there we go
KH: A lot of the time the same people would pick us up.
JC: So you were hitchhiking to school every day?
KH: Yeah, one other hitchhiking story, this is right after I graduated from high school. We were going up to Metro Beach/Metro Park. I was going to meet my friends. I was standing on the corner of Eight Mile and Van Dyke with my thumb out when a Detroit police car pulled up. I’m thinking, “Oh, geez, what did I do here?” and he just said, he rolled down, this is when they had two to a car, maybe they still do, I don’t know, but the one on the passenger side said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m trying to get out to Metro Beach,” he said, “Get in, I can give you a ride to Groesbeck and Eight Mile,” which is like three miles up the road. It was sort of weird, in those days even the cops picked you up when you were hitchhiking and gave you rides.
JC: I was going to ask you about that, it also speaks to what I wanted to talk about. You described your neighborhood at the time as predominantly, or exclusively white —
KH: Exclusively. White Catholic
JC: White, Catholic, middle class, upper middle class. What was the relationship with police officers in the community? I mean, pick you up and give you a ride.
KH: Well, besides, the doctors and lawyers, we also had police officers. Three doors away from us was Mr. Griffin, who was known in the neighborhood as a policeman, who at one time was head of the Detroit Motorcycle Unit, or was heavily involved in it. I remember one day we heard the rumble of motorcycles and there must have been twenty of them coming down our street and parked in front of his house, so it was — my uncle was a Detroit police lieutenant, as nice as Mr. Griffin was, my uncle was not the kind of person a black person wanted to meet at any time of the day, so he would — so, that’s kind of what, I think the relations with the police department in our area were very good. “Redlining doesn’t exist” they say, but our area code was 48234, our zip code, and you — oh that’s one of the good ones — so that’s kind of how the neighborhood was. Baseball games back in the 1970s started at 8 o’clock. We were 14 - 15 years old would take the Van Dyke/Lafayette bus down to downtown Detroit where we had to transfer to another bus to get out to Tiger Stadium. It was just kids, 14 - 15, no adults, and we would come out, because the game started at 8:00, it didn’t end until 11 or 11:30 and you walk out of the stadium there would be so many people waiting to get on the Michigan bus to go back downtown, we would walk from Tiger Stadium back downtown to, I guess, right now it would be Campus Martius area, it was where the Gayety Theater, the Monroe block was where we stood for the bus. It was torn down in the mid, in the Seventies, and then ride the bus back. So we would get home at 12:30 and my mother would be waiting, reading a book in the living room, didn’t matter when we would get home, my mother would be up reading a really good book.
JC: This is a very good transition to what I wanted to get into, you’re 14 - 15 years old, you and your brothers, your friends, take the bus down to Tigers Stadium, to move into July 1967. You’ve just turned 15 years old, went to De La Salle High School, I guess you’re on summer break at this point. What are you doing that summer? Are you working? Other than going to Tiger baseball games?
KH: Right after, I was a freshman that year, I had just finished my freshman year and right after that we went to, I was in French Club because one of the requirements at De La Salle was foreign language and I took French. The French Club went to Montreal for Expo ’67. So part of June I was, for maybe a week, ten days, we were gone. We took the Brooks Line Bus. Brooks Line was based at a terminal at Harper and St. Cyril, which was actually where my great-grandfather had a house at St. Cyril and Hafeli Street, for that matter, just north of Harper. We went to Montreal for a week and went to Expo ’67 and a few other places, Quebec City and St. Anne-de-Beaupre, because after all it was a Catholic trip, we had to go up there too, which was a pretty cool place anyway. We had 35-40 kids on the bus, every one of us had $20-30 worth of firecrackers stuffed in the bus — which were illegal in Michigan —we came back, we had great fear of what’s going to happen when they search the bus and we’re all going to be busted. Since we had a Christian Brother sitting right up at the front seat of the bus, the customs guy come on and said, “You got anybody on the bus you didn’t have when you left?” and he said, “Nope” and he said, “Okay, you’re free to go.” Totally different experience than you would have fifty years later. About a week after that, I went up to Port Austin for a week with my cousin. After that, not much going on during the summer, we were still hitting the pool, but when you’re 15, you’re almost too cool to do that kind of stuff, because there are so many little kids in the pool. We didn’t have cars yet. Too old to play army, so I don’t know what exactly we did, probably just hanging out. I can’t really recall what exactly we did during the weekday. I do remember Fourth of July we shot off all those fireworks. We had shot a cherry bomb with a slingshot straight up in the air and you could see it sparkling, and my friend is walking, this is right next to Queen of Heaven Church, it would be a vacant area that was part of the church landscape. You could see that sparkling come down right over my friend, and we yelled to get out of the way and the thing blew up about ten feet above him.
JC: Despite being illegal, there was no—
KH: You didn’t see the police around, nobody was complaining, we were only shooting off firecrackers, these days, everybody is shooting off $300 worth of rockets.
[Restaurant background noise]
JC: So, when did you first learn about the riots, the unrest?
KH: It was a Sunday night, as I recall, that things really started turning for the worst. We had a little black and white TV, our only TV was a little portable one in the kitchen, and I’m sure we’re watching Channel 2 News back then. I can’t remember what they called it, but basically it was a minor disturbance when it first started.
JC: This is not long after the Blind Pig?
KH: The Blind Pig, right, which I believe was on a Saturday night. Then by Sunday afternoon, things really started picking up and my brother was at, my other brother, I was talking to him about this yesterday, about what I was going to be doing today, and he said he was at the ball game that day, and you could just look out beyond the stadium and see the smoke all over the place, but that was just the first Sunday. It was later, the next few days, as it escalated, that I was more aware and more involved in one way or another.
JC: Let’s talk about it. In what ways were you involved? What do you recall about—
KH: Well, I can’t remember what day it was when President Johnson called in federal troops to help the National Guard, but they would fly into Selfridge, back then it was still an Air Force base, and then would helicopter to the State Fair Grounds, which was their staging area. Because of where we were at, just south of Eight Mile Road, they basically followed a route that ran south down I-94 to Eight Mile Road, then west, because we would see a dozen or so Hueys flying. It was nighttime, but you could definitely hear them and you could see the lights flashing out as they were heading to the Fair Grounds to get everybody together there. The other thing we would notice during the day, since my dad worked at the tank arsenal, I would be up there every day with my mom, just about, to go pick him up. We used to pick him up on the Van Dyke side of the plant. Although he was an electrical engineer, an electrical engineering technician, he wasn’t involved in the manufacture, per se, rather than the design end of it, mostly reading blue prints and things. On the east side of property was a tank test ground. We used to watch them, while we were waiting to get over to the Van Dyke side, we would just watch those tanks running around the course, going up ramps and things, so I was very familiar with the sound of an M-60 tank and an armored personnel carrier, for that matter. I can remember one day, all of the sudden, we hear this rumble of tanks and armored personnel carriers.
JC: While you’re at home?
KH: Yeah, at home. This is the part that kind of embarrasses me now. All of us kids, and most adults, all race down to the corner of Rolyat and Van Dyke to watch the convoy racing down and of course, we were cheering, and saying some rather nasty things, that, “Go get ‘em” and all that kind of stuff and so —
[Restaurant background noise]
KH: So, “Go get ‘em,” “Go get those guys,” well we didn’t use “guys.” You could look down toward Six Mile Road and there, up to Six Mile Road, now and you could look down Van Dyke and there was a line of smoke roughly from the whole horizon. Most of it seemed to happening on the west side. Well it started at Twelfth Street, not far from the Tiger Stadium, the area, but it did spread to the east side too. It seems to me most of it was west side stuff, but there was a lot of smoke down there. Of course, not being old enough to drive there, we kept our distance, and life seemed to go on pretty much. I mean the pool was closed. There was a rather large sporting goods store right across Van Dyke from our street, Dee’s Sporting Goods. Dee’s was closed because, and actually had guards around it, because they had enough weapons in there to arm a small army. That was one of the cool things, you walk into Dee’s and just see the gun room and all that kind of stuff. So that’s how it really affected our neighborhood.
JC: Do you remember any other reactions of your family, your neighbors at that time?
KH: We were all pretty much the same back then.
JC: What about your parish? You said everybody went to the parish? Do you remember any reaction within the church?
KH: No, not particularly. Again, we were a Polish group, and Polish had their own set of detractors, so if we could find somebody who we thought was farther down the pole than we were, then that made it that much — we were all cheering for the police, we were all cheering for the army. That was the way it was then.
JC: What about in the aftermath of what you saw, what you experienced? Did you find yourself, your family, your neighbors starting to change habits or attitudes? You said you were going down to the ballpark, to the Tigers game.
KH: I think things had changed considerably — When it was over for us, it was over. Even the next year, I think life went back pretty much too normal. Even next year, right after the assassination of Martin Luther King, there was not as a big a flare up, but there was another flare up, right after the assassination. But, even that was April 4, that was right around opening day, and we still went. I went to opening day ’68 and I went to another game, because it was Easter Vacation. I went to another game during that time, and we took the bus both times and even though there was some violence, we were careful, but I don’t think, the danger seemed as great as it had seemed in 1967. Now I was going to talk about my epiphany.
JC: Okay, go ahead.
KH: I mean I had my attitudes, but they changed in 1969. I was between junior and senior years of high school and I had to go to summer school for math, which is not surprising. I went to Osborn High School, a Detroit public school, not far from where I used to hitchhike. That’s in what is now a 48205 zip code, which was considered one of the more dangerous areas of Detroit in 2015. But anyway, it was me, and one other white girl, and about fifteen to twenty black kids, and we got along really well. I mean, I had friends come out of that group and so this isn’t so bad, we can get along, I mean heck, I’m in summer school with them, that doesn’t make me any better, I’m there. So my attitudes started changing, and then when I worked at K-Mart on the east side of Detroit in 1973-1974, most of the crew there was black kids my age, and we all got together, and those two incidents really changed my attitude. When we got married, we moved to Romulus and we bought a house, right after we moved in, the house next to us, moved out in the middle of the night. We’re going, “Uh-oh, there must be a black family moving in next to us,” and I said, “Well, if they can afford to buy a house that I can afford to buy, what’s the problem?” So by the end of the Seventies, I had probably done a 180-degree turn on how I felt, and I think that has continued. One of my best friends in choir is a black guy, wouldn’t have much a choir without him either, he’s a real deep bass, but anyway, so I’ve had friends from here on out. The riot kind of started changing my attitudes more than you would have thought.
JC: So the aftermath of ’67 was almost an awakening for you personally?
KH: Yeah, it was. There are certain people in my family who that hasn’t happened yet, but for me it was quite easy and with my kids’ attitudes are pretty same as mine.
JC: What do you think, you spoke about the legacy of the unrest, the riots of 1967 were personally — what more historically, community-wise, how would assess the legacy more generally for Detroit?
KH: There are a lot things that have happened in Detroit since then that make me sad. I don’t like what’s happened to the inner-city areas. I drive though past the abandoned auto plants and wish that I was born fifty years earlier than I was. When all this was going on, I have a Master’s degree in history, so that’s kind of where that comes from, but we took a tour several years through Henry Ford Museum where we went to Ford sites around the city. You get to Livernois and Warren, and this was where the Lincoln Plant used to be, and you go to Hamtramck and this is where the Dodge Main Plant used to be, and you drive past the Packard Plant and it’s just a derelict, that kind of stuff is hard. The southwest side, the same way, I did an interview with a priest down there, we’re driving down the Clark Road area down there, the southwest side of the city and all the auto plants are gone and so I’m probably wandering off the question, so you should repeat it again.
JC: Well, just to follow-up, so you see some of the racial tension and economic decline or problems that Detroit has faced as intertwined, then?
KH: Well, yeah, because the neighborhood I grew up in, which was 100 percent white from anywhere, almost north of Six Mile all the way to Eight Mile, is now heavily a black neighborhood. Granted, it’s a very stable neighborhood.
JC: Did your parents continue to live there?
KH: They lived there until 1991. That bothered my dad to even move then, because the house he grew up in was right on the corner of Van Dyke and Lance, which is one street over from us. That house was built by his dad. When we were kids, it was owned by J.J. Knapp’s Photo Studio. It’s still there now, although I think it’s empty and another thing, I mentioned earlier my great-grandfather’s house down on St. Cyril and Harper, in 1997 or 1998, I guess it was, for my parent’s fifty-seventh wedding anniversary, we rented a bus and we went down to places where they had grown up. We went to, my mom grew up at Miller and St. Cyril and every time we drive down St. Cyril we’d see the house, well went by there in 1998 and it was gone. My great-grandfather’s first house, which was on Hathon Street, just off of St. Cyril was built in the 1880s and every time we’d drive by we’d see it. 1987, we were down that way, we took our kids to go see their great-great-grandfather’s house, it was gone. My great-grandfather’s beautiful brick house was occupied in 1998 and the people who were there, sitting on the porch, it was a black family, they were perfectly happy to have us come and take pictures on their front lawn, and Hafeli Street is right there, so were telling them the story of Hafeli Street and they knew how to pronounce it after that, but two years ago, Josie, my wife, and I went up there. We were coming back from Belle Isle and we said, “Let’s go up through the old neighborhoods,” and all that was left of my great-grandfather’s house was a shell. The floors were gone. Everything was gone. The only thing that was still there was the front door and the glass on either side of the front door. Why didn’t they take that? So, it was just, everything, that really, I took pictures and posted on Facebook and my sister posted pictures of the way it looked in ’98, and I said do not like this post, do not push like, there is nothing to like about this picture. I was really angry. Can’t blame everybody, but looting is something that happens. We actually took a tour of a copper mine, when my son was starting at Michigan Tech in 2003, and the guy said, “There is 90 percent of the copper is still left in the mines of the Upper Peninsula, but as long as there are people stripping copper out of houses, there is no need, there is no industry for it, there is no reason to open the mines.” That is one of the saddest things about Detroit, is that kind of economic destruction for those kinds of reasons, that’s what bothers me the most about driving around down there.
JC: Despite that, you still say you see yourself as a defender of Detroit; you encountered people, when you went up to college in the UP, when you have traveled extensively?
KH: Always, always
JC: You’ve encountered the negative perceptions of Detroit, but you—
KH: Even the job I have now, I’ve worked for the federal government for 38 years, but about two years after I started working there, before I got married, I was living at home from 1977 until I got married in 1979, and in early 1979, I saw an ad for a job at the Detroit Historical Society. It was to work out at Fort Wayne and I thought, this is what I want to do. This will be fun. I got interviewed by the head of the Society, or the Historical Museum, I think his name was Weeks.
JC: Weeks?
KH: Yeah, I think that was his name. They asked me for ID and I pulled out my driver’s license and because I had just moved to Romulus, there was a sticker on the back of my driver’s license that said I no longer lived in the city of Detroit. Sorry, this interview is over. I was heartbroken; I really was, because I would have moved back to my old neighborhood in a flash. Even though I had a nice house in Romulus, but I could have got a much nicer house in Detroit for less money or about the same about of money, and I wanted to save that neighborhood, because it was my grandfather’s neighborhood. I’ve always wanted to move back to Detroit. As it turned out, I knew the guy who got the job, and he got laid off after about a year, so I guess I made the right — so I was fortunate that it happened the way that it did, because I’ll be retiring in another 230 days, and it’s the only job I ever had out of college. I have to be happy with that.
JC: We can wrap up here, I wanted to know: is there anything else that I didn’t touch on, any memories, or thoughts, or ideas, or things you would like to discuss that we didn’t get to?
KH: Oh, there’s tons of memories, but I’m not sure they apply to this, and plus it’s get a little loud, we can mosey over to my house. We covered a lot of it. I will always be a Detroit defender. My mother still goes down to Queen of Heaven once in a while.
JC: The parish is still there?
KH: Oh, yeah, it will stay now because it’s the only Catholic parish in the Eight Mile corridor between Grosse Pointe and Redford. So the Archdiocese will do what it can to keep it going. The only problem is that it has no parking, as I mentioned earlier. We were pretty much boxed in on Sundays because everybody parked on the street and parked on three streets around it, six masses on Sunday. We had a Rolyat Street reunion about three years ago. Now, I found it funny that you had to, if you lived on Rolyat before 1970 was the cutoff. I found that a little suspicious. To me, it was no black people allowed, basically what it was. I don’t know if it was conscience or not, but that’s when we grew up, so that’s the kids we knew. We didn’t want the kids that none of us played with, none of us hung out with. The motive may not have been that, but that’s the way I saw it, well I don’t think it was, because my brother organized it and my brother’s probably more liberal than I am, but I just found it funny. We met in the gym at Queen of Heaven and there was about thirty of us were there, it was great, and we did pictures. If you want pictures of Detroit, eastside of Detroit, I will be happy to provide that to Society at some point.
JC: Okay, I can get you in touch with the staff there.
KH: It would be copies, because, I just bought a scanner.
JC: We can wrap up and talk about this, but Ken thank you very much for taking the time today. I really appreciate you spending time and recalling the memories from the period.
KH: And introducing you to Rocky’s.
JC: Yes, that’s true. Thanks, Ken.
KH: You’re welcome.
**KD: This is Kalisha Davis. I am interviewing Judge Victoria Roberts on January 15, 2016 in Detroit, Michigan. You’re a Detroit native, right?
VR: I am.
KD: And were you born here in Detroit?
VR: I was.
KD: Okay, so where were you born exactly?
VR: I was born in what was Women’s Hospital and I lived on the east side of Detroit then. I lived on Joseph Campau. I was born November 25, 1951.
KD: Awesome, so did your parents reside on the east side also?
VR: They did, my parents came from the South, and they were part of the great migration of blacks from the South. My dad is from New Orleans, Louisiana. My mom from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and they both worked in a defense plant in Tennessee. I understand from talking to them that there was a facility that was opened in the Detroit area, and so they moved and continued working in those jobs for a short period of time. My father ended up working at Great Lakes Steel and my mother was a domestic worker; she took in ironing, she cleaned houses and she had six children along the way.
KD: That’s what I was going to ask you. Where are you in the line up? How many sisters and brothers do you have?
VR: I have six sisters and brothers, but only six of us not seven of us grew up in the same household.
KD: Okay.
VR: And, I have two brothers who are older than I. I have one sister older than I that I grew up, and then I have another older sister and then I have two younger sisters.
KD: So you fall somewhere in the middle?
VR: I’m sort of in the middle, the peacemaker.
KD: The peacemaker? [Laughter] I can imagine. Now what are your parents’ names, and your sisters' and brothers' names?
VR: My father’s name is Manuel Roberts. My mother, her name is Grace Roberts. They’re both deceased. My oldest brother, named after my father Manuel Roberts. I understand my parents came to Detroit around 1943, '44, and my oldest brother was born here in 1945 and he is deceased. Then I have a brother who was born in 1946, Ronald, and he now lives in Pasadena, California. My sister Patricia Roberts was born in 1948, and she’s deceased. I came in 1951, my sister Joanne Roberts was born in 1955 and my sister Teresa Roberts was born in 1958. And then the sister I did not grow up with, her name is Doris Jennings and she lives in Maryland. But everybody else who is living, with the exception of my brother who lives in California, is in the Detroit area.
KD: Okay, so they stayed here for the remainder of their —
VR: Yes, my brother is the only one who migrated, he went west and I went to law school in Boston and came back, but everybody else stayed here.
KD: Okay, and what types of work do your siblings do?
VR: My brother Manuel was a mechanic at Ford Motor Company. Started doing that right out of high school. He didn’t go to college, although he was very smart, and he stayed there for 30, 35 years, retired from Ford Motor Company. My brother Ronald, ended up going to Eastern Michigan University, and then went out to the University of Southern California and got an MBA, and has worked in a number of positions using his masters degree, comptrollers of companies and he is retired now. My sister Patricia worked for the Department of Social Services, which is now DSS, I think, and she graduated from Wayne State University with an, I think her undergraduate degree was in — you know what, I’m not quite sure. Maybe it was social work. I think it was social work. So she worked for the Department of Social Services for many, many years before her death. And then there’s me, and my sister Joanne is a manager at AT&T right here in Downtown Detroit and she did get her masters from University of Michigan-Dearborn, I think in management. And then my sister Teresa is a court reporter and she’s working for a judge now in Wayne County Circuit Court. So that’s us. My sister Doris, who lives in Maryland, got a PhD in education and she was an educator. She’s retired now also.
KD: That’s awesome.
VR: Yeah.
KD: So what did you – because it sounds like, well most of your brothers and sisters have college degrees and are educated and even graduate degrees. Was that something that was emphasized by your parents, by your family, like where did the motivation —?
VR: Where did that come from? You know, I had this conversation with my sister not too long ago. My sister Joanne, because she has a son that just graduated from Adrian College and she called me early in the morning and she was talking about, she says, “You know, our generation,” talking about our sib ship, “was the first that graduated from high school,” and most of our children have all gone on and graduated from high school and college and gotten advanced degrees. My dad finished the ninth grade only in Louisiana, my mother finished the tenth grade only in Tennessee and so they were not formally educated, although both very smart. My mother eventually got her GED but that was after all of us were in school and it wasn’t until the mid-sixties and then after she got her GED she ended up working for the J.L. Hudson Company in their warehouse as a merchandise checker, all those little tags that you seeing hanging on clothes, that’s what she used to do. That was her job after she stopped doing domestic work. But my parents, my dad particularly, was quite emphatic about education, you know even though they themselves were not educated, they knew the value of education. My father worked in a steel mill, he worked at Great Lakes Steel, he worked at Zug Island, which is a filthy place, and would come home filthy. Ended up, his hearing was very affected because of the noise in the plant and he was there for 35 years. And he would always say that he didn’t want us to work as he did; he didn’t want us to come home dirty. So education was very important to them. They didn’t know a lot about helping us with applications to college, didn’t know the first thing about it. I know that I navigated that all on my own. But I knew that it was important to them and I think we all got a very strong work ethic from our parents and a very strong sense of the value of an education. So somehow, some way, you know we all managed to do it, they didn’t have any money and so we were all on our own and some of us got scholarships, some of us didn’t but everybody managed.
KD: That’s what it sounds like. That’s pretty awesome.
VR: Yeah.
KD: Now where did you live in July 1967?
VR: I grew up on the East side, I was born 1951. In 1960 I lived in the same house on Joseph Campau for the first nine and a half years of my life. In 1960 my parents moved into what is known as the Boston-Edison Community. And we lived on Edison, we lived between Linwood and LaSalle, and in fact, my parents are both deceased. My dad died in 2006, my mother in 2007, and we still own that house. We’ve been trying to sell it [laughter] but we still own it and you know my mother, my parents both got quite ill later in life, but we did not put them in nursing homes. And we kept them in their home and we had people coming in to take care of him, and take care of them. But I say that to say that my mother died in 2007 which is when we went through the economic crisis, the mortgage crisis, and the house when we had it appraised in 2007, appraised at about $40,000 and we were not prepared to just give it away.
KD: Right.
VR: And so we've held on to it and rented it out with some success. So we moved in 1960 to that house on Edison and that’s where I was living in July of ’67 when the riot happened.
KD: Okay.
VR: And it started just a few blocks from where we were living.
KD: Right, exactly, yeah on Twelfth and Clairmont.
VR: So we were between Linwood and LaSalle then it was Fourteenth and then it was Twelfth and Edison was two blocks from Clairmont. Atkinson and Clairmont, so we were about four blocks away from where it started.
KD: So you were in middle school?
VR: In ’67? No, I was actually in the — I had finished the tenth grade and was going into the eleventh grade in the fall of ’67.
KD: So you talked about your parents’ occupations, you talked about your siblings. What do you remember about the city during that, not even that period of time but maybe mid-1960s. What was the norm for your family, how did you interact with your neighbors, what kinds of things did you all do normally?
VR: Yes. Well my family was a blue collar family, my dad in a steel factory, my mother doing domestic work, but we were in what was considered to be, you know, a middle class neighborhood. And I attribute that to my mother primarily, she tried to scrape and save as much as she could and somehow they managed to come up with a down payment for a house in Boston-Edison. And I do believe that at that time they paid about, that house cost about $13,000, which was nothing but a lot to them. And our neighbor, our neighborhood was changing then, you know it had been a white neighborhood primarily, like most neighborhoods in Detroit and it was becoming, it was shifting, and there were a lot of black middle class families moving into Boston-Edison. And so our neighbors were school teachers, they were doctors, and there were not a lot of blue collar people. I think we felt that. We felt the class difference living on Edison. And I didn’t have a word to describe that, I just know that I felt it.
KD: What high school did you go to?
VR: We were at, I and my young sister were at Visitation and when we were on the East side we had been at St. Elizabeth. My father was a fallen Catholic but it was still important to him that we get a Catholic education. And I believe at St. Elizabeth, at the time Catholic schools have always had tuition but I think at the time it was $50 a family. So we were all able to go to St. Elizabeth. When we moved, I and my younger sisters ended up at St. Elizabeth. My sister went to, let me see, I was in the fifth grade. My sister went to Durfee in the middle school and Durfee was on that campus with Central High School, Durfee Middle School and Roosevelt Grade School. So she was at Durfee, my brothers -- I think they stayed at Northern on the East side for a period of time and then they ended up at Central.
KD: Okay.
VR: So the three oldest were at a public school just a block away from Visitation, and then the three youngest were at Visitation. So that’s where I was in school in July of ’67, had just finished the tenth grade. But you asked me about being in that neighborhood and how it felt.
It felt a little isolated because we were in a minority, being a blue collar family. At Visitation the makeup of the school was primarily white even though the neighborhood was not that, and I think the reason for it was that it was a very good school and a lot of people whose families had lived in the area for a long time continued to come there, even though they were coming there on the bus, even though they were coming from suburbs now. They continued to come in and be part of the Visitation community and that was true from fifth grade on, I remember it was still true when I was in the ninth grade, when I was in tenth grade. The high school was predominantly white until the riot happened. And dramatically, in September of ’67, when I went back to school following the riot the school was overwhelmingly black.
KD: Where were your friendships? You talk about issues related to your class?
VR: Yes.
KD: Compared to the majority in your neighborhood. Were your friendships at school? Were they in the neighborhood? Were they somewhere else?
VR: That’s a very good question. I certainly had friendships at school, people I regarded to be my school friends, and there were people on the block also that we socialized with, that we played with. I have to say as I reflect back, probably my closest friends in high school were people that I went to school with, rather than people in the neighborhood.
KD: And so you talk about them being majority white, did you feel any sense of tension coming from them?
VR: I didn’t. I didn’t feel, I didn’t feel any tension that way. I think the tension we felt more was a class tension than a race tension.
KD: That’s interesting because your family moved to the city just after or before the race riots?
VR: You mean to the west side?
KD: Your parents you said they moved here in 1943, so the race riots in the city, I believe were in 1943.
VR: Yes, you know I didn’t have any knowledge of that; it wasn’t anything my parents ever talked about. I could tell you when we lived on the east side on Joseph Campau it was pretty close to Hamtramck and it was a very mixed neighborhood. St. Elizabeth, when I was there in the grade school, that was a predominantly white school also. But I can’t remember feeling a lot of race tension then. I can tell you a story and it is unfortunate, we had, we lived in a wood frame house on Joseph Campau and I had — there was a white neighbor next door to us. Then two doors away a black family and there were kids in that family that we played with all the time. I can remember the boy’s name being Junebug and the girl, she will go unnamed, right now, but I can remember and they were a family of brown skinned black people, right. We were light, you looking at me now, my father was from New Orleans and was a quote “Creole”.
KD: Okay.
VR: And you know "good hair," and I say that in quotes also. And he was very light skinned, in fact I had relatives in New Orleans who had migrated to California and were actually passing for white. And he married, almost to his regret, because he would say things that were quite regrettable about my mom, who was a brown skinned woman from Tennessee. And she had quote “nappy” hair, and so he ended up with these children who were, you know, light, most of us, and with different grades of hair. I happened to get “nappy” hair. My sisters had, depending on who you are and what your view of hair is, some people would say that they had a better grade of hair. But I can remember, and my mom, so I had nappy hair, but my mother pressed it all the time and it was long so we had, I had long pressed hair. And I can remember walking home from lunch, for lunch from St. Elizabeth on the east side and it was only two blocks so we came home for lunch my mother was always home, because she was doing laundry at the time, she was doing ironing for people. And we would come home for lunch. I can remember walking home and this girl who lived two doors away from us, walking behind me and taunting me and telling me, “You think you’re good, you think you’re better than everybody because you’re light skinned and because you have long hair.” And she actually attacked me a couple of times as I walked home from school.
KD: Wow, even with your siblings around?
VR: No! I don’t know why but the time she chose to attack me I was by myself.
KD: Oh, she knew.
VR: And so she knew, and she would just walk behind me, she would taunt me and this was long before we had a name for it; today it’d be called bullying, right. But that was it, that was the taunt, “You think you’re better than everybody because you’re light skinned and because you have long hair.” And so I remember that, I remember that. That sticks out in my head more than anything, more than anything that could be categorized as racial tension in the late-Fifties, early-Sixties, before I turned 10 and before I moved to the west side. And then after the move just feeling that class tension when I was in Boston-Edison
KD: I can imagine. So, we talked a little bit about norms, but what kinds of activities did your family do together? Did you all shop anywhere in particular? Was there any sort of entertainment that you remember or maybe the family looked forward to?
VR: I can remember that we would on many Sunday afternoons drive around Belle Isle. Just drive endlessly around Belle Isle, and my father liked to drive. And so we would get in the car and we’d drive. Another driving activity I can remember is at Great Lakes Steel, he’d get two weeks of vacation and every summer until, I’d say ’61 ’62, we would all pile in the car and we would drive to New Orleans and spend my father’s two weeks of vacation in New Orleans. I remember that. There were not a lot of family activities that we — things we did as a family. My father was a troubled person, and he was an alcoholic. He had, I think, a lot of regret about how his life had turned out, he certainly experienced the — I think, for the lack of better word at this moment, experienced the madness that a lot of blacks did during that time period who didn’t have the benefit of being able to complete school, or have opportunities open to them, even though he knew he was -- he was a very smart and very capable man and I think he felt pigeon-holed and felt he didn’t have a lot of opportunities available to him. And I think he felt trapped also, as I said earlier, about knowing that many of his relatives were passing for white and having a better life, as he regarded it a better life. And he was not able to do that once he married and had these children that he couldn’t pass off as being white people. So he was a very troubled, very troubled person, and I think that, I don’t know all of the reasons why he became an alcoholic but I do think that that contributed to it. And I think that, as I talk to a lot of my friends my age who came from blue collar families, black families, so many of our fathers were alcoholics.
KD: I can imagine, because did he have certain experiences even on the job? I know having read a few things about discrimination that, workers faced among, you know, and that is what kind of stemmed or led to the race riots [in 1943]. You know that black people weren’t given the same leadership opportunities and be earning the salaries they deserved. You know there were systems put in place to create some barriers to—
VR: Yes.
KD: to really—
VR: I don’t really know the answer to that because he certainly never talked about anything that had happened on his job.
KD: Okay.
VR: I think to the contrary my father was a member of the Great Lakes Steel Workers and at that time unions were incredibly strong and it feels like they were striking all the time. Because I can remember, you know, they provided food for the families of people who were on strike so we would have powdered eggs, we’d have powdered milk and canned meat and stuff that was really nasty. But I can just remember them being on strike a lot. But I say that to say that he was a member of a union and he would often go to work drunk and probably today it would never have been tolerated. But he was a likable person and people, I think, did a lot to protect him and would find a place for him to sleep, a corner for him to sleep so that he wasn’t working and endangering himself or others. And I can just, I can just remember him talking about that and as years went on he became even more troubled. We had more interaction with people that he worked with and who were in the union and who did a lot to protect him and protect his job. They knew we had a big family and they protected him; he never lost his job. Got suspended [laugh] but he never lost his job.
KD: So I’m thinking about a question related to how your family may have understood city government. You had brothers, how they may have related to law enforcement. Thinking about like, leading up to what happened July 1967. What was your family’s perception of city leadership and the ways in which they were interacting with particularly the African American community in the city, but, any other—
VR: I know that my brothers as young teenagers in the city had several encounters with the police. That didn’t seem like they should have happened. For example like I can remember my older brother had a drop-top, red, red with a black top, a convertible and he had a girlfriend. I remember, and this one particular incident he was telling us about, he was driving, he had the top down, it was in the summer, he had his arm around his girlfriend and he was stopped for that and pulled out of his car for that.
KD: Oh wow.
VR: And given a ticket for that. I remember him being just exceedingly mad about that. My other brother, I can remember him just telling us about times when he had been stopped by the police and it just didn’t seem that there was any reason for that. My brothers were never arrested, they were never in any kind of trouble. But I do remember that kind of discussion about police harassment and didn’t have a sense of how widespread it was probably until the riots did happen. But I think that, you know, we were fairly insulated. I mean I can remember just being on my block and playing, you know, and a few people that we were in touch with on the block during the summer, and I don’t really remember a lot that was going on that precipitated the riot. My information came later and has come even later than that as I find out more about the history of Detroit but then when I was, what 15 years old, didn’t have a lot of knowledge about what was going on in the city and my parents were not – they were not engaged in community groups, community activities, so I didn’t have that perspective either. They were just working people, they didn’t go to meetings, community meetings in the evenings. It just didn’t happen.
KD: So, how did you end up first learning about what was happening?
VR: I can remember that night just hearing a lot of gun fire, I mean we were that close to it and then on the news, hearing that the police — just conflicting stories, I think. There was one story that the police had invaded a blind pig, I think that was what we were hearing more than anything else, and that shots were fired and people were killed and it just kind of escalated from that. So I remember, I don’t remember much about anything that precipitated it and I don’t remember anything other than the news accounts in the first few hours following it. I remember being told you know we just need to, you just need to stay in your house and then the gun fire just continued, I remember that. And I remember us being just on the floor, for what seemed like hours in that day and a couple days after that. The other thing I remember about it is that we were at Edison and Linwood, was Sacred Heart Seminary — and it’s still there — and that was used by the National Guard as a headquarters and so, another vivid memory that I have is of tanks just rolling up our street all the time. There were tanks and they had men on them who were standing up with guns, rifles poised and they were on all sides of these tanks and they were just rolling up this residential street. I remember that. I remember also that we lived near Joy, well Clairmount, Clairmount when it got to Linwood became Joy Road, and Joy Road intersected with, I think, the Boulevard, if I’m getting this right — or, intersected with Grand River — and that was a commercial strip there and that’s where we shopped, that’s where a couple of grocery stores were, that’s where the post office was. There was a cleaners there that we used. And I can remember once we finally ventured out, all of those commercial places with their, you know, the windows smashed in and at the grocery store people just streaming out with cartfuls of food and people streaming out of the cleaners with handfuls of clothes and I can remember [laughter] I was just a child, a child, right? I remember my mom had bought me this really nice pink suit for Easter in 1967, at the time the riot had broke out, that pink suit was in the cleaners and so were up there and I’m thinking, you know, somebody probably took my pink suit and I’m crying about my pink suit. And of course everything was stolen from the cleaners and I never got the pink suit or anything else that had been put in there. But that’s — those are my memories: the tanks rolling up, people looting, taking things from the grocery store, taking things from the cleaners, taking things from all the other commercial establishments and just, you know, sporadic gun fire, I remember that. And once we went out it wasn’t for long, I mean we came back and I can remember pretty much being barricaded in the house and only going out to sit on the porch and to watch these tanks roll up and down the street.
KD: Right. I can imagine how chaotic something like that must have felt especially for your parents trying to manage these six children. Because what – like how did they react? Was there certain rules? Like you said you really weren’t allowed to leave the house. Like, did your dad – was he going to work in that period or was everyone pretty much hunkered down at home?
VR: No, my dad was still, I believe that he was still going to work. I don’t remember him being hunkered down. I remember him going to work. My dad always went to work, I remember that about him and I think that’s part of where our ethic came from. He might be drunk but he was still going to work. He may have stayed up all night and come in at four o’clock in the morning but he was getting ready to go to work.
KD: He was going to be there.
VR: He was going to go to work. So I don’t remember him not going to work during the period of the riots.
KD: Okay, let me see.
So there’s this discussion, like, even as we are working through the exhibition and the project itself where there’s a discussion around how to refer to this period in time. So I’ve heard you a few time refer to it as a riot. Some people call it a rebellion or an uprising. Like, is there a term that you think is best to describe this time in history and if can you share the why you think it?
VR: Yeah. You know I haven’t given a lot of thought to what to call it. I know that it has historically been dubbed "the 1967 Riot" and I think that was a term that caught on, that stuck, and all of the uprisings that were happening across the country, I think were referred to as a race – as a riot, as race riots. So, you know, I don’t know what to call it and I don’t know if it’s so important. We know that it happened and we know that it happened for a reason and that at least in Detroit it was an incredible turning point for the fortune of this city, for the direction of this city, for race relations. It was, you know I think we hit bottom. I think we hit bottom. What is so — what was so incredible to me, and I mentioned it before, was just the mass exit of whites from Detroit in such a short period of time. My school — not a lot of white families still living in the area but a lot of white students commuting to the school because it was a great school and they didn’t come back in that short period of time, they made a decision that they were just not going to enter the city of Detroit. And those who were still living here put their homes on the market and they left. That was so dramatic to me. To be sitting in a classroom that only four months before I had left and it was pretty integrated and then I come back and it’s 95 percent black. The other thing that happened was that the Archdiocese of Detroit, and maybe it had been in the works before the riot happened, but the Archdiocese made a decision to consolidate a lot of schools. And so that consolidation coincided with the Fall of ’67, post-riot. So I went back to school, I was no longer at Visitation, I was at St. Martin de Porres High School, and it had consolidated, three or four, I think, Catholic schools. Small, losing population I guess I’m not sure about the reasons why. But I went back and did my two years same location but at St. Martin de Porres and that’s where I graduated from.
KD: So, this actually, this question actually, this is a great transition to this question as far as how this affected your life, how did things change for you? How did it impact your family? Were there thoughts and feelings about what had happened, that maybe led to some decisions that your family made or that you made? Maybe pursuing a career in law? Or is there anything?
VR: I was actually very interested in journalism and I got my undergraduate degree in journalism and had always been a writer. I wrote poems, I wrote short stories, I wrote a play in Latin. So that didn’t change, I still wanted to be a writer. It felt like not a lot changed within my household. As I said, or eluded too, there were a lot of other things going on in my household that were far more important than, at least to us, than what was going on, on the outside. There were very significant issues that we were dealing with. My mother was very distracted, if you will, from what was going on on the outside. So we had significant things going on inside my home. But I do remember, so that was in ’67, and Martin Luther King was killed in April of ’68, I think. That hit me hard. That hit me hard. I think that there were a lot of discussions at school about race relations immediately in the Fall of ’67. I think those came about because of who the principal was of this now consolidated school. And my principal was Joseph Dulin who was the first black principal of a Catholic school in the United States and he was militant, he was militant. At one point — I think I had graduated already — but at one point Dulin and others had taken over and barricaded and chained because they felt the Archdiocese was not paying enough attention to education, now that, in the city of Detroit, now that all these white people had exited. So Catholic education in Detroit following the riot had a very different population and Dulin was very aware of that, you know, because he was the first black principal to a school that comes into a high school that was all black. And so I think that he, he more than anybody else in my life at that time, really caused me to start thinking about race and about discrimination. And he made us feel that we were being discriminated against in our education by the Archdiocese of Detroit because the population had changed and there just wasn’t the same attention going to be given to our issues.
KD: So when you think about how he may have inspired you to consider those disparities and look at, and I know this is a whole other conversation, so I don’t want us to spend too much time, only if you want to. But the education system now in the city of Detroit and what young people are facing and all of the problems and how like academic achievement is not even on the checklist as far as what has been achieved. Which in my mind, especially as a youth advocate, gives me a sense of rage to know that our young people can’t even depend on having a decent education on their way out so they’re not prepared for life in the 21st century.
VR: Yes.
KD: So how? I’m trying to think of how to relate the two, because I think there is definitely a link between what was happening for you and where we are today. What would you say about that? Like how, how have things kind of progressed or regressed in a way that now, you know, on the other side, you know, we have thousands of young people that are impacted by decisions that are being made within the education system. Does that make sense?
VR: No, I understand exactly what you are saying and I think it is regrettable what has happened in education because in some ways it doesn’t feel much different than 1967, ’68, ’69. I think there was a time where it was possible to get a very good education in the city of Detroit. My –I’m 64 years old, my contemporaries who grew up here most of them went to Detroit public schools. They got great educations, they did well in college, they were competitive. You can’t help, you cannot help but accept, I think, that there is a real racial component to the quality of education. I think about for example the fix of cross-district bussing that people were talking about. As if, as if, you are not going to be able to improve education unless it is with white people.
KD: Right, right.
VR: Bring the white people back into Detroit and quality of the education is going to improve, ship us out to the suburbs where education is already of high quality. But there is that racial component to what happened in Detroit in the decline of the public schools and it’s directly connected, I think, to the exit of whites from the educational system. They exit and we can no longer depend on a quality education for our kids, and that began then and it is continuing. You know, we have teachers — and I have a view but I won’t express it — we have all of these teachers on strike right now and a lot of it has to do with class size and conditions in the schools that they say are deplorable that children shouldn’t be exposed to and that resonates; it has merit. But why are we talking about those things? Why are we taking about not having running water, faucets, shower facilities, rodents, not having adequate supplies; I mean, those things are just so basic. And they’re not available and they’re the same kinds of things we were talking about in Sixties, in the Seventies, and it hasn’t been sufficiently addressed. And it is going to be, I think, the main hindrance to attracting middle class families with children to this city. When you can get all the young millennials and people who are not interested in families and starting families that you want, but that’s not – but they’re going to be a transient population. You want to get people here who are invested, who care about education because they’re going to have children and who want to stay here, who want to be part of a community. That’s what you want and it’s going to be hard to get that unless there is some serious attention and investment given to education and public education. We can talk forever about charter versus public and what that has done to the public school system, and I don’t get that either because the Detroit Public Schools operates charter schools and that is all very mysterious to me. But there’s so much to be said about education. Once I started practicing law and I moved into Rosedale Park and I lived there and I raised two children there, and lived there from 1977 to 1997 and my daughter went to the Open School out on Telegraph and Seven Mile from K to eighth grade and then she went to Renaissance for high school and it was a great education and I would always monitor what friends, what the education was like for friends who had their kids in private schools and I felt that she was getting a very competitive education, but the Open School was a unique experience.
KD: Yeah, it was excellent.
VR: And we had to stand in line to get her into that school and it was just totally unique. It had a race balance that it tried to maintain. Parents were required to come in and put in X-hours a week or your kids couldn’t stay in the school. And it was just a wonderful, wonderful experiment and I had no complaints about Renaissance. But we were part of a, you know, we were part of a community and we were part — we lived in Rosedale Park and people — there were families, people were very concerned about education, they were immersed and that’s what you want. That’s what you want in all of the areas of Detroit in order to, for it to experience the kind of renaissance that everybody is hoping for. That’s not going to happen without the education system being overhauled.
KD: So we have a few more questions left and I think we’re ok with time.
VR: Okay.
KD: So I guess my first question is along the lines of, what would you say to future generations about your memories of Detroit before 1967, during and after? I think that’s the first question. Like what would you want them to know about that time in our city’s history? What’s most important?
VR: Um, I think it’s important for people to know that things are cyclical and that history is very informative. And for many of us who think that what is going on today is brand new and no one else has ever experienced it, it is, you know, it’s just a false sense of reality. And, so we have a history here, some of it very rich, some of it very, very troublesome, and I think it tells us there are some problems here that are endemic that need to be addressed or we’re going to remain in this cycle. What I don’t like that I’m seeing now — I love the resurgence, I love the renaissance, what I don’t — but there are problems in it, there are some problems that are very troubling. I don’t like that enough attention – I believe that there is not sufficient attention being giving to affordable housing. I do see all of the companies that are in the Detroit area that are coming back to downtown Detroit and hiring, I look at the makeup of the work force, and it looks very, very white to me. I go in all of the restaurants, to the entertainment venues and it looks very white to me. In some of our communities, they’re being transformed and I think that there certainly was a wish that whites be attracted to live in Detroit, to shop in Detroit, to use all of the entertainment venues and that is certainly happening. But my question is, at what cost? And I don’t know that – I think that a part of what — something else that needs to be a part of the discussion though is this, and that is the effect of the so called “War on Crime” that coincided with the riots that started in the mid Sixties. That “war on crime” decimated the black communities, it really did. And so now we have all these families that lost fathers to prison, because of some severe and harsh law enforcement policies and severe and harsh sentences and it really, it just tore our community apart and when do we recover for that? One of the affects now is that, we have so many black men with felony records and they can’t get jobs because of that. What are we going to do about that?
KD: It's not clear.
VR: So, all of these parts, they’re absolutely related, race riots, race uprisings, whatever you want to call it, the “War on Crime,” the exit of whites from communities — all of those things are related and they all need to be addressed in a way that is going to somehow repair — they just have to repair what has happened in the black community, or Detroit is not going to experience the kind of renaissance, the kind of inclusive renaissance that so many of us hope will happen.
KD: So this is my last question, and, because I didn’t want to sit down with you and not talk at least for a moment about your experience as a mediator in regards to the bankruptcy. Because that, that within itself, is another important turning point for the city. And I know, like, a number of people, and rightfully so, believe that, you know, the bankruptcy is a result of dysfunction that has existed within the city for, not just ten years, but, you know, forty and fifty years. Going back to this period in time, that you know, that we’re talking about today. Are there ways to maximize opportunities, like we talked about some of the ways in which there are some imbalances already, you know, the bubble of diversity among residents and work force development particularly for African American men, problems within the justice system and those imbalances. Like, how do you, on the other side, you know, of something like a bankruptcy for the city that had a great impact, how do you begin to move in a direction that is – that creates more inclusive opportunities for more people?
VR: Well, certainly I think that, I think that educational opportunities, and not just for higher ed in the university sense that we’re accustomed to thinking about, but educational opportunities to develop workforces need to be expanded. I know for example that, now we’re seeing just this resurgence of building and construction and because that was something that didn’t happen for a long time here, people were not interested so much in going into the skilled trades, the building trades, and that used to be a place where people could made a really solid living and raise a family, you know, and live in Detroit and have a very good quality of life. And now on a lot of these construction projects, as I understand it, they’re unable to find Detroiters with those kinds of skills. And so if there is a real commitment, I think, to making this an inclusive city and a city that tries to employ as much of its residents as possible, I think that that is one area that employers need to give some attention to, developing some apprentice programs, not so much — the focus doesn’t always have to be on a university education but creating other opportunities. I think also that I think that something has to be done to address the criminal records that are a bar to employment, and I know that in some instances an employer can get a credit or a tax break if it hires people who have criminal records. I don’t think that a lot of potential employers know about those tax breaks and I think that they have to be, they just have to be marketed in a different way. And I think employers have to feel like it is, this is someone that we could take a chance on because just getting that foot through the door is the hardest part, if somebody can get their foot through the door and, you know, as a federal judge and somebody who sentences people all the time, it’s one of the hardest things that I do. I just know that employment opportunities and a lack of them are a primary reason why people are recidivists and find themselves back in prison. And so what, what can we do? What can we do first of all to stop sending so many people to prison in the first place, and then what can we do to get them back integrated into their community, integrated into their families so that they’re not headed back to a prison as their next place to live. So I do think that employment opportunities and making it possible for people to create their own wealth in a legal way, they don’t have to engage in criminal activity for their wealth, is huge in this city, just removing the barriers to employment, maybe making it easier for people to expunge their criminal records if they don’t have violent crimes, and if they have otherwise shown that they’ve turned their lives around. So I think that that is – I think that that is going to be, I think that that is big. I think the other thing is housing and affordable housing and I know a lot is being done to remove the blight in the city. But I do think we have to make certain that when developers come in, that they are required, they are absolutely required to devote so much of their space, a certain percentage of it, to housing that is affordable. Affordable for, you know, a family that has a mother and a father and children. Affordable to a single parent with children. Affordable to people who are only making ten dollars an hour. There just has to be, what is affordable? And you have to look at your population, and it’s going to be a different number depending on what your population is. I know that there are cities that have made a decision that We’re going to wipe out homelessness within a certain time frame. I don’t know if I’ve heard of that kind of initiative in the city of Detroit and I think it would be a worthy initiative; there should not be people living on the street in this day in age.
KD: I agree.
VR: We have, I belong to a church that every winter there are a number of churches that set up what they call a rotating shelter and so for a week period, people who are homeless rotate from church to church to church, and it gives them a place to sleep and gives them three hot meals and we do entertainment and things in the evening but I’ve been doing this for about five years now and it is just very sad to see the same people showing up. You know sometimes people, you know, events happen in their lives, circumstances develop, they find themselves homeless but four years later?
KD: Right.
VR: They’re still rotating through shelters.
KD: Right.
VR: And so many of them, you know, are mentally ill and don’t have adequate treatment. There are just so many things that have to be attacked on so many levels, and, new buildings going up and new arena and that’s great and it’s glitz and it attracts a lot of people to the city and it does provide a lot of jobs. And all of those things are good and should continue but the real hard stuff, the stuff that isn’t glitzy, needs to be addressed.
KD: Where does the responsibility lie for that? For addressing those issues, like we can — I believe in personal responsibility, I believe in, if there are ways that I can help someone, if I can create an opportunity for someone, then it’s my responsibility to do that. Right? But how do you impact that? Create that kind of connection or make an impact on a larger scale where you are actually seeing that kind of result, you know. Is it policymakers, politicians making decisions, is it community members coming together? And there’s been, you know, because there’s so much division, you know, right now around things like water and education and everything that’s happening in Flint, how does a community come together? The way, and you know, it’s just a question I’m throwing out there I’m not expecting you to have the answer.
VR: Well, I do think that many pieces of this are part of a big picture that policy makers and leaders need to have. But there are so many small items and pockets in that big picture. You know I think about communities like Rosedale and Sherwood, where you have people that are very, very engaged in their community. And sometimes when you look at that big picture it seems absolutely overwhelming and I know, as having been the leader of a number of organizations, even in an organization which is doing something not on a grand scale, you have to break it down and break up and you have to find somebody who is interested in your pieces, and it may be just a little piece but if I can get somebody to do that little piece then they’ve contributed, and they feel they’ve contributed, and they haven’t been overwhelmed and you know a lot of people are not big picture people. They live in a community and they want their community to work, they want their community to function. Figure out how to break this big picture down into those kinds of concentrated focus efforts that can engage the entire community but in their space. The other thing, you know, is certainly money. Detroit needs a ton of money. I think about, I think about all of the wealth that is in this country, all the wealth that is possessed by people who have Detroit connections, you know the entertainers, the sports figures, and you know, just millions and millions and millions of dollars, I would love to see, you know, them come together and maybe, you know, school by school, you know, We’re going to make sure that this school has sufficient recreation, we are going to make sure that this school art programs, we’re going to make sure this school has a physical ed facility. That can be done on a school by school, case by case basis. I think that, you know, so many people — it’s easier not to think about things like that. It’s easier to just, you know, live your little life and not think about other things that have to be done and other people who may need help who aren’t as fortunate as us. And there just, I think, has to be a way to attract that wealth, to have people say, This is how I’m gonna use my money, and to know there is something, a small piece of the puzzle, that they could devote their wealth and attention to. And make a difference. But a place like Detroit which has so many issues, I do think the efforts that we see in so many communities and community groups, it’s huge, it’s big, it needs to be done and we can’t always depend on the politicians. And we can know, you and I sitting here can look at the city, and we can know what needs to be done but then where do you start?
KD: Right, Right. Well is there anything else you would like to share that I didn’t ask?
VR: No, that was a lot. That was a lot.
KD: I appreciate it. That was awesome.
VR: Thank you. Thank you
**WW: Hello. Today is January 31, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. I am sitting down with -
AC: Sister Ann Currier.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
AC: Thank you.
WW: Would you like to tell your story?
AC: I'm not sure what you want. First of all, I worked in Detroit. And my main reason for coming is because of the people I worked with. Trinity was always noted for the poor, and when the riot broke out, Father Curran opened up the church and the school for anyone that needed help. And they stayed there until they were - police cars were all over the place, and we went back and forth. The curfew was six o'clock for us, but we didn't abide by it. [laughter] We did as we pleased.
And we took care of them. We fed them. We did whatever we could for them. And I kind of think - I think the pastor at St. Agnes, Father Granger, must have called Father Curran - I think - and so people were ushered down that way, because we were noted for opening up our doors for anybody at any time.
We saw the fire, we saw the smoke, we saw the whole shooting batch, but the important things were the people. They came into the church, they came into the school, and we took care of them.
WW: About how many people?
AC: It's hard to say. Enough. They filled the place. But it was hard to say. We weren't thinking of numbers, we were just taking people as they came, and whatever their needs were, and helping them make telephone calls. If someone came for them, they went. Others came. That was it.
WW: What was the atmosphere like inside the church? Were the people in there afraid or anxious?
AC: Not at Trinity. Because it was called a port of entry. Trinity was a port of entry for people from all over the world. And people took care of Trinity, in the sense of the poor would not let anything happen to Trinity. I was there for 45 years, so I know.
WW: Did you expect any outbreak of violence in Detroit that summer, or did it surprise you?
AC: No. I didn't expect it, and I was probably surprised, because I think people should be peaceful.
WW: Did it change the way you look at Detroit?
AC: No. No. I stayed there. [laughter] After all that was over with, I stayed there. I was there until I came home - here. And that's only 10 years ago.
WW: Is there anything else you'd like to share? Any stories from that week?
AC: No. I think you've heard them all.
WW: All right. Thank you so much.
AC: You're welcome.
WW: Today is January 31, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. And I'm sitting down with -
JL: Sister Janet Lemon, IHM.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me. Would you like to share your story?
JL: Well, that summer I was at Marygrove studying for my master's degree, and we heard about the riots on TV. We could - and after a few days, you could hear some gunshots. But we had to go to class. The people that went to Wayne State, that lived outside of that area, their classes were canceled.
So anyway, we went to class, and we would turn on the TV to see what was going on around us. After a few days they called in the National Guard because the riot was spreading, and we were out walking around the campus in the evening, and a jeep came through with four soldiers in it. And they - three of them had guns. One was the driver. So we asked them why they were on our campus. We have a beautiful woods there at Marygrove. And they said, "Well, we're checking the woods to see if there's any snipers." I thought oh-oh.
So, then at the end of the week, I think it was on Saturday - Friday or Saturday, I can't remember which one - I don't think we had class on Friday, I'm not sure, but - some of us went to a center where they were giving out clothes for the people that were homeless. They were - their houses were burnt or something.
And so I went and helped - sorted - I sorted clothes. Some of the other sisters, after class, were asked to go to the courts and help write up the files, because there were so many arrests. So that's all I remember about it.
WW: What was the mood at Marygrove? Was it tense?
JL: Yeah, it was really tense. And it was hard to focus, you know, on what your classes, because we knew what was going on around us. So we didn't know if we would get involved, you know. But I think our campus was pretty well protected.
WW: Did this change the way you looked at the city?
JL: Yes. Yeah. It didn't feel safe anymore, you know. We wondering if we were going to be okay. So that's all I remember about the riots.
WW: Thank you so much.
JL: Okay.
WW: Hello. Today is February 7, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. I'm sitting down with -
PA: Sister Pat Aseltyne, IHM.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
PA: You're most welcome.
WW: Would you like to share your story?
PA: I would. In 1967 I was missioned at Our Lady of Lourdes at River Rouge. And we lived right across from the fire department. So in a sense, we had a ring-side seat in seeing the tanks go up and down the street. And River Rouge at that time was quite divided between black and white. There was a railroad that went through Coolidge and Jefferson, right near that corner.
We were offered an opportunity to volunteer wherever we could fit in, so I went down to the main police station in Detroit – and was given the job of answering telephones. People were calling in to try and find out where their loved ones were. They had been picking up mostly black people, if I recall right. And they were putting them on buses, because the jails were filled. And then they would put the names of these young men and boys in a book, and our job was to answer the phones, get the name of the person missing, and then look at these books to see if we could find them, so that we could let the people know, at least that we had found them.
There was a curfew in the city, as you know, it was six o'clock, and I was looking out our front window of our convent, and I saw a little old lady walking by, kind of hunched over, so I ran out because I wanted to warn her that there was a curfew. But when I approached her, I saw that it was not a little old lady. It was somebody carrying a bottle of liquid, which I – with a wick in it, which I recognized from the movies that I watched, that it was one of the things they had thrown – would throw into a house. So I ran back into the convent and called the police. I never did find out what happened after that.
I did hear some things about – one of the convents that I was in, I would hope that maybe somebody or I could do that – would find out which one – because a young man rang their doorbell frantically because he wanted a safe place to hide, because he was being chased by the police. And they did let him in, they let him hide, and the police did come. And somehow they got the police to leave. They wouldn't let them search the house.
And then as a result of this, I do remember too that I went to that convent and as a result of all the things that had been happening, we talked to the people that were in apartment buildings along the way, and found out that they were paying just an enormous amount of rent. And if they had known to look outside the city, or at least away from the middle of the city, they could have had much more comfortable places. So I say that in the sense that, it was one good thing that came out of all the rioting.
And I also am aware – I've been down Grand River and Twelfth Street and all that. Even at this point it still is a mess down there. None of the – I shouldn't say none – but few places have been built up. But it's still pretty bad. I would hope that someday they will do something about that.
We had a cook who was black, and it was a surprise to me that she was apologizing for her people. And that kind of grated on my sense, that it wasn't – it was – I felt it was the fault of the people who were not helping the black people, that it was our fault, and not her fault. And we used to drive her home so she would be protected, getting out of our neighborhood. That's about all I remember.
I do recall that my family – the first I heard of this was when I went back to my family. It was a Sunday, I believe, we were coming back from a short vacation. And my family told me about this, and they were very upset. My family were very political, so it wasn't a big surprise to them that something did come to a head. And I remember that we had a lot of compassion for the people who were hurt at this time.
WW: Did it change the way you looked at Detroit?
PA: Well, I had a great love for Detroit, and I respected Detroit. As I said, my parents were into politics. My dad was a precinct captain, and so we were kind of brought up that way, that we loved the city. We used to go down, even as a little child, we lived right off Grand River. We'd get on the streetcar, the old streetcar, and go down to pay the insurance, my brother and sister and I. And I feel bad about Detroit now, because of living there. I had also lived at St. Rose in the east side of Detroit and loved it, because – you know, people are people. And actually, I think you can help people much better when they don't feel like they have everything, and there can be a much better rapport among people when there isn't the rich and the poor. We came to a happy medium, or at least a more considerate medium.
WW: Thank you so much. Is there anything else you'd like to share?
PA: Well, I think too that, as a result of some of these things that I've experienced – I just spent twenty years in Houston, Texas, taking care of children who were - you know, were in poor families and needed to be away from their families – and I also got a chance to – to be with their parents, and at that point in my life I felt it was a privilege to be able to do that. You know, some people think that – oh, it's very difficult to be in a situation where there's a lot of poor people, or where there's great need. But to me it was – and I think maybe I felt that way pretty much all my life - that it was a privilege to care for them , for people. And I think it was the build-up that we had in our religious life and our experiences that brought us to having a lot of compassion and empathy for people.
WW: Thank you so much.
PA: Thank you.
WW: Today is February 7, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit '67 Oral History Project. And I am sitting down with –
MF: Mary Ann Flanagan, a sister of the Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
MF: It's nice to be here.
WW: Would you like to share your story?
MF: Yes, I would. I was a young sister in nineteen sixty - seven? eight, was it? And I was studying at the University of Detroit. But it was a Sunday, and so my parents had come to get me, to spend the day with them, and they were driving me back to St. Gregory's Convent in Detroit. And as we were coming in from Dearborn – which was just a regular, steady drive, as usual—all of a sudden we began to notice smoke that was kind of ahead of us.
And my dad was a little bit concerned about continuing on, but we did, and he returned me to St. Gregory's. But at that time we began to realize that we had kind of driven right into the center of a lot of agitation and a lot of activity that wasn't usually there in that neighborhood. So I entered St. Gregory Convent door and the sisters had said, "How did you get in? There's a riot going on right around us!" And so they took me up to the rooftop of St. Gregory's Convent, and from that vantage point, I was able to see – you know, I'm not even sure of the correctness of the street, but it possibly could have been Woodward. It was a major, major street, and what we saw was just like – sofas were just walking down the street like bugs. But under them would be people carrying these sofas from the furniture stores along the route there that had been—windows had been broken and everything had been taken out.
So it was a strange, strange, sight, like these walking sofas. I will never forget it. But also, as we were learning from the radio—a description of what was actually happening, the seriousness—truly began to come upon us, that this was going to be a real crisis for our city.
I grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, which is kind of well-known. I grew up under the vantage point of Governor Hubbard, who was –
WW: Mayor?
MF: Pardon me, Mayor Hubbard, who was a notable racist. In fact, I went through twelve years of Catholic education at Sacred Heart School and had never met an African American ‘til after I graduated from that school. Because it was such a racist city I never really moved outside of Dearborn and had no association, until I entered the congregation and then began education— graduate education at the University of Detroit.
So it was just a striking memory I will never lose, from that day. Kind of the initiation, I think, of the violence, was first of all just – the stealing and the breaking into places, and then just the walking of the sofas down the road. Then later we gathered—it had become violent, and further down into the city there were the fires and the ransacking of homes and so on. It was a sad day.
I had a certain understanding of being one of those racist individuals, though, who never participated in any kind of interaction with the black community. Why they would be—why that community would be so angry at us? It was understandable, really, to me. By that time I—as a sister, had done a lot of study on racism and systemic violence and so on. So—but at that time, it was just a very shocking day for me to see this acted out. And as I say, I will never forget that day. That would be my story.
WW: Where was St. Gregory's?
MF: You know, golly—it was some fifty years ago, I'd have to look on a map to see its exact location. It was on the west side of Detroit. One of the bigger Catholic parishes and during the summer many sisters who did not teach there resided there, when they would be going off to graduate education at U of D or Marygrove and so on. I'm sorry I can't help you with that detail of the geography. I'm sure I knew it then, but I don't know it now. [laughter]
WW: So the rest of the time did you just stay hunkered down?
MF: We did. We—it was like, we knew the city was kind of exploding in its own way, and so I recall that we did not go on to school, graduate school, that Monday or into that week, 'til it had kind of been agreed that the violence of it was over. But it—it was a—truly, a frightening experience. One that you could have an intellectual appreciation of, but one that emotionally was still—you were on the underside of history for the first time, and you were kind of kept imprisoned. Which would have been what many African American persons do experience in our society—did at that time, especially, and still do in some ways.
WW: Did it change the way you saw the city? Did you feel comfortable in the city afterwards?
MF: I would have to say, following that summer I was missioned to Atlanta, Georgia, so I actually did not stay in the city itself. But when I got to Atlanta, my new ministry there, I was constantly being asked about— "You were in Detroit, you're from Detroit." Everyone knew that this was a very signal event that—of a racist explosion, as it were, that for many people was frightening. I don't think, because of my—hopefully, my initial commitment to fight racism—if I had stayed in the city, I would have asked to work in the city.
Actually, I later was a professor at the Marygrove College, which is pretty much an African American community there, and I was never frightened. I was not ever frightened to go there, and actually even I was there the night before one of our sisters was murdered in that very neighborhood. I was the last person to see her, as we both were teaching evening classes at Marygrove. And I went to my car, and she went—kind of through the neighborhood to go back to her home, and she was murdered that night.
So—I think she was a woman who was convinced she would not leave the city because of its violence, and its violence killed her. But she was a witness to an effort toward integration and toward a statement. And my congregation, in respect of her values, told the judge, when they had caught the murderer, that the congregation pleaded that he would never be given the death penalty, as a statement of how we believed that too many social circles, too many social systems, gave shape to that young man, as part of a racist society.
But it did leave me changed. My awareness of that, those historical events, they were very few, but maybe they were more strident because of my growing up in an absolutely, totally white background, and being almost embarrassed by it. Remembering my father was one of the first leaders of the diocese to try to have circles of communication in Dearborn about racism itself, and some of his lifetime friends were both shocked and angry with him for doing this.
WW: Thank you so much.
MF: You're welcome, you're welcome. I kind of—those are broad-circled ideas but I hope it gives the Society something of a feel for it.
WW: It certainly did.
WW: Hello. Today is January 31, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project. And I am sitting down with—
MG: Sister Marie Gatza.
WW: Thanks so much. And we are in Monroe, Michigan.
MG: That's right. I wasn't one of the sisters who were actually present on the scene where the riots were happening in Detroit, at that time. However, I was working with Sister Margaret Brennan, who was the president of the IHM congregation at that point. And since Margaret died just a few months ago, I felt that I was getting a little nudge from her to go and say something about what she was doing, and what we were concerned about at the time that the riots were happening in the Detroit area.
So, our televisions were on, and we were on the phones contacting, or trying to contact a number of our sisters who had— who were living in the convents in the area, and teaching in the schools in the area, concerned for their safety. So we saw on the television pictures of the rioting and the terrible wreckage and destruction that was occurring, and we could hardly believe that was happening in our wonderful city of Detroit.
But basically, we wanted to let the sisters know that we were praying for them, and that we were concerned for their safety, and that we were hopeful that the confusion that was going on would be short-lived and that everything could be restored to safety again. So I just wanted— I thought maybe it would be important for you to understand that it was the whole community that was involved, as well as our sisters who were directly on the scene where the riots were happening, and we're so sorry that all of that occurred, but that's part of the history.
WW: Were you surprised by the outbreak in '67?
MG: I think I was surprised, but as I look back on it, I could see that things were coming to a head in some way, and would probably have to break loose some time or other.
WW: Did it change the way you looked at Detroit?
MG: I think it made us feel closer to Detroit, in a way, more caring, because these were our people. We had loads of students in the area, who were concerned about their parents, and we were connected with them. They were our brothers and sisters in the area, so what was happening to them was happening to us too. We were hurting as they were hurting, and we hoped for better times for them.
WW: Thank you so much.
WW: Hello. Today is January 31, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I'm in Monroe, Michigan. And I am sitting down with—
JG: Sister Jean Ann Gorman.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. Will you tell your story?
JG: The day of the riot I was coming home from Canada, from a class reunion, and the first thing I saw was a tank on the expressway. I was taking a Sister back to Marygrove.
So we turned the radio on, found out that there was disorder in Detroit. Drops off sister and turned back, went back to St. Boniface Convent on Twelfth Street. And that night we had fires going around— homes on fire. For the whole week we had fires going on, and the children were frightened, and the parents who brought the children to school. We kept the school open overnight, and we had big tables with pillows on, where the parents could rest. We had a daycare during the year, so we had about eight or ten cots that the little kids slept on. Other children slept on the floor, on blankets and things that we had.
One of the priests and two Sisters stayed up all night, for the whole time of the riot. And we were there in case anything did happen, the parents— we would alert them before anything drastic would happen to them.
Another thing that was interesting was that all the food that was being collected from other places was being dropped off there, so during the daytime we had distribution of food. We had it on shelves, in the cupboards, so we could tell what we were giving the people. The first thing we asked them was, How many children do you have, and what are their ages? Because baby food and other foods had to be separated from the regular food. So during the day we had many, many people that came in for that. Because there were no stores, no gas stations, nothing open down there. Nothing.
And then we were told, when one of the men came in, he said he had five children, and they ranged from eight to thirteen. And we fixed up the grocery bags for him. We fixed up two large grocery bags for him. And when he reached out to pick up the bags to carry out to the car, his arm had been burned, and it was just a draining sore from his elbow, above his elbow down to his wrist. It was awful-looking, so we see if we have any kind of medication that we could give him.
And we said, Just a minute, we'll carry— he was going to carry those out. We said, No, we'll get somebody to help you carry them out. And he looked at me and he said, "Sister, when you love your kids, you can do a lot of hard things." And I thought that was— I never forgot that. Man, how much he loved those children. That he could do that for them.
Another thing that we had that was interesting, there was a woman that came down and looked at clothes, and she kept picking up clothes and putting them down, picking up clothes and putting them down. So we asked her if we could help her for sizes or for what she needed. She said, "I lost my children." What do you mean, you lost your children? She said, "On Sunday, I had their breakfast ready for them. I fed them. And the oldest one was about twelve years old. I only had to go down around the corner to pick up my mother to go to church. When I came back from picking up my mother, there were yellow tapes around our house and they wouldn't let me go in. And there was a police car there." The policeman asked her if the children were old enough to tell what their ages were. "Oh yes," she said, “They'd all know their name and their age.” And he said, “Well, we took some people down— an ambulance went by and they picked up some people and took them to the Receiving Hospital." "Receiving Hospital? What happened to them?” she said. He said, “I don't know."
So she said she went to Receiving— she walked to Receiving Hospital, because she couldn't drive. They wouldn't let the cars go— any transportation down there at that time. When she got to Receiving Hospital she asked there and they said, No, nothing there, but— go to the morgue. And the poor mother walked over to the morgue, and her children were not there.
So this was the second or third day she couldn't find her children. And she was just frantic, so we got a girl from Wayne State who happened to be a volunteer. And we asked her if she was a social worker, if she could help her. Well, they finally did find the children. What happened was, her husband, who worked nights, his mother lived on the Eastside of the city. And when he heard about the riot, he went to his mother to see if she was okay. Then he went over to pick up his children. He got the children but he couldn't find his wife. She's out searching for the children. So they were separated. But no telephones, no communication was available, so we waited for the three days, but we finally did— the social helper did finally get some way to contact her husband and they found out the children were okay.
That was one big thing. And then another thing was we had all of the Sisters in the area were asked to stay at Boniface, to be together. Now our sleeping quarters— we took mattresses off of the bed and put them on the floor, and put blankets over the top, over the springs and things, so we'd have accommodations at least for them to lie down someplace. I slept on a chaise lounge—a summer piece of furniture— in the parlor of St. Boniface.
And one morning waking up with a tank going up the steps, by the steps of the church which was right next to the convent. We managed there pretty well as far as our food and everything was concerned. We had to cut back on everything, because what they brought from their convent was okay, and we got a call that told us to go to Cass Corridor and pick up the Sisters at St. Patrick's there. And we were not allowed out on the streets so one of the priests contacted a policeman and he got a car and there were two other cars, there were our two cars and another policeman that was following us to go over there to pick up the Sisters that were there. We found out there was a sniper in their basement while we were there. We also told the Sisters to get their medicine, any medicine they had or just overnight things that they would absolutely have to have, because we didn't have room the in car for a suitcase and all those kinds of— we wouldn't have time to stop for that either. We just had to drive down the driveway, get in the car fast and keep going. We had to keep the cars going to get them back over to the convent.
But that was some of the experiences that I had when I was at Boniface.
WW: Did '67 surprise you?
JG: Did what?
WW: The outbreak of violence. Did it surprise you?
JG: Oh yes. Yes. We were very much surprised. We never had anything like that happen in the area before, even with the inner city children, we never had any problem, big problems.
WW: Did it change the way you looked at Detroit?
JG: No, I was brought— well, yeah, I would say in how I looked at the city. But Detroit— I was brought up in Detroit, but on the Westside of Detroit, and I wasn't conscious of the fact that there was this much disorder down there, and when my father dropped me off the first time, the day dropped me off, he said, "I spent my whole life trying to keep you out of a place like this," where I was going to teach down in that area. But I loved teaching down in that area. It was refreshing.
WW: Thank you so much.
JG: Thank you.
WW: Hello. Today is January 31, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit '67 Oral History Project, and I'm in Monroe, Michigan. I am sitting down with—
MH: And my name is Sister Marie Hopkins. My voice is awful.
WW: No, it's not.
MH: How well do you know Detroit? Do you know where Marygrove College is? All right. I taught at the college. I lived at the convent. Do you know where Meadowbrook is? Out at Oakland? The concert center?
WW: Uh-hm.
MH: Oh I'm glad you know all this, okay. There was a concert going to be held. And I was going to go to it and I had two others from Marygrove and me. That would be three of us. And my good friend had been transferred from Marygrove down to be principal at Girls Catholic Central on Parsons, off of Woodward. So you kind of get that picture.
So we went down to Parsons— we went down there, picked her up, and we scooted up I-75 to Oakland and went to the concert. Concert ends, we leave, we're coming down I-75 and I said, “You know what? I would like to cut over to Woodward now and see what Woodward's like at eleven o'clock at night.” So we scooted over, and I said, “My glory, there isn't a car, there's nothing here!” I didn't know it was that bare at night.
And the next thing we knew, we came to the corner where— what's the name of that store? Demmer's (?). Demmer's is on a corner. I don't know if you can remember that; you're too young. And here stand two soldiers with guns. Well, that scared the living daylights out of us! And we were so dumb, we didn't even think to put on the radio and find out what was going on.
I said to the car, we've got to get Marilyn home, down to Parsons. We're almost there. So we kept going and now we began to see soldiers here and there, holding guns. Still didn't know what was going on. And so we got to Parsons and dropped her off at the convent there, and I scooted over to Hamilton, and I was going to take Hamilton up to Six Mile. We came to the first stoplight and we got the red, and I stopped, and a motorcyclist— not a policeman, not a soldier— pulled up beside us and he yelled, "Get the hell off the street!" and we yelled, What's going on?
At that the light changed, and he took off. We still know nothing. I kept going to Six Mile and back home. When I got to Marygrove Convent, everyone was tense and upset. Now, next to the convent there's a wooded area. Half of that property is wooded. And we had been told there might be a fire in it, so we were to sign up and take turns staying up all night just to check the woods to make sure there was no fire. So that was my first night of the riots. And didn't know a thing until we got home to the convent.
WW: Wow.
MH: That's it, there.
WW: What did you do the rest of the week? Stay hunkered down?
MH: Say again?
WW: For the rest of the week did you just stay at the convent?
MH: Oh yeah. We stayed right there, and we really monitored the woods, day and night, for a few days there. And other than that, if you remember, nobody came down Six Mile. And really, our area was not touched in any way. But we didn't know that was going to happen. So that's the end of my story.
WW: Just a couple quick questions. Did this change the way you viewed the city?
MH: Did what?
WW: Did '67 change the way you looked at Detroit? Did you still feel comfortable in the city?
MH: Well, I was never a Detroiter. I came from Flint, and I would say, as far as fear, I just thought, this is a big city, and that's what happens.
WW: Is there anything else you would like to add?
MH: And?
WW: Is there anything else you would like to add?
MH: No dear, that's the end of my tale.
WW: Thank you so much.
WW: Hello, today is January 31, 2017. My name is William Winkel this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project and I am sitting down with—
ML: My name is Sister Mary Laubacher.
JL: My name is Sister Jean Laubacher.
WW: Thank you both so much for sitting down with me, would you like to tell your story first?
ML: We are blood sisters. I lived at Marygrove during the summer of the riots, and I was studying at Wayne State University. I had spent that Sunday afternoon over in the library. When I came to supper at the convent, I saw how crowded the dining room was. Then when I asked about it, they said, Didn’t you hear what is going on? The sisters in the neighboring convents— and there was few of them in each of the convent even over the summer time— had been asked to come over for safety reasons to Marygrove, but they did go back to the convent later in the evening. The next day I called a man from Dearborn who was working on a project with me, and I had material all laid out in the library, so I called him and asked him if he would like to work on it, since we didn’t have class at Wayne State. He took up my offer, and came at one o’clock in the afternoon, I don’t remember the man’s name, but he sat there with his head bowed down, and kept repeating, “Did you see Livernois, did you see Livernois?” The poor man was traumatized. He had come up Livernois, had gone to school at St. Cecilia’s, and on the way to Marygrove, he saw all those stores, especially the furniture stores that were burning and gun stores. Where people had purchased furniture on a layaway system or our credit system and they wanted their bills burned so they wouldn’t be asked to pay their bills. But we didn’t accomplish anything that Monday. The following Wednesday we went back to class. There were about five African Americans in our class and the professor nicely invited us to talk about the riots instead of the work at hand. There were two reports that I remember so distinctly. One of them was a woman who said— a black lady— “I looted the way everybody else did.” And she said, “When I went into the store on Monday, I saw young black woman over at the refrigerated section of the store, pilling her grocery cart with gallons and gallons and gallons of milk”. She said that woman couldn’t have had a big family, maybe she was going to give the milk to other friends, or maybe it was just a symbol to her of the first time she could have everything that she wanted, at one time. Another man told us, that a gas station on a corner run by a white man had been targeted. But next to a gas station, there was a small mom-and-pop grocery store, and the man who managed this store gave back people credit, and didn’t charge them right the way, he let them pay as they could, and in order to spare that grocery store that gas station was not torched. Those were the two anecdotes that I remember from that day, and that’s just about all I have to say.
WW: Did you stay on the campus that entire week?
ML: Did I see?
WW: Did you stay on the campus?
ML: At Wayne State?
WW: Marygrove.
ML: Oh, at Marygrove. Yes. We were safe. That first Sunday afternoon, I remember Sister Hanora who was the president stood up at the end of the meal, and told us that some people wanted the gates to Marygrove locked and she said, “No, we are not going to have the gates locked, because if any of our buildings are torched the fire engines won’t be able to get through to help out.” So, the gates were not locked, but I understand there were armored cars at gates of Wyoming and on Six Mile to prevent people from coming in.
JL: What about the one that saved our church?
ML: Oh, I heard that when the people who were causing fires got near St. Agnes church, some of the black men who were catholic put their arms out in front of the church and hollered “Don’t touch my church, don’t touch my church” [laughing], over and over again. They certainly didn’t want their church burned. I just heard that by hearsay.
WW: Did all the unrest changed the way you looked at Detroit?
ML: Did?
WW: Did the unrest in ’67 changed the way you looked at Detroit?
ML: Well, yes. I don’t know how to answer that. It made me certainly more sympathetic towards the black cause, and we had a number of African American students who came to the college. And many of them, when they gave talks in class, used poor grammar or poor annunciation, and I could feel the white girls looking at me as much as to say aren’t you going to do anything about that. But the black girls were commuters, they weren’t residents on campus, and it was hard to get them to correct their speech or their grammar. But I also knew when they got to a classroom of black students, they would be more readily accepted than a white teacher, and so we lived through that change. Of sixty-eight black people for 1968, that was the motto, and they recruited sixty-eight black girls. Not necessarily from Detroit, some of them were from out of state, and those girls lived on campus with the white girls. I roomed with them.
WW: How long did you stay in the city after that?
ML: Oh, I don’t know. I just hoped for the best.
WW: How long did you stay in the city after that?
ML: Until 1974, and then I went to Lansing.
WW: Thank you so much.
ML: You’re welcome.
JL: Well, my story isn’t that profound, and it will be shorter. I that summer stayed at St. Francis de Sales, which was on Fenkell and maybe Wyoming or somewhere around there. And that evening we had been at Meadowbrook for a program, so we didn’t know what was going on, and we got to Detroit we noticed there was a lot going on. Anyway one of the sisters that we lived with there had a relative or a nephew that worked at the jail. And he asked her if she could get some sisters that would go and help with the clerical work that had to be done. So we had a police escort, and when we got out of the car, there were bus-loads of black people, they were all hanging out of their window, like this. So anyway, we had a guard, so we did our work, I don’t remember what we did. But anyway around twelve o’clock we were finished, so we had a police escort back to St. Francis de Sales, and I remember going so fast down John Lodge with the lights off, getting to our destination, and when we got there, the police got out, and had their guns ready so that we could get into the convent safely.
WW: Where was the work, the clerical work you did for the police department, where was that at?
JL: At the jail, I guess. Yeah, at the jail.
WW: And what was the clerical work that you had to do?
JL: I think we had to— you know, I don’t remember what it was, but I think to keep track of their names perhaps. I don’t know.
WW: Was it just that one day or—?
JL: It was just that one night.
WW: Are there any other memories you would like to share?
JL: No, I was taking class at Marygrove, but we couldn’t go for few days.
WW: Did ’67 changed the way you looked at the city?
JL: No, I don’t think so. More you know, knowing the problems of the black people, you felt sorry for them. But I don’t think it changed my thinking. It’s just too bad it happened. Those poor people, we still have them in the inner cities, so.
WW: Alright, thank you both so much.
ML: Later that week, I was talking to one of my advisees, and she was laughing and said that on Sunday afternoon when her father saw what was happening— and they lived in the Marygrove area— he packed up his wife and kids let them all go up north to their cabin. But she laughed and said, “He let me stay with a neighbor so I can go to class.” Julie Valenti her name was, she thought her father was too impulsive and acted too quickly. He didn’t know, but his neighborhood would be torched.
WW: Well, let’s finish up them, again thank you both so much.
MD: Good afternoon, today is Tuesday, December 6, 2016. I am in Monroe, Michigan, and this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's '67 Oral History Project. And I am sitting down with—
SH: Sister Sharon Holland.
MD: Yes. And where were you—when and where were you born, Sharon?
SH: I was born in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1939.
MD: Okay. And what was your neighborhood like growing up in Pontiac?
SH: It was a nice neighborhood. Residential. Every street had an Indian name. We knew some of the neighbors – not everybody. There were people, some in the neighborhood I went to school with, but—wasn't overly involved with people in the neighborhood, but we knew the immediate neighbors.
MD: Okay. Was it integrated?
SH: I would say that the neighborhood was not integrated. Progressively, the school was. The high school more because there was just one public high school. The grade school, probably not, because the African Americans pretty much lived in another area of the city, so their schooling would have been according to where they lived.
MD: Okay. And moving forward a little bit, how did you first hear about what was happening in 1967?
SH: During the summer, or part of the summer at least, of 1967, I was living in Detroit—I think at St. Gregory's convent—going to summer school in the city. And I don't remember the first moment I knew it was going on, but suddenly everything was going on around us and we knew that—gradually found out things had started, I think down around St. Agnes. But it was just, when it was happening.
MD: What did it feel like during that week? What did the community around you feel like?
SH: I - I think it must have felt pretty insecure. I know we didn't have school. They had army vehicles and that parked around in the parking area around the school where we usually went—or in the area where we usually went to school. I remember there were requests for different kinds of help, and I think that I was about ready to go help—I think at the jail, they needed help typing up stuff, and I could do that—but it didn't happen. I think some people went, but I don't think I ended up going, so it may have been later, when they didn't need as many people. But I was going to do that.
I think the thing that sticks in my mind most is—well, there was a certain anxiety about shooting in the neighborhood around the convent, and whether shots could come through the windows. They had police, if I remember correctly, on the roof of the building across from the school. They were afraid of snipers being on the school roof, or some of those places around, so there were police—watch kind of activity, all around in the neighborhood.
I guess the other thing that really sticks in my mind was seeing the fires that were down around Livernois, and the looting. They were things completely out of my experience, to see people looting stores and carrying off TVs and whatever. I'd never heard of such a thing, so it was—an impression has lasted.
MD: Do you remember if there was a change in how the students were feeling?
SH: You know, I don't. I don't remember how soon we went back to school. Almost everybody that I was studying with were sisters, and some had been, I suppose, involved in—somebody else said some were asked to go and help out with processing juveniles who had been arrested and whose families didn't know—Monica was telling me that, I don't remember that, but—I’m sure we must have talked about it after we started school again, but I just—I don't remember.
MD: Okay. Some people refer to it as riots, or rebellions, or—singular—or any other terminology. Do you have any say in what it should be called?
SH: Well, there probably should be another word. I recall that the word most frequently used at the time was "riots." The whole disorder kind of thing. But reflecting back on it, we begin to learn a lot about the city that we didn't know about the city, and the—the situation of African Americans in the city that I was ignorant of. I lived first in Pontiac and then I came to the convent and lived in Monroe, and there was not an awareness of the kind of thing that would make the city boil over. So—
MD: How do you think what happened in 1967 affected the city then, and possibly also today?
SH: Well, I'm sure—you know, I didn't stay in the city, so I didn't live with—I didn't live with the results, but I have a feeling it probably engendered additional fear and anxiety, probably on the part of everybody, in different ways. I don't think I would have known it at the time, but I think now, probably there was never enough done to try to heal relationships, to build better relationships, between the various ethnic and cultural groups in the city.
You know, that's a thought after a long time, and looking back, I still haven't lived in Detroit, so I don't have the same first-hand experience of what the relationships are. But more and more, as we learn about racism, the more I become aware that probably the things that—it’s hard to know what should have been done, but we haven't healed relationships, we haven't built relationships as well. Haven't learned enough about other cultures. And had the kind of encounters where you come to know people and it overcomes fear.
Realize a lot depends on people's background and what their experience of another race has been. If it's been positive, you're easy. If it's been—you've been programmed to something negative— I'd say at home I wasn't programmed in any negative way, but you don't reflect on everything in the same way when you're young. I was thinking back. We had a woman who did, once a week, did some housekeeping. My mother wasn't well and she came in once a week and helped with the cleaning and that. Lovely person. We'd come home from school and have lunch at the same time with her. My dad was from the south, and if he was home, which was rare, he didn't eat with us that day.
Now I never asked about it, but my guess is that maybe he wasn't comfortable. Or maybe he knew she wouldn't be comfortable. I don't know. But it sticks in my mind as another thing. But he would go down to where she lived and deliver things at Christmas time, and he belonged to the—I don't know if it was the— what's the name— NAACP. I don't know if he would have belonged to it, or collaborated with it—
MD: As an ally?
SH: Yeah. He was in public life, and he was associated with—with trying to do things right, I think, so. That's sort of a far ramble from Detroit, but you're affected by what you grow up with. But we had black students in high school, and that was good. I mean, it didn't appear to me to be a problem. But very few at Marygrove when I went there. Now the Hispanics and African Americans would be the majority there, so things change.
But I realize there's a long way to go in race relations that I was less conscious of then than I would be now, as we study more about racism, and the structural aspects of it, and how it's all related, so that housing and education and health care and all of those things are impacted, together.
MD: What lessons can we learn from the city of Detroit around what happened in 1967? This is our final question.
SH: What can we learn. Whatever it is, I don't think we've learned it. Well, of course, Detroit hasn't exploded like some other cities, and, please God, won't, but I think there have been a lot of efforts. There are efforts in the city to build the relationships. But the things that we're seeing in some of the police things, of black/white, and shootings, and that kind of thing, and the rising up, in other cities, and the states, make me wonder if we don't have a lot, as a nation, to do, of trying to deepen our understanding of racism, of racial tensions, of prejudices. All sorts of things. But did we learn? I'm sure we learned some. And again, I was removed from the city. There was a whole big report published, wasn't there? After the—I think. That was supposed to, maybe, bring out some of the learnings, but I don't remember when it came out, or the name of it. But that probably tried to bring out some of it. I guess I'm— in a way, been too far removed from the city to really have the pulse of it.
MD: That's fair. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us today.
SH: You're very welcome.
MD: And once again, just to be clear, this is Maddie Dietrich interviewing, also with—
CG: Celeste Geddert.
WW: Hello. Today is February 7, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. I'm sitting down with—
DC: Sister Diann Cousino.
WW: Thank you for sitting down with me today. Would you like to share your story?
DC: I would. I have kind of forgotten it, but the impact of the experience just never leaves your mind. So I'm going back to Sunday, July 23, 1967, and my mother was a widow at that time, with nine children, and we were going to— she was picking me up at St. Martin's convent on the lake, and she had to drive through Jefferson to go to Newport, Michigan, where we were having a family reunion. And everything was normal. It was a sunny day, and we saw our cousins.
Then it was time to come home, so we left the family and came through Jefferson and I just couldn't believe my eyes. There were young men with bats and balls and rocks, and throwing them in the storefront windows, and others were running in the stores, just grabbing stuff. I didn't know what was going on, and I was trying to hope that my mom could remain peaceful and we didn't want to alarm the children in the car.
So then she took me all the way to St. Martin's and I was worried about her going home. But I didn't know— it just shocked me so much that this was happening in our own nation, in our own country, in our own city, and I taught in Detroit, at Jesu, and I just couldn't imagine, because we had good relationships there with people. I just couldn't understand what was going on there.
And in our journal it says because of the economic riots, they called it, there was no Bible School, because this was in the summer. But I was attending Wayne State, and we wanted to help out— the sisters in our convent. We called the police to see if we could help out at Deaconess Hospital. They said, No, Sisters, we don't want to jeopardize your safety. So they said, Just pray and just hope that this blows over.
But we were hearing gunshots, and machine guns, and we learned later that a policeman died at Jefferson and St. Jean.
Then on Wednesday, July 26, we decided to brave it out and go to Wayne State, which is where we were taking classes. And we had food and clothing and things, but this was terrible, to go down Jefferson. I can still see it, the— the army reserves were on top of the building with guns, to protect the city. And Belle Isle was protected. All the people they wanted to deter were sent to Belle Isle, and they had guards down the street of Belle Isle.
And then that wasn't enough. Then a tank came down the street. So going to class that day was really scary. We didn't know what was going to happen. We had heard there were problems in Detroit, and so— it was quite an experience. And when I taught at Jesu, it was pretty much an all-white school, and when I left, it was pretty much an all-black school. But we had a good principal and we had good education for the children, and so that went smooth, but those years were very stressful, not knowing for sure.
You know, we didn't even know what caused it. We just came upon it, so.
WW: Did it change the way you looked at the city?
DC: Yeah, I would have to say yes, because it had me asking questions, like, was there a different way of teaching? And I remember one of our— we had superintendents that were IHMs, and I remember when Sister Anna May came to— she brought a new series of books with us, to teach from, and— this shows you how naive I am, but she wanted us to present them to the children, so I did. And she didn't tell us anything, and she looked at the children and they didn't notice anything. Well, those books had more ethnic groups in them. They started having more black children and Spanish, and so on. So it was an introduction of changing some of our ways of things.
But we just— I guess, from the very beginning of our IHM community, we believed that every person was important. And the Sister brought this education system from Belgium, and it was like everyone was ready and everyone was important and you didn't have to get all As to be rewarded. It was your character. And I think we strived to do that in our teaching. But it did carry with me. I went on to Wayne State and I enjoyed all the ethnic people, but when I got to Marygrove later I got scared, because some of those people were— I wasn't sure. And I could feel the tension in some of the classrooms. But my teacher, Sister Jackie Conn, tried to— she wasn't supposed to do this, but she'd bring in a whole chest of food that we could cook there. You could make Taco Bells and tacos and you don't have to have a lot of— we just had a crockpot and that type of thing. But I noticed that really broke the ice. We all had to bring something to eat during our class. And there's something about food. And then we had to mix with different groups all the time, so it was pretty good.
But it did change my thinking about things, because I never knew. I grew up and I wasn't— I didn't know about race or anything. It didn't cross my mind. But that really— that was really scary, because you didn't know how safe you were. I guess that's the whole thing. We tried to make it safe for our children.
WW: Thank you so much.
WW: Hello. Today is February 7, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. I'm sitting down with —
AC: Ann Crimmins, IHM.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
AC: You're welcome.
WW: Would you like to share your story?
AC: Yes. It's been interesting, since the invitation that I'm finding things come back. In 1965, I went to St. Charles in Detroit to teach grades four, five, and six. St. Charles, still actually, the church is still located about three blocks east of Grand Boulevard, and between Lafayette and Kerchival.
We had probably, the student body was about 50 percent black, from right around the neighborhood, and a significant number of white families living in Indian Village, which is about six or seven blocks away. My sense - I enjoyed teaching. I enjoyed teaching there. I enjoyed the mix of students. I wasn't real aware of racial tension. Most of us wanted to be there and then we were very connected with the Church of the Messiah, which is over on Lafayette and the Boulevard. That's an Episcopal church, where we had like an ecumenical group that met around racial questions and concerns for the neighborhood.
We also had a small group of students from the Chaldean community, who owned a number of small stores on Kerchival. So, when it got to be the summer of 1967, I was at Marygrove for graduate studies, for teaching certification, and that was on the outside edge of what was going on, but we could go up to the fourth floor of the residence hall and look out and see the clouds of smoke coming up. And heard about it mostly through the news: radio, TV, some pictures. It was pretty startling to see the neighborhood where I'd spent the last two years really going up in flames. And being very aware of some of the people who owned those small stores, and how much they had sacrificed to make that business go.
I don't - there were all kinds of stories about how they didn't treat people well, and all that kind of thing, but it was - because we knew both sides, we knew both populations pretty well. It was really very disconcerting to watch all of this happening.
During the time - and I can't - I have no memory of when all this happened, or how - but once things began to settle down a little bit - of course the National Guard was around and driving up and down the streets. I don't think they were tanks, but they were big trucks and there was a curfew and of course there were a lot of curfew violators.
There was quite a group at Marygrove that summer - of people. We were all in our twenties at the time getting classes for our permanent teaching certificate. And so we were asked to go different places, and I can't remember exact - the thing that stays in my mind is Recorder's Court, which I don't think exists anymore, but we were to go down and meet people who were being brought in. Mostly the family members of people who had been arrested. So they were - they wanted some reassurance. Of course, we were dressed in our medieval garb at the time so we rather stood out in the crowd.
And I remember feeling that was a really good; it was a way where we could contribute positively. I remember talking to my mother on the phone. She lived in Port Huron and she did not like that I was anywhere near the place. I told her by mistake that I was going down to Recorder's Court. Well, she just about came down and got me. [laughter]
I said, Mom, I'm fine. I'm fine. I never had the feeling of being frightened. Of course, we went in groups and people were very glad we were there, so they were very careful that nothing too bad would happen. And I know different groups went different places. But at least my experience of it was the whole sense of being kind of a reassuring presence to people who were in really stressful situations.
I went back to St. Charles in August after summer school ended, and it was really - in fact, I was just there a couple weeks ago, for something else, and drove down Kercheval and around and back up Lafayette, and down Townsend, was where the school building is actually still there, it's all boarded up. Reminisced about where my classroom was, and all that good stuff, so it was kind of fun to reconnect.
But that third year, from '67 to '68, things were different, and part of it was back in the really old days each parish had a high school and a grade school. And at that time we had - the parish decided that they really couldn't keep all these high schools going. So we closed the high school, and the four high schools on the east side merged into East Catholic, which was open for a number of years. I can't remember – it’s closed some time in the last ten years. And so that was different, in that we had a lot more room in the building, and the big kids were gone. They were the ones that made all the noise. And so there was a feel, that way, that was different.
But the other - certainly a lot of the families from the Middle East, who had owned these stores, were gone. And the - so there was - and that wasn't a huge group, but there were several families that we knew, and certainly cared about. So they were gone. But the rest all came back, including a number of these families from Indian Village, and their attitude, as I can remember one of the mothers saying to me one day, "I really think we - I think we can get past this, and I want to be part of, and I want my kids to be part of, an integrated society."
So that next year - and then I left, at that point, was reassigned somewhere else in '68, so I didn't get beyond that first year. But it was a very challenging time, and a very - in a lot of ways, a good time. There was a lot of good energy in the Catholic community and the Episcopal Church around the corner. And there were other churches, too, in the area, that were - came together with the idea of supporting and developing the community, and working with racial challenges in the area. So, I think that may be enough. Anything I missed?
WW: No, I do believe you covered it.
AC: Okay.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
AC: You're welcome!
WW: Hello. Today is February 7, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. I'm sitting down with -
AC: Sister Alys Currier.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me. Would you like to share your story?
AC: I was not in Detroit at the time of the riots, but was living in Marian in - it's in Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Birmingham - and commuting in to the University of Detroit in order to - where I was in class when we got word of the riots. And so they ask us if we would bring down food for the people that were working to - in the churches downtown, and helping out, feeding whomever needed to be fed, and so on.
So we went out in the kitchen and we made an assembly line, and we made - I don't know how many sandwiches, but we made a lot of them. And then Sister Rose Ange and myself was asked to take them downtown. So we got in the car and we took other things down that they needed, like clothes and things that people might need, and we drove downtown, and as we pulled into the alley in back of the Baptist church where we were going to deliver all of our goods, all of a sudden I looked up and the car was surrounded by all soldiers and their guns were pointed at us.
And we just looked at them with surprise, and they came running out of the Baptist church. Said, "Oh no, no no no no, they're just delivering things." The soldiers thought we were looting. And so the helpers unloaded our car and the soldiers stepped back but they didn't go right away. They just stepped back and then we left. Went back to Marian. And that's about the substance of the story.
WW: Do you remember what it felt like for you driving into the city?
AC: No different, I mean - I didn't think a lot about it because I was not in - you know, we just heard about it in Marion, so I didn't think a lot about it.
WW: Did you see any smoke or anything on your way into the city?
AC: No, I don't remember - I have to go back - did I see? - I probably saw the soldiers and things as we were driving down the streets, but that's -
WW: Do you remember what Baptist church it was?
AC: No, I have no idea. We went into an alley in the back of the church and we didn't even get out of the car. I mean, they took everything into the church. We didn't even go in to the building.
WW: Did that experience - being surrounded by soldiers and such - did it change the way you looked at the city?
AC: No. I didn't - No, it really didn't change the way I thought about the city. I was missioned in the city later - a couple of years later - and I saw the changes, and that was different. I saw the changes, because I lived right down where much of that happened, and I think I experienced it more a couple or three years - I don't know how many years later - when I actually taught in the city. But not during the riots itself, what it did to the streets and the - it was in Twelfth Street. I think Twelfth Street was kind of hit hard, well, that's where I lived. Right down near Twelfth Street for a couple of years. And that's where I saw. But that wasn't during the riots itself. It was after the riots, so that's - you know.
WW: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
AC: Hm?
WW: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
AC: No. Except that Rose Ange said to me, "I'm glad I brought you, you're calm." [laughter] You know, I didn't react. Which is a good thing.
WW: Do you remember what kind of sandwiches they were? [laughter]
AC: No, I really don't! [laughter] I just know we made a lot of them, and we didn't go to school that day. But we - I think we went to school the next day. I went back to U of D the next day. I'm not sure, but I don't remember - the thing I remember mostly, is the driving in that alley, stopping, then all a sudden look up and see all these soldiers with your guns pointed at you. That's - it kind of, you know, I kind of think I reflected on it a little bit after I left and thought, you know, that was - not for myself, but for the people in the city. Because it didn't really bother me that much. I didn't think about - myself, that much about it. But I did think about the city after that. But before that, it was - it was kind of removed, because I wasn't living there.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I greatly appreciate it.
AC: Mm hm.
WW: Hello, today is February 7th, 2017. My name is William Winkel, this interview is for Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, I’m in Monroe, Michigan and I am sitting down with—
RAL: Sister Rose Ange Leddy
WW: Would you like to share your story?
RAL: I would love to. That summer I was going to classes at the University of Detroit, and living at the convent in Marian in Birmingham. And I’ve got a couple of stories. One was I was in Canada, when the riots broke out and I had to come back across the bridge and through town you could see where the fires were going on, it had just begun. And then, they were collecting clothing for people, and food, and we had a station wagon. So we gathered up a lot of clothes, and we had the station wagon packed, literally to the ceiling. So I can only, when I was driving, I could only see a little slit out the rearview mirror. And we went to the near Eastside, I can’t remember the name of the church, it was not a catholic church, where they were collecting these clothes. And we went to one place where we were supposed to drop it, and they said, no, we had to go to this other one. So we got back in the car and we headed to this other one which was a short distance away, and went down the alley to pull into where we needed to drop the clothes. And all of the sudden as we stopped we were surrounded by police with their guns drawn, pointing in the car. Of course I wasn’t very nice, I sort of laughed, which is a nervous reaction, but it’s also like they knew as soon as they saw us that we were sisters, because we were still wearing habits at that point. But they were under so much pressure and tension to stop the looting, so they of course let us unload the car, and that is basically that piece of the story. I also remember the National Guard on the corners, even after we started back to classes in the city. And my dad had a business in the city, on the northwest side, I don’t believe it got—it didn’t get looted, I know that, and I don’t remember even if the windows were broken, but he may have had to board up those windows too.
WW: Did you know about the uprising before you crossed over the bridge, or as you were crossing the bridge?
RAL: Yes, yes, no I already knew about it because it was already on the news.
WW: Okay.
RAL: I’m not sure; did it start on Friday night?
WW: Sunday, Sunday morning, early Sunday morning
RAL: Sunday morning, Okay. So we already heard about it on the news, because that would have been Sunday afternoon when I was coming back across.
WW: Did it change the way you looked at the city?
RAL: Did it change—? I don’t think it changed so much how I looked at the city. It changed it forever though. I have next generation family members who wouldn’t think of going into the city. I taught there in the seventies, in the city, and I always considered it my city, so if I want to drive across town, I drive across town, and if I want to go someplace I go there. But it did dramatically change things. I think that the dramatic change was combined not only because of the riots and the white flight, but it was also at the same time as the drug business started. And as some of the Scholastic Magazine, which was a teachers’ paper and kids’, talked about how they were marketing drugs just like you market jeans. Except under the table in a sense, and I think that mad— I think really the drug business made a bigger change overall in the city than even the white flight. But the white flight was due to the riots.
WW: Do you remember— going back to your story of dropping off supplies to the church. Do you remember the look on the police officers’ face or how they reacted when they saw and realized who you were?
RAL: I remember thinking they just looked exhausted and tense.
WW: Did you run into any issues as you were leaving the city, to go back to Birmingham?
RAL: No, didn’t have any problem getting, getting in or getting out.
WW: Okay, fine thank you so much.
RAL: You’re so welcome, thanks for asking.
WW: Hello. Today is January 31, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit '67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. I am sitting down with—
TM: Sister Theresa Mailne. I was stationed in Detroit, on Twelfth Street, at St. Agnes Parish at the time of the riot. However, I know some background before the riot that helped contribute to the riot.
It started in World War Two. The section where I lived, at St. Agnes, was really considered a wealthy section during World War Two. But when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, the men were drafted. That left a lot of women without any man in the home. Every able-bodied man was in the draft, to respond to the Manila bombing.
Because of that, there was a need for us to develop an arsenal, in order to fight the Japanese and the Germans during World War Two. That meant that we had to have a place where we could do it safely and not be bombed by the German submarines in the Atlantic Ocean.
That necessitated having it in the middle of the United States rather than on the coastline. So Detroit was the place picked, the reason being, we had waterways that could take whatever was made there to the coastline to be used.
Detroit was then named the arsenal of the war, or the arsenal of the free world. Willow Run was a tiny airport at the time, twenty-two miles outside of Detroit. They had another tiny airport called Metro Airport. Wayne County Metro Airport. That later became enlarged and is now the famous Metro Detroit Airport.
In order to build the things at the Willow Run Airport, which was named Willow Run Bomber Plant, the women from the south came up to work at the arsenal. That meant we had to have housing. So all the wealthy homes— all the posh homes that were empty because of the war— were now subdivided, temporarily, supposedly, to accommodate housing for the women who would be taken by bus to Willow Run Airport. That's why I-94 was built, to make it a freeway, so the bus could take them with no stoplights. That was the first freeway.
Now we fast-forward, through the 1950s, to the 1960s. In 1966, I was appointed to be the principal at St. Agnes School on Twelfth Street. This had been the neighborhood church for the very wealthy at one time, so it had beautiful buildings.
On the morning that the riot started— oh— pardon me. There's one other item that I must tell you. As principal of this school, I walked into a situation where— of a changing neighborhood. And the new pastor— he was as new as I was— had decided that he was going to do something to really renovate the neighborhood. At the time, the women that had worked in the bomber plant had a lot of children, and those children were walking the streets. We had the largest population of children in the whole city, located in that one area. A half a block from St. Agnes School was a public school that was on half-day sessions, because there were so many children, and they didn't have enough schools.
Our school was partially empty, both grade and high school. So we decided, together, that to help the situation and get these children off the streets, that we would turn our school into a community school and take the children from not only the public school a half a block away, but from St. Theresa's, which only had a grade school, and from Visitation Parish, which only had a grade school. That filled up our high school, and it filled up our grade school.
We still had the problem on Saturday, with the children walking the streets. So we decided to offer fun classes on Saturday. We offered art and music to these children, and we later on got a gentleman who had retired as the CEO of Rockwell Corporation to help us out. He decided that he would do what he could to get these children a hot breakfast, so they wouldn't be drinking a bottle of pop and eating chips on the way to school.
And we did that. So we served a hot breakfast every single morning, and we also had a lunchroom, and we had extra food for them, so they would have proper food. For the high school girls, the teachers in the high school offered secretarial classes for the mothers on Saturday, so that they could get out of their work order, which was being a prostitute on Twelfth Street. They used to walk past our convent and click up and down Twelfth Street, and you would see the cars coming from Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills. Right across from the convent was a red light house, and the women would direct the men from these suburbs to go to those houses where they went in for the business of prostitution.
So we were seeing all this, and trying to do something about the situation. That's why we offered the secretarial skills for the mothers.
Our school was filled right away with these half-day students. They didn't have to come to our school, and we even said, if you don't wish them to go to religion classes, that's fine. They have a study hour during that period. All of the prostitute mothers wanted their children to go to the religion classes and to have— to learn about God, and they wanted their children in our school so that they would learn discipline. It was a very wonderful situation that Father Granger supported, and made sure that everything was taken care of.
Now we have to fast-forward to 1967. In June, after the school year was over, I was appointed to be principal of Jesu School, which was farther west, two blocks from Livernois. That necessitated my having to drive between the two schools, because I didn't have any chance to do all the principal's work at St. Agnes School. So I was trying to take care of all the files in that office, at the same time that I was trying to prepare for a much larger school with thirty-seven teachers, whom I did not know, and I had to interview each one of them, and hire new ones, and get ready for the faculty there so they could get to know me and I could get to know them.
I had a really big job that summer. Then the riots broke out. What was I to do? Well, we found out through Father Granger that the rioters had started on— way up— maybe about a mile up Twelfth Street, just past Visitation, and they started about two or three o'clock in the morning.
Then we heard— then— something that I heard, when the block clubs met in St. Agnes Hall during the year, toward the end of the year one of the women just happened to make a remark, which I didn't attend to at the time. But the remark was this: "I got word from Ohio that there will be something happening in a few days." In a few days the riots started, so I knew that they knew about it. But it was coming from Ohio. The information. I thought that was a little strange.
Well, we then, during the riot, Father Granger— we decided with the pastor at Jesu that we needed to feed the firemen and the policemen who were working in the riot area. At first the local police took care of the riot up when it started, because there were about ten or twelve people that started it.
And they started it by being very noisy and fighting out on the streets. And they awakened people that were asleep. And so they came out to see what was going on, and then they joined in the loud noises and the shouting and all of this, trying to get it stopped. And the crowd just crowded— became larger as it came down Twelfth Street, and came down toward where we were.
About ten o'clock in the morning of the day that the riot started, Father Granger heard this noise, so he looked out the window. He was getting ready to go over for mass, but he heard the noise, so he looked out, and just in time to see a man with a huge rock in his hand, ready to throw it through the rose window of the church. And at the same time, one of our parishioners grabbed his arm— he was out there— and said, "Don't you dare touch any of our buildings!" None of the buildings at St. Agnes were touched.
But, at the same time, he saw that the fireman was very tired, trying to put out the fires on Twelfth Street. And so he said, "Teach me how to use the firehoses and I will put the fires out for you. And you can go to another precinct or whatever they call them, fire station, and do work there. All right."
In the meantime I had been moved to Jesu to be in charge of the people— of our sisters who were students at the University of Detroit during the summer. That's what I was to do. And that's why I had to travel back and forth to St. Agnes, to finish the office work at St. Agnes, and how I got into a lot of this.
So when I came back to Jesu, the pastor came over and he said, "I think we should help the people down at St. Agnes, at the parishes down there, by bringing them food, because they're not getting lunch and they can't buy anything in the area." So Jesu Parish became very involved in providing the food and the pastor asked me to get people to take it down in their cars.
And we had to mark the cars with a big red cross on the top, so nothing would happen to the drivers of the cars. And our men, from Jesu Parish, would bring food down every single day. So I was involved in organizing all of that.
Now after two weeks, everything died down. Seemed to be stopped. I think it was about two weeks, anyway. The first part of the riot. And I had relatives coming from England to visit my family on the Eastside of Detroit, which really wasn't touched much by the riot. So I went over, on I-94 which had been built. I could go straight to where my relatives were and visit with them. So I drove over, all the way from Jesu, which is at McNichols and two blocks from Livernois, and visited with my family.
About seven PM, my brother hadn't been listening to the news, but he did say that he thought it would be a good idea if I got back home while it was still light. So I started down I-94 and just about at Woodward Avenue, a Jeep appeared on either side of my car. I was driving alone in a big— I think it was a station wagon. So I'm driving alone, I had a habit on at that time, so you could tell that I was a Catholic sister. And they just appeared on either side of my car with rifles pointed upward, and just accompanied me right down all the way to the exit for Jesu, all the way up to the Jesu garage, for my car. I parked it in the garage. They stayed there until I closed the door of the convent and went in, and then they drove away.
Then, all of a sudden, we hear the riot has started up again. But this time, it's on Livernois, which is two blocks from us. And what I learned from the people was that— who lived near there, and came to church— was that they had marked the stores with white crosses and I am unsure whether or not that meant don't touch this store, or whether the ones that weren't marked were the ones that weren't to be touched. But I do know that not every store was torched. Not every store was looted.
And afterward I found out— because the mayor lived in Jesu Parish and I had a chance to talk to him— I learned that the stores that I guess were marked were the ones that were looted— rather, the ones that had "gypped" or overcharged the people who lived in the area. And in investigating that, we found out, because a lot of our parishioners at St. Agnes that were poor had jobs as maids, or servants, or chauffers, up in the Bloomfield Hills/Birmingham area— many of the women had the job of buying the groceries for those wealthy people for their home. So they went to the local stores like Kroger or whatever, and they bought the food.
Then they would come home and go to the Kroger's in our area, and the food would be wilted and rotten. And so they started buying their own food up in Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham. Well you can imagine how they felt, having to do that, and having found out that they had been ripped off. And so it was really bad. And that was why the stores on Livernois— which at the time was called the Avenue of Fashion— that some of those stores had done the same thing. Overcharged the people. But if they had gone to a shop out in Bloomfield, it wouldn't have been that charge. So they were an angry group of people that lived in that area, because of that. That was where some of the anger stemmed from. From the fact that they were being treated in an unfair way. That was part of— a very big part of the root of the problem.
WW: Did witnessing all this change the way you look at the city?
TM: Pardon?
WW: Did witnessing all of this change the way you look at the city?
TM: Well, I'm a native Detroiter and I love Detroit. I've never been afraid to drive there since the riots. Many people are, because they don't know what's going to happen if they drive alone. I've never had that fear, and my family lived on the Eastside, and I had to drive on I-94 all the way across the city to get to their home. But I never felt any fear. I guess I just felt— I felt safe, but I also felt that the police force was a very good police force. I had a brother-in-law who was part of it. And— oh, I should tell you that when the riot became more than just a scuffle, up at the beginning, they first used the Detroit Police. And it wasn't until later on— maybe three or four days— before they realized they were in over their heads. The police were all called from their vacation to come and take care of this, but they couldn't handle the whole thing because it was popping out, you know, in more than one place, and they couldn't work twenty-four hours a day. So that's when they called in the National Guard. Okay.
So now fast-forward again, to after that first part. I was at Jesu and we've already talked about the riot starting up again on Livernois Avenue. The University of Detroit is right across McNichols Avenue from Jesu Parish. And there were National Guard people on the tops of the buildings there, shooting at the looters down below.
But by this time— television was still relatively young— the television cameras were televising the cars that were looting the stores on Livernois. And when I looked at the television to see what was happening and where— because it was a good source of information, so you'd know where it was relative to where you were— I could see that the license plates on the cars looting Livernois were all from Ohio. The police noticed this, and the National Guard noticed it too, and that's when they closed the roadways that came from Ohio into Michigan. They closed them off and had guards there so no cars could come from Ohio. They closed that off, and that stopped a lot of the looting on Livernois.
Now afterward, we had the beginning of school, and I was principal at Jesu. One of the people that lived in our parish, and whose children came to our school, was the mayor of Detroit, Mayor Cavanagh. And he came to pay the book bill for his children and after that, we had a conversation about the rioting and the looting and what had happened on Livernois Avenue, because that was close to where he lived. And so he told me his version of what he had observed, just from living in the area, and as mayor having to deal with getting the National Guard and all of that. It wasn't— he went to the governor to get them.
So he was very much involved. I don't know if he's still living or not. No, he isn't? He was a wonderful, wonderful man, and was mayor for a while. But he had to go through all of that, and deal with it from a whole different aspect.
Now things continued, with my principalship at Jesu, but we were still— I was still very conscious of the needs down in the St. Agnes Parish. So there was a wonderful pastor there, whom I mentioned earlier, Father Granger, and I kind of coordinated with him, to get food down to him, and he could get it to his parishioners any way that he saw fit. And he knew who needed the help and who didn't need the help. But he was dealing with an awful lot after the riots, because so many places had been burned out. Homes had been burned out. Stores had been burned out. And one thing that I neglected to mention, was when the riots started on Livernois, they started looting in the stores. What the police were doing, and the store owners who didn't want their produce to be taken, were bringing it over to our convent. So the bottom of— the basement of our convent was all finished, with flooring and everything, and we had a very large room down there. So they brought their produce— like clothing and all sorts of things— it was the Avenue of Fashion, after all, so we had very expensive clothing and things like that coming into our convent for safe-keeping, because they knew that they wouldn't touch the convent.
Now, do you have any questions?
WW: Were you surprised by '67? By the outbreak of violence?
TM: Was I—
WW: Surprised?
TM: At what?
WW: The outbreak of violence in '67? Were you expecting anything?
TM: No. Except that, in hindsight, I thought back to what this woman had said. "Things are going to be happening in three weeks." I thought they know something I don't know. And then it happened, and here I am, right in the middle of it. So it was truly something. And if you can get the story about what St. Agnes Parish did, for all the people in that area— because it continued on. It continued on. And you can see why we took the time during the time I was there— you can see that what we have done, is what really protected our parish. Because we became part of the solution the year before the riots broke out, up the road a bit.
They hadn't done that. But we did. So our whole area was not torched. Nothing happened to it. Nothing. It was protected by our parishioners, and by people who lived in the region, because they knew we did things for them. It was a wonderful experience, in hindsight, to be able to be part of a solution, not part of the problem.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me. I greatly appreciate it.
TM: You're welcome. I hope that was helpful.
WW: Hello, my name is William Winkle. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. I am sitting down with Ms. Mary Ann Markel. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
MM: Thank you. Glad to be with you.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
MM: I was born in 1932 in Marine City, Michigan.
WW: And what brought you to Detroit?
MM: Actually, I’m a Sister, and I was in the community and my first teaching position was at St. Mary’s of Redford. I think it was 1955. I was there for two years, and then I went to other places. I went to Chicago and Albuquerque and Auburn Heights and then I came back to Detroit in 1967 and I was principal at Queen of Hope’s Grade School and St. Suzanne, and then I was IHM Leadership, and I lived in Detroit until 2012, then I moved to Monroe.
WW: How old were you in 1955 when you first came to the city?
MM: Probably about twenty-five, I think.
WW: Had you heard anything about Detroit before you came?
MM: Oh yes. I had a couple aunts that lived in Detroit, and I’d go down there for summer vacations. Yes, I was familiar with the city.
WW: Well, when you came to live in the city to work, did you feel comfortable in the city?
MM: Oh absolutely, yes.
WW: Are there any experiences you’d like to share from your short time there before you moved away again?
MM: Well, St. Mary’s of Redford was a very active parish. People generally loved Detroit, people were active, participated in the city. I know people that would get on the bus and ride downtown to work and come back. I would say things were, people were happy and healthy and it was expanding. The parish actually expanded. They had two schools form the parish, so it was a growing population.
WW: After you left and you came back in ’67, did the city seem different to you?
MM: It was a time also of excitement, because so many things were happening in the city. Probably the most things were happening in the Church because the Vatican II had happened. And people again were excited again about the new things that were happening in the Church. I don’t think I was aware of things that different in the city at that point.
WW: In ’67, what month did you come back?
MM: I think I came back, probably in August.
WW: Okay. So you arrived after?
MM: It was ’69, so it was after the riots.
WW: Oh you came back in ’69?
MM: Yes. But actually I was studying at Marygrove in ’67.
WW: Okay.
MM: In the summer we would go– I was doing a Master’s Degree– so I was at Marygrove in ’67.
WW: Oh, okay.
MM: And I was still living in Albuquerque at that point.
WW: Gottcha. Were you in town for the uprising?
MM: Actually, I was what we call a home visit. We had just been able to go home, we used not to be able to do it. I was home all day, so we didn’t have any radio on or anything. And as they were returning me to Marygrove, we saw— I said, “What’s going on?” So we turned on the radio, and realized there was a riot going on.
WW: Uh-hm.
MM: And my brother dropped me off at Marygrove, and he was gong back to Marine City, and as he was going back, he was on Livernois, and folks were looting those stores. He was very frightened, he said, he moved as fast as he could to get out the city at that point. It was such a surprise because we had been so involved in family things that we weren’t even listening to anything. So it was like, oh my god, what’s happening?
WW: As he was dropping you off, was there sense of, “I should just go back to Marine City with him?” Or were you like, “I’ll be fine.”
MM: Oh no, I knew I’d be fine. At the campus, I was not frightened at all.
WWL: Oh, okay.
MM: I guess I didn’t even know enough to be frightened.
WW: During the rest of that week, did you see anything else, or did you stay hunkered down?
MM: Oh no, we were not hunkered down. They decided to cancel classes, and at Marygrove that’s a big deal to cancel classes [laughter]. I think there was a debate at one point. Anyhow, we laughed because as they cancelled classes, they also gave us some work to do. On that Monday they made sure we got something to do. But then we were asked to go help. I went to St. Agnes, I think I went two or three days, and we were just giving out clothing and all that. And I said to someone— this is one thing I remember— I said to somebody, “How do you know how much to give?” And one of the black women said to me, “The people that need, really are in need, will only take what they need.” She said, “The people that are just here for whatever, will take as much as they can get.” Which is such a wise statement.
WW: Uh-hm.
MM: For me to hear. I guess kind of the frightening things, I can’t remember–we must have gone on a bus or something to help–I don’t know how we got there, but seeing the tanks in the city was like, oh my god. This is serious. What’s really happened here? So, that was my big impression of seeing the soldiers.
WW: Did ’67 have a lasting impression on you? Did it change the way you looked at, say, the world?
MM: I think it made me very aware of what white privilege is. At that time, in ’69 when I came, I was at basically a white school, and during the eight years I was at Queen of Hope, the population changed from white to black. So, I had that experience of knowing what that was. For me, I think what helped me is to know that when the school was about 50/50, it was such a good situation because people felt pretty equal. And then when it tipped the other way, it changed again. The same thing happened when I was at St. Suzanne’s. So I had those two experiences of going from basically a white school to an integrated school.
One of the things that, at St. Suzanne’s at one point, one black woman came in, one parent came and said, “I’m going to move my children back home, it’s too black.” In other words, she wanted her child in a more integrated situation. So I think having had that experience helps you understand what the progression was. For me, it was kind of like a progression. They would be a St. Cecilia’s, and then you would come to at St. Suzanne’s, and then move out of the city. So to see that pattern, you know.
WW: Uh-hm.
MM: I think that the pieces— like at St. Mary’s of Redford where I was at one point, and I was close to Queen of Hope, they had so many things going, and yet they couldn’t hold it either. I mean, they held an integrated situation for quite some time, but eventually it does change.
WW: Did the Catholic Church and the greater Catholic community in Detroit, were they affected by Father Cunningham’s work throughout the city?
MM: Oh yeah, I think so, yeah. I think he was very instrumental. I used to go to Focus: HOPE walks, I did one that was ten miles, now I’d consider walking about three [laughter].
WW: Yeah, they turned it into a 5K.
MM: Yeah. I think his work was very instrumental and made people aware. And then we ended up doing some justice work and protesting and I think at that time we always talked about social justice as a community, I think we became more active— put our bodies there instead of just our words. And I don’t know if you know this, at that time Marygrove was basically a white women’s college, and our president at that point sent out to all of Detroit Public Schools a scholarship for us to get— it was “68 for ‘68”— so we wanted 68 students from those schools to be at Marygrove. Did you know that?
WW: Yeah.
MM: Okay, yeah, okay.
WW: I was thinking, did U of D do the same thing?
MM: I don’t know that.
WW: Okay.
MM: Yeah.
WW: After you left to go back to Albuquerque, did you say to yourself, “I’m gong to go back to Detroit,” or was it just happenstance that you got to come back?
MM: Well in those days, we used to get like assigned. So I was assigned to Detroit.
WW: Oh, okay.
MM: I would not have been afraid to be in Detroit. Actually, I lived in Littlefield probably about five years, I was the only white woman left there. I lived with somebody else, another, we were the only two white women, and I was fine.
WW: Uh-hm.
MM: I was fine, in my neighborhood, you know. Three streets over, I wouldn’t be fine, but I had been there thirty-some years, so they knew me, they watched out for me. I had a couple break-ins, and my family was getting too nervous. Then they asked me to come here, so that’s why I did. I loved being in Detroit.
WW: How do you feel about the city today?
MM: I think it’s doing well. I just hope they do more for the neighborhoods. I mean business is fine, and I’m very concerned that we don’t take housing from poor people to get the rich people in, that’s one of my concerns.
WW: Alright. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
MM: I don’t think so. I just think, just the whole race thing, you never know when it’s ever going to— people work with each other, but until they’re friends with each other, I don’t think we’re ever going to solve the race problem. I mean, we’ve got to socialize more. I man we can work with each other, and that seems to work out okay, but until there’s a socialization, it’s not going to change, I don’t think.
WW: Uh-hm. One follow-up question that I did miss. Earlier, you called it a, ‘riot,’ is that the common word you use, or is that how you interpret what happened?
MM: I guess that’s how you hear it, the ’67 Riots, that’s what I’ve basically thought of. “Uprising” could be just as well. I think it was fermenting. The police activity, that was— I mean some of the same stuff we’re seeing today.
WW: Yeah.
MM: Absolute same stuff. At that point, the police force was basically white I think.
WW: Uh-hm.
MM: At least that’s my memory of it.
WW: It was about ninety-five percent.
MM: Yeah, yeah.
WW: Well thank you so much for sitting down with me. I greatly appreciate it.
MM: Okay, thank you.
WW: Hello, today is February 2, 2017 my name is William Winkel this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. I am sitting down with…
MO: Sister Madonna Oswald, IHM Immaculate Heart of Mary sister.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, would you like to share your story?
MO: I’m a Detroiter, I was born in Detroit back in 1927, and I love Detroit. I lived in Windsor for a while, and I was very glad even though our wonderful neighbor is wonderful I was glad to get back to Detroit. Because my father was doing very well in his job we moved a lot in Detroit, so we were on the Eastside and Westside and so forth. We finally build our home in St. Mary’s Parish, and loved Detroit continually. We’d go downtown Detroit, with a place to go, meet under the clock and so forth. On the day that we are speaking about though— even as I think of it now so long ago I have great feelings of sadness that this wonderful city with these wonderful people had to come out with such anger and such destruction, because of all the inequities that were going on at the time. In our convent at Star of the Sea in Grosse Pointe where I was stationed at that time, we heard many calls coming in from our sisters some who were in actual Detroit, downtown Detroit area and beyond, telling us about all of this and what they were trying to do. Some sisters who were closer even made sandwiches and took them out to people and did whatever they could. We were not able to do that, but were in prayer and understanding of what was happening. Detroit has continued on to grow from that time, but I don’t think we should forget what some people, the price people had to pay for where we are today. And, the pictures are coming across my mind at this point of watching the stores being crashed into, and people yelling and all of that anger, I can feel it at this moment and that is quite a few years back.
WW: So you had to stay hunkered down in Grosse Ile, ah, Grosse Pointe?
MO: I don’t know if it was hunkered down, we were about 40 minutes from downtown at that area.
WW: In Grosse Pointe?
MO: Yeah, isn’t it about 30 minutes right down—?
WW: No.
MO: Little farther, half hour at the most, maybe.
WW: Oh, no worries. When did you head back into the city after ‘67? Did you avoid the city for a while, or did you go back in?
MO: No, I think we kept pretty much the same contact with the city. However, I’m sure that we were all told to be careful, and to be our best and to show that.
WW: Thank you so much.
MO: Well good.
WW: Hello, today is January 31, 2017, my name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, I’m in Monroe, Michigan and I am sitting down with—
JS: Sister Josephine Sferrella.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
JS: I appreciate what you are doing. I think it is marvelous, that 1967 was sort of a benchmark, a culmination of many things of the city of Detroit. I was at Holy Trinity, which is not too far from Twelfth Street, and then later taught in Boniface which is right on Twelfth, near seventy-five. That Sunday morning we knew nothing about it, but as a group, because we have been so tired working hard in the inner-city, we decided to treat ourselves and we were going to go out to Meadowbrook and watch the concert and have a lunch there and we did. We came back, it must have been about three o’clock, three thirty, and we got to the city borders and we were stopped by a jeep with three or four soldiers in it. And we didn’t know what was happening and we looked at each other curious at first and the a little bit concerned, and the soldiers wanted to know— first of all, they said, You can’t come through. So we said, But we live— how we can get to our home. So he asked us where we were going and we told him. So he said, “We have to escort you, because we had some civil disturbances in this area today.” So we followed him to Holy Trinity, we parked our car, and he said to us, “Now lock the car very well, and when you go into the house make sure that you are not standing near a window or where a light can indicate from the outside that you are there. Just stay clear of windows, we don’t know who maybe around and we want to make sure you are safe.” So that was the Sunday. Then on Monday we began to work with Lou Murphy at what they call the Dorothy Day workhouse, and they cooked the soup and the meat and we served them to all the homeless in the area, and it was interesting and sort of sad and pathetic. And we had to be very careful because the homeless men were trying to steal the Sternos, the little can of Sterno we had. So we did that several days to make sure that they were fed. The soldiers were on the lookout for us every day, and we go to Boniface, which is not quite a mile west of Trinity, they would be parked at different areas, so that we knew we were safe going back and forth. I know that we were in fear, we really weren’t sure what was going on but then we read about it and people called us. It was summertime so the sisters were not really working on the mission, but were living there and going to school at Wayne State, University of Detroit, and so we were assigned at different places.
But I can recall, I think it was either that Monday or Tuesday, it didn’t dawned at me how serious it was until this one morning I heard this big rumbling sound and I looked out my bedroom window and here comes an actual tank. I had never, never, seen one up that close, with a gun on a turret, the soldier that was seen on it, he saw me on a window and he saluted me. But at that moment I really was frightened. It dawned on me that this was really serious business, and I could not believe that here in the sixties in Detroit, the United States, that we had tanks on our ordinary streets, you know, and soldiers were on them. So it made me very much aware of the situation around. I knew there was a great problem with the police department because, working with my students at Boniface and Trinity, we always had a hard time with our black students. If they were out of school, like if they were at mass serving mass, they come over late to school, but if the cops saw them, they would stop them, and they would want to arrest them because they were supposed to be in school and they would not take their word from them. And I remember that I called the city, and they told me to make sure I took the number of the police numbers badge and let them know, and they would take care of it, and I did. It was the only way I could stop the police officers from sort of verbally abusing some of our kids just because they were black.
So I knew we were in a situation that was not— it was not great. It was not good. And I felt sorry for the mayor, Cavanagh, because he was just beginning in his term. As far as the rest of the riot situation, I felt badly, that it took the city many, many years to even help clean up some of the wooden buildings, some of those that were— I had a dear parishioner who had a grocery store on a corner of Twelfth— I think it was near Atkins— and it was burned to the ground. But that made me very much aware, threw me more into the civil process, and to the needs of the city than I had ever been before. But, I sure do not want to go through that again.
WW: Did it change the way you looked at the city?
JS: Yes, it did. I have always loved Detroit; I spent quite a few years there. As a congregation one of our directives is to work with the city in whatever way we can. And so we have been doing that. And early on before the early sixties— well I’d say the seventies— we had many, many schools in Detroit. Our congregation had more schools than any other group. So we really were committed to the city. I know it changed my fact that I needed to get more involved.
WW: Did you become uneasy in the city afterwards? Did you still feel comfortable walking around?
JS: I felt comfortable, not after, not during that week because the soldiers were around and the snipers were still around. But after that, I have never had any fear of walking the streets of Boniface or Holy Trinity. First of all, the people knew me, they knew we were sisters, they knew me by name. And we would help them, when they needed it, and they knew we took care of them. So, I felt that they would save us, they would protect us, they wouldn’t do anything against us now. Maybe I was naïve at that time, but I may find it a little hard now after so many years away from it, and not being familiar with it. But at the time I had no fear, other than that first meeting with that unbelievable tank. That really— it just jolted me.
WW: Is there anything else you would like to share?
JS: No, again I want to thank you for doing this, I think this is important to get people’s I would hope you would be able to find some of the people who were hurt by the riots. Only they can really tell you what their actual experience. They lost their homes, they lost their clothes, and some of them lost their own sons and daughters, I mean there were over 40 that were killed in that riot. So, I am very happy, and I’m thrilled and privileged even though I don’t have very much to say. I’m very happy and thrilled to be a part of it, and I wish you great luck on it.
WW: Thank you so much.
WW: Hello, today is February 7, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit '67 Oral History Project, and I'm in Monroe, Michigan. I'm sitting down with –
LO: My name? My name is Latitia O'Connell. Okay?
WW: Thank you for sitting down with me today. Feel free to start your story.
LO: Okay, this is my story. The Sunday that this happened rose beautiful and sunshine and not much humidity, and it was beautiful and hot. And so some of the sisters decided to go over to the cathedral for mass, which they did. Now, they didn't come back, so we were afraid that something had happened. Finally, they got back, and they said that when they went into mass, everything was quiet and beautiful. When they came out, everything was burning and they could not get home, so every road they tried to take to get home, they were blocked by fire.
So it took a long time to get a detour around all the fires and get home. And if we wanted to see the fires, we should go up on our roof, right then, and we would see Detroit burning. So some of us went up on the roof and sure enough, you could see black plumes of smoke coming up in sort of a circle, all around Detroit.
So then we came back and everything was quiet where we were. So we ate our supper and we cleaned up and came in to sit down where we had what we called recreation—where we gathered in the evening. And now I'll have to stop for a minute to let you know geographically how this goes. If you were to look up, you would see Fenkell, which was like a big top of a T, and the stem of the T, about a block down, was where we were. Now also, between our house and the house next to us was a rather narrow alley, but an alley people could go through.
Okay, so we sit down for a nice quiet evening when suddenly we hear the crackling of shattering glass. And not too long after that, people start bringing the furniture that they had looted from the furniture store on the corner— I never will forget there were two or three older people carrying a beautiful new, great big sofa. And so they took all the furniture through the alley.
Now when that was over, they threw Molotov cocktails in all of the buildings, I don't know how far down, but at least a block. And they all went up in flames. So by two o'clock in the morning our convent was so full of smoke you could hardly breathe. And naturally, we didn't go to bed because we didn't know whether they were going to come our way or not. So enough for the night.
The next morning, we found out— now, here, the chronology of the actual dates is a little bit fuzzy, but it's exactly the way— the way it happened. We first heard that the court in Detroit had taken in more than two hundred people, and they couldn't keep all of them, and obviously not all of them were guilty, so they wanted as many typists as they could get who were skilled typists and could do legal documents. So a number of our sisters— this worked out of Marygrove, so I don't know any more about it, except that I do know that a number of our sisters went. Meanwhile, in our place, Governor Romney had called out, by this time, the National Guard, so there were tanks strategically placed all around from our place downtown, and there were also armed National Guardsmen, and always had their guns at the ready, to shoot. The tanks had their guns sticking out over the street and the Guardsmen had their guns cocked, ready to shoot, if anybody came near. So it was kind of dangerous.
But anyway, about this time, Sanders called us up and said, We did our big baking just before the riots started, and we have all this merchandise and we can't deliver it. So if you would like any of it, you're free to come down and take any and as much as you want, and it's all free. So we were actually willing to go, and I volunteered, and some sister drove with me, I don't know who she was, but anyway— we drove down to Sanders, through the tanks. I can still remember those big guns sticking out. But nobody stopped us. We went to Sanders. We filled the car with Sanders merchandise, like cakes and everything. And came back, uneventfully, and put the Sanders things in a deep freeze that we had down in the basement, and came back and had our supper. Now that was that day.
The next day, or thereabouts, the court wanted a survey of all the people that were still living in all the burned out places, to see what the situation was, so they wanted some volunteers that would go from house to house in these burned out areas and see what the situation was. The questions were about how burned out the house was, are you safe, are you well, do you have enough food, and so on. So it was rather uneventful until we came to one house, and this poor old African American woman, about middle age, was so scared, she opened the door about one inch and was scared to even talk to us. But after we convinced her who we were, and what we were doing, she opened it up and she started talking to us. And she told us that the roof of her house was burned out, but she was still going to live there, because she didn't dare show her face. Did she have any food? No, she didn't have any food. Did she have any way to get any food? No, because if she showed her face, she was afraid that she would be shot. And worst of all, her son had disappeared on Friday evening. He had left, and he never came back home again, and she didn't know whether he was alive or dead. And that was worrying her more than any of the other things.
So we took all the data down, amongst other data, and sent it in to the court, where we were supposed to send it. And what they did with it after that, I don't know. So that was one day.
So then, the next day— this was Thursday by now— we still couldn't go outside unless we were pretty sure. So we had a late mass that was over about four o'clock, I think, in the afternoon, and a sister was just ready to clean the sacred vessels when a knock came at the door, and it was one of the National Guard, armed, of course, and he said take cover immediately, there are snipers all around. And don't leave until I give you the clear sign.
So we went to a little tiny place, like a little hallway between two parts of the house, and we sat there until he came back and gave us the all-clear that the snipers had gone. So that's really the major things that happened in my personal story.
Now my second story has to do with a manuscript— did you get it? A manuscript that Sister Mary wrote about a family that she knew and she kind of tried to make it into a story, but it's absolutely true, and the people in it were personal friends of hers, so it's a rather, I think, good summary of what happened during the riots. And there probably is quite a bit of information in the general archives of any of our convents that were open that summer, because most of them were in the midst of where the riots occurred, I think. But you'd have to check this out with the archives.
St. Benton, where we were, was open, and Holy Trinity was open. St. Agnes was open, I think. And St. Rose. You'd have to check. And maybe some more convents. And most of those convents were in areas where the riots were. So you probably would find quite a bit of information there.
Now that's pretty much the end of my story. Do you have any questions?
WW: Did what you see during '67 change the way you looked at Detroit?
LO: I suppose, subconsciously, it did. I didn't realize it at the time. But not Detroit, so much. It made me very, very much interested in the race problem, which I've been studying even until today. And the other thing that really, as I look back on it, was that Detroit was one of the only cities where this was so throughout the whole city. Most all of the riots that have occurred since, and even the ones that occurred this year, in Baltimore and New York and all these— they were localized. They were localized to the place where the injury happened. But the Detroit ones were all over the city. And another irony was that I don't know what they were doing, exactly, because I was not in on it, but there was a group of activists in Detroit, and I think some of our sisters were in on that— you might look up Shirley Ellis's file, she probably had some things, and some other people— but they had been working on this problem. They knew that it was a very volatile problem, and that something could happen at most any minute. But nobody that I ever talked to realized that something would trigger it like it did, and as far as I can see, from what I've read and studied, nobody has ever found out exactly what was used to trigger it.
WW: To trigger it?
LO: To trigger it. To start it off.
WW: It was a raid on a blind pig, on Twelfth and Clairmount.
LO: Was that it? And they've definitely established that now? And okay. So that's established. Any other questions?
WW: No. Is there anything else you'd like to share?
LO: I think— I think about all the people of Detroit, would be good people to begin to study the race problem as it still exists today. I just finished two articles, one in the America, and then the conclusion to a very good book called When Race Meets Real, and it's right up to date. Has people we all know in it. And the conclusion from both of those— I'm putting the two together— is that we are never going to solve the race problem, until the white race realizes its own sin in the way it has treated the blacks, and is humble enough to admit that we are no better than the blacks. That we're brothers and sisters, and that's going to take a lot of doing. It's not going to happen overnight. At least that was the conclusion. In this one article, in America, on conscience, Europe has already come to its knees and seen its sinfulness that led to the Holocaust. But America seems never to have realized the guilt the white man has because he always feels superior, even today. And until he stops feeling that superior, we can't solve the race problem. Does that answer your question?
WW: Can you ask me a question?
LO: No.
WW: I thought that's what you said. That was perfect! Thank you so much.
LO: Really? And it came through okay?