MB: Would you please state your name?
AD: Alee Darwish. 59 years old, I grew up here. I worked at Ford Motor Company for 32 years, I retired April 1, 2006. We originally resided in Highland Park. My father was auto worker he retired in 1963. Started at Ford’s in 1916 and we used to live in a neighborhood that was basically a melting pot: a lot of Europeans, we had Native Indians, we had Armenians, Hispanics, Middle Eastern, and we also had a handful of Jewish families.
MB: Can you tell me how old you were in 1967, when the riots occurred?
AD: In 1967 I was 12 years old, it was summer vacation from school and every day six in the morning we used to go out and play baseball. We used to call it the alley, Alley Stadium. We picked teams, get out there six o’clock, six-thirty a.m.; eleven thirty everybody’s mother would be on the back porch to call their kids in for lunch. We’d be back out in the alley in about twenty, twenty-five minutes. Six o’clock dinner, be a rerun of the mothers on the back porch again calling all the kids for dinner. We’d play outside in the alley until eleven, twelve o’clock midnight, but we had the huge street lights in the alley.
MB: So you said your father worked for Ford at the time. Would you consider yourself working class, middle class, high class, how would you consider yourself and your family?
AD: My father was a middle class. As I said he worked for Ford. He was a butcher by trade. He originally came — he had uncles on both sides of the family in Sioux Falls, South Dakota little lake. He came at 13, and he came to Highland Park in 1915 and he started at Ford’s.
MB: In ’67 you said he was already retired correct?
AD: He was already retired four years with 47 years.
MB: What do you remember about Detroit in the mid-1960s before the riots? How was it? How was the city?
AD: Downtown Detroit, it was like a metropolis. There was a lot of heavy foot traffic, not only during the week, but also on the weekends. There was festivities, there was old Olympia Stadium. There was the old Tiger Stadium which was referred as Briggs Stadium, Walter Briggs Stadium. And in the summer time the Tigers would play there, in the winter time the Detroit Lions football team franchise would play there.
MB: And how was the city life? Like where would your family shop? Was it more into the city or more into the suburbs where you lived?
AD: Everybody shopped up and down Woodward between Manchester and Davison. You had clothing stores, you had shoe stores, you had hardware stores. You had women clothing stores, Winkleman’s. We also had Sam’s, which, basically, catered to men, to kids, people who were too tall or if you had a heavy waistline, I mean they had all kind of stores. In fact one of the first Coney Island’s, not the first, was on Victor, it was called Red Hot’s, it was there in 1921, and once a month my late father would take us for a haircut, and on the way back we had a choice; either go to Red Hot’s which was a Coney Island, or there was a place called Red Barn Restaurant which was on the corner of Davison and Woodward and we’d go there and have a big party. So we’d kind of switch every other month.
MB: During the time, in the sixties, how would you describe the relationship between the people in your community and neighborhood and the city government?
AD: City government at the time I guess it was an easy flow, I mean, we didn’t have a whole lot of crime. I mean, even now, every now and then you probably have a minor incident but in terms of the community as a whole collectively, whether your ethnicity was European or southern American or Middle Eastern everybody knew everybody’s kids and all the parents knew everybody’s family. And if one of the parents seen somebody else’s son or daughter doing something wrong, or using vulgarity, they would bring in the house wash their mouth with soap. And you wouldn’t dare go home and say, “So- and-so’s mother took me in washed my mouth out with soap because I used vulgarity.”
MB: How’d you feel about Mayor Cavanagh? How would you say the community felt towards him? Before the riots, how did they feel about him?
AD: Before the riots, Cavanagh was a very young mayor. He had a good administration. There was a little bit of tension between the African American community and the white community, but it wasn’t major until the ’67 riots erupted. In fact that wasn’t the first civil disturbance, they had a first riot in 1943.
MB: Did you feel before the riots that the African American community at the time were being treated unfairly?
AD: Yeah. They were treated unfairly. There was no such thing as equal opportunity back then, and the police department at the time, I think was roughly 80/20 or maybe 70/30. The majority of the police force, the supervisors, the deputy chiefs, all your department heads were basically white.
MB: And what was the living conditions like for an African American family in an area of segregated housing and school?
AD: Well, we all shared the same schools, there was a handful of families that were Catholic that could afford to send their kids to private schools. Most of the melting pot children in our community we all went to public schools, we all went to public parks, we all played together collectively. After school, during the week, when you’re done with your homework or on the weekend, and a lot of times if the alley was taken, we would walk to Ford Park which was between Manchester and Six Mile on Woodward, right next door to the Ford Motor Company Model T assembly plant.
MB: Do you feel that their living conditions were any different than yours, or do you feel like it wasn’t as segregated as people may think?
AD: In terms of living conditions I think that the non-African American households back then weren’t, in terms of upkeep, as good as the rest of the homes in the neighborhood. I’m not saying their lawns weren’t always mowed and manicured and clean, but everybody else in the neighborhood, their homes were much better. Now we had a handful of African American neighbors, which, their lawns were manicured the grass was watered, it was fertilized in terms of lawn nutrition and so forth .
MB: How did you first hear about the civil disturbances that became known as The Riots?
AD: Well that Sunday, in July, we were coming back from a mosque on the south end of Dearborn. We had two routes, usually since we lived in Highland Park we would take Davison all the way down to Oakman, make a left on Wyoming from there we went to the mosque. And sometimes on the way out, we’d take Vernor all the way downtown, hit Michigan Avenue, go north and that would take us to Highland Park. That particular afternoon, my Ma decided to take Woodward, which was a good thing, because otherwise if we would have took Wyoming to Oakman via Davison, we would’ve been caught right in the middle of the civil disturbance, which detailed rioting, looting, and burning down stores.
MB: How did your family react to what was going on as a whole? How did your parents deal with the events that were unfolding?
AD: Well after we got home and we found out, what had happened, it kind of startled the family. But in terms of kids in the neighborhood, the parents first top priority were the kids: stay in the house, don’t go outside”. And then they implemented a curfew. They called in the National Guard and they thought that the National Guard could handle the civil disturbance. They thought wrong; they had to call in the 82nd Airborne Division. And when they called them in, they really clamped down: five o;clocl, nobody on the street and if they found anybody on the street they would take them in. They would ride up and down Woodward with halftracks, tanks up and down the neighborhoods, and jeeps with .50 caliber machine guns on the hood. They also had helicopters roving the skies too.
MB: As a kid, it must have been pretty cool playing in the streets, walking out seeing National Guard members and members of the 82nd Airborne . Can you please explain some of your memories of witnessing all this first hand?
AD: Well as a kid, you’d think it’s cool because you see the army and military equipment being used on certain TV shows like Combat, but this was live. You would see the army people at the gas stations, you would see them at the stores, you would see them patrolling the neighborhoods, but as of five o’clock, you better be off the street. So every parent made sure their kids were off the streets. You could sit on your front porch or back porch you’re not gonna go out in the street, and you’re not gonna go out and play in the alley.
MB: Growing up only three blocks away from the riots did you hear any of the rumors of police brutality going on or any of the unfair treatment of African Americans?
AD: I’m assuming that they were treated not with justice, not with fairness or not with discipline, whether it was from the shopkeepers or to the police department and it kind of got out of hand and the African American community — which I don’t blame them— they started to rebel, they said enough is enough.
MB: And did you, your parents or any of your siblings witness first hand any of the events that occurred during this disturbance?
AD: If you walk out in the alley and you look towards Davison and Hamilton, you can see clouds of black smoke, you can hear the gunfire, you can hear the sirens during the day and sometimes in the evening.
MB: As a child, it must have been pretty scary hearing the stories of looting and burning down buildings. Can you tell me how you felt back in the day, as a child, hearing rumors of possible violence reaching the suburbs? How you felt and how your family must have felt?
AD: Well, it never reached the suburbs because in conjunction with the Airborne Division and the State Police and the Michigan National Guard they contained the violence they contained the area so it was limited it didn’t go outside the boundaries.
MB: So, did you notice an immediate migration of the whites from the city of Detroit to the suburbs, or was that something that happened slowly?
AD: Whether it was Detroit or Highland Park at the time, after the riots, the area started to go south. Most of your white Anglos, predominately Catholics, started to move out of Detroit, started to move out of Highland Park. Tax base shrunk, cities were in the red, and what really put the icing on the cake is years later when Chrysler moved out of Highland Park, they were on the verge of bankruptcy. No tax base, no industrial tax base, was available because they took care of the bulk of the tax base. Ford Motor Company had a limited production facility they were making the jeeps for the military back then. And they had a test rack on the corner of Manchester and Woodward. And as kids we would go there and hang on to the side of the fence watch the jeeps go around the agility track. The would have fast stops, sharp turns and they would check to see if the jeep was durable and that it could handle that type of terrain once it was shipped overseas.
MB: Being a Muslim American man, how was the Muslim community at the time in Metro Detroit during the sixties.
AD: Muslim community back then it wasn’t a tenth of what it is today. You had certain pockets and certain areas and certain neighborhoods. We had basically maybe 30, 35 families that was it. And they were not only Lebanese, they were Lebanese they were Palestinian, we had a handful of Jordanians. And back then everybody was known as Syrian. Syrian bread, Syrian cheese, Syrian food. It’s not until the late nineties all the sudden everybody all the sudden Lebanese. I eat Lebanese food, et cetera.
MB: Leadership-wise, how did the leaders in the Muslim community react to what was going on in ’67? Was there any planning any rejoice —
AD: They were concerned about the health and welfare of the family, the kids getting to and from school safely, but back then everybody walked to school, you had a handful of families that were very apprehensive that they would take their kids to school and they would drive them back. But the riots were not directly towards the ethnic melting pot, it was between the white administration and the African American and how they were treated. Did we have a plan? Not to my recollection but we had very few politicians back then. We had Mike Barry who was the Wayne County Road Commissioner, we had Jimmy Karoub which was one of the most effective lobbyist in the State of Michigan, he represented all the major sports teams and the car dealerships.
MB: Would you consider all these very prominent names, would you consider it a tight knit group or was it more broad spreading out through Metro Detroit.
AD: It was a tight group because they were a minority. And when you’re small you gotta stay intact versus what we have today, just in our area between Dearborn and Detroit, businesses, residences, law firms, medical doctors, cardiologists, you got about 250,000 people—that comes a long way going 50, 55 years back.
MB: Was there any instances of violence coming from members of the Muslim community? Did any members see themselves facing any backlash whether it was the storeowner who owned the store in downtown Detroit or violence reaching their areas?
AD: Most of the storeowners back then, yeah, you had a handful of Lebanese, you had a handful of Palestinians. But most of the party store owners and the liquor store owners were Chaldean. They’d come from Iraq. They are a Christian, Catholic minority that basically come from a town called Telkaif and Baghdad and they have other pockets.
MB: Do you remember any instances of one of their stores getting burned down or robbed during the riots?
AD: There was a couple robbed back then, I can’t remember their names but my father knew them and his friends knew them too.
MB: A big role you could say coming court of these riots was a group called the STRESS [Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets] unit.
AD: STRESS was a decoy unit of the police department—average guy was probably six-foot or better—and they were supposed to make the streets of Detroit safe. How did they make them safe? They would pose as vagrants, homeless people, sitting on the corner, and they would wait for somebody—whether they were African American or white—and when they came to try to rob them or beat them up there was other scout cars in the area, and when they seen this particular action taking place on one of the STRESS members they would come and beat them up, a lot of them got killed, and they were incarcerated.
MB: Did you know or your family know any STRESS officers personally or was it something where they had to hide their identity?
AD: Personally my dad didn’t know any STRESS police officers but he knew a lot of police officers in Highland Park, detectives, sergeants, patrol people but not in the City of Detroit.
MB: How do you feel about them, how do you feel about the STRESS unit, do you think that the way they did their job was a little too extreme at times, do you think they were always fair, or were they a little radical in their approach?
AD: Well, they were radical and the purpose of STRESS was to clean the streets of Detroit and make them safe and that was—STRESS was in action until Mayor Young ran for mayor I think, in 1973, ’74. The first thing he did when he took office and he took that oath was abolish and dismantle STRESS which he did. Not only did he do that he integrated the police department and the fire department which is—if we look back now you gotta say the police department in Detroit is about 75/25, 75 African American and 25 percent are a little bit of everybody else.
MB: Some folks like to refer to the incident that happened in July 1967 as a rebellion or a revolution—how do you see it, do you see it as a riot, rebellion or a revolution?
AD: I see it as a civil disturbance. I see it—people being rebellious, we shouldn’t have to be treated like this. We pay our taxes, we go to work every day, why are we treated as second hand citizens?
MB: After the civil disturbances were over, what did your family do? How did they react? Did they have to rebuild? Did they consider moving?
AD: We didn’t have to rebuild and we didn’t consider moving. We just mind our own business. The kids have to be home by a certain time. We could play in front of the house, we could play in the back of the house, we had a handful of kids, which we always got together collectively and if we went to the show our parents dropped us off to the show, and if wanted to go to at park the parents took the kids and by such and such a time they would say well seven-thirty, eight o’clock, that’s when the street lights went on in the summer time, roughly eight o’clock, they would come pick up the kids. We’d play shuffleboard, we’d take sandwiches, and we’d make a picnic out of it.
MB: Did you notice a difference within the City of Detroit after the riots were over?
AD: Yeah, there was still a lot of tension, I mean, people were killed, a lot of people were killed, they were hospitalized, terrorized, it just was horrible and a lot of feelings got hurt, I mean you don’t forget if you lose a family member or someone got incarcerated or someone lost a limb during the civil disturbance.
MB: Experiencing both incidents do you see any similarities between what happened in ’67 and what’s going on now in Ferguson and New York City, et cetera?
AD: What’s going on or what went on in New York or Ferguson is a little bit more extreme today, and not only is it extreme it’s getting nationwide media coverage. Let me add something: it’s getting worldwide media coverage not just locally, not just nationally. I mean I read foreign correspondence every day and when these incidents took place you could read them on European correspondence German, Russian which are all translated in English.
MB: But police-wise do you notice any similarities between the unfair treatment of African Americans then and now? Do you feel like we’ve gotten better, or stayed the same if not gotten worse towards how we treat minorities?
AD: You’ve had a few major incidents if you read the news, you read the paper sometimes you got cops getting killed, you got white cops terrorizing African Americans, you got a couple of cops get shot in Ferguson, you got a few in New York. Some were fatal and some weren’t. So basically this world is changing. It’s not changing for the better. But the police departments should have guidelines, which they probably do, but they got to enhance them. Because the responsibility of city government is to protect their citizens. Once the public loses interest in the police department and then they feel they have to take matters into their own hands: the violence, the guns. Things are not getting better today. They should be getting better because we live in a world of technology. More people are going to school, they’re getting educated, they’re being professionals, they’re sending their kids to college. We should be going north not south.
MB: As a movement, the African American movement nowadays. Do you see any similarities with them back in ‘67 to how they are nowadays. You know, standing up for their rights against, what’s the unfair treatment of their people? Do you see any similarities movement-wise?
AD: Movement-wise, they are much more organized. You’ve got the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]. I don’t know what kind of headcount they had back in ‘67, but now they’ve got NAACP chapters all over the country. And then you’ve got another guy, you don’t hear much about, Louis Farrakhan, he was very militant and, and he was the type that taught “the white man is evil.” The white man is not evil. There is good and bad in everybody.
MB: So would you say we’re more organized now where they were more radical back then, or?
AD: They’re more organized now. Yes, you have a few radicals. You have people like Al Sharpton. You got people like Jesse Jackson. And power is in numbers and they have the numbers. And the African American community as a whole, they’re starting to go to school now. They’re starting to get educated. They’re starting to educate their kids. Which everybody should be educating their kids, because at the end of the day they can’t take education away from them.
MB: Is there any particular memories that you remember, you know, from what happened back in ’67. Anything that you’ve taken with you til today?
AD: As I said, we were three blocks away, but we never shared any civil disturbance with the other side of Davison or with the other side of Hamilton. We always got along. Yeah, there was a little bit of tension in the neighborhood with the other African American kids. However, but, as I said, the parents knew each other. And you would have a couple of scrimmages, arguments, maybe a handful of fistfights, but next day you’d be playing ball in the alley.
MB: And, you mind me telling me a little bit about your father? I’m sure working at Ford, he did work with a lot of African American men. Did he hold those same relationships as he retired, while going through on the riots. Do you remember any stories he would tell you about how they were being treated and what not?
AD: My father- Let’s backtrack. Henry Ford, when he started production in 1903, there wasn’t a whole lot of people here in this country. He went to South America, he went to Europe, and he went down South. That’s why the majority of the African American communities that work for the Big Three, they still to this day they got family down south. Whether it's aunts or uncles or grandparents. There’s still a connection to states like Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kansas. One example is when somebody dies up here from the African American community, which I have experienced, they keep the body out for one week. The reason behind that, so they can all drive up here and express their condolences. But the base for most of the African American people here in these northern states, or the Midwest, all came from down South.
MB: So, they held a very very prominent role. Can you just give me a little background knowledge about your father, you know, what type of man was he?
AD: My father had a very dear friend. I never knew his real name, but he was African American and his name was Cadillac. And a lot of times Cadillac would give him a ride home. My dad didn’t have that sense of prejudice or bias. My father got along with everybody. As I said, he worked 47 years, his last 25 years he was a relief man. Weekend recreation, they would go out to coffee house. We had a coffee house for basically all the foreign people. Whether you are Armenian, Lebanese, or Palestinian, Italian. They played backgammon, they played Rummy, they played Gin, they played Pinochle. It was just something for them to do. Never had a problem at work. My dad was a very respected individual, in the neighborhood and in the community as a whole.
MB: Culturally, did you notice a difference with the times, as early on in the sixties where, you know, music, fashion would be one way, whereas towards the later parts where the riots happened you see any of the changes culturally where the music became more radical, the clothing became more radical. You know, or was it steady through on?
AD: I remember back in the sixties going to school, we wore dress pants and jeans, but the African American kids, I mean, they dressed up like they were going to a banquet, like they were going to a party. I mean, they were clean, thick and thin socks, pinstripe slacks, silk shirts. And then later in the seventies, if you recall, you had the platform shoes, you had the huge bellbottoms, you had the big disco hats, you had the baseball shirts, you had the fluffy shirts, the button-downs, the pullovers, the fancy colors on the cars, the spokes, the horns of a bull on the frontend of a Cadillac or a Lincoln. Yeah, there was a culture-change in terms of music. The music back then you can comprehend every word, every note. Yeah, that was something. In this day and time, the only thing you recognize is the lyrics, which are all four or five letter obscenities.
MB: So there wasn’t really a big difference in the style of music or lyrics from the beginning of the 1960s towards the end, there wasn’t a big change?
AD: No, up until 72, 73 it was okay. In the eighties and nineties then rap came along. And rap came along and I guess if you knew how to curse, you knew how to sing.
MB: Is there anything you’d like to say about how the Muslim community was structured back in the day? Clergy-wise?
AD: Clergy-wise, you had a handful of clergies. You had an Imam, which is clergy in Arabic. Back then I remember an Imam by the name of Kalil Bazzy, he was from south Lebanon, God bless his soul. You had Imam Shaykh Karoub [sp?]. He was the first one here, he came here in 1912. In 1962, they had a fiftieth anniversary commencement for him. Later on in the sixties, you had Shaykh Chirri who originally came to Michigan City, Indiana, and then he came up to Michigan. Today, you got 10, 15 different clergies and you got X number of mosques, masjids as we call them, or you call them house of worship.
MB: In the sixties, how were they organized clergy-wise? Was there, leadership-wise, was there just one main Imam everyone would come to or was it spread out?
AD: Back then, we had two, three masjids. We had the Hashmi Hall on Dix which is south end of Dearborn. We had the other mosque down the street. And then we had the mosque on Joy road and Greenfield in the city of Detroit. That’s the only mos- Oh, and the Albanians had one over on 9 Mile and Harper off of I-94.
MB: Would you say, how were these funded through the community? Was it organized where there would be a board? Or was it just a community effort?
AD: Every house of worship, whether you’re Muslim or not, they had a governing body, they had a board of directors, they had a women’s auxiliary, and they had a men’s auxiliary, and they also had a youth club. Board members consisted between six and eight, and you had a member from the youth, so it was basically between seven and nine members totally. Most of the funding came from the worshippers, but a lot of times you would get money that came from overseas. You know, from Muslim countries.
MB: Finally, overall, how do you feel that the riots affected Detroit? Do you feel like it ultimately held us back for 50 years or is it something that just had to happen in order for Detroit to move on?
AD: I think the city of Detroit is still scarred from the riots. Because you still have a lot of people who are citizens of Detroit, and the outskirts, who still remember the riots. Who knew somebody who was killed, brutalized, locked up, or abused. Detroit is upcoming now, but I think we still lack behind in terms of being a major player. What made Detroit, or Detroit wouldn’t be where it is today, if it wasn’t for the Big Three. The Big Three pay a heavy tax base in the city of Detroit, whether it’s a manufacturing facility, or administrative, or whatever. But I think we’ve still got a long way to go. Affirmative Action, I’m totally against it. It should be based on your qualifications and your education, not your background, not your skin color, not your faith, or religion, or ethnicity.
MB: How long after the riots did you live in Highland Park? And what did you and your family do afterwards?
AD: We moved out Highland Park in 1969. My mother feared that she would lose us to the integration of the American society and we would end up marrying outside our faith, our ethnicity, so we all moved to Lebanon. That was my mother’s idea. My father didn’t really want to move back because he had no family left. He had many nieces and nephews and cousins on his mother’s side and his father’s side, but he had no siblings left. His mother and father died back in the twenties and thirties. And I said, he came here over, what 1913, he came over here 114 years ago. But after we went, we moved back, we realized we had grandparents. There was a culture behind us. There was a culture that we can create an appetite for, learn our faith. We never knew we had all this family there because we lived here all our lives. So when I moved back here, I had the best of both worlds. I’m American-born and I can just infiltrate society, but at the end of the day I’m an Arab of Muslim descent.
MB: Alright, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.
AD: You’re welcome.
**AO: So today is November 17, 2016, my name is Amina Omar, this interview for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am currently sitting here with—
AT: Amne Talab.
AO: Ms. Talab, where and when were you born?
AT: I was born on July 17, 1959, in Highland Park, Michigan, at 137 Pasadena Street.
AO: Where did you live in July of 1967?
AT: I lived at 137 Pasadena Street in Highland Park, Michigan.
AO: And what were you doing that year?
AT: I was about eight years old and I was going to school. And while we were in school, they sent us home, I remember, at that time. On the first day.
AO: So what was it like being a Muslim Arab growing up there?
AT: So back in that time, there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on what you were, whether you were Muslim or Christian or black or white. The area we lived in was a very diverse area, so we had people from the Middle East, from Mexico, from—we had Native Indians, African Americans, it was a very, very diverse area. And nobody really focused on being a Muslim or a Christian or anything like that back then. So you were just—everybody was called Syrian back there. If they were from the Middle East, they were called Syrians. So we didn’t emphasize—it wasn’t a factor in anything. We were just, you know, from the Middle East. We were considered from the Middle East people. And we didn’t feel any uneasiness or any type of, like, we’re being looked at because we’re Muslim or Arab, at that time.
AO: So what do you remember about Detroit in the mid-sixties?
AT: So being that I was so young, I don’t remember a lot. I remember, like I said, our street was very diverse. We had people from all different nationalities, different countries. It was a beautiful neighborhood at the time. I remember I always went downtown for the parades, the Thanksgiving parade, and we’d always go downtown—I think it was on Woodward, Hudson’s was there, which is now known as Macy’s—but we would, you know, we grew up very comfortably over there. We used to go to the Tiger games. There was this one restaurant there called Red Barn, we always went there. It was a very, very fun time before, of course, the riots started. But it was a very nice neighborhood that we lived in, and we enjoyed—we really enjoyed it there.
AO: So your neighbors, did they all interact?
AT: Oh yeah. Our neighbors were—I mean, nobody had computers or phones or DSs, or whatever those—all these little technology gadgets. Everybody went outside and played in the alley. We either played baseball, the boys played football, we’d play whatever, you know, we were always outside playing and enjoying ourselves. It was more of a—being out in nature, rather being inside of your homes doing things. In fact, when we left—we did leave the country in 1969 and the whole block had a party for us before we left, like a farewell party.
AO: Wow. So there weren’t any tensions between races and different backgrounds?
AT: Before this time, it wasn’t. There weren’t any. After it became—and not against Arabs or Muslims, just it was more of a white and black issue, when the riots started.
AO: Okay. So how did you first hear about the riots?
AT: If I can remember—again, I was about eight years old. We were in school, and they said there’s been something, some civil disturbance, some public disorder, something’s going on, you know. I think it was—some problem had happened the night before at a bar or at a restaurant or—I don’t know. And then the police had to come in. And then the police had to come in, and—I can’t really remember, like, specifically, but something where the police got involved. And then they said, you know, the blacks are fighting against the whites, and whatever. The police are shooting and there’s a lot of chaos in that area, wherever—I can’t remember where that area was. So they were kind of worried so they sent all the kids home from school. So all I remember is my mom coming and picking us up from school.
AO: So how did your family react to this event?
AT: At the beginning they just thought it was just an incident that happened and got out of hand. That’s what we thought before, because it was so peaceful there before. So we didn’t think so much of it. They didn’t say it was a riot or anything. They just said there’s been some civil disturbance, there’s been this—an issue. This is what I recall, and I can’t remember vividly, but I remember they said that something happened, and the white people and the black people were fighting, and the police came and started shooting, and that’s all. So we didn’t think of it immediately as a riot, or—we just thought, you know, maybe something happened and they’re just worried about the kids. And our school was right off of, like, a main street, so they just told us to come home and sent us home. That was the first day.
AO: Do you remember if, like, the mayor or anybody from the government told you guys anything? Or how did they react to it?
AT: To be honest with you, I was too young. I remember Romney was, I think, the governor at the time, and President Johnson was the president. I remember that because I read about it later on. But I think after a while, there were, like—they would come on the TV and say stuff like, “Everybody needs to be calm, everybody needs to keep order,” or—I can’t remember, I can’t remember exactly. But I know, like, it started to get serious after—because it was like about five days where it was awful. But then they started—and then the federal troops—I mean the, yeah, troops came in, and it was almost like a war. I mean, by the time—as we were progressing it was getting worse and worse. Then nobody left their homes, we all stayed home for a little while. And then we went back to normal life after that. But there was a lot of tension then. There was a lot of tension. Even after things had settled down, because I think, like, about—a good number of people died. I think when I read about it was like 45 people maybe died? Actually black and white and women—they categorized it like that. So I know even after things calmed a little bit, there was still a lot of tension then after that. So we weren’t really allowed to be out alone. You know, only in the backyard, only close by home. You know, first we used to go play in the alley and on the streets and we would go places, but after that there was a little bit more caution. Parents worried more about their kids. All parents, not just the Arab parents. Everybody on our block really worried about their kids, and we tried to stay together. And what was beautiful about this whole thing was that even though there was all this tension, the people on the block were very, very still close. Because we had been there—you know, our parents and their parents—had been there for a long time. So there wasn’t a lot of—like, within our block, whatever number of houses there were. But nobody really ventured out. We didn’t go the parks. We used to go this park called—Ford Park? Or Palmer Park? I can’t remember the name of it. It was also off of Woodward, but we weren’t allowed to go to the park anymore. So things like that.
AO: So I know some people describe this event as a riot, and others refer to it as a rebellion or an uprising. How do you think you would describe this event?
AT: Well, at that time I really couldn’t figure it out. But after what I’ve seen through the years, I think it was more of a social disparity or financial disparity issue, where there was a lot of—I think at the time, if I recall correctly, at the time there were some issues where there was a lot of poverty. And I think that the African American community or the black community was feeling also that they maybe were not being treated well, or maybe that the white people had the upper hand, and something like that. I mean, that’s what I remember. And I don’t think they did this because they just wanted—you know, they just wanted to create tension. I think it was more triggered by some of the social class issues and the way people are treated and maybe discrimination. I don’t know, I mean, this is just what I think. I don’t think it was just because somebody woke up and said, “I’m going to shoot 10 white people,” or a white person woke up and said, “I’m going to shoot 10 black people.” I think it was more of the whole economic situation, in addition to the social discrimination issues that were happening, maybe, then. And again, I was very young so I don’t remember everything. This is how I analyzed it.
AO: How do you feel like the experiences during the riot affected your life at all?
AT: Well, even a year—probably a year later, it was still—like I said, maybe there weren’t people killing as much and having all these—it was more controlled because of all the police force and everything else that was there to control everything, but there was still fear. And I think I had a fear at that time, because I had to walk back and forth to school, and I was always supposed to be with my elder brothers, and I always had a fear that something may happen to me for the few times that I had to come home alone. And there was a constant fear factor after that, if I ever had to be alone or I ever felt—I always felt like something would happen. So life wasn’t the same after that. It wasn’t the same.
AO: So what message would you like to leave for future generations about your memories of Detroit before, during, and after the event of July?
AT: Well, before the riots, it was beautiful. Like I said, we had a beautiful childhood there. We really enjoyed it. After the riots—the period of the riots was really fearful and scary. I think because I was young I really had a lot of fear. But—again, I think the message that Detroit was beautiful at that time. I was in Highland Park. During the riots it did get a little bit ugly, a lot of people were killed and bad things happened to people. And it was a fearful time, you know, that’s the message I want to say, it was a very fearful time. And at the same time, it was due to some reasons that we were too young to understand at the time. So I don’t know if that’s why they ended up calling it riots, or—but there was some other factors that contributed to this happening. Like I said, not just because—so it was a bad time, the message is it was a bad time, it was a fearful time. But then after I think—I left the country. So I don’t know what happened after that. We moved out of the country, we went away for seven years. And when I came back the first place my brothers took me was back to our old address, because I wanted to see it again, and we did go back to Allen Park. And this was in 1976. It was different. Our house was gone, there was no house, it was burned down. There was no house. But, I mean, the message for Detroit—I think Detroit is right now doing very well. I think that the revitalization of the Detroit area needs to get attention from everyone. We need to revitalize Detroit and make sure that it’s one of the best cities in the country. I love Detroit. I don’t like Highland Park too much because of my experiences there, but I love Detroit and I think we should all work hard on trying to make sure that it is revitalized and becomes one of the best cities in the country.
AO: Is there anything you feel we haven’t discussed or should be added to the interview?
AT: No, that’s good.
AO: Well, thank you for sitting with me today.
AT: No problem.
GS: Hello, today is July 5, 2016. We are in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit 67 Oral History Project. My name is Giancarlo Stefanutti and I’m with Nita Hadley today. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
NH: You’re welcome dear.
GS: Okay, where and when were you born?
NH: I was born October the seventh, 1955 in Mount Clemens, Michigan.
GS: Okay, so do you have any sibling?
NH: Yes, it’s seven of us, sisters and brothers. I have four sisters and I have three brothers, one is deceased.
GS: Oh wow. What did you parents do?
NH: Well, my father, he worked for General Motors Auto Company in Pontiac, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom.
GS: Okay. So what was your neighborhood like? Was it racially integrated?
NH: Well, when we first moved in the neighborhood, we lived in the vicinity—it was one block over from East Grand Boulevard, we lived on Helen Street, between Vernor and Charlevoix. And when we first moved there, it was in the early ‘60s, because I went to elementary school not in that area first, I went into elementary school—I’m trying to think of where was it—we were in Dubois, a school called Duffield, and then we moved after my dad had got the job and we moved over to this new area and I started elementary school there at a school called Barry. During that time, the neighborhood was mixed. We had about half and half. There were Italian people living in the neighborhood, Greek people, black people, it was fairly mixed. But as the years went on, people that were not black were moving away, and more black people were moving into the area.
GS: Was your school you went to integrated or no?
NH: I started first grade at Barry and when I started there, it was a mixed group of children there when I started elementary school. The school was fairly mixed. It was like, maybe, three-fourths black by then though, and about one-fourth other groups of people.
GS: Did your siblings go to the same school?
NH: Yes we all went to the same school; we all went to Barry Elementary, started school there then we all went to Butzel Junior High, and then I went to King, Martin Luther King High School.
GS: What was your childhood like? Was it just kind of a normal childhood growing up?
NH: Well, I had a great time because I went to school, waited for summer vacation, had a great time on summer vacation, we had the same kind of rules most kids did. You know, you had to be home by a certain time, you played within the neighborhood. We looked forward to the summer because the summer time, there were a lot of things to do. The school always was open for summer recreation during the summer, and we would go to another school that was down the street from us that was called Marcy in the summer, and they would have a bus come and pick up all the kids and take us to day camp. And the day camp, they would bus us and take us to a camp that was in River Rouge, and we would go swimming there because the other schools didn’t have, we didn’t have swimming pools, and so we went out there. We would sometimes do a two week camp that busses would come and meet the school, they’d take us to another camp for about a week camp that was called Green Pastures. And then if we didn’t do that, we stayed so close to Belle Isle Park, we’d walk to Belle Isle because we stayed just that close because Boulevard was one block over from us and we would all get together so kids and stuff and we would walk to Belle Isle. We would go there for bike riding, fishing, canoeing, and just a day at the park.
GS: Nice. I’m sorry, where did you say you moved again? From Mount Clemens?
NH: Well, I was born in Mount Clemens, then my family had moved—during the time I guessed they used to call it the “Black Bottom” area, and they lived on a street called Duffield, then I went to elementary school over there, and by the time I started like first grade, we moved over into the area Helen.
GS: Helen.
NH: Yeah, Helen. The street between Vernor and Charlevoix.
GS: So then, kind of moving towards the early sixties, could you sense any tensions growing within the city, or no?
NH: Well, at the time I was only eleven when all this started happening, but at the time I was growing up, everything went, from the way I looked at, you know, seemed alright. I just noticed that some of my friends that weren’t black friends were moving away, they were moving. But other families were moving in, most the families that moved in, they were larger families like ours. They had quite a few kids, you know, like maybe three or four, five kids. Most of the men, fathers, worked at the auto plants, and mostly all the moms were stay-at-home moms. And we had a block club, we used to have a thing every May that was called The May Festival, where all the houses were judged on how nice you kept your yard up. You got a prize and everything, they used to block off the streets for us in the summer time too and they used to have a thing come around where you could swim called the Swim-mobile, and they would block the streets off and bring this big thing where you could swim in it and it was called Swim-mobile. And then as time’s going on, a lot of these things that we were doing activity-wise, they stopped. The Swim-mobile wasn’t coming as much anymore, so we start the day camp thing, but everything still looked the same to me. We never had any problems, we walked to the store without any problems, and back then, kids just went and did everything together. No problems.
GS: Okay. Where were you when you first heard about the riot then in 1967?
NH: Well, actually, it was the day after the riots happened, it was on the news. In the morning, I know my mom was worried about my dad, because he worked the afternoon/late shift and he worked in Pontiac and he had to get home, back to Detroit, and she was worried because at the time, it wasn’t on our side of town, but she was still worried about him. We watched a lot on television and at the time, we had relatives visiting with us that were here for the first time from California when it happened. And we had heard about years before, few years before, they had riots in California, and this was a couple years later and now it was like, we were having a riot, and we were just looking at the news, watching with my mom the next day. And everything in the neighborhood seemed, in our area, still seemed fine.
GS: So the rioters were kind of away from your neighborhood?
NH: Right, because we heard the riots where we were on the East Side of Detroit. And these riots had happened on the West Side, but my mom was worried about other relatives because they lived over in that area. I heard them conversing on the telephone, they were saying that everybody lost their mind, they weren’t able to get to us, so I watched my mom’s reaction. My dad did make it home, and then they didn’t let kids around adults talking, so they—“Go outside and play,” and that’s what we were doing outside, playing. And then, we noticed all the neighbors going back and forth to each other, talking on each other’s porches and everything, and I remember my dad discussing with the other neighbor that lived next door, they were the Whites, that was their name, the White family. And Mr. White and my dad were talking and he was saying “Are we gonna be able to work, still?” Because they both worked at auto plants. He worked at Chrysler, my dad worked at Pontiac with GM. And later on in the evening that night, it’s like, you start hearing explosions, and it lit up all around us like toward Mack Avenue, was like maybe a few blocks over. And behind us, you started smelling smoke, and as usual, kids now we’re, “Go down into the basement, adults are talking.” And we were down there, and they were looking at television, and next thing you know, other neighbors were there knocking on our door and they’re outside talking and everything, and my mom was wondering about my dad going to work, and he did go to work. But it was a problem that happened—I remember we were discussing because like, by then, we didn’t know it until like, two or three days later—all this is still going on. There’s no police around, but we’re just seeing all these fires happening. You can’t see actually where they’re burning at. My mom, she would always send us—my dad, he drove a Rambler Station wagon, and that was the only vehicle we had, so she would always send us kids up to Mack Avenue and on Mount Elliot and different places, the shops. She’d give us a list, and we would pick up certain things, put them in the wagon, bring them home. We would go to the bakery, go to the meat market, to the grocery store, to the pharmacy, everything, and she wasn’t letting us do that this day, and that was unusual, because we always would do that. She said “You can’t go.”
GS: Oh wow.
NH: And in the meantime, we’re getting these calls, she’s talking to my cousins that are with us from California. I hear she’s on the phone talking and they wanna talk to their moms to let them know they’re alright and everything, because they’re also I guess watching on TV where they are and what’s unfolding, she said “Well, we really don’t know what’s happened over this way, we started smelling smoke and see fires, and it looked like it’s coming our way. But I haven’t let the kids, leave the block.” And they couldn’t stay on the phone long, because long distance costs a lot of money. And my father, I remember when he came home that evening and he had a hard time getting home because by then—I don’t know if the next day or the third day, National Guards were there, that’s I guess what they called them then, and we noticed that jeeps were coming down the area, guys were walking the block and everything, with guns and up and down the Boulevard and then, my dad was talking about how they had set up a station at the school at the corner, Mack and the Boulevard, a school that was called Eastern High School at that time, and they had set up camp there, and there were tanks up there. We actually saw tanks and jeeps and everything riding around, and we were informed, that there’s a thing—we knew about our curfew with being kids, we had to be home at a certain time—if there’s a curfew for everybody, and we couldn’t go anywhere. And it spoiled our summer, because we as kids, we wanted to go to Belle Isle, we wanted to go to our rec center, we wanted to go, to day camp, but we were just confined to just right in front of the house. And at night time, my mom would have us all go to the basement, because we heard noises, and they said there was shooting, you could hear all types of shooting and by then, it was so much fire and smoke surrounding us because later we found out that they had burnt down everything on Mack and they had burned down things on Jefferson, and we’re so like in the middle of this, where our blocks are located and everything had gotten burnt on Mount Elliot, that was behind us, and it got pretty scary for us, as kids, because we actually didn’t understand what a riot was, all we knew was that we couldn’t go anywhere and there were a lot of fires everywhere around us. And my mom and dad were—the first time I’ve seen my parents—I could tell they were scared. And of course, that scared us, and I remember my mom and dad discussing—the thing, he had to have a written permit to come in and out from work, back and forth in the city. I think that they gave it to him at work, showing that he could come back, because they were telling people that, you couldn’t come in and out of certain areas, and he had to go all the way to Pontiac. And he also, at the time, started—he had the station wagon, I remember he had loads of food and different stuff when he would come back and give stuff to neighbors and stuff, because no one could go out and buy anything. We had a corner store that was on Vernor, and they were owned by some Italian people, and they were very good to everybody. They would let you buy stuff and pay for it later, and I remember that my dad and a lot of people got together to protect the guy’s store, and said “We’re going to take care of Al’s store. We’re not going to let anybody, burn or mess with his store.” But Al himself was limited on what he could get because he couldn’t get in and out. He stayed there. I remember a lot of the guys, my dad and other neighbors went there and sat, and protected his store, and after about four days—four or five days, we didn’t see the sky lighting up with fires or anything, but we were told that curfews were lifted, but actually it wasn’t, for a lot of people in the area, because when we went out, my dad, we’d try to go and do things, the National Guard were still there, and there was nothing to go to because they did—after a few days, we took a drive in the area and it was just devastating because our grocery stores were gone, the pharmacy was gone, and some of the churches were burnt, and everyplace we shopped and did business at in the area was gone. Mack Avenue was just devastated, there was nothing left. And people were still going in and out of storefronts, getting things out of there, and I think a lot of it might have been out of necessity because some of them probably was—and, I’m just saying from my viewpoint—there was no stores left, so people were going in stores that were already broken in, getting food and canned foods and different things. And my mom said, “No, nobody in our house is going to be doing that,” because they were still shooting people for doing it. And it was a bad summer for us kids, it’s like we only could listen to what was being said, but it was a nightmare because like, you walked down—everything you knew that was familiar was gone. It was just gone. The drug store, and we used to go to the drug store on Mount Elliot, the hardware store was gone, the dry-cleaners, the grocery stores, meat market, and everything was just burnt and gone. To this day it’s still gone. It never came back. One of the places that we used to go to, a little restaurant, we’d walk up there after we’d shopped and get us a hamburger or stop and get some ice cream, or soda, all those places were gone. And then my mom and dad said, “Well, maybe we can go get something at Easter Market,” because on the weekends, we as a family would all get together in the station wagon, we would go to Eastern Market and shop, for vegetables and things. And because prices were cheaper, you could buy in bulk, we were a lot of kids, we were a big family. And it was sort of sad because like, when we went to Eastern Market even, most of the vendors didn’t show up, because they were scare to come down. And so a lot of vendors, there wasn’t a lot you could even buy at Eastern Market because the vendors that were selling the produce stuff didn’t even want to come.
And it’s sort of sad because like, all these things that happened, like you see right now the neighborhood still never came back, and it was always so nice because these people that we shopped with and stuff, they knew us kids, they knew us by name, and a lot of them were white. Italians, Jewish people, most the people that owned the businesses were white people. But, it was sad to see that—we wouldn’t see them again, they wouldn’t see us. We didn’t understand, but everything that we knew that was familiar wasn’t there anymore.
GS: So, after the riot, you said a lot of these shops were burned down, what was the general atmosphere in Detroit like?
NH: A lot of sadness. A lot of people seemed very depressed. We did more television watching than ever because there was always something on the news and we never watched a lot of TV. Only weekends and stuff, we watched television, on Saturday and Sunday—Saturday morning and stuff, but we weren’t big TV watchers back then. But the TV was always on, and we were watching all the things and the news were showing all the different homes and all the different area that were burnt out and gone, and they were reporting on how many people were shot and killed and they visually showed a lot of people that were—I saw people that were lined up on the news at gunpoint against walls and things and it looked like it was the army, like it was war. And we know what war is, and it just looked like it was war going on in our area. And I didn’t know what to make of that because this is America, we’re not at war, what’s going on. But it seemed like it was war because there were tanks and jeeps and men with guns and army in uniforms. And these were just regular people that once upon a time were my neighbors. I didn’t know them personally, but these people I see all the time in my community, at gunpoint lined up buildings, and on the news. I didn’t know why.
GS: It’s crazy.
NH: Yeah.
GS: So moving forward to Detroit now, what are you opinions of the city at present day?
NH: Well, I recently moved from the city. I always lived in the city, I moved about three and a half years ago. I lived over in the vicinity of Harper and Vandyke and it was our family home, my mom and dad since then had been years had divorced everything, and this was my mother’s home, and she had passed and I had taken the home and I lived there for like nineteen years in that house after she had passed, raised my child there. I had to leave because the neighborhood had changed so much. They had closed down the high school that I went to in the area—it was Kettering High School closed up, and they had closed up the junior high school, they tore down the elementary school, the theatre was gone. That whole area was changing, all the stores that used to be—the drug store wasn’t there anymore, there used to be a United Shirts there, it was like everything that was there that was available was leaving, and the homes were being, you know. As soon as somebody moved out of a home, junkers would come in there and destroy it and take everything out of homes. We still had a block club even there, and it’s like one, two blocks in the area are block be nice. Everybody owned their homes, took care of their problems, but then you go two blocks over and it looks like you’re in a warzone, little Beirut. You know, you’re surrounding the perimeter of your neighborhood, where everything is demolished, and homes are vacant and overgrown, weeds everywhere and businesses are gone and everything’s just getting empty. And I’m by myself, I don’t drive, and I’d catch the bus and all of a sudden they’re no street lights anymore everywhere, the kids are out there catching the bus stops—the school’s not there anymore, and you see posters up in different gas station areas where women are missing, up and down Harper Avenue, it was known as like, you see suburbanites come and getting off the Smart Bus at Harper and Vandyke because that area become a drug zone all around, nothing sold but crack cocaine. You see prostitutes up and down, you couldn’t even walk to the store and the gas station that area, me thinking I was trying to go to work, but they’re stopping, thinking I’m a woman prostituting myself, because prostitutes are all up and down there early in the morning, and late at night, and crack. People are on crack and my family told me that “You have to leave. You know, you can’t stay here anymore, Mom. It’s just not safe for you.” But I hated leaving my home, my neighbors, we were all, close. We would get a bus together and every year take—they still do it to this day because I didn’t go on the trip—they still get two buses together and take the whole neighborhood to Cedar Point. But outside around, it’s just you can’t live there anymore, it’s just dangerous. And I moved and I moved into an apartment. I moved all the way in Saint Claire Shores. My daughter lives in East [unintelligible] Village and my other—sisters live near Harper Woods. Everybody, we all moved out of the city practically, and I don’t like apartment living. I miss my neighbors, I miss my garden, I miss a house. And right now, what’s happening is that the areas downtown, I see them reviving a lot downtown and everything, but the city itself where I just left is just going all to hell. And that’s all over Detroit. You got two, three blocks where people are still keeping up their homes and things, but you got other blocks where it’s just horrible, it’s just scary what’s going on in other areas, and it’s still like that all over the city. And a lot of black families, they’re moving into the suburban areas now because in the three years that I’ve been living where I’m at, I’ve seen a lot of change, because like, there’s a Kroger grocery store near me and it used to be racially mixed with a lot of people going into the grocery store. But I see the change. I see the people that used to be in the neighborhood that I left in the grocery store now. And that’s because a lot of the stores out there aren’t available and a lot of them moved out toward my way. A lot of people now live in Harper Woods, which is just next door to Saint Claire Shores and a lot of people are living in Saint Claire Shores now too, in apartment buildings and homes and things, and it’s just changed. It’s just like they said before, it’s the urban flight. You can see it happening. Everything’s becoming black out in the suburban areas. All my friends, now they live in Warren Michigan, or they live in Saint Claire Shores, or they live in Sterling Heights—some of them—and they live in Harper Woods. And all the young people I know, friends of my daughters and everything, they’re moving downtown, in the Midtown area. You feel like you’re not included right now—at least I feel—downtown Detroit because like, I’ve always worked Downtown. I worked for the Fox Theatre, and I worked the Music Hall, and right now I do office cleaning at the D.A. Building, and I see like we would stop at certain restaurants in the morning, I’d get a breakfast burrito at this one particular store called Grillworks, and it used to cost me $2.95. It’s the same place now, same food, $4.95. For the same breakfast burrito. But everything that you used to eat down there, back when I was working at the Fox and Music Hall, you could throw a bowling ball down Woodward Avenue. The only time you would see white people really come down there was if they were going to a hockey game, or to one of the games of baseball. I go to Eastern Market now and it’s like, “What Eastern Market is this?” It’s so cultured now, they have everything going on at Eastern Market now. But prices have changed. A little bit unaffordable, a lot of things downtown for a lot—I love all the new stuff that’s going on. But, I’ve seen actual things happen. Like a lot of people that worked downtown, they’re in maintenance, they clean a lot of these buildings and stuff, and most of them are black. And you can see the difference when, like, when they have the security and stuff around, they almost make you feel like you don’t belong there. There’s some particular person, someone in general, if you go downtown, you look on a lot of buildings down here, some graffiti person writes notation all over the city that says “Vote N.C.P.” If you look, it’s everywhere. And we know what it means—it means “No colored people” downtown, and it’s graffitied on a whole lot of stuff. It’s “Vote for no C.P downtown.”
GS: Wow.
NH: And it’s graffitied everywhere. And the people that clean up know that’s what it—this graffiti person is doing this everywhere. I know Mr. Gilbert, he’s got a lot of surveillance going on, I wish they find out who’s doing that, because it’s everywhere. And it’s actually funny that you can see the racial divide in downtown everywhere because, like, there’s the transit center on one side, on the corner where I catch my bus at. On the other side of the street is where the Smart Buses come. And the Smart Buses take—a lot of people still live in suburban areas and they take the bus in an out of the city instead of paying for parking, and on this side, you can see black people standing over 40, 50 deep sometimes, waiting on buses. Smart Buses always on time, I’ll ride a Smart Bus now, because I live in Saint Claire Shores. Bus is always on time, and all on this side is white people leaving, a few black people going to catch the bus, and it’s like you can just see the divide. And when they have different things that happen down there, like if there’s special events going on downtown, we used to go downtown to all the Waterfront events used to be free at Hart Plaza. Everything would be free in the summer. You have to pay for everything now. All the summer events, when they do the river thing, the fireworks are still free but if you want to do river walk events, you have to pay to get into that. I even heard on the radio our soul music rib festival that they do every year, you’re going to have to pay for that. I was here when that techno festival first started, it used to be free, now you pay two or three hundred dollars a day to go to that thing.
GS: I paid 70 bucks to go to it actually it was way too much money!
NH: It used to be free!
GS: Yup.
NH: I used to go, it used to be free! So one way that downtown is not inclusive, because everything is priced where you can’t afford it. Really, you can’t afford it to be downtown if you’re black, certain districts the way you used to be, because—it was a relief that Belle Isle even, you just went to Belle Isle. But they weren’t taking care of it. People didn’t appreciate Belle Isle anymore. And if they’d had more security and things out there and ran it the way they should, they could’ve stopped a lot of things that were happening at Belle Isle before the state took it over, because nobody was policing young people out there at the island. I love the way that it’s clean out there now and everything, but you have to pay. And it makes you feel like everything we used to do, and you didn’t have to pay for, don’t group everybody into like, everybody’s bad, and everything’s going to happen, but it feels like you’re not wanted down there. You just don’t feel like you’re wanted down there, “Just do your job and leave.” Because a lot of people go out to lunch and they go out in groups, you just see this constant presence of the special security and everything. You know, pulling people over, too many in the car, you’re a certain color down there, and it’s embarrassing to see that they make them get out of the car, and it’s almost like the way it was back in the sixties because “Too many of you in the area and we don’t know going on with you. Let’s see and stop you and—” They’re just in the car going to lunch or something, and they’re getting pulled over by the security, the security on the bikes. And it’s like they have what they call the transit police down at the transit center, and it’s my opinion, that the transit police are just there to keep you down there in that transit area. If they don’t do what they’re supposed to do in that transit area, they let everything go on there as long as you keep it down in that area. Because there are people down there, they’re selling drugs in that transit area, every kind of thing is going on over there. And the only time the real police seem to show up is when they’ve done something stupid, somebody’s gotten shot. Like a few weeks ago, somebody got shot. They made the police presence known in that area because they’re shooting for a few days, then they disappeared again. And I heard those guys get paid, like, they sit there and they get paid like 16, 15, 18, dollars an hour, and they don’t do anything. They just walk around or sit in their office and stuff, and they have guns, they have licenses to carry guns but they don’t stop anything.
GS: Wow.
NH: They’re just like “Keep it down this way, and we alright in this perimeter.”
GS: Well is there anything else you’d like to add?
NH: Well, right now, I love the way things look downtown. I really do. I just wish that people wouldn’t judge, because someone’s color when you’re downtown and everybody’s black or something’s going to be doing something bad or up to no good, because I always enjoyed before everybody came down—when Campus Martius first was open, I’d bring my grandchildren down here to watch the movies, on the theatre screen, when it was mostly black people coming down, because there weren’t a lot of white people coming down because they weren’t working down here as much, they didn’t live down here. But now, when I come down here doing these things, they look at you like you don’t belong here now, and I was doing this before you were coming down here. But you get that feeling. I went down to lunch and met my daughter—she works down here too—and I met her for lunch, and we walked over to Campus Martius, and the area we used to go where they set up the beach area at and everything, they made it, like, “Oh, you can’t sit over on this area and this area unless you’re going to be buying food,” which is high end food. It’s the summer time, you’re not going to pay five dollars. Some people will pay five dollars for a French fry, a pack of French fries to sit over in that area, but they made that area where they know some folks are not going to pay five dollars so “If we make this price, you won’t be able to sit up over in this area of Campus Martius by the beach, in these chairs.” Because we got something from the food truck and we went over there, because we already sat anywhere down there. We went there the other week to sit in this area, “Oh, you can’t sit over here, unless you’re buying food from this particular place at this area, so you can’t sit over here.” Feeling not inclusive, you know what I’m saying? I hope it doesn’t stay that way because we’re not going anywhere. We just want to enjoy just like you and just don’t judge everybody the same, because I’ve lived here, and I’ve stayed—I love this city and I’ve always been here, and I like to partake, I enjoy things Downtown, you know? But in my opinion, if it keeps on going on this way, it can happen again. I can see it, because I saw it, and it can happen again. And I’m not the only one that feels this way.
GS: Well thank you for sitting down with me today.
NH: Thank you.
GS: Hello, today is July 26, 2016. My name is Giancarlo Stefanutti and this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s 67 Oral History Project, and I’m sitting down with Arthur Divers today. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
AD: Thank you.
GS: So where and when were you born?
AD: December 12, 1962.
GS: Okay, where were you born?
AD: Here in Detroit, Michigan.
GS: Okay. So where did you grow up as a child?
AD: My first residence was 9362 North Martindale.
GS: Okay, and what did your parents do growing up?
AD: My father was a retired educator and my mother’s a homemaker.
GS: Okay, do you have any siblings?
AD: Yes I have a brother and a sister.
GS: Okay. So what was your neighborhood like then, growing up? Was it very racially integrated?
AD: At that time – in that area, there was Joy Road – Joy Road, the Jeffries Freeway, Dexter, all that pretty much was black. However the businesses over there were white, and there were Jewish people. And you had business of all type of variety you could think of on Joy Road. You know, now it’s nothing but vacant lots, but you had businesses back to back there were no gaps and vacant lots. No, it was businesses on both sides of the street.
GS: Okay, where did you go to school?
AD: Oh at that time, I started kindergarten at Keiden School, which is two blocks south of that location on Martindale.
GS: Okay, was that very racially integrated?
AD: That was mostly blacks. Yeah, at that time, yeah.
GS: So you were born in the early 60s, so I don’t know if as a child you could sense any tension, but could you, you know?
AD: You know, at that time I couldn’t sense any racial tension, but I saw a lot going on, but I didn’t get a connection on it until I got older and – quite naturally after I joined the police department, saw life from a completely different perspective, but I had no understanding that whites and blacks had these deep-seeded issues. But I did see a lot of stuff, now as I’ve got older I said ‘oh, I see how that happened, I see why that happened’.
GS: Could you describe what one of those things were?
AD: Well, that whole area there was the epicenter for that riot. That riot sprawled all up and down Joy Road, Warren, Michigan, they burned all of Grand River up in there. That’s the area that I lived in – but like I said that was a heavy business district, you had a variety of thriving businesses in that area, but again at that time they were primarily run by Europeans or Jews – and then there were a few Middle Eastern people, but it was primarily Europeans and Jews that ran those. They had drycleaners, beauty shops, we had dime stores back then – that was a dollar store now– Shoe shops, place to get your haircut, they fixed cars; there was a variety of things. And the funeral home – the funeral home is still there.
GS: So moving to the riot itself, where were you when you first heard about it?
AD: Okay, my experience with the riot was this: my dad he’s a retired educator, at that time he was a regular teacher, and we frequented that Joy Road area to go home. And my grandparents lived on Gladstone right off Twelfth Street. And Twelfth Street was where the riot was, and that area there again was heavily – it was stores, businesses, clubs. What happened specifically, the nights of the riot, we pulled up on Joy Road to, Petoskey, the intersection now has a liquor store on the corner, and there’s a house there. The house’s address is – 4209 Joy Road – that house is still on the corner. That house still stands there today because that was a Michigan State Police National Guard Command Center for that area. So you had officers changing shifts, you had tanks coming in and out of there, you had soldiers in formation, they were having roll call there, I became aware of that because we pulled up there, you have to pass Petoskey to get to Martindale, and the soldiers, they had everybody stopped. And, I had never seen a rifle. I’m 53 and at then my parents didn’t own firearms. So I’m a little guy, looking out the back seat of the car, and my dad says “You sit here, I’ll go talk to them,” and it was two white soldiers from the National Guard, and he had a rifle and a bayonet. I had never seen a rifle or a bayonet, and I’m like “boy, that thing looks sharp!” And he talked to them, they talked to him, and he got in the car and we pulled off, and we went through this everyday. They knew him and he knew them. And you had the state police there and you had the National Guard there. They exchanged gunfire between the authorities and the black residents; they had ran all night and all day, particularly all night. It got so fierce one night until, my mother, she forced all our bodies on the floor, and she threw her body on top of us and she started praying. The fighting was just that intense that night, yeah. And it was tanks up and down Joy Road, you had tanks, you had soldiers, you had Detroit police out there, and the place burned. Everything burned. The houses burned, all the businesses down there burned, the only ones that didn’t burn were, you had some people that had their own armed security, you had several business guys who were out there with their shotguns standing in front of their stuff so it didn’t burn. But a lot of it burned. A lot of people lost their homes, and they just gutted – that’s why you don’t have a Warren - young people like your age asking “Well, what was here?” Well, all that was there prior to the riot. That’s why you don’t have a Joy Road, a Twelfth Street, Harper burned on the East side; Jefferson – what’s the other big one over there – Dexter, Linwood, Woodrow. All those were businesses on both sides of the street, and the reason why they’re vacant lots now is because they either burned them down or in later years the city came and demolished that property.
GS: With the National Guard being there did you and your family feel more secure or were you more concerned?
AD: Well, we felt more secure because the local authorities couldn’t handle that. You know, you had the state police coming in, you had the National Guard coming in, then you had the military come in, but it was needed. But the place burned and burned – it looked like it wouldn’t stop burning and it wouldn’t stop shooting.
GS: How was your neighborhood reacting, similar to your family?
AD: Yeah, yeah. Everybody was on lockdown in the house. And they had what they call a curfew, you couldn’t come out by a certain day at a certain this – you had to drive way out to get groceries and come back. You know, yeah.
GS: So moving towards, you know post riot, could you sense any changes in Detroit? You were still pretty young.
AD: After then my dad moved us, it had to be about ‘69, he moved us from that area out to the John Lodge and 7 Mile. Due to schools, the crime, and then that riot situation, and the decline in the quality of life. After that riot happened that area down there, there was a serious decline in the quality of life after they burned everything down. He moved us - that was either ‘68 or ‘69 - he moved us over on Morrow and Margarita, 7 Mile Lodge area. And then that’s why I subsequently went to Winship Elementary School, and then I went on to Ford High School from there, and then after that I joined the Detroit Police Department.
GS: Could you just provide an example of how your old neighborhood, you know, lowered in way of life and quality of life?
AD: Well, there’s nothing down there anymore, all the stores are gone, and they had every kind of store down there you could sit here and make a list. Joy Road had every kind of store you could think of, and all that’s gone after that riot. So there’s no place to shop, they had theatre there – The Riviera – which used to be there on Grand River and Joy Road, it’s gone, it’s a federal facility now, social security administration’s in there now they tore the place down, that used to be a theatre, we used to go to that theatre all the time there, yeah, it went out of business because of the lack of population in the area, they couldn’t make money.
GS: So a lot of people call the riot using different terms like ‘ rebellion’ or ‘uprising’ and you were very young, but looking back now would you call it one of these terms or would you still call it a riot?
AD: I’d call that a riot. Because the whole city was on lockdown for five to seven days, and Romney and Cavanagh – from video footage that I saw – they were doing the best they could to handle that situation. I personally don’t believe that Cavanagh thought that, the black community would rise up like that and have that much going on. From what I’ve read, and people I’ve met, he was trying to mend that, trying to have some order, some respect, amongst the races in the city of Detroit.
GS: So how do you see Detroit today?
AD: Well I see Detroit today struggling to get all in line with all the other big cities that have nicer facilities than we do, you know. And that’s probably one of the major reasons why we don’t have a thriving business district is because of that riot. We had one at one point, and after that the whole business thing went in the tubes, and we’re trying to come out of that. They’ve done a lot of work down here, Midtown; and they’ve done a lot downtown, but okay what about the neighborhoods? We had nice stuff in the neighborhoods prior to that riot; they had every kind of store, or restaurant, that you could think of. You know like they have out in the suburbs, well Detroit was like that at one time. You go out to Farmington Hills, Novi, West Bloomfield; Detroit was like that! We had stores and theatres and clubs like that, prior to that riot, but that riot sucked the commercial life out of the city, and then a lot of the blacks left – the whites they had been leaving anyway– they accelerated that. And then I know it’s one thing, after all that the Middle Easterns came in and they bought all the liquor licenses, so they have a lock on all the liquor stores now, they have a lock on a lot of the grocery stores now, those people weren’t that prominent in that liquor industry or that grocery industry, that was run by Europeans primarily and some Jews. Arabs didn’t have that kind of influence, but they have it now, they’re some hard working people. Yeah, they work twelve, sixteen, eighteen hours, yeah.
GS: Well is there anything else you would like to add?
AD: Well, you know, the interesting thing about this, you know, the focus at that time of the riot – the grievance, I’ll say – was mistreatment of the citizens by white male officers, and I guess that’s what we’re coming back to now, you know. That’s just the funny thing about it. After that riot, Cavanagh left, we had [Roman] Gribbs in there, and then Coleman [Young] came in, and what he did with the department, he went to Washington, he got federal money, and he dismantled the white male leadership. And he forced that agency to hire blacks like myself, and minorities, and females of all races on that job, and integrate that job, and then they created a thing called crime prevention where the officers actually go out – you say Community Policing – it was crime prevention back then. I worked there before I got promoted, and mending this [unintelligible] relationship with some friendship with these people, everybody wants to see somebody that looks like them in an authority position. And you know he changed a lot of that, to the point where it is now. I kind of benefitted from it in that kind of way, but I work with some very good white male officers, I worked with some that were openly prejudiced – but I worked with some that say ‘I’m not with that, I’ll work with you, alright this is my first year or so on the job I’ll work with you.’ And they showed me some of everything that I needed to make it out there on that street, to deal with the citizens, the bosses, and stay alive out there, so you know. And there’s good and bad in that profession, I worked internal affairs for six years, I’ve dealt with blacks that weren’t that good, that were shady, and I’ve worked with whites that weren’t that good and shady and I had to deal with them. But those are things that paused a fallout from that riot or some people say rebellion, I say it was a riot because it was extremely violent, extremely dangerous, and the city almost burned down, if they hadn’t done that inter agency thing with the state police, the National Guard to come here because the Detroit Police couldn’t handle that it was too much. Cavanagh and his people they couldn’t handle it.
GS: Wow. All right, well thank you for sitting down with me today.
AD: Okay, sure.
GS: Thank you.
[TIME STAMP END OF INTERVIEW 13:29]
[End of Track 1]
WW: Hello, today is June 18, my name is William Winkel. We are at the Detroit Historical Museum for the Detroit Historical Society’s 1967 Oral History Project. Can you please state your name for me please?
BF: Brian Fountain.
WW: Alright, thank you for sitting down with me today.
BF: Say it again?
WW: I said thank you for sitting down with me today.
BF: Oh, oh, thank you.
WW: Can you start by telling me where and when you were born?
BF: I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but I’ve been in Detroit my whole life.
WW: When did you come here?
BF: When I was two months old.
WW: Okay. What year was that?
BF: 1957.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in in Detroit?
BF: I grew up on the west side of Detroit in the area of Tireman and Livernois.
WW: What was that neighborhood like for you?
BF: Wonderful. Growing up in Detroit in the 1960s, I had a lot of fun. Enjoyed elementary school, enjoyed middle school. A lot of things for kids to do. My big thig was baseball; I played baseball every day, or every chance that I could get. My father, he worked at Ford Motor Company, my mother, she was a housewife. I have two brothers and three sisters, and my grandmother stayed about maybe a 10 minute walk from my house. She stayed on Northfield and Tireman which was probably a mile and a half or two from where the riot started.
WW: What’d your parents do for a living?
BF: Oh, I just mentioned it! My father worked at Ford Motor Company–
WW: Oh sorry, I missed it.
BF: –and my mother was a housewife, yes.
WW: Sorry, I missed that. Where were you in July 1967?
BF: In July of 1967 I was at my grandparents’ summer cottage in Carlton, Michigan.
WW: Why were you there–just a family vacation?
BF: Yeah. Well we would go pretty much every weekend out there, during the summer months.
WW: Mmhmm. How did you first hear about what was going on back in Detroit?
BF: I was in the garage area of my grandmother’s cottage, and a special report came on Channel 7 News, and it said that there was rioting going on in Detroit, and all of us kids and grandparents got around the television. We saw aerial photographs of just big plumes of smoke coming from all these buildings all over the city.
WW: How’d your family react?
BF: My grandmother, she panicked. She told my grandfather–she called him "Daddy" –she said, “Daddy, we gotta go back, we gotta go back to the city.” So she told all of us kids to start packing up our stuff, and probably within an hour we were en route back to the city.
WW: What was the drive home like? Was it anxious?
BF: For my grandmother, probably. For us, we were more curious because the only recollection I had about a riot was in Watts out in Los Angeles. So I knew what a riot was, and from the pictures I saw from the Channel 7 News report, it looked like exactly the same pictures I saw and videos that I saw from Watts. So the ride back for us, again, was more of curiosity. The route that we took, coming in 94 Eastbound, we came up around McGraw, we didn’t see anything that was unusual at that point.
WW: At what point did you see something unusual?
BF: When we got back to my grandparents’ house, she stayed on Northville off of Tireman, I was in the backyard–and my grandparents were just relieved that the house was still there. I was in the backyard, and I was at the fence by the alley, and I saw two guys carrying a brand new couch down the alley. Being a 12-year-old kid, in my mind I’m thinking, “I wonder where they got that brand new couch from?” And I had heard about looting on the news reports, and I’m thinking they got that from some store.
WW: So you didn’t see any smoke in the sky or anything from where you were in the city?
BF: At that point, no.
WW: Okay. After getting home, did you and your family explore the city at all, or did you stay hunkered down?
BF: Yes. My grandad took me and some of the kids up to Grand River and the Boulevard, and that was probably a half mile from where the riot started on Twelfth Street, and when I got down there, it looked like some World War II bombers had flown over that area and dropped bombs. It reminded me of the same photos that I saw from Dresden. I mean the buildings were just burned out, you could see smoke everywhere. There were still firetrucks there, people milling about, and the furniture store–and I don’t know if this was the furniture store where these guys got that couch from–the furniture store was burned out, Cunningham Drugs was burned out. At this point you could see smoke. I don’t really remember any flames, I just remember little embers of fire burning and little wisps of smoke coming out of all these buildings.
WW: Were any buildings that you frequented affected, or no?
BF: Yes. This had a big impact on me as a 12-year-old. My father was also a bowling instructor at the Lucky Strike bowling alley which was located on Grand River and the Boulevard across the street from the present Tabernacle Baptist Church. It was owned by a guy by the name of Mr. London, he was a white guy, but most of the people that bowled there were African-Americans and everybody loved Mr. London. On Friday and Saturday nights, that’s where we hung out at; it would be the equivalent of kids hanging out at a skating rink or a recreation center. The Lucky Strike was our recreation center. We went there every Friday, every Saturday until the parents of the kids would finish bowling.
Well I had heard the next day that they had set the bowling alley on fire, and I didn’t believe it. I’m thinking in my mind, “Well it’s just probably partially burned, Mr. London will repair it.” So my grandad took me back up there and when we got up there, I was in absolute shock. The whole building was burned out, and I was crushed because that was a place when you think about your childhood memories and some of the places that you hung out at, that was our hang out. The ironic thing about that was all those kids that we hung out with, I never saw most of them again, it wasn’t until later on as an adult I would see a few of them and all of us would reminisce about the good time we would have at the Lucky Strike.
So as an impact on me, that was probably one of the biggest impacts, was not having a place to go, a place that you went for probably the last–I think I started going there when I was eight, and at the time it burned down I was 12. That was a big, big thing for me as a 12-year-old.
WW: Was your family further impacted by what happened?
BF: Not from the standpoint of economics. My dad still worked at Ford’s, my grandad, he worked at Ford’s. My grandmother, she was a homemaker, my mother was a homemaker, so from an economic standpoint it did not impact us in any way.
WW: How did your parents react to what was going on?
BF: My parents, we all talked about it, but they didn’t really get into it from the standpoint of the impact it was going to have overall on the city. At the time of the riots, I think the city was around 70 percent white and 30 percent black. They didn’t talk about it in terms of how it was going to impact the neighborhood or anything, we weren’t looking at it from that standpoint, we were looking at it from the standpoint of people telling us that Twelfth Street was gone, and at that time that was probably the closet shopping area for African Americans on the west side.
WW: What kind of shops were there?
BF: They had clothing stores, they had jewelry stores, cleaners, a lot of night clubs. Just a nice mix of different places–shoe shops, barber shops, some were black-owned, some were Jewish-owned, but it was a nice mix of places where you could go to get just about anything.
WW: As a kid did you notice any change in atmosphere in the city from before the riot and then afterwards for you?
BF: As a 12-year-old, no. Later on, in looking back, I saw a transition in the racial make-up of the police department, but I didn’t know it was because of what had happened in 1967.
WW: Are there any other experiences you’d like to share?
BF: Yes. There was two other experiences. One was at night, the tremendous amount of gunfire heard one particular night. It was coming from the East, and later on I found out that at Henry Ford Hospital, there was a gunfight between some snipers and they had pinned down some National Guardsmen and it was like a gunfight that you would hear like in Vietnam. It lasted for more than five, seven, eight minutes.
The other thing that impacted me was we took a drive down Linwood, and I looked down one street, and I’ll never forget this: it was like the first ten houses on this street were burned out. It was like each house was just a shell, and it looked like some bombers had hit this whole block. I don’t recall the name of the street, but later on, I think the street was Pingree. I’ve seen pictures of a street that look similar to this in research that I’ve done on the riots, but I’ll never forget that. And I’ll never forget the devastation that I saw on Linwood.
WW: You said the word “riot” a couple times. Is that how you identify what happened?
BF: Yes. Some people call it an “insurrection,” some people say it was a race riot. I don’t think it was a race riot, I think it was the climate that existed in the city of Detroit between a predominately white police department and a black community that was being mistreated.
WW: Have you ever thought about leaving Detroit?
BF: Oh yes. You know I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve always entertained thoughts of going other places–Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia. If there’s a place better than here, I owe it to myself to find out. This is what I always tell people: I don’t want to live here wondering if I could have had a better life somewhere else.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
BF: Ah, no.
WW: Alright. Thank you very much for sitting down with us.
BF: Alright. Thank you.
"8 MILE, ETHNICITY, AND A SMOKING GUN"
In the decade following the 1967 Detroit Riots, I lived a half mile north of 8 Mile Road—the boulevard that drew a deep cut between Detroit and the northern suburbs. For several decades, the cut has been infected with racial polarity. My neighborhood in Warren was mostly German/Irish. In every direction of the compass, except due south, there were no black residents. If there were, their scarcity left them out of the census. Although hundreds of thousands of African Americans could be found within a mile, I know there were several kids in my neighborhood who hadn't interacted with a single one, in any capacity, until they reached adulthood.
When I was four or five, I played at the Belle Isle beach with children who were black. At the time, they were just other kids to me. In a few short years, I was taught by my relatives and neighbors that the word, other, had deeper implications for blacks. "We gave them the city," my grandmother would say, "and look what the hell they've done to it." The city she was referring to had a distinct boundary. I often tagged along with my mother and grandmother as they walked to the shops on our side, the Warren side, of 8 Mile. I would look across the wide boulevard to Falwell Field. It was huge, with park benches, picnic tables, and baseball diamonds. I could see black kids playing there, and envisioned myself being in that field with them. Then I would imagine them in my park, with my friends, and the same awkward feeling of alienation always percolated in my belly. Perhaps I harbored the fear that they would one day want my city. Looking back, I realize there were many things I was taught to fear as a child. Very few of them proved sound or unbiased. The Light Guard Armory building, which rolled out a number of tanks to quell the '67 Riots, still stands next to Farwell Field—now a dilapidated structure used mainly, ironically enough, for gun and knife shows.
Occasionally, I would see a black mother and child or an elderly black man shopping at the grocery store in Warren. Silence surrounded them as they strolled the aisles like unwelcome party guests no one would ask to leave; though it was clear their presence impeded the social ease of everyone else. I'm sure most people who entered the local stores and restaurants lived in my city. But there was no way of knowing for certain which shoppers lived in Warren and which ones didn't. If the individual was black, however, one might as well bet the pot they were from Detroit.
Twenty years ago, I worked in Hamtramck. The city was literally surrounded by Detroit. On my commute, I noticed that every northbound car in front of me with a black driver turned east or west at some point. None of them ever crossed 8 Mile. As I made my way across the median of the road Eminem had made famous, I wondered if there was an invisible wall running along it.
I had witnessed first-hand why discernible numbers of black Detroiters never traversed it. On my ninth birthday, in the playground of my elementary school, I witnessed the strangest event of my childhood. It was the only time I ever saw someone draw a gun, point it at another human, and pull the trigger.
I remember the incident—the year was 1977, August 31st to be exact—in colorful detail. Although it was my birthday, I went to the schoolyard alone. The neighborhood kids boycotted my party because I had said one their mothers looked like Johnny Cash. My punishment was justified.
I had become a fan of a group of hoopsters playing basketball on the old concrete court at my school. Athletic and in their twenties, they drove the basket hard and moved fast. It was exciting to watch them, which I did from a nearby swing. They played on my enthusiasm, throwing me a wink or a grin when they dunked the ball or made a seemingly impossible shot—a street level version of fan appreciation. I even forgot my purgatorial birthday brooding.
It was also the only time I remember a collective of African Americans anywhere, doing anything, in the city of Warren. I'm certain that part of my fascination stemmed from knowing this was as far from usual as, well...a dozen black folks shopping in my grocery store.
A short, stocky man in a suit showed up and said something to the players, his words drowned out by the action on the court. When he yelled, "Hey!" he got their attention. ''I think it's better for everyone if you get in your cars right now and get the hell outta here."
One of the players politely said it was a free country and they weren't bothering anyone. The J. Edgar lookalike pulled out a pistol and pointed it at them. ''Go back to your own goddamn neighborhood," he sneered. "You know damn well you don't belong here." Then I heard five or six bangs and saw a puff of smoke emerge from the gun. The players flinched and cowered from the loud popping sounds, but no one was hurt. Then the man walked briskly back to his car and drove away. Thankfully, he was shooting blanks, but the incident left me frozen to that swing long after everyone had cleared the schoolyard, which they did swiftly.
They must have known this was a game none of them could win. Who knew how far away from the school they lived? It could have been less than half a mile. Wherever it was, 8 Mile was the ethnic knife that sliced through the city.
Nowadays, I occasionally check in on my old neighborhood, driving though the streets I biked as a child innumerable times. My old elementary school is now an empty field. The homes still have the same features, many of them built in the '50s when the great white flight to the suburbs was in full bloom. By 1968 when the Fair Housing Act was passed—a bureaucratic effort to disrupt neighborhood segregation−white Detroit residents had already been selling their homes to black families. This was not a sign of tolerance or harmonic integration. Rather, it was an act of abandonment, where white families could find new communities on the other side of 8 Mile. There, the Fair Housing Act dwindled into impotency. My own family's diaspora started in the 1950s, when my grandparents and several aunts and uncles left their old Italian neighborhood and moved to cities like Warren, Royal Oak or near the lake in St. Claire Shores. A few relatives chose to remain in Detroit, but by the early nineties, they left, too.
I remember an encounter some years back with a U.S. customs agent. I was returning from a visit to Canada. She asked me where I lived and my natural response was "Detroit." She became incredulous, and replied, "Are you telling me Detroit is the city on your driver's license?" When I told her the city on my license was Troy, I must have fit the demographic she was expecting. I was cleared without further delay. I wouldn't have been surprised if those players would have had an easier time playing a game of basketball in Canada. The only two obstacles they would have encountered would be the Detroit River and a customs official. In order to make it in Warren, at least when I was growing up, African Americans needed a powerful saw to cut through the icy bark of racism.
A blade durable enough to meet the task hasn't been invented yet, and the grim events over the past year and a half−Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Charleston are a few of the cities spotlighting the recent rise in racial disharmony−indicate the frost covering the bark is only thickening.
NL: Today is Friday, June 19, 2015. This is the interview of Daniel Jennings by Noah Levinson and Lily Wilson. We are at the Detroit Historical Museum on Woodward Avenue in Detroit and this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society and the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Daniel, could you start by telling us where and when you were born.
DJ: I was born in Detroit, Michigan, September 2, 1956 at Mercy Hospital, which is right down the street—along this way—off of Woodward Avenue.
NL: And where were you living in July of 1967?
DJ: July of 1967 I was living at 403 Mount Vernon—which is roughly three blocks—three or four blocks northwest of East Grand Boulevard.
NL: And what were you doing at that point? You were a student?
DJ: Pardon me?
NL: You were a student?
DJ: Yeah, I was a student.
NL: Okay, where at?
DJ: Breitmeyer Elementary School—I was just going into the sixth grade that summer—because this happened in the middle of that summer. Do you want me to continue?
NL: Absolutely.
DJ: As a matter of fact, I had a neighborhood job. I was ten years old, this was about a month or so away from my eleventh birthday on the day that my dad was killed which I believe was a Monday and I was working. I actually had a job at the supermarket around the corner. So I was around there working. I was a stock boy—stocking the shelves, taking the garbage out, burning the trash, stocking the return bottles. And I was back there working, matter of fact, and one of my friends—this is the second day—let me start from the first day of the riot. The first day of the riot I believe was on a Sunday. I was riding my bike—I used to ride over to Hamtramck regularly. So we was over there near the Buy-Low's store and I was riding over there and we were—friend end of mine—a couple of friends of mine—we were riding over there and what happened was that I had gone over there several times ever without incident so on this particular day we were riding the bikes, coming home and all of a sudden, the people who usually were always friendly—the guys rolled by and they were shooting bean-shooters at us and "Niggers get out of here," you know this kind of thing and I had never experienced that before so I was like, "What's wrong with them? What's going on?" So we kept riding and one guy rode by in a convertible and threw a piece of fat meat—and I'll never forget—like barbeque fat and hit my friend in the face real hard. And we thought it was funny, we laughed and we just kept on riding and wondered, what'd they do that for? And so by the time I came home—this was the first day—and then I heard about all the burning and the stuff had began to escalate and didn't pay it much attention; I was a kid. Next day I got up and went to my job at the grocery store around the corner. My dad, I think he got up and had gone to the—it's a union hall office, I forget the local number, right here on the Boulevard and John R. I beleive, or Brush. So anyway I was at the store working and then I think around two o'clock or something like that. Two o'clock, two-thirty, three, a friend of mine ran over there and said, “Well hey, Reggie”—that's my nickname—my middle name Reginald. He ran over there and said, "Hey man, we just heard on the news—your dad's been shot." And then I said, “Well no, that's a big mistake.” I said my dad should be home now because I know he had gone to the union office earlier that morning. So anyway my friend left to go out—then he came back and said, “Well no, man, it's the facts, I'm sure—your dad's got shot and I think he's dead." And so I ran home because I live right on the corner. The market was around the corner and we had a recreation center on the corner and our house is on the very next corner. Very short block, maybe about ten, eleven houses. So I get home and I see my sister just over me—and she's in political stuff—now with the president, and ran the city—Democratic Caucus—her name was Cecelia Walker. So anyway I ran into the house and she's there doing handstands on the couch and I grabbed her legs and pulled them down and I say, “Well, where's mom and them at? Where's Daniel?” We called my daddy "Daniel." She say, "Well, Daniel's been shot. Mom and them have gone to the hospital." And then at that time I say, “Well he's dead,” because I said I heard he's dead. And then at that time she jumped up and started just beating on me because they used to beat on me regular. I had six older sisters—and I had to throw this little part in but, I was the oldest of seven boys and a man that had six girls first. So, when I came along I was really spoiled. I got bicycles, regularly went to the football games, you know, wherever I wanted because I was the first son and he had to wait more than eight years before he had a son. And so when I wanted to watch the football game—they wanted to watch Shirley Temple—and we had one TV to share between all of us and my mom and them had the TV in their room. So when I went back in and told my dad they didn't let me watch the football game—they want to watch Shirley Temple. So he come in there and then say, "Turn this TV and let him see some of this football game." So when he left out the room, I got the beat-down. I got hit with four cans of pop, high-heeled shoes, telephones—and this was on the regular—but I was never allowed to hit them back. So, I didn’t—but see—I would just curl up and take the beating and then, you know, they'd turn the Shirley Temple right back. But—see that was the last time I got hit—the day that my dad died. And I told my sister then—because she used to beat me—I say you're never going to hit me again. I say because I'm the man of the house now. And they never raised a finger at me again after that. And so when my mom and them came home and I saw her doubled over, crying, you know—I knew it was true then. So I immediately stepped into manhood that day, and I was not 11 years old yet. But I knew that I had to. Maybe my dad had a premonition that his time was going to end early because he used to constantly—and still until this day I live up to it—he constantly told me "I want you to promise me that you're going to take care of your mother and your sisters and brothers because I'm not always going to be here." And see, especially the younger ones, they play on that. Because they come to me and, you know, I've had four or five brothers live with me in the last couple of years. And the baby sisters, they call me, "We out of toilet paper, we need this, we need money, we need gas, we need—" and they still to this day, in my heart, won't let me let them grow up. And I still sacrifice to do that to this day so that was something that was always there. And one other thing I appreciate what my dad did is when the snow—see to this day even the complex I live in with my mom in Taylor, Michigan—when it snows, they come and do all snow, and lawn, and everything. But I always get up and shovel the snow at mom's place and the place next door to me on both sides because he told me—“Don't you ever let me come home and see snow out there on the ground and your mother and sisters have to walk out there on some ice because he said I'll get out the grave and come whoop your tail." So I always do that. Just to be safe. But after that, like I said, I grew up and I became the man of the house. Like I said I already had a little job—and I was all for other little jobs in the area. I mean I would go around and hustle. I became a natural hustler. I would go up and down the street. I would rake leaves, I would take garbage out for people—but I had—I was a boy scout too. I wasn't old enough to be a boy scout but I wanted to be a boy scout when I was eight years old. And my dad went up there and told them, “He wants to be a boy scout. He's 11 years old," and I joined the Scouts. So I already had three years of experience by the time I was legally old enough to be a scout. And I wanted to be a boy scout not so much to be a boy scout but having eight sisters and a lot of girl cousins—and back in the sixties you usually saw a lot of military personnel walking around with their uniforms on. That was regular. All up and down the street, they would march up and down the street with their uniforms on. Something you don’t see today. So when all my sisters was on the porch and my cousins and their girlfriends scream, “Oh, look at how cute they are. Oh, they look so good in their uniforms." That's why I wanted to be a boy scout. That was my main reason so I joined the Scouts. But I have a lot of those values and morals in me. I still remember the Scout Law and things. So that was good. As life changed for the family, I always had a job. I always got little jobs at the school. When I came back to school I was already an "A" student and had perfect attendance but that really escalated because— I didn't think so then, even though I felt I was deserving of all the positions that I got because when you walked into the school the first day you saw a big picture of me: Daniel Reginald Jennings, safety patrolman of the month, first lieutenant, president of the student council, vice president of the career-study club, sergeant-at-arms in the future-teachers club. We had an explorers club where I had a rank in that, I don't remember what it was but we went swimming out of the school because we didn't have a swimming pool in our school, Breitmeyer. We used to come up here to the white school. It was over here somewhere off of Beaubien, back at St. Antoine somewhere. And so I had so many activities at school that I never got home before six or seven o'clock. And I this singing group—everyone sung The Temptations—so we practiced and sung The Temptations—and all of these things. My childhood was—I seem to have gotten a lot of special attention. I remember when the teacher—when I was in the seventh grade—the year that my dad died and the teacher asked us to write down where we wanted to sit—if we specifically wanted to sit next to someone, and the compliment to me was that there were so many people—I think it was more than half the class wanted to sit next to me that the teacher actually put me up at her desk and I had to sit down facing the class. And not that I think much of it then, but as I reflected back on it, I kind of realize wow, that was really a compliment to me. And so the brothers and sisters, we all got together and we supported one another and I kind of took care of them. I just remember working and helping to take care of the family and stuff. And one of my oldest sisters, grandparents, they helped contribute. Neighbors, they would bring over food. We didn't really have lack of. So we had gotten a lot of support from the neighbors and the community because this was a worldwide story then. Everyone knew about it; my dad with all these kids. I got a lot of handmedown clothes from my cousins and they were nice. Those are some things that I grew to remember. I think by the time I was 16—I think that next year when I was 12, it was one of the best summers of my childhood after my dad died because I took off my gym shoes and I started wearing street shoes and dress clothes because I said I'm a man now and I am not going to be playing or running ball—I still played baseball but I actually had the job at the store, I was doing that. And the lady that lived upstairs, she asked me to walk her kids home at lunchtime. And she paid me five big dollars. That was a lot of money. Because they were mixed; her husband was black and the kids—she thought other kids would mess with them. So, I would bring that money home from the store. I would get $15 a week which was good money. Because I can remember you could get a can of soda for ten cents, you could get a loaf of bread for 25 cents. I used to go to the store with a dollar and come back with a lot of goodies. I had a loaf of bread. I remember a pack of cigarettes was about 32 cents because my oldest sister always wanted some cigarettes so I would bring her some. But it was just a lot of good times. That summer we went on a lot of trips. My dad used to always take us all out to Belle Isle—and that was a horrible two years for me—that year, I think it was '66 and '67, because my favorite idol Chuck—what's his name? A hydroplane driver at Belle Isle. He drove the Miss Pepsi boat. His name was Chuck Thompson. He died the summer before on my baby brother's birthday. And that was a horrible, horrible day for me and then that was on July 12 and then almost a year later I lost my dad. And my whole world seemed like it was coming to an end. I got past those times and the next year the rec center on the corner, they took us on trips. We went to all of the local parks. One day we would go to Metro, the next day we'd go to Belle Isle and we'd get to stay out there all day with lunches and by that time I was interested in the girls—they had been chasing me a while before that, but I wasn't interested until I was 12. And we went to Stoney Creek and all of the Metroparks—Kensington—there was about five of them but we went each day of the week and we would go and we would play all day. So, to me that was the great escape for what I had to deal with when I came home. Because there were times at home when having that many brothers and sisters, my mother, thank goodness, she always looked at me as a little special I guess because she used to always hand me a little piece of chicken. Because if you weren't there for dinnertime sometimes, you'd miss out. So those are the things I remember. I was a child—I remember the city—like before the night my dad died we were sitting on the porch and I didn't really understand what was going on. I know the city was in a blaze and everything but that was something that we never ever spoke about at my house about the race relationships or anything of the political stuff that was going on. That night, I’m looking up. I remember seeing the sky bright orange and red from the fires because Twelfth Street was on fire. I used to go over there with my friends. We used to—because we were fascinated because it was hustle. You'd see pimps and prostitutes and all up and down and all the pretty colors and the nice convertible cars and they were shooting dice and playing cards and there was something for us to run over there. We ran and played at the GM building, with all the cars in the showroom. We went underneath the tunnel to the Fischer building. And this was something regular. They had a nice restaurant there on the boulevard called—it wasn't the Chin-Tiki. I think the Chin-Tiki was downtown—but they had tiki torches burning in the front and they had a nice little lake—so these were things for us—we played in the front. That's what my childhood was like the time that my dad got killed. My Easter Sunday, after we came from church, we'd get on the bus. And that's something a lot of youngsters nowadays don't do at least in the inner city. When I was seven or eight years old, I used to catch the bus all over town by myself. For Easter Sunday our thing was that after we had gone to church and colored the eggs and visited who we had to visit, me and some of my friends, like the single group that we had, we had a gang but we had a good gang. Our good gang was called the "Young Leaders." And now that I think back, the guy who had started this gang was at the barbershop. We used to go across the street and shine shoes at the shoe shop parlor. That's one thing this guy named Red—wonder if he's still around—his shop was right here on Oakland, over here near Clay Street, over in that area. We used to shine shoes and he would always tell us if he saw us coming down the street and our shoes wasn't shined he'd make us come in there and he'd make us shine our own shoes and say, "You've got to keep your appearance up." Saying that if the rest of you was looking a little tossed—keep you hair combed and keep you shoes shined. That's what he told us. So we would shine shoes but it was the guy at the barbershop—we always kept our hair as if it were cut. So the guy over there, he told us—well he knew who I was from my riot days. I didn't think about it then, but he said, "What are you guys doing?" We'd say we were doing just little kid stuff and he'd say well I want you guys—and say, “Well who is the leader?” And everybody looked at me and said, “It's him." And so—he say, “Well, you guys got a gang.” And I say, “Yeah we're the gang—we’re the North End Gang.” He said, "Nah, I want you guys to become the 'Young Leaders,' a good gang, I want you all to go around and do good things." He bought us t-shirts. He bought us all t-shirts, had them printed "The Young Leaders." And we'd come in and get a free hair cut every other week and then we'd go across the street and get our shoes shined because we were wearing the dress shoes—we was out of the gym shoes except from when we was playing basketball, playing baseball. And so those are good things so they're was a lot of people—and now that I think back he was probably doing that—and even the days when I was in school with the Future Teachers and everybody hands down voted me as president to the student council and now that I look back I believe they was trying to prepare me for the position of leadership. Because today, I got my company—I'm struggling with it right now but my camera—that's my Jim Reg Productions where I do television, video. I mean I know how to do it all. I went to the film school. I lived out in California. So I toured a lot of the studios out there, learned how to build the sets, you know, just about everything involved with the business. I went out there back in 1997 trying to produce a television show and I left away because my grandmother was sick—I didn't really go back after 2000 but my vision—it just evolved to the point of whether I wanted to build a complex here, in Michigan, to teach people film, television, because they have an idea of doing music video and TV show, film, I bring to the table what someone must have and teach them of how to go from an idea from concept to conception basically. So that's basically what I want to do. That's my vision right now. I want to get a whole school and basically turn that into an entertainment complex—because the school—I hope I didn't drift too far off the course.
LW: No, I think it's important to know, sort of, the positive things you’ve done over the past several decades.
DJ: I worked at Chrysler—I skipped over a lot of stuff. When I was 16 I worked on the parking lots down here. Right over here, next to Wayne State. I Parked cars for two or three years, worked all the lots downtown. We ran the Silver Dome parking lot when it first opened. And then after that there were little odd jobs like I was always working since I was ten. The Raleigh House, a restaurant, I'd wash dishes, bus tables. I worked at the Bed & Spring Company. I worked at other companies. And day jobs where I'd actually scrape up soot from the floor. I worked, I worked, I worked. Then by the time I was 19—when I just turned 19, matter of fact, I had just put in an application in at the UAW for all the plants—they called me at Chrysler. And so I worked at Chrysler for 20 years. I went to an early retirement in 1994this was my twenty-first year out of there. I came out of Chrysler the next year so my ex-wife and I broke-up and so I ended up traveling. The next year—I broke up in '94 with her, because I wasn't working and she was and she was feeling like she was the man—but it didn't work, so I ended up going to the Million Man March. I went to the Million Woman March because I had a lot of lady friends bordering of me and another friend buying the company—they barely had—they had a lot of products to sale and they were scared they were going to get ripped off without a guy. So I went to Philadelphia, to the Million Woman March, Washington to the Million Man March. I took my son—had one son and six daughters. And so we went to the Million Man March, Million Woman March, and after that I just traveled around the continental United States. I went just about everywhere something was happening. I've been to New York and all the surrounding states. Washington, Philadelphia, all up and down. Went to Atlanta, Georgia. Got family in the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, went to Florida for film-stuff down there. Went out to California, went to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Milwaukee to the Miller Brewing Company. Went to—in California I was in San Diego. I went to Tijuana, Mexico. I went to Malibu—everywhere. Everywhere I out there I just went, I was out there for a month or something and I just traveled—Texas—there's not many places—Arizona, Palm Springs—so I had a good time after I left Chrysler. I just traveled. And I met people. In California I went to the studios. I was at Spielman's set—well I can't say on the set—I was there—well I was on the set but I was not in the picture-that—90210—that movie—that show—we would watch them make it rain and it was interesting to see how they did that. They had tall sprinklers over the buildings. Like water sprinklers, regular water sprinklers, lawn sprinklers. And they turned them things on and turned on a big fan and it was raining. It was interesting to see a lot of stuff like that. So I had that experience. That was great. Met a guy who was friends—Denzel Washington's partner—they owned the restaurant—out at the LAX. And then a little kid that was saying the Michael Jackson movie, he was the little kid that sang, playing Michael Jackson—just met everybody. Guys who was producing the Tree Stooges movie. I was just meeting everybody. Everywhere I go I ran into people that was doing stuff. We was on the set of Freaks & Geeks—that was a show that came on. I went to a place. They had a show called Quantum Leap. I don't know if you remember that or heard of that but I was in the producer's house. He was a music producer and they kept introducing me to people that are producing shows for Keenan Ivory Wayans, the Wayan Brothers. People from Biloxi, Mississippi, they produced Eddie Murphy when he first got out to California so it was exciting because that was when I was learning TV and wanted to do this stuff so I learned so much about the industry and after I learned all the ins and outs it made me want to come back here and do something. That's why I endeavor to write today—to build a studio. And my brother-in-law is a master electrician, they carpenters, they plumbers, they learn how to build houses and so I could take any old abandoned lot or building and learn how to work them buildings that was burnt up—how they cut the old steel out—I mean the old wood out—replace the wood. So, that's why I said with me getting the studio thing down the road, that can help a lot of people. I want to give back to the city. That's my main thing because I want to be in a position where I can give back, where I can help people who have any type of goal or desire to do something positive. Because almost anyone who wants to do something positive—that's good and positive—I'll work with them. We need truck drivers, caterers, makeup people, photographers, writers, visionaries. So this is something I want to do for the city. Because it's not about the money for me, or even the recognition. I could be in the background. But the one thing, I don't know if I talked to you on the phone—is the day that they brought my daddy's bloody clothes home.
LW: Yeah, why don't you tell us about that day and what your dad was doing that day.
DJ: Yeah, well that day that he left home and he went to the—I told you a lot about me, I'm sorry. Let me get back. But that day he went to the union office—and the story that they told us is that at that time, but I learned later on because I did a CNN story and that time my dad left and went to the union hall and then they said he had got tied up with some guy that had just got of jail and they went and broke into a store. And that was an embarrassment I had for a long time because I know we didn't need any food at that time because that night before that he died, my sisters' boyfriends and some other guys they broke into a store—well they didn't break into it. Someone else broke into it but the took advantage of it—because there was a store—I remember the store. It was right here on Euclid because it sat right in the neighborhood. And they went down there because they were looking at the folks running in and out—just a little neighborhood small ma and pa store. But they went down there and they came back with baskets full of food. And then some of the other neighbor people, they came with all these baskets. They kept just bringing us food because I had all these sisters and these guys wanted to talk to my sisters. They was nice looking—they kept bringing us bags—“What y’all need?”—and I remember sitting on the porch and they brought all this stuff and we had so much food that it was in the neighbor’s house upstairs and across the street and all of that. And it was almost like a prelude to your daddy's going to get killed and you all are really going to need this. I didn't think of it at that time, but when I reflect back, it was like wow, the universe knew and it made sure we had enough stuff until the monies came in that helped tide us over. But like I said he went to the union hall, I went to my job. That was the last time I saw him in the morning when he was getting ready and I went, “See you dad," and I left and I went out and I went on, and I went to work I when I came home he was gone. And so I don't know when they brought his clothes back home. I don't know if it was that next day or whatever but I remember then in the back room and I saw his clothes I was looking at his—because he had blue jeans on and looks like a plaid shirt kind of like the style you have. They were covered with blood because he was shot in the forehead. And what happened is that he and his half-brother who I didn't know abut at that time—none of us did—he had a half-brother. And I think it was my granddad that was with them, and they was riding around by the store. And somebody else, what they said because I went over there and the guy—people who lived across the street, they told me my dad was riding—I guess they were in the area and somebody threw a brick and broke a door and broke a window but the owner was in the store. Okay, and it wasn't my dad or the guys, but they end up—they didn't break the window—but my dad like after he saw it he was going at—not at no food probably some liquor. That's probably what he was looking for. Because he peered through the door, he didn't even get in. I think he stepped the first step and then got in and got shot down right there as I heard. I did a story back in '87 that the twentieth anniversary with CNN and what they told us was that the guy who lived across the street—he was staying down the street—we had taken photos because they used the photos on the CNN interview and the World News. Front page in the newspaper, and that went all over the country to my understanding. I didn't know that at the time. The guy said, "Who are you guys, what are you doing?" I told him my father was killed here. He said, "I saw the whole thing, I sat there right across the street." And I said well I want to talk with you when we finish this photo session. So I did talk to him and he told me what had happened and we didn't know but I believe the car—because when he described the car—and he described older gentlemen. The older gentlemen was my granddaddy—that's what it sound like. My grandfather drove a white Falcon and his hair was white. Well then that is my father and then he said the time the story was said an old man was the daddy and his two sons and I kept saying that couldn't of been right because my father didn't have no brother because his brother died when my father six years old. My daddy used to remember telling us that he would remember they lived upstairs over a confectionary or something. And the story he told us about his brother was named Frank, his half-brother named Frank, he said that he saw an ambulance come—the people downstairs would never turn the heat up and the brother caught pneumonia from that. He said he remembered the ambulance came and took his brother away and he never saw him again.
LW: But he had a half-brother he was with the day that he died?
DJ: Right.
LW: How did they get together that day? Do you know?
DJ: I don't know.
LW: But you had never heard about this half-brother?
DJ: No, I had never heard of him.
LW: Until after you heard that your dad was dead.
DJ: I didn't hear about it until the day I did the interview—maybe members of my family might've known—maybe one? But he had a half-brother—I checked it out. I asked my mother, and she really didn't know about it, but I asked one of my cousins that knew something about it. I still never met this guy until this day.
LW: Until this day?
DJ: I don't know him.
LD: You don't know what happened to him after '67?
DJ: No, I don't know, I never heard of him. But I asked my cousins did they ever hear that my dad had a brother or half-brother and he said, "Yeah, I know something about that but you would have to ask your grandparents." That was the story.
LW: So, based on what the neighbor across the street said, your dad was with two other men—
DJ: Right.
LW: We think the half-brother and your grandpa?
DJ: I believe so. Just from his description.
LW: Based on the description of the car.
DJ: Because my grandfather and my grandmother have passed away—and my mom is gone—so I had nobody to substantiate that story.
LW: Right.
DJ: But as young as I was I remember at that time—and then when we did that story—I think I was in my thirties. I still say that my granddad drove a white Falcon and I was telling my sister and they was saying, "No way, no way it was him." But it sounded like him to me.
LW: And what do you think they were doing that day after your dad left the union office and then the store was on John R. Is that right?
DJ: Stanley's Patent Medicine. My only guess would be these fellas was trying to get a drink. But I don't know, I wasn't there. But that would be my only—something to try to make sense of it—I don't know what type of mindset they was in and that was them that was with them. But my thinking is that maybe they were going in there to get something to drink. The story that they came and told my family at that time is that my dad had got hooked up with someone who had gotten out of jail—which wasn't true, I don't think. Not from what this guy said. Then this guy might've been to jail—I don't know this other guy.
LW: The half-brother maybe?
DJ: Yeah. And then he said they just got into something and that's the story that I heard. I'm like some ten-plus years old. But I never heard anything else about it until the day that I did that interview. And that was in 1987. And I remember them telling me that this is going to make the front page. But I didn't know it was going to make the world news. I wasn't prepared for that.
LW: So at that twentieth anniversary, the story—you sort of think it was rewritten so that it wasn't—
DJ: I certainly felt better about the story that I had been told—that that was truly the case of what really happened. My granddad would never talk to me about it. And that may have been him, because—the reason why I think it may have been him is because that when they tried to contact him to try to get some information about the story—and my grandma—they wouldn't talk. The day that my grandfather—on the day that my daddy died, my granddaddy quit work. He used to work at Chrysler—was it Hamtramck?—Dodge Main. He retired, he never went back to work after that.
LW: What did your dad look like?
DJ: I got a picture over there if you’re ready for you to see it—it's on the computer. I had some other pictures of him. He kind of looked like a black Elvis Presley. He had his hair processed from the thing.
NL: Sideburns?
DJ: Well, I don't know about the sideburns, but, you know, back in the day, we wore the processed hair. We had all of the looks—had your hair permed and waved and that kind of thing. This thing come up—I hope my battery is good, because I leave this thing at home and someone is at the house with it. Here it comes. I don't really know what happened, but it was certainly—when I heard my dad wasn't the person who broke the window—they was going to the store, the guy that I talked to, he asked me, he told me, he was running and telling my father "No! no! no! Don't go in there, don't go in there, the owner's in there and he got a rifle, don't go in there." And so they said my dad looked back, and he just stood in and “pow!” and the shot rang out.
LW: Was there a lot of riot activity on that strip in that neighborhood along John R? Do you remember? Because you lived very close to there, right?
DJ: Yeah, we were close but I mean that's John R and Harper's right over here.
LW: Right.
DW: I lived several, several blocks away.
LW: So, he was driven there, because there was a car.
DJ: Right.
LW: And there—you're not sure about the amount of riot activity along that street.
DJ: There was rioting throughout the city.
LW: Okay.
DJ: It was on fire. The whole sky was red, black, even in the daytime.
LW: Okay.
DJ: I remember that because around me—the store—it was about three blocks up—the store they hit, someone had broken into that night and people just coming out with stuff. I saw them running because I was looking but I wasn't allowed to leave the front yard. But three blocks down you could see people running up with all kinds of stuff. I do remember hollering, “Bring me an ice cream!” [laughter]. That’s what I was thinking. But I never got the ice cream.
LW: What did your dad do for a living?
DJ: He mostly did demolition work I went on several job sites that he had—where they tear down the building and stuff, he dad that work. He worked at Ford once upon a time. We was talking about how he was bouncing out the plant; it was a Ford plant. It might've been the one out here—Wixom? Yeah, Ford Wixom. He worked there. He worked at that Wixom plant. And he also used to work on the docks. I remember he was an excellent swimmer. I remember one night he was knocked off the boat and I remember the police coming to our house. He had arrived shortly before they had got there and my dad was in the tub and when the police came they actually told us that our dad was lost and he was feared to be dead because he got knocked off the boat by a crane or something. And what he did was that he swam up onto the ship and he crawled up—and this was in the wintertime—and he came home. And then the police came. And so when the police came and they was telling us we need to talk to your mom and they was saying, "Sorry, we got some unpleasant news for you." Something about "We think your husband is missing. He was knocked off the ship, we searched for him but couldn't find him." Then my dad came out of the bathroom, towel and all, saying that everything was okay, what's going on? And they was—"Who are you?" "I'm Daniel Jennings." And they said, "Oh, okay sir, you was supposed to contact some folks,” and they went into that.
LW: So, when your dad did die, and the story that you told was that he had been looting a store.
DJ: Right.
LW: That what your mother was told?
DJ: Right.
LW: And what was her reaction to that?
DJ: She was sad. I didn't see my mom crying at all. She was just sad, shaking her head, and I remember that I didn't know what looting was. And that was the word that they used. We were like we don't need no food—they said he was just going in there to get them babies some food. And I didn't understand these patent medicine drug store. Knowing what I know now, and knowing that he did step in the door—they were probably going to get some liquor. I mean truth is truth—that's my analogy of it right now. Like I said, he did step inside the door and the guy did tell me he was trying to warn him, "Hey mister, hey mister, don't go in there!" And they said he stepped in and didn't get a step, and the shot rang out and then he told me they brought him outside, when the police came, they laid him on the sidewalk, on the stretcher. Just laid him out there for a couple hours or more, uncovered and everything. Just like they said this is what you all will get if you come and mess the businesses or something like that. Now that part was hard for me, I really didn't like that, at least they could've covered him up. When I was looking at his bloody clothes I couldn't understand why wouldn't the guy shoot him in the arm or in the leg or something, or fire a warning shot. I guess it's just the heat of the moment or whatever because the guy that had no idea that this guy had fourteen kids at home, and had been struggling that morning just to find work. That’s what he was at the unemployment office for, to register for a job. So I say why did he have to kill him, and I went up there, I went up to the store as an adult, I wanted to see the guy, I didn’t know if he was in there or not. But I would go visit that corner many times, almost once a year and just stand there and one day I just walked in the store and I just stood there by the door but this was when I was in my twenties and thirties when they was still open. And I just looked and I saw a guy standing back there, working, like it was a drug store, a liquor store slash. I think they sold liquor there. And I was looking and I was a saying, “I wonder if this is one of the guys who shot my dad?” I didn’t have any ill intentions or anything but I just—it gave me some kind of comfort and some type of closure and understanding. And I still go there. I just rolled by last week—they building a housing complex. I get this certain feeling when I go on that corner. Is this the corner that my dad took his last breath? And I got closure a couple of years ago when we were in Virginia. I did a story on Virginia, I don’t know if you all saw it on the Internet when you looked up the riot, but it WHSV, when it say, “Riot victims remember son,” ["Riot Victim's Children Remembers Father's Legacy"] and you Google that. We did an interview down there, and I was down there because they was having the Martin Luther King march. They wanted to turn one of the boulevards to name it after Martin Luther King. It was a main boulevard in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I was going to move down there so, and when they was able to change that name to the Martin Luther King Boulevard, that gave me a sense of closure for what happened to my dad. For some reason, I don’t understand it, but it did. Because I know that they died in the same type of struggle. My dad wasn’t out there marching for a cause or anything but it was just the times, he got caught up in it. That moment, I don’t know what led him to go to this store that day. I don’t know what brought that on and as I reflect back that is the only thing I can think of why would he be going in the store like that. I went down there and when I saw that it was Stanley’s Patent Medicine, but I believe they sold liquor. I said maybe he was going there to get a drink. I don’t even remember my dad drinking a lot. He liked black label beer, Pall Mall cigarette, and I don’t even remember seeing him drink any liquor. Maybe it was the other people that were with him, I don’t know.
LW: You mentioned that you didn’t talk much about race relations in your house—
DJ: Never.
LW: But you mentioned that your dad was sort of caught up in the same struggle. Can you talk about what that means?
DJ: Well, what I mean by that is the struggle of the times. I remember riding with him in the car one day and some other brothers and sisters and our house was the last house on the block. They took it out— it's the last house— and put in this Chrysler, 75 Freeway in right here. I remember they were tearing down everything in the neighborhood. I lost a lot of friends. When I say lost, I mean they moved away. I was a boy scout, I would go away to camp, I would come back and they gone, my friends that moved away. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to them. Some of them I never saw again. But I remember I would ride down the street and I remember my dad stopping and just saying— and I didn't understand why he asked the guy—“Can I get some work with you? All you’ll have to give me is 50 cents an hour.” They were tearing up, and demolition is what he did. I don’t remember what the minimum wage was, I imagine it might’ve been a dollar and some change. This was back in 1964-65, a few years before he died. And there is just so much bulldozers and construction everywhere and he was trying "Can I get some work?" and they was like “no.” He’d say, “I’m looking for work.” But that’s the one good thing I say about my dad is that he always was there. I know a lot of guys—I got kids—a couple of them outside my marriage but I always took care of them, child support, had them with me every minute, but the thing is he always was there. He could’ve easily packed. The ways the times was back then. If you remember that movie—I’m trying to think of it. You would have to leave. Back then, the way the welfare in the eighties system worked—they had a movie with James Earl Jones and Julia, Diane Kearle. You might not remember. Julia, she was the first black TV star, female. But they had a movie called Julia. But they did a movie in the seventies that was depicting the times, the situation. I’m trying to think of the best way to say this without it sounding—if you was on welfare, ADC, you weren’t allowed to have new stuff in you house. Like a new iron, or telephone, or car. That’s what this movie was about, I was trying to think of the name of it. I remember when my mother used to call when my dad didn’t find work and she was calling trying to get some work—saying I’ve been trying to get some assistance from the ADC and they told her—“Do you have a man there?” And she’d say, “Yeah, I got a husband here,” then you couldn’t get no help. So the only way that a family could get assistance was that the man had to leave. He had to leave the house. And that’s the only way they’ll help give you food and assistance that you need. I remember us getting the Goodfella Boxes, every Christmas, with all the little toys and trinkets in it. That’s what I’m saying. My dad didn’t leave. He stayed there and struggled through the times and went to find work and stuff. It was the riot times, is what I’m talking about. My daddy wasn’t out there marching against the cause or whatever. He did step into that store, that’s undeniable. So my thought process when I kept going over and over why would he go into this store. And the only thing that I could think of is maybe they were trying to get something to drink. I think my dad probably did take the liquor-drink. I never saw him drink liquor, but I know he drank beer, I know he loved the Pall Mall cigarettes and the what did I say—the Lucky Strike—no, Pall Mall cigarettes and Black Label. There was a beer called Black Label. Oh, that beer, I tried it when I was grew up and it was nasty. I don’t know if it’s still out there, Black Label, but I just didn’t like it. That’s what I meant being caught up in the times—Martin Luther King was caught up in the times—trying to struggle for equality and justice. And this same event that took my dad—was the people was struggling for equality and justice that he just a victim that was caught up in-between it and lost his life. He may’ve been out there just trying to get a drink or whatever. That’s what I mean by the same because it was the same set of circumstances and it was that day, you know, when people lose someone, and they don’t have all the answers. And like I said when I was down in Virginia that day, I felt a sense of closure when they gave him that. This was something the people wanted so bad. I probably wouldn’t even sense that type of feeling but since there was so many people against it in the area, saying, “Well, maybe we can put his name on such-and-such a playground way back over here behind Julio’s farm or something. And I was like, “Wow,” what is so bad about this man having his name up on the boulevard? With so many people, it would bring comfort to them and honor to them. And when they finally won it over, that’s when it made me feel good. I didn’t know I was down there—they put my picture on the front page of the paper. I mean it’s small—with my sister and then they had me on several news clips, and they kept calling me—“You’re on the news, you’re on the news, holding up a sign.” Maybe it was because I was parked right in front of the police station and so maybe they search my license plate and say well who is this guy? Dan Jennings from Detroit, maybe they put that together because they treated me like a celebrity down there, but I didn’t expect it, I didn’t know why. Here’s these pictures I wanted to show you all, together for you to see. This is little short video of my family. This is when we was doing the thirtieth anniversary for my mom, that’s my company Jim [unintelligible] Productions [music in background]. I had better pictures of him but I didn’t get a chance to get them. When he was younger he used to be a paperboy and things like that [music in background]. These are all of my brothers and [unintelligible]. Actually, my mother had one son after all of us—my other brother—last one by my father—he’s deceased—this is at his funeral [music in background]. This is my brother: he’s the one who died. We was at his funeral, the last picture you saw with all the brothers—that’s the last son of my father [music in background]. That’s my mom. I got another picture of my dad, and that’s who all the sister—down here—she died—that’s the second oldest girl, that’s when they was babies. This had to be maybe three or four years before I was born [music in background]. That’s my dad. Right there. That’s him. Again, his dad--his mother, his dad’s twin sister, he had a twin sister, another sister, he had a—my granddaddy, my grandaunt and sister. My dad, my older sister, but she died in 1971. She had a brain tumor; she was twenty-two years old. That’s my mom over here and that’s my dad’s momma—my grandma—right here. And this had to be—looking at their ages from the picture—I’m guessing this is from 1950—Donna was born in ’50. Yeah, so it was 1953-54 something like that [music].
LW: Thank you.
DJ: I know I probably have a ticket down there because it was over with—two o’clock I think. So I just have to deal with that. So I probably left out some stuff because I’m kind of jumping back and forth. But then again—
NL: Do you, because you said you didn’t talk about race relations in the house where you grew up. Is it something you ever discussed with friends or people in the neighborhood?
DJ: I never did. Not during those times. We never—
NL: Were you thinking about it very much at those times?
DJ: No, I never had any problems. Like I said, I had the neighbors and stuff and I didn’t have a lot of dealings with the opposite race or the Caucasian race. I mean, I went over to Highland Park, Hamtramck. There was the Polish over there—but never had any problems. We had a supermarket that was around the corner—Joseph Campau and Holbrook called Buy-Low’s, and I lived over on right [unclear] and Davidson. Which was a nice, little distance. We would venture out as kids. I would ride my bike all the way from the state to the State Fair, and to Belle Isle when I was eight, nine years old. But there’d be groups of us. But we was very responsible and I didn’t have any issues with any of the races or anything. And like the first incident I ever had was the first day before my dad was killed when they was throwing at us and cursing at us and calling us niggers, I never had nothing like that happen. What did they do that for? You know, we never bothered anybody. We were kids. Like Alice in Wonderland and Leave it to Beaver—I was a boy scout and I was raised up—and for a scout, you had to do a good dead for the day. And everyday that I woke up, I had to go out and ask someone, “Can I rake your leaves, cut your grass, wash your windows, you need something from the store?” I had to do that everyday and wasn’t allowed to accept anything for it. Couldn’t accept any money. That was a condition of my parents, my grandparents, and the Scouts. I always had to say, “Yes sir, yes ma’am” to adults. That’s the way I grew up. I remember I was doing the interview in ’87 and I was telling the guy this and he said, “Man, that sound really corny.” And my answer to him was it was the corny truth [laughter]. And it was, the guy who was doing the interview for the news—when I told him that I watch Leave it to Beaver—he said that it sounded really corny and I told him it was corny truth though. That’s the way it was at my house. And I still have a brother to this day, and he was born 1960 so what that make him? Fifty-five years old? He still, wherever he’s at he still—if he find an episode of Leave it to Beaver, he’ll watch it. He will. Just like we got the computers right now, I still love my, because the music. The Gunsmoke, The Fugitive, David Jensen—I don’t know if you heard of that or remember that was a popular show. But just me hearing the soundtrack and the music to these songs it makes me, reminds me of my childhood when I was at home with my mom and dad was right there and we was all watching TV, that’s the only link I have to them right now—is to sit and watch a certain show, and I hear the music playing, like the Gunsmoke music. Because I know my dad loved watching Bat Masterson and Gunsmoke and I hear that music playing and that inside, there’s something that reminds me of home. I get that warm feeling like he’s still a part of me. I know it may sound corny but that’s the truth. It really is. But I didn’t know what they was rioting, looting for. This is the real confusion to me, because when I heard later on that it was about the races—it was white people and it was black people coming up and down the street with baskets of stuff together on my block. And my dad used to ride us downtown—a big thing for us coming up is he’ll pile us all in the car and they’ll get a couple of big bags together and fill them up with tuna fish and bologna sandwiches and jelly sandwiches. And the big thing for us was to ride out to the airport, the city airport, and watch the planes take off. Or to ride up and down Palm Street over here near the old Tiger Stadium because a lot of hippies was there, back then. I mean, you see the psychedelic colors and there be plenty of black folks over there too. So the races was always intermingled. So I didn’t have any recollection—I never was mistreated or called out my name by the whites back then. Not only when the riots started, but then it was a long time after that. I was grown almost, working over here parking cars before I had any understanding—the white races being careful—because I never heard that as a kid. We never talked about it in my house. We played and we had a good time. I did my scout stuff, did my good deed, did my chores. When I rode my bike, and I got to throw this in before we go. One day, my big thing was to come home, ride my bike, play with my football—loved the Lions. Matter-of-fact, the day that my daddy died, the night before, we was sitting on the porch and we was watching the people come up and down the street with baskets of stuff and everything. And he said—he used to call me “June-sack.” I don’t know why because it has nothing to do with who I am or a nickname or whatever. But he’d say, “June-sack, this year we going to catch every game.” He was talking about the Lions and I said, “Yeah,” and that’s why I really felt cheated. The guy who killed my father cheated me out of making every game—we had never been to every game. Those are the things we talked about. And the one thing I want to say is one day I was living on [unintelligible], the street before they tore down—and my dad—he got into the habit—there was so many of us, and we would have stuff just thrown all over the house everywhere. And he’d get up at three, four o’clock in the morning and wake everyone up. “Get up, clean up!” The boys—I was never allowed to wash dishes—because of all the sisters. That may be chauvinistic but there was so many sisters. The girls had to wash the dishes and they had to sweep up. The boys, we had to clean the yard, wash the woodworks around the edge of the floor, I think and do the windows to or something. He would wake us up to do all of that and he took me out in the backyard and said, “I want you to clean up back here in front of the garage,” took me on the side, “I want you to clean up all this trash, clean up the garbage stains.” I learned a valuable lesson that day that brought me to tears—the day we did the twentieth anniversary, because it gave me “stick-to-it-of-ness.” He said, “Have all this done by the time I get home from work and I ain’t got to tell you twice.” And I said, “No, you don’t.” When he came home, I’m outside throwing my football, just having a great time. And then my daddy call me—“June-sack, come here boy, Reggie come here.” And so when I go in the house he say, “You do everything I tell you to do?—come on, let’s go see.” So I went back to the backyard, all straightened up, all neat. “Good job son, good job.” And then he said, “You burn the trash like I said, you set the cans up on the thing like I tell you to do?” Go back there it was all done, everything. I knew I hadn’t done it so we go into the house, “I got one more thing to show you.” They used to throw away a lot of refrigerators, stoves, and washers and dryers, they had the big boxes laying on the curb. My dad had got one and laid it out all flat in our family room. My bike, which was a pretty, red, Schwinn racer. And I had all the toys. I had mirrors on it, hub-a-light, streamers, siren, saddlebag in the back—pretty. I mean all the girls wanted me for that bike. It was in a thousand pieces. He had took the chain link off my bike, the handlebars off, the gooseneck, the paddles, the spokes are loose. He just took everything off. The fork was off, and it was just laying there neat in a hundred pieces and say, “Now put it back together.” I didn’t know what to do. I was maybe seven or eight. And he gave me a pair of pliers; he gave me a crescent wrench, and a screwdriver. I never will forget them three because I didn’t know what to do with them. And he said, “You’re not leaving this room until you put this back together.” For three days, all day week-ends and after school I had
to come in there and sit in that room with that bike. I’m crying, hair knotted-up, snot running in/out the nose; and he came and showed me a little piece here and a little piece there and I end up fixing the bike because it had handbrakes and he took all that lose. But that was such a valuable, valuable lesson to me at t hat time I didn’t realize it. Once I got this bike back together I became the bike repairman in the whole neighborhood. I would put the bikes together-the double bikes they had at Belle Isle that you had a seater-heater, and I’d take the front wheel off of this one and put it on the back of that one and even in my business, when I endeavored to do my magazine and no matter what type of challenges that was thrown at me and I kept remembering you better not quit, you had better stay to see it finished even if the day you finish you walk away then but you don’t quit, you don’t stop short. He taught me that and the day that we did the twentieth anniversary, you know, my picture’s in the paper and they had a little picture of him I think. I cried when I saw that for some reason because for some reason it made me think about that day that he took that bike loose. I was dealing with so many challenges at that time—they trying to force me out of business—I say negative forces. And trying to shut my office down, they had [unclear] and my car up got blown up and all kinds of crazy stuff. There was people who saw this business stuff and didn’t want it to happen. But I didn’t deter from it. I just kept going strong. That’s probably the last thing I have to say about it but it gave me strength and a sense of closure that day. The city, I want to see it flourish, I want to see it happen. Even though I’m out in Taylor, Michigan right now--’m getting ready to move back to Detroit—possibly in the next couple of months. Hopefully, or it may be a little while. I want to build a complex here. I want to build something that will help the people—just create jobs and teach people. There is a lot of talented derelicts out on the street. Not to take away from anybody, I can’t compete with any of the major studios or the entertainment complex that they’re putting down here—Ilitch and all them guys—but I want to be able to help create something that could compliment what they doing. See, if I can create something that can compliment it. The existing infrastructure, then these people won’t to worry about people coming to rob them or hit them in the head, because they got a legitimate skill. I’ve worked successfully so many times with the neighborhood gangs down here where I used to have a store down on Joy Road and Evergreen, a sportswear store. They got themselves a couple of little gang factions—they call themselves the Bloods and the Crips of all things. I had come up with an idea because they had broken into my store, broke into a couple of businesses next to me—so I started calling them guys over into my sportswear store—I wish I had brought my portfolio, showing I had my prototype magazine and was setting it up for worldwide distribution and showing them pictures with [unintelligible] and Leon Spinks and Hearns and all them guys—I had Hearns products in my store. I was telling these guys—“You all living this life out here, robbing and breaking into these stores,”—I thought of an idea, I said, “You know what you guys could do, for as little as fifty dollars, or twenty dollars, you guys could start a business. Think about it. Get you a wagon, get you a bucket of water, some vinegar, and some newspaper.” That’s what my grandma used to have us clean her windows with and say, “You can go up and down Joy Road here and get twenty businesses and they’ll pay you fifty dollars to clean they windows every other week; that’s a hundred bucks a month.” Then I say, “You can clean they awnings also.” And now I say, “What if you got twenty businesses? To do the windows and awnings. Just do four hundred dollars, starting out, that’s two thousand dollars; then if you get a mobile on Warren and over on Clement. That’s six thousand dollars, instead of you breaking into these businesses, now they are a source of revenue.” They listened. They all came to my store and then I said—I talked to all the stores and businesses around there and they was agreeing to let these guys do this instead of breaking into they place. I said we’ll design you a little logo—if you picture the Pepsi-Cola logo—it’s red and blue—that you guys—different gang members that are fighting each other—will represent one of these businesses. I said, “Instead of you going up and down the street running—imagine you being chased down the street—but not by each other with knives and guns—but being chased by people because you a celebrity. They’re chasing you with an ink pen because they want your autograph. You a celebrity now, because you was able to start that little musical group thing you was trying to do—you was able to open that little bakery for your mother—that she want a little bakery shop up here. You were able to open up a little sewing shop, because now you got money going into the bank. I’ll show you how to set up a bank account and get going.” They had all the gangs in my store—my store was no bigger than this room—a little bit—but one morning they all peeking around the buildings and—I had started talking to them and their parents started coming up talking to me—but they snatched me off the scene that day because I went into a divorce at that time. So they forced my store to close and I kind of lost contact with these kids—this was back in ’95. But they would really listen, and they would say, “We been listening to you, and nobody else talked to us like you do.” And that’s all these kids in the gangs want. They want to feel a sense of belonging, that somebody like them, or show them something because I kept talking to them. I would even give them money sometimes—four or five dollars—I’d ask, “What are you all going to do with it?” If it’s going to keep you from going and hitting somebody in the head or whatever, I’d give them twenty dollars and go—“Well come back and see me. I got a little chore I need you all to do.” And the chore was Charles Costa. You all know that name? Chuck Costa, he used to have a paint shop—he ran for mayor a few years ago. He used to have a big paint shop on Grand River. I think he still may be around somewhere but originally he was from Canada. He had a paint store it was called “The Paint Store.” He ran for mayor sometime in the nineties. He said he’d donate all the paint that we needed. I promised them kids that if they would come and paint the graffiti off the buildings. If I get the paint and you paint the graffiti off the buildings then I’ll take you to a ball game. We’ll have a car wash and help raise some money, wash the cars, then I’ll print, I was giving them t-shirts out my shop, printing nice stuff it—positive. They agreed to do the car wash, they wanted to go to the ball game, but a broke-up in my marriage and that kind of stripped everything away from me. I took years trying to get back on my feet. But that process of work, today, still, it’s still work. I talked to them about instead of you robbing the businesses and having graffiti, I say, “Think of what it would be like if your moms could sit up here at one of these restaurant-shops in an open area with chairs and at night they could come down and you guys is watching and helping patrol the area, I ain’t saying like gangsters but now you all grew up. You got on suits and ties, but now instead of you breaking in, every business you look at, you got a source of revenue coming from it, that’s helping you out. And then, up and down your block, this is the stuff you have to do. I said I could get you all, actually, to meet with the mayor, to probably sit at the White House someday. We could make this work. Go up and down the block, talk to the block club leaders, go up to Evergreen and Reynold, we’ll rent the lawn mower, and we’ll go and cut all the people that can’t afford to get their lots.” And this is the type of stuff that I’m into. They were starting to do it, and I asked each of them to write me at least a one page letter about what they wanted to be when they grew up—what you all want to start doing positive once you all start making money. And I had a stack of letters this thick. But the system took me away from all of that. I was trying to help these kids and they was starting to listen, but I know something like that’ll work. They’re still reachable—it’ll work. These youngsters out here want to do something positive; they just don’t have guidance and leadership. But I showed them success, I had my book, I had pictures with me and a lot of celebrities, pictures I had taken from traveling around the country, and pictures with mayors and all different people like that. Oh, you know so and so and you did this and that—I was driving a nice car—and I said you can have these type of things without cutting and shooting one another. But like I say, that’ll be a great feeling for me to be chased, but not by someone with a knife or gun but by someone with an ink pen—hey, can I get your autograph. They like that. That’ll work, and I’m going to make it happen one day when I get this studio. What I’m going to do when I get this studio all set up. I looked into the possibility of bringing in—back in ’95—I still got the book at home—they had to pay like all these hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits. Like the Philip-Morris Company—all the tobacco companies, right—millions. I thought about building a facility—I’m so loaded with great ideas. I thought about them building this infrastructure—this facility—somewhere in the heart of the city—and they can have their names on it as contributors of—my brothers could even build it—they got the background—journeymen, and master electrician brother-in-law—and we’ll bring in other companies too. In the center I want a place where the youngsters can learn computers—or even the elderly people can learn computers—they can learn skills. I want them to bring in the local police chief, the pastors, everyday people with businesses and talk to them. And I want then to go through a seminar—orientation—that was the word I was looking for. Like they go through an orientation for a week or two weeks. First they talk to the different businesses—they talk to the people from Habitat For Humanity—talk to people like myself that would be interested in doing a video—I was printing t-shirts. We can teach you all these different ways you can be successful out here. And then after you graduate, I’ll have a jacket printed for maybe twenty students at-a-time. I can get Pepsi-Cola, or one of the local companies help contribute to the jackets—to purchase them—and I will print them—give them a wholesale price or whatever. I would take the loss—just getting them out here. And people like stuff like that and this would help them. Because when each one of them left there, they would have a positive outlook on what they could be. If you want to do music, if you want to do writing, photography, you want to be a law enforcement officer, or pursue a career in the military. I would have all those officials and individuals come there and speak to them. I would try to have some type of incentive program, an award program, and hopefully when they left they would leave with a positive attitude toward doing something positive in the city. And if we could reach just one, that would have been a great benefit because they’ll go out and reach others. And lastly, I used to talk to these kids—when I started dealing with these gang members coming in—because all this was in me from what happened to my dad. I didn’t want him to go out there—because, you see, he lost his life.
LW: Mmm-hmm.
DJ: Maybe they probably had a few beers and they let’s go to the store—whatever the situation—was that they wouldn’t have to look for that as a resource. When they got finished in the class that we taught them constructive—no matter what was happening in society—they would always follow a positive way out of any negative or financial situation they was in. And that’s basically the message I wanted to give them—the ammunition that I wanted to give them is that you don’t have to pick up a gun or a knife. You don’t have to steal, you don’t have to rob—you can get it positively. And that’s the main message I wanted to put to them. I still see this facility existed today. I used to talk to them, I used to say, “Now, when you go to school”—I was watching this movie the other day—Dangerous Minds—you probably saw that. I thought that was a great system where she gave them an “A.” And it’s harder to keep it, it really is, than it is to earn it. Especially when you haven’t done the things to earn it. You really got and go extra-study—I used to tell them about the attitude adjustment. Those were the things I was teaching them. I would tell them, “If you came home one day and, say, someone tore the curtain up. Say your sister tore it up and she told them—“It was you” and you came in and told them “I didn’t do it, it was her, here’s the proof.” So the next day you come home—she took your favorite white basketball outfit or favorite white walking suit and she took it out back and she slushed it in the mud and got the basketball and dribbled all over it and then she threw it down at your door. When you walked in the door, I said, “What’s going to be your reaction to that.” When you walk in your reaction is going to be I’m going to kick her so-and-so—not there. I say, think about this, I say what if you was able to come in and you see your suit right there and your attitude was different. What if you said, “Oh, clumsy me, I left this suit out in the mud and it got all dragged and messed up.” And you picked it up and you dusted it off in front of her and said, “I got to take this coat to the cleaners, I got to go wash it, do you need anything washed sis? I could wash yours, take it to the cleaners. I’m even going to pay for it.” I said, “What do you think would happen to her mindset after that?” You just blew her mind because she didn’t get the reaction she was expecting. I say people do things because they want a certain reaction. But I said, what if someone did something to you—they hit you or they ticked you off or got you mad—embarrassed you in front of the other person? What if you didn’t react the way that they did? What if you turned around and said, “Well, yeah man”—even if they were wrong—what if you say, “You might have a point there; let me shake your hand,” and turned and walked away from it. Then maybe at a later date you came back and dealt with that person and said something positive like “That wasn’t the way to handle that.” I said, “You wouldn’t be dead, and that person wouldn’t be in jail for killing you, or vice versa. You need to think about those kinds of things—learn how to control your reaction, and you’ll live another day.” I still want to do that. Okay, I’m going to get ready to get out of here, unless you need something else.
LW: No, thank you so much.
DJ: I hope that I have answered all your questions. See, because I can go all day; we’ll be here past midnight. You got to stop me. So I’m going to get myself out of here.
LW: Thank you, Daniel. That was really nice. Thank you.
DJ: Thank you all. I was glad to say all of the memories that I have for that time.
LW: Good.
DJ: Because everything I said to my knowledge is true, and just--and that’s all I can say. It’s true, I can remember that happened.
LW: Thank you very much.
DJ: But you’ll be hearing about me, soon. Because I’m going to do this video, production company and all positive stuff. Trying to help make a difference out here. I know I talked a lot today but—it’s my dad—I just want his name to remain alive. Whatever accomplishments I make out here—they’ll ask—“Well, who is this guy? Where did he come from?” And mentioning my name they’ll have to remember him. And that’s basically what I want—his name to live. Okay, thank you.
LW: Thank you.
**In this interview, Buchanan discusses his experiences growing up primarily in Virginia Park during the 1960s. He notes the escalated police presence in the community, and details several anecdotes of police brutality he experienced as a child. During the unrest, his mother was transported to and from work by the police and National Guard, once in an armored personnel carrier. He recalls the events in great detail, remembering the smell of burning buildings “everywhere” and the constant police sirens which sounded like “wailing.” Buchanan discusses the importance of Twelfth Street as a site of black economic self-sufficiency, which he claims no longer exists, and will not exist in the near future despite the revitalization of Midtown and Downtown Detroit.
WW: Hello. Today is December 13, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Detroit, Michigan. I am sitting down with Mr. Darryle Buchanan. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
DB: Thank you for having me.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
DB: I was born in Detroit on July 28, 1955 at Women’s Hospital, which is now Hutzel Hospital.
WW: Did you grow up in the city?
DB: Yes I did.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?
DB: I lived in several neighborhoods. When I was born, my father was in the military, so my mother–single woman, 20 years old, she was living with relatives–at one point we lived down on Hastings and Canfield. It was kind of interesting going back and remembering that because that whole area has been replaced by I-75. We lived there for a moment, and for the most part though I remember growing up on the Northeast Side in Conant Gardens, that’s where I first started school. We moved from there to Highland Park, which I absolutely loved living in Highland Park. My parents divorced and we moved onto Virginia Park which probably is where I would say where I grew up.
WW: What were some of the differences between those neighborhoods? Do you remember them being staunchly different or kind of along the same lines?
DB: Highland Park was probably the most different of any of the communities that I lived in. It was very integrated, and very viable in those days because Chrysler Headquarters was still in Highland Park, and a lot of management and executives lived in Highland Park. I would actually see them walking to and from work everyday. It was interesting because even at lunchtime, they would leave, go home, have lunch, and then go back. It was just a very different time. This was the early Sixties, ’61 to’63 is when we were living there.
WW: Are there any other memories you’d like to share from growing up in either Virginia Park or in Conant Gardens?
DB: In Highland Park, I was eight years old, and we were practicing for my first communion. I was raised Catholic.
WW: Uh-hm.
DB: I went to Blessed Sacrament, which is not too far, Belmont, where we were in Highland Park. During the rehearsal, I remember one of the nuns running into the church and telling us all to get on our knees and pray, that the president had just been killed. That was something that you never forget, I don’t care what age you are, I was eight years old, and that’s a day that I remember like yesterday.
WW: Wow.
DB: Especially being Catholic, all of the excitement around having a Catholic president, what he meant to that. In that time period, that was the thing that stuck out most to me.
WW: Wow.
DB: Funny thing: you know how little boys are, especially back in the early Sixties, we’re just coming out of World War II and Korea, we all had army helmets and guns and we played war and did all that stuff. You don’t really know the difference between ethnicities or anything like that. Going to a Catholic School, you have a lot of Chaldeans, a lot of Filipinos as well as white and black students, and I had this one Filipino friend, and we were all just kids, we weren’t shy, you know, we’re walking down the street and he said he was talking about, “What are we going to do? What’s going to happen to us?” Then he said, “What if the Japanese attack us?” All the little boys looked at him like, “What are you worried about?” you know? Because we didn’t make distinctions, we just know that he looked Asian, and that was it. We just said, “You should be okay.” That’s the most memorable thing about that time for me.
WW: Uh-hm. Given the diverse community that you grew up in, both in your neighborhood and at your school, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhoods growing up or did you venture around the city? And if so, did you feel comfortable venturing around the city?
DB: That’s the one thing that caused me a lot of problems when I was a little boy: I had wanderlust. I just, for whatever reason, I had no problem walking around the city, catching the bus around the city.
On the east side and west side of Woodward, streets have different names. I knew that my favorite cousin lived on Glynn, and Glynn is Belmont, where I went to school, on the other side. So I just happened to look over there one day, and seriously, I was about seven years old, Friday afternoon, I looked over there and I said, “Glynn? My cousin lives on Glynn.’ So I just started walking down Glynn, and I walked down Glynn all the way, got to the expressway, had to go around, come back on the other side and keep going down Glynn. Eventually, I got to my cousin’s house and walked in and they were sitting down getting ready to have late lunch, so I sat down and next thing I know it’s Friday evening and we’re just running around playing, and my mom is panicking, she’s calling looking for me, and my aunt was like, “What are you talking about? He’s sitting at the table with us right now.” That’s just how it was for me. It was just an adventure. I just loved growing up then. It was a different time. It was just easy just to get around. I mean a seven year old on the bus? I’m talking about getting on the DSR [Department of Street Railways] bus and you can’t event imagine, people worry about their kids getting on school buses now, let alone getting on DOT [Department of Transportation] buses. East side/west side, and it’s funny because even now my sons are always asking me, “Dad, how do you know this?” I say, “I grew up here. I know everything about Detroit.”
WW: [Laughter.]
DB: Just drop me off and I guarantee you I can find my way back home. It was a good time, a very different time.
WW: Growing up, do you remember any tension growing in the city? Either economic, racial – ?
DB: Until I moved on Virginia Park, I never really noticed anything. I was friends with, as I said, Filipino kids, Chaldean kids, white kids, I would go to their house, we would visit with each other. I didn’t notice anything different until I moved onto Virginia Park. Then some stark realities started to set in for me that I wasn’t ready for but I lived through and it was just a stark difference going from one environment to the other. Not to say that it was bad, it was just different.
WW: Would you mind elaborating on some of those differences?
DB: Well, one, just the number of people that lived in the community. We moved in with my father’s parents, and they owned a two-family flat on Virginia Park, and right next-door was an apartment building, and up and down the street, there were all two-family flats, multi-level and multi-unit dwellings. So small apartments, big apartments, four units, and that kind of thing. So there were way more people living in that area than I had seen either growing up in Conant Gardens or in Highland Park. But it was good, a whole lot more people to play with for sure, and a whole lot more people to get into trouble with as well.
Along with that, I noticed differences just in poverty rates and things like that. I had really never seen people that were struggling financially, families struggling. It wasn’t like I separated myself from them, they were my friends so it was no distinction in terms of me versus them or income or those kinds of things, but I did notice just the difference there.
The other thing that I noticed was the police presence that was in that community. I barely ever saw the police before in my life until I moved over there. And then it was just a regular occurrence, seeing police. You know, I think my first time being involved with the police or the police saying anything to me, we were little boys, we found a pack of cigarettes and we’re running around trying to find matches so we could light them up. We were in the alley–because we used to play in the alleys, the alleys were actually pretty nice to play in then–and then these police rolled up on us, and, “Hey, what are you doing?” and started chasing us because we were smoking cigarettes. I was scared, for sure, but couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. It’s like why go to those extremes when you could have just as easily said, “Put those down” or “Give them to me” and they’ll throw them away? But to chase us, I thought it was a little bit extreme. So, just from that aspect, I noticed there was a difference from being a little boy kind of naïve growing up in Highland Park, now I’m a young man–not even young man yet, I’m still nine, ten years old growing up over there. All of the sudden, I started seeing that it’s a little different over here.
WW: Going into ’67, were you still living on Virginia Park?
DB: Yeah, yeah. I actually, from ’63 until adulthood, that’s where I lived. Grade school, high school, and college, that was the base for me living there. So yeah, in ’67 I was right there. I actually, I turned 12 that week. I turned 12 that week. It’s one of those things that you’ll–like the assassination, this is burned in my memory. Sights, smells, sounds, things I just, I have flashbacks of them.
WW: Where in Virginia Park where you?
DB: Right on Virginia Park between Twelfth and Fourteenth Street. Yeah, right at the epicenter. Our house was – it now is on the corner of Fourteenth because they tore down the apartment building that was next-door. So I got to see and feel the entirety, the intensity of the whole event.
WW: Did you and your family go onto Twelfth Street at all growing up? Was that your main thoroughfare?
DB: When I first moved over there my mom was telling me, “Now, we’re moving to a different neighborhood, you stay off of Twelfth Street.” You know that’s the worst thing you can tell a little boy, what not to do, because I started going on Twelfth Street. I didn’t have a choice really because the school I went to, St. Agnes, was right on the corner of South La Salle Gardens and Twelfth Street. It didn’t make sense to walk all the way back to Fourteenth a lot of days when I can just walk right down Twelfth to Virginia Park and come home.
I’m going to tell you, man, there were so many things that I saw, it was just alive. It was alive. There were stores, there were theatres, there were restaurants, I mean, it was a fully self-contained area. There was no reason for you to ever leave that neighborhood to do anything. Just think about on my block, on Virginia Park, just Twelfth Street between Virginia Park and Seward: just in that strip, in my block, there was Dr. Maben’s Pharmacy, there was Hope Brothers’ Barber Shop, there was Fishman’s Hardware, there was the Chit Chat Lounge, there was a beauty shop in there, but then there was Picnic Barbeque, and then there was actually a dairy on the corner where we would go and buy milkshakes, Boston Coolers, ice cream, all that, and then a market on the opposite corner right there. There was no reason to ever have to leave the neighborhood to do anything. You could just go up and down Twelfth Street: clothing stores, you name it, gas stations, everything right there. I thought it was probably the best time of my life in terms of growing up and being able to see life from every aspect. There were church people, there were hustlers, there were regular, everyday folks, families, just doing what they do. It was – economically, there was a way for everybody to do something, make some money. I remember as a little kid–just because of the way the neighborhood was, the people that lived there, I was a little boy that never, never had to go without money. All I had to do was walk down the street and just ring the doorbell: need somebody to pull your weeds, cut your grass, shovel snow? I would even make money just walking up to the store and I’d ask people, “I’m going to the store, you need anything?” And they would say, “Yeah, bring me back whatever.” And I’d bring it back, and they’d give me a nickel, a dime, or whatever. That was good money. If you had a quarter back then, you could buy a pop and a bag of chips. For a little boy, that was good. I saw jitneys, I don’t know if you know what a jitney is, but a jitney is, they’re the original Uber drivers. So you go to the market and not everybody had a car, and so the jitneys would see you shopping, and a lot of them just had regular folks and would see you coming, and say, “I got you on your way out.” No problem. So they would load up your groceries, take you to your house, unload them, and go back to the market and get the next one. When I saw the Uber thing, I said, “Seriously? That’s nothing but a jitney. That’s wild.”
WW: How did you first hear about what was going on on Twelfth Street that night on July 23?
DB: Well I told you I went to Catholic School. At St. Agnes, I was an altar boy, a safety patrol boy, I did all that stuff, right? So, throughout the summer, you still had a schedule as an altar boy and I remember getting up to do 8 o’clock mass and my mother was an emergency room tech at Henry Ford Hospital. So she knew I was getting up to go, and I was actually up and ironing my cassock. So I was up ironing, and I could hear activity, and I said, “Man, wow, people are partying early today.” I could smell some smoke, and I was thinking people are barbequing or something. So when my mom called, she said, “You’re not going to church this morning,” I said, “Mom, I have to. What are you talking about?” She said, “There’s a riot going on on Twelfth Street and you’re not going to be able to get to the church anyway, so just stay, I’ll be home in a minute.”
Immediately, I went out to the front porch, and I noticed that all the noise that I was hearing was people milling about and going up and down the street. The looting really hadn’t started yet, but it was just a matter of time before all that broke out. My grandparents were there, we woke, and then we were just on the porch for the most part just looking up and down the street, neighbors milling about, talking about what was going on. Then my mother came home in a police car, and I was like, this is interesting she always caught the bus. But I guess bus service was disrupted, so the police brought her home in a car.
Now, my social consciousness is starting to come about, and by the age of 11, now I’m about to turn 12, and it concerned me seeing my mother in a police car because now I’m trying to get a feel for what’s going on up there but then seeing the police bringing my mother home, I was worried about how the people in the neighborhood were going to see our family because later, as my parents, my grandparents got away – well I got away from them, and of course you know I went right up to Twelfth Street just to watch everything. It was really something to see. It was really something to see. So many people so angry all at once. But I understood what was going on, because, as I told you, I had been dealing with this whole police presence for quite some time. What I’m saying is when you grow up in that neighborhood, you learn to play cops and niggers when you are young. The story about the cigarettes, that was typical of the kind of things that happened to us in that neighborhood.
For the older guys, I could see that it was even worse. There were guys that were teenagers that I saw growing up, and I just thought they were the coolest guys in the world; they used to wear their crisscross sweaters and their mohair slacks and their gypsy split shoes–that’s how they dressed going to high school. I was like, “Man, when I grow up, I want to be just like them.” Well, in the interim, a lot of those guys ended up going to Vietnam, and so they’re coming back from Vietnam about the same time that this is going on and they weren’t the same. They weren’t the cool people that I knew when I was little. They were dark, they were disturbed. You could tell something was wrong with them. They’re in the mix now too, coming home to have to deal with those same conditions. I remember seeing a guy that lived in the apartments that I told you were next-door to us, and just hearing all that going on that night, he just clicked into survival mode, and I saw him with his gear on jumping out the side window of the first floor of the apartment. I don’t know where he went, and I don’t think I ever saw him again. But I just remember seeing that and I was thinking, “Man, this is way worse than anything I could have ever imagined.” All that happening at the same time that we have this police presence in our neighborhood, and naturally knowing all these things, we’re now wearing naturals and we’re talking about Black Power.
I remember my mom used to, I said she worked at midnight, so in the daytime, she would sleep and certain things had to be done, and she would put me on the bus to go–and I mean, again, you know, it’s no big deal – go downtown, pay the Hudson’s bill, pay the light bill, take these light bulbs and exchange the light bulbs–that’s when light bulbs were actually free. That was part of my growing up, that was my responsibility as the oldest boy in a single-parent household. Inevitably, every time when I’d catch the Fenkell bus, they’d either be somebody from the Nation of Islam, or somebody from the Black Panther Party who would be there talking to me, telling me, “Young Brother, this is how you need to conduct yourself. And when you’re stopped by the police, you need to know how to answer, how to respond. You need to know these things in order to survive. Young Brother, do not wear your hair so long, you won’t be able to escape the pigs. Don’t wear bellbottom pants and do not wear platform shoes, you will not be able to get away.” These are things that were engrained in us as little boys in that neighborhood. Then, when I would have a conversation with somebody form the Nation of Islam and they started talking to me about how I should I take care of my body, and how I should eat, and how I should dress, and how I conduct myself in public. It was a different time in that I really feel like most of the young men of my generation, we were kind of raised up to be soldiers in terms of the Civil Rights Movement and just all of the turmoil of those times. This was all just a part of that. So seeing my mom get out of that police car caused me a little bit of concern.
That night, we’re now moving into where the National Guard and the Federal Troops were coming in, and there was basically martial law, so the curfew, lights out, and at night, they came and picked my mother up again to go to work but this time they picked her up in an unmarked police car, I had never seen one of those before. Totally blacked out, no insignia on it whatsoever, and when they came and knocked on the door, and she left out with them. They left and they didn’t even turn on the lights in the car and I mean they shot down Virginia Park so fast, it was kind of shocking to see.
You look at all that and my concern now is how’s that going to be taken in the neighborhood, how are they going to feel about us? Because I had seen black businesses on the corner of Virginia Park and Twelfth Street was Dr. Maben, he was a pharmacist, and I couldn’t believe that they actually broke into Dr. Maben’s drugstore and looted it because it was a black business. So right then I knew that black, white, Jewish, whatever, none of that mattered right now. That’s just how out of control the situation was. So my concern for my mother was real. Okay?
Then you add to that, the next morning when they brought her back, she came home – this armored personnel carrier came down my street ‘ding, ding, ding, ding,’ it’s like making this noise and you can’t help but notice that, right? So I run to see what is all that, and the thing pops up, the soldier pops out, and here comes my mom, popping up out of this armored personnel carrier, like, “Okay, thank you,” came on in the house, and I was like, this is unbelievable, totally unbelievable. But I think because most of the people in my neighborhood knew my mother and my grandmother. They were both nurses, and they just knew them as healers, so I don’t think that they looked at them as being compliant with them. They’re just healers, that’s what they do. We didn’t really have a concern, but I’m 11, I don’t know that.
WW: After your first trip up to Twelfth Street, did you go back at all, or did you, after what you saw the first times, did you stay hunkered down at your house?
DB: You couldn’t keep me off of Twelfth Street, and I just kept going back. Each time I went back, there was less and less of Twelfth Street than I remembered. I actually saw a building, and if you’ve ever seen a building on fire, the building’s on fire, when it collapses, there’s this rush of cool air that comes out of the basement–because remember this is in July, so you’re thinking everything is just hot–but when the building collapsed, you can actually feel this cool air rush all the way across the street. So I’m standing on the corner of Virginia Park and Twelfth and this cleaners was on the opposite side of Twelfth Street, and when that building collapsed it was weird. I actually saw rats running out of the building on fire down the street. I saw some things that day, I saw some things. Just the smell of the burning building, and then it was just everywhere; that smell was everywhere.
One thing that I always think about is back in those days, the police sirens now, they kind of give you like a ‘whoop-whoop’ kind of sound, back then it was like a long drawn out ‘wwrrrr-wrrrrr’ and normally you would hear it and it would be a police car, fire truck or something going by and that was it, but it was constant, it never stopped. It was like a constant drone of sirens that just never went away. After a while, it just started to sound like wailing, like crying. It’s almost like the city was dying and it’s that crying sound that you heard. It was eerie, you can’t forget it, you never forget that. The worst thing is that, as I said, it was probably the most vibrant neighborhood community and then it wasn’t. It was like it just died, and it never, ever came back. There’s been attempts trying to rebuild. I know my grandfather was part of the Virginia Park Association, and they put in a Community Center and a little shopping area right there, and that was a source of pride, but it was nowhere near as robust as Twelfth Street was on its own.
WW: That week, was your house threatened by fire at all?
DB: No. We were far enough away from Twelfth Street that there was really no–and there were no fires on my block. The buildings were looted, but none of them were set on fire.
WW: Oh.
DB: The fire I was telling you about was across Twelfth Street, so it was between Twelfth and Woodrow Wilson. So it wasn’t on my side. Actually, that was separated because it was a trailer rental lot that was next-door to it, so when it burned, it just kind of burned on its own, separate from anybody’s community. There may have been a house that was behind it, that was I think it was singed, and I think it may have had some fire damage, but on my side of Virginia Park, nothing really happened. So, no, there was no threat of any fire.
The one thing that I did see a lot, was a lot of just the police presence more so. Living next-door to that apartment building was interesting because on the roof there was an antenna on the roof, with everything blacked out, the lights out. I woke up to the entire apartment building being surrounded by state troopers and federal troopers and they all had their guns drawn pointing at the top of the apartment building. There was a state trooper in our backyard that was next to a tree that was in the yard, and he had the gun drawn on the top of the building, and I remember crawling all the way to the window and peeking up and trying to see, look up there, and the guy looked over and he said, “Get out of that window”. I got away from the window and crawled back. We slept in my grandparents’ dining room that entire week under her dining room table. There’s no air conditioning, so the windows are up, so you see and hear everything that’s going on, so when that happened, I immediately started running toward the windows to see what was going on. That’s another one of those things that you don’t forget.
WW: Were you, granted you were really young, did you understand what it meant for the National Guard to be coming in?
DB: Well, I knew that–
WW: Or did you see them any differently as you saw the police?
DB: Well, yeah I did. As I got older, then I found out that there was a huge difference between where I was and other portions of the city. See where I was, on the west side, we were at the epicenter of everything; I mean Virginia Park is only like five blocks from Clairmount, where it originated, and so the federal troops were the ones that came there. Now the interesting thing about them is that they don’t spook easy, man. I mean, they would talk to us. They were stationed on the corner, and we would just go and stand there and talk to them and the guy would talk to us; he was just mellowed out. He wasn’t in Vietnam, and I’m sure he’d been there, so he wasn’t sweating this very much. I just remember sitting there, talking to him, he took his helmet off, put it on the ground, and he sat on his helmet, and we just sat there talking to the guy. Just mellow. Now, what I heard is that my cousins lived on the east side, and they said the guys that they were dealing with were nothing like that. Now, I didn’t know at that time that that’s where the National Guard was, so those are Reserves that are pulled up and these guys are being called up to duty and being put into this situation; they’re coming from wherever in the state of Michigan and they just, they didn’t know, whereas the federal guys they were like, “This is not a big deal.” I mean it’s a big deal, but they’ve seen worse, just the way they responded was totally different. I did know that there was a level of seriousness and concern for safety and everything else, but I didn’t feel like these guys were a threat, like something was going to happen. If anything, I felt like they were going to stop things from happening. And it did, it did really settle things down in the neighborhood for the most part. And then it just seemed like from there, it spread out from where we were–which it had to do because they had to calm that area down first –but it spread out the other areas of the city, and I think that’s what prolonged the whole rebellion.
WW: Awesome segue: how do you refer to what happened in ’67? Do you see it as a rebellion?
DB: When I was younger like everybody else, we called it a ‘riot,’ and as I got older, I started to understand it more, because, as I was telling you, the confrontations that we had with police, and actually confrontations Ihad with the police made me change my opinion about it, that it wasn’t a riot. Because typically when you think about a riot, you’re looking at people going after each other. In ’43, people were going after each other, okay? In ’67, nobody was attacking anybody. They were against the police and there was some economic tensions that were going on so people were looting, stealing, doing all that, but it wasn’t like people were being attacked. No specific group was targeted, so it couldn’t really be a riot in the classic definition of a riot because there were no groups going at each other other than people going after a system that was very oppressive for the people in my neighborhood, myself included.
I remember once my mother, when she did get a car, she got this Olds 88 which was like a tank, I think it was like a ’66, just an absolute tank. She picked me up from basketball practice, and my brother and sister were in the car. She said, “Stay in the car.” This is right on the Boulevard and Twelfth where there was a Cunningham’s and an A&P. She said, “Stay in the car, I’ll be right back.” I said, “Okay.” She gets out, and I’m coming from basketball practice, I’m thinking, “I’m cramping, I need to stretch,” I got out the car. And when I got out the car, my brother and sister locked the door, so now we’re playing. I opened the door, so I jumped on the bumper of this tank and I’m jumping up and down on the bumper and I’m telling my brother, I’m yelling, “Open the door! Open the door!” They’re laughing, saying, “We’re not going to let you in! We’re not!” I didn’t notice out the corner of my eye that an unmarked police car had pulled up on me while I’m jumping up and down on this car. I turned and looked, and it’s The Big Four. They got out, and they started walking toward me, and this is when my Black Panther training kicked in, and I’m standing there and talking to them and I had my hands where they could see my hands and I’m telling them, “What’s the problem, officer?” So this one cop walked up and grabbed me by the lapels of my coat–this is how small I was and how big this guy was–he picked me up by the lapels of my coat, my feet were dangling, and he was shaking me, and he was saying, “Where’s your knife?” I said, “Officer I don’t have a knife. Why are we doing this? I haven’t violated any rules, I’m playing with my brother and sister. What have I done, officer?” I’m just trying to humanize this whole thing, I’m not, “Where’s your knife? Where’s your knife?” My mom came out of the market, she has on her work clothes and she looked at them, and they looked at her: they knew each other. Remember, she was an emergency room tech. These cops had brought in some young men before, and she recognized them. The words that started coming out of my mother’s mouth right then, I couldn’t believe it. The officer looked over there at her, they eased me down back on the ground, got back in the car and drove off. So I was standing in that parking lot, looking at their car pulling off, I was like, whoa. Then I looked over at my mother, and I started thinking, “I think I want to go with those police officers.” That’s just how it was. I was playing.
I was a little boy playing with his brother and sister, and my brother and sister, they’re in the car, now they’re crying, it’s a mess, and it’s for no reason whatsoever. Because a little boy was playing in the parking lot. That’s just the kind of stuff that was going on until it got to the level of S.T.R.E.S.S. [Stop The Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets] – and this is after the riot but the riots didn’t stop that. If anything, it intensified it. Those are the issues that we had to deal with, that I had to deal with, from the age of eight ’til the age of 18 when I left and went away to college. Those are the things that were going on. So, looking back, I can’t say that it was a riot, it was a rebellion. Because being a rebellion, it did result in some changes being made. The Big Four, S.T.R.E.S.S., all of that, they were abolished, and it had to be, otherwise, we would’ve lived in constant fear of the police. We just didn’t have a good relationship with the police department in my neighborhood. It was not, it was not a riot, it was a revolt; it was us saying to the system, “Get off our backs.”
WW: Earlier you said children of your generation were raised to be soldiers. Do you think that was a benefit?
DB: It should have been. It should have been. I say that because we were raised with a certain consciousness about what we were supposed to be doing to advance the civil rights movement. The doors opened wide, opportunity started coming our way, and I was up at MSU [Michigan State University] and there were more black students at MSU at that time than they’d ever had. Clifton Wharton was the president then, and there was intentional work on recruiting and graduating black students through MSU. So when I say that the doors opened wide and the opportunities came, we got caught up in the me-ism of that time. When I look at a lot of the things that go on, and what’s happened since then, I really feel the personal responsibility that it was my generation that dropped the ball on this because we were raised with a certain mindset, a certain consciousness, and then we bought into the me-ism of the Nineties and the corporate life and all of those things. We forgot about the movement. I jokingly say to people all the time, “We went from ‘It’s Nation-time’ to ‘Hey baby, what’s your sign?’” We weren’t doing what we were prepared to do in terms of community building. Yeah, we were successful, corporately, and things like that, but we took our eye off of how we got there, and how we got there is that those in front of us, when they paved the way, they made sure that they brought us in behind and said, “Okay, this is what you need to do.” That didn’t happen. So that generation of young men who started to fill prisons and get caught up in all of the drug trade and all of those things, those are my sons. These are my grandchildren that I’m working now trying to save. That’s why I do what I do, and it’s more, not personally failing, I mean I’ve got two sons who are doing exceptionally well, but overall we forgot what we were supposed to be doing. Yeah, there were challenges, but there’ve always been challenges. There are challenges now. What are you going to do? So that’s my motivation when I get up in the morning: just to remember that I was called upon to do something, and how do I do that now?
WW: Very nice. Is there anything else, any other stories you’d like to share from either that week before we move on, just to go past it?
DB: I had never seen that kind of madness before in my life in terms of it just seemed like there was everybody just kind of lost their compassion, they lost their soul. To just go and just destroy property like that, especially–I mean I was standing in front of Dr. Maben’s Pharmacy, and I was begging people, I was crying, I was like, “What are you doing? Dr. Maben is a black man. What are you doing? He serves our community.” But the madness overtook everything, and it destroyed which was once a very viable, strong, black community. Strong in terms of, we weren’t quite there politically, but economically, for the most part, we were self-sufficient.
My uncle, when I was talking about Hastings earlier, he was a pharmacist. When I was a little boy, I used to think all the time about my family was rich, I just thought we were the richest people on earth because my Uncle Smitty was a pharmacist, my Uncle Joe down the street was a barber, he had his own barber shop, and my Uncle Clement was a mechanic and he ran his little mechanic shop out the back of Digg’s Funeral Home. Diggs, they had a funeral home that was around the corner on Canfield, but in the back, my uncle said, “Hey, let me rent that out, and I can fix cars back there and I’ll fix you cars.” They were like, “Cool.” That’s what he did. But the one I loved the most was my Uncle Bunch, and I didn’t know Uncle Bunch delivered coal in the winter and ice in the summer and he picked up junk but Uncle Bunch had a horse, and for a little boy, a horse is like the coolest thing in the world; I just used to think, “Uncle Bunch has a horse.”
So I saw all of that, and then I also saw, when I-75 came through there and it just wiped out all of that. Then we moved into the other areas, onto Twelfth Street and then like that, and then I watched how just the madness made us destroy our own economy. It just changed a lot of things; I think it changed our own perceptions about who we are. And it was really nobody that could stand up and speak in a way to help understand what we were doing, and how that was going to impact us.
So, here we are, 50 years later, we’re seeing a resurgence here, Midtown, downtown. Twelfth Street’s not coming back. Anybody that lived on there and saw that, they know what I’m talking about. Just being over there, you didn’t have to go anywhere else. Northland was like an overnight trip as far as I was concerned. There was no reason to go to Northland, didn’t have to. We were totally self-sufficient. We don’t have that anymore, we don’t have that self-sufficiency. Our neighborhoods are dominated by other people who – I’m not blaming anybody, it’s the way it is but we don’t have a viable black economy anymore, not like we had then. When I was talking about Dr. Maben and my uncle, they were pharmacists, there was a group of black pharmacists who would get together and have fundraising events, big dinner dances, those kinds of things – they were real big back then – and they raised funds, they had scholarships and all kinds of things. There’s no black pharmacist group like that now. So a lot of those things don’t exist anymore since 1967. That was kind of, when I talked about that wailing, those sirens, truly was the death of our community and our economy. It just kind of cast us out to the winds.
So we see that now, and it’s like we casts dispersions on people who live on the other side of Eight Mile and all these kind of things, and it’s like we’re caught up in things that had nothing to do with how do we bring back what we once had? How do we do that? So if I want to leave on anything, that’s probably it. That’s my biggest concern because now I have two sons who are capable, they’re educated–I mean my oldest son graduated in four years from college, and he’s working, my youngest son is about to graduate from college–in these times, a lot of people say, “Well, that’s it, I’ve done it,” but I haven’t. Because there’s so many young men that they interface that need the same opportunities, that need to be able to do the same things. How do we make sure that we do that? Not to the detriment of anybody else, that’s not what I’m saying.
WW: Uh-hm.
DB: I’m talking about me, just like anybody else would be concerned with themselves.
WW: Thanks so much for sitting down with me today, I really appreciate it.
DB: It was a pleasure, man.
WW: Thank you so much.
GS: Hello, my name is Giancarlo Stefanutti, today is June 18,2016, we are in Detroit Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Thank you for sitting down with us today.
DM: Thank you.
GS: Can first start with telling us your name and you’re date of birth?
DM: My name is Dominic Kevin McNeir, I was born January 13, 1960.
GS: Okay and where were you born?
DM: Burton Mercy, as I recall, here in Detroit, Michigan. That hospital is now gone, but yeah. In Detroit.
GS: Okay. Growing up, what was your childhood like?
DM: I thought it was very typical. As I’m understanding now, it may have been a little less typical, maybe even atypical. My parents were both from the South, my mother from Baltimore and then Virginia, and my father from Alabama. Both were educated by historically black colleges, Tuskegee and Hampton, and both went on and got master’s degrees. So by the time I was born, they had moved up to Detroit, were established as it was a middle class family. We lived in a Jewish neighborhood on the West Side of Detroit, Seven Mile [and] Livernois area on Santa Rosa, and it was, from my ideas when I’m talking about it, it an idyllic kind of birth—childhood—not birth. Childhood. We were very comfortable. We travelled, we had what we wanted. Money was good in Detroit, particularly for educated blacks at that time. So upwardly mobile family, and my family’s very connected to Motown. So my babysitter babysat for Marvin Gaye. And so I grew up in Marvin Gaye’s home as a little boy, and all the stuff that could’ve happened to a child happened to me. One of these days I’ll finish this book on it growing up, Motown For Me. But it’s something I really want my children to know. I’ve told these stories to people and they say, “You should publish that.” I just wanted my kids to know what it was like. But now that I have grandchildren too, I’ve been writing these for myself for ten years now. It was a great childhood. And I wish Detroit were like it was then. I don’t think many people really know, can understand, how it was, particularly before the riots. Parts after the riots still too, but particularly before the riot.
GS: Where did you go to school?
DM: I went to Louie Pasteur Elementary, which is in between Seven and Eight Mile off of Pembroke and I remember my favorite teacher—she’s long gone—was Onita Lewis, she also was my piano teacher so I took piano for about—forever. About ten years actually, but with her about five or six years. And then I went to Hampton Junior High, also in the same neighborhood, and then I went to U of D Jesuit High off of Cambridge. My son, when he was of age also went to U of D High. When my grandson gets of age, we’ll send him to U of D High, it is our school of choice for my family, so yeah.
GS: Very nice. You said you lived in a Jewish area of town, was the school integrated racially?
DM: Well, yeah. It was interesting, we lived closer to where the riots began—and I’m going to use “riots” quote unquote because a lot of people still don’t agree it was actually a riot, that it was other things but that term may be a little misleading when you look at the way words are used and how riot is defined—
GS: I was going to ask you about that actually.
DM: —I’m willing to yield it for the moment but I’d say riots quote unquote, I wouldn’t call it actually a riot. Nonetheless, my family lived on Monterrey off of Linwood, because that’s where our church home was, Saint Andrews A.M.E. My sister’s still here, she’s the only one here from the immediate family. And my mother spends time with my sister, me and Marilyn and my sister here and so we went to from our home on Monterrey off of Linwood, we moved to Santa Rosa right before I started kindergarten. So we moved around four, going on five. And in the neighborhood, we were the fourth black family in that block. Seven Mile, Livernois was all very Jewish, the avenue was stylish, they called the Avenue of Fashion, I’ve seen a little—they’re trying to come back—but it was avenue of style, all of the shops were Jewish, all of my classmates were Jewish, my closest neighbor across the street, the Schwieg family, they had three girls and I played with their daughters. Nora was my age, when they would do Yom Kippur and we would do Christmas, and they would do Hanukkah and we’d just exchange holidays. And we played together. I remember my first fight in elementary school was when a black friend of mine jumped on one of my Jewish friends. And my father said, “You should protect your friends,” so I bashed him in the face with my steel lunch pale, you know? I just thought that was the right thing to do. So, you know, they were picking on Aaron, I said, “That’s wrong. Don’t pick on Aaron.” [laughter] So I didn’t know there was anything in terms of racial tension at all as I grew up. Now, by the time I went from kindergarten to fifth grade, the neighborhood had transitioned, it was all black, I think that was the last Jewish family left by the time I was in fifth grade.
GS: What year was this?
DM: That would have been 19—what year did I graduate from elementary school?
GS: Just an approximation is fine.
DM: Well, ’70—’68—’69—‘around ’70 I guess. Yeah, ’70. Now, I can tell you I graduated high school in ’78, so I’m moving backwards, I started high school in ’74—’72. Around ’71, ’72.
GS: Okay. Just kind of thinking about the riot itself, you said growing up was pretty nice, you didn’t notice any immediate tensions in the city?
DM: Well, I mean, I don’t know how much you can discern when you’re eight, ’79, ten, eleven, twelve, particularly my parents were quite protective, and there were rules, they were followed. You know, so that was just kind of the bottom line, I was more afraid of my father than anybody else. And if my father said do it, it was going to be done. So we didn’t really—and my father was also protective, you know, so I never really felt threatened by anything. But, I just noticed as my elementary school, as Pastor changed, there became more tension. But it’s interesting because the tension was short-lived. All of a sudden, there were no Jews in the community. They were just gone. I don’t remember how quickly it happened but it seemed like it happened pretty rapidly. Like I said, when we moved in in ’65, we were one of four black families. By the time I got to the third grade, there was only one white family left. So in only three years, the only Jewish reminders we may have had were several of the businesses stayed for a while.\
GS: I see. So just moving into ’67, what were you doing when you first heard that the riot was happening?
DM: That was kind of interesting, because my mom’s older sister lived in Philadelphia. She had a brother in Baltimore, she was the youngest. Her side of the family was interesting because my grandfather was Native American, my grandmother was black. His father had been thrown out the tribe for marrying a black woman, so we already had experienced that kind of racism, between Native Americans and blacks. Anyway, so my parents—we went to Philadelphia to see my aunt, and it was early July, and we did this trip every year. So we would go south and east. We could go down to Alabama, well Pensacola, Florida, Mobile, Alabama, my grandfather lived in Camden, Alabama, 45 miles outside of Selma, then we would come back up east and do D.C, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Virginia, and that’s where my parents would leave me. In Williamsburg and my aunt, and that’s where I would stay for the rest of the summer. This particular year, we did Virginian first, an East Coast swing, and then we went south—I’m sorry we went South and then we went East. And so we were in Philadelphia, and they start talking about problems in Detroit. Well my father was a hunter, so my father had rifles, he was, you know, a veteran of the Korean War so he had knives, samurais, and all of those things. But he was a hunter so he was very comfortable with them, we had become comfortable with them, and we knew where our weapons were, they were on every floor, they were locked up, “You don’t touch this.” I never touched it. You know, children would go play with guns, I didn’t touch them. I knew where they were, I didn’t know how to use them, I wasn’t going to try. But our home was stocked. But it was not because of the crime, because we sat on the porch then on Santa Rosa—there was a little porch [until] one, two, three on William and the weekends. All the neighbors knew each other, we were in and out each other’s homes, it was, you know, that’s what it was like. We didn’t even have to lock the doors. I didn’t even have a house key until I was in high school. You know? Because I didn’t need one, my parents didn’t lock the door. And so it was just very, very different. But as they start talking about these skirmishes in Detroit and, you know, police activity and unrest of blacks, we started noticing things. My mother told my dad to have one of our cousins go over to the house with my sister. My sister was home by herself. So Pearl is 15 years older than me, so she was in her early to mid-20s. She was working, she couldn’t get the summer off like I could, you know, school, so she stayed home by herself. Not a big deal. When all the activity started happening though, my mother felt a little uncomfortable and did not want her there by herself, so I had a couple cousins who were her age or older. And one was in the navy, he was, you know, pretty reliable with our arms and things, and she had a couple of male cousins go over to come help my sister, help her at night mostly. So the riot was over at Twelfth, Rosa Parks—it wasn’t Rosa Parks then—Twelfth Street area. And it kept moving westward. And so we could look in the newspaper, in Philadelphia, and see in the paper, it would show you how it was moving. I don’t even know how we saw the paper, there was no internet, but somehow my parents were able to know what was happening in the newspaper. And this is over four or five days. My father did not want to rush back, he was enjoying vacation. My mother was extremely nervous with my sister being home alone, even though my cousins were in the house with her, and even though they had weapons, she wanted to come back home. Well my daddy said “No it’s okay. They’re alright.” So noticed about the third day it had gotten around Fenkell. My mother said “Well it’s only a couple miles away, we really need to go home.” My dad said, “I’m not gonna be rushed home, we’re gonna stay.” So, I think a day later, there was a huge store, like a—I don’t know what you call it—a garden store—what’s the big garden store that we have—with garden supplies and things for your home, like a Home Depot kind of place but it was called Merchandise Mart. Merchandise Mart was on the corner of Seven Mile and Livernois, on the east side of the street. It took up the whole square block, and it was bombed, and the whole Merchandise Mart was gone. The entire square block was gone. So that was two blocks from my home. My mother told my father, “We’re going home now.” So we didn’t plan anything, we threw everything in the car and started driving from Philadelphia nonstop. So when we got to the city limits or close to the city limits, the National Guard was out, and you could not enter the city after night. So my mother said, “We’ll stay in a hotel tonight,” which incidentally there had places we could not stay in a hotels in the South because they didn’t let black in the South, even though it was illegal. But I remember on peeing—I’m sorry—urinating on the side of the road, my mother carrying a bucket on the side, and felling totally like “What is this?” Because I’m a child growing up in the North, but I have southern parents. So I’m learning racism. Subtle racism in the North, but blatant racism in the South. So we were going in a hotel, at that point we weren’t going to get a hotel, my father said, “Pearl’s home alone”—although the cousins were there—“I have a home with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. I’m not staying in a hotel, I’m going to my house.” So we crossed into the city. When we crossed into the city, we were quickly picked up by helicopter. Helicopters had the lights on us, and my dad used to buy a brand new car every three years so I think at that point we had a Riviera that was a year old, a light greenish Riviera, hardtop, four-door. They pulled us over and they checked us, we told them what we’re going on, why we’re in town, they said, “You know, you’re illegal after curfew.” My dad started to argue, my mother said, “Don’t argue.” They went to the trunk and of course they found guns, my dad brought his rifles back from Alabama. Because we had just done the South-East trip. By that time we had four, five police cars around us, helicopters over us, they took everything out of our car. They emptied the entire car. I remember crying because they took everything. They just threw it out! Just threw it out like it didn’t matter. We had the license, the rifle—we had a couple rifles, couple handguns, all registered, all very legal, called Philadelphia, etcetera, etcetera. So the last thing I really remember about all of that, they were gonna take my dad to jail. Then my mother started crying. She said, “I don’t know how to drive.” Now she was not telling the truth, but she was not gonna let them take her husband to jail. So she said “How will I get home? I have my little boy here,” and she spun this long story and they said “Okay, we’ll let you go home, but we’re gonna have to accompany you.” And that was really what was frightening to me. So if you can imagine, we had one of those tanks in front of us, and they had a tank behind us, and two police cars on each side, and a helicopter over top, and all this noise going on from the time we entered the city limits until eventually we got somehow from Woodward to Livernois—I don’t remember around now, until we got to our home on Santa Rosa. And then, we walked in the house, the phone rang, and it was the National Guard, who then had to speak to my mom, my dad, and me, to know that we had gotten in the house, and that someone had not sneaked out of the car with these weapons, to try to go arm someone else for whatever illegal things they were going to do. The riots, quote unquote, the acts of civil disobedience kind of ceased after that. The only other thing I recall as the time went on was just seeing how many parts of the black community had been destroyed. And how no parts of the white community had been destroyed, and wondering why if we’re so unhappy with things that are going on, why are we destroying our own places? That’s what I recall. It made me very very sad.
GS: That is sad. So you called it quote unquote “riot.” What is the word that you would have instead of riot? Would you call it maybe an uprising?
DM: I guess I’d be more comfortable to say that. I mean, now I’m a newspaper editor in D.C. and we’re covering the Freddie Grey case and in Baltimore and they use the word “riots.” And I think “riots” is a term that is often loosely used. I have a good friend who grew up next to me, Terry Halcott, she was also a writer. She’s never willing to use the word “riot,” because she says, “It wasn’t a riot. It wasn’t a riot.” But, you know, if I use that term as a descriptive to talk about what happened in Baltimore, then I’d have to use it as a descriptive to talk about what happened in Detroit. The unfortunate thing about it for me is not so much—I mean for me it’s an issue of semantics, for some others it’s not. I would call it an issue of semantics but I think what troubles me more is 40 years later, the same kind of stuff that got people upset enough to bomb their own places and destroy their own businesses and hurt and kill folk in Baltimore is the same people were angry about in Detroit when I was seven. You know, police brutality, infringing on people’s rights, those kinds of things. It’s not a whole lot different.
GS: Were there any, that you could see before the riot, as a child, did you notice the tension between police and Detroiters?
DM: No. But I do remember—it just came to me too, I don’t even know where this memory came from. The Detroit police had a program called STRESS. That was the acronym. “Stop the robberies, enjoy safe streets.” I’ve never thought about that until now, and I had to do a report on it in junior high school, the year before McGovern ran [as the Democratic nominee for president], which would have been ’71, I had to write a report on it. And the only reason why it kind of comes to me is, see, I never had issue with police. I never did while I was here because eventually, my sister would marry a deputy chief of police. But by that time I’m in my 20’s now, so, you know, I graduated from U of D then University of Michigan—U of D High then Michigan then go on to start work in corporate America and stuff. But I remember the STRESS report was talking about way before the riots and subsequent following the riots, there continued to be these times where the mostly white police department attacked the mostly black citizens of Detroit. At that time, in the sixties and early seventies, Detroit was mostly black and the police department was mostly white. So there tended to be these constant flare-ups that did not stop. In fact, probably got worse. I can’t back that up with fact, but what I remember, got worse after the ’67 encounter.
GS: I see. Well is there anything else you’d like to say?
DM: No I think—So my oldest child is a daughter, Jasmine, is 26, and my baby’s a boy, Jarred, and he’s 22. So, I’ve been riding around with both of them the last couple of days, since I’m here for Father’s Day, and as we’re going around, showing them places. Pointing out things. What was quite interesting, we just went into the barber shop, my son and I, and the guy that sits down to talk with us is a nephew of Congressman John Conyers. My sister was on John Conyers’ first campaign, because John Conyers lived a block away from us on Santa Rosa.
GS: Wow.
DM: And so I’m mentioning this just to say in those days, in the Motown days, and Cornell West would call it the golden days of Detroit, when Detroit was a little like Harlem, and I like that description because it was. There was such an exchange, it was so comfortable between celebrity figures, political figures, because there weren’t a lot of them but they were just coming into their own. It was never, “I got more than you,” or, “You got more than me,” or, “He’s an entertainer. He’s a whatever,” or, “He’s a politician.” Like I said, I didn’t have to make an appointment with John Conyers, I walked up the street. His wife opened the door. And they called me Nicky from Dominic, “Hi Nicky!” You know, so it was that kind of deal. And that was all the Motown folks. I mean, The Tops, I was connected with them and The Miracles, of course Marvin Gaye, and I went to school with Gladys Knight’s kids and so we used to play together. Gladys Knight, she’d make us kool-aid and spaghetti and garlic bread and we’d play basketball in her backyard ‘cause—I was telling the guy in the barber shop today—it was the only yard in the neighborhood that had big lights that you could see at night. So it was a full court, lights on both sides, we played basketball till we dropped. It wasn’t aggression, “Well, you gotta check your gun, you’re gonna come here and hurt us, what if you lose but you wanna fight?” No! We played. We lost, we’d get mad, we’d hit somebody in the nose or kick him down and they’d get up and say, “Oh man, I’m sorry.” “I’m sorry too.” We’d just play ball again. So one of the things I really miss is just how we got along with each other. Conflict resolution was something you did by yelling and punching maybe, and going home with your nose bloody. And the next day, you got up, “Hey, let’s go play ball again.” “You think Ms. Knight’ll let us come back?” “Well, we didn’t tear up anything.” You know, we didn’t curse anybody out, we didn’t shoot anybody out. I look sometimes and just wonder, you know, have we really come anywhere, progression as a race? Because our young people now—I don’t fault anyone—but the way we resolve issues now, the way we encounter one another. It’s just so not what I experienced as a child, particularly what I experienced here in Detroit. And I’ve been riding around, you know, I see Detroit rebounding slowly, finally, and I think that’s a wonderful thing. But I don’t see it rebounding to bring more people of color here, and that, I think, is sad. You know, just like D.C., where I am now, I don’t know if D.C. will ever be Chocolate City again, you know? I don’t know if Detroit will be, you know, the place for soul for folk, because it’s not anymore. And that’s not to say change is not good, I understand change. But, as I discern Detroit, it has become a place where generations allowed property to devalue to purchase it—these weren’t black people buying this property by the way—and now, they are starting to reinvest in boatload, they’re gonna sell high, that’s what you do in econ, I get it. But unfortunately and tragically once again, many people who look like me got caught in between all of that, have lost their homes, been forced out of the city, I mean it’s a typical thing that’s happened all over the United States but it’s still wrong and it still makes me very sad. When I remember growing up on that street in Santa Rosa with trees overlooking the—arch of trees like in the Arboretum in Ann Arbor, all the neighborhood block clubs and we had parties, you know, block of the street and have Halloween parties, and block off the street and have summer parties, and block off the street and they’d open up the fire hydrants and you’d have pool parties in the street, we burned our leaves together, we cried when someone died in the family together, we exchanged food. You know, Detroit was a real, real beautiful place and I just wished my children could have experienced what I experienced, the joy I had. There was no place on the planet I could’ve ever imagined or wanted to live, besides the West Side of Detroit. Yeah.
GS: Wow. Well thank you for sharing this experience with us.
DM: Thank you, I enjoyed it. I appreciate it.
GS: As did we.
[TIME STAMP END OF INTERVIEW 28:24]