WW: Hello today is August 16, 2016. My name is William Winkel. We are in West Bloomfield, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am sitting down with --
MR: Mary Romaya
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today Mary.
MR: Thank you.
WW: Can you please start of by telling me where and when were you born?
MR: I was born October 1944 in Detroit.
WW: What neighborhood did you grown up in?
MR: At the time that I was born we lived on, my parents had a home on Virginia Park at the corner of Third. We weren’t far from the Fisher Building. And I can remember going to the Fisher Building when it was a movie theatre, going there as a small child. When I turned nine, on my ninth birthday in October, it was still in Virginia Park. Then we moved to Northwest Detroit on a street called Whittingham, on the corner of Seven Mile and Whittingham, is between Livernois and Wyoming. So my ninth birthday was on Virginia Park but I celebrated Halloween that year in Northwest Detroit.
WW: What prompted the move?
MR: We lived with another family. My parents had immigrated to the U.S. My father came in 1929, my mother in 1937. We lived with this other family who was my dad’s nephew, although they were only six months apart in age. They both decided to each have their own homes. So they sold the house on Virginia Park, and the other family moved to Lawrence Street in Detroit not far from Hamilton. And we moved to Whittingham.
WW: The two neighborhoods you grew up in, were those integrated neighborhoods?
MR: I would say at the time that I was there they were primarily white. The house on Virginia Park, I mean I remember the neighbors as being white. I remember it being sort of a professional neighborhood because we weren’t far from the Fisher Building. Also we were not far from Henry Ford Hospital, the main campus. And I remember there being doctors that lived on our street. And Whittingham, when we moved to Northwest Detroit, the area was primarily Jewish. We were one of the few Christian families that lived on our street and in that general neighborhood. And even the Seven Mile, Livernois area was called the “Avenue of Fashion”. We used to shop there and then eventually when Northland was built we would take a bus or drive to Northland. So in a long way of saying it, probably the neighborhoods were primarily white. By the time I got married and left Detroit in 1976, and my parents moved out in 1978, the neighborhood, the Whittingham Northwest Detroit neighborhood was primarily black.
WW: What did your parents do for a living?
MR: My dad owned a grocery store, my mom was a homemaker, but my dad had a grocery store. When he first came to America, worked for his brother-in-law, then eventually he and his nephew opened a store on Third and Brainard. And then in the early 1950s, my brother, I’m sorry my father, joined Tom Matte, who had a store on Third and Peterborough and it was expanded. So my dad became the working partner at Tom Matte Market. And his nephew still ran the other store that they had and then bought another store called Consumer’s Market. My dad and his nephew stayed as partners, but they worked at two different stores. So they shared in the profits of two stores.
WW: Very nice [laughter].
MR: Well yeah but, he was a half partner in the other, in Tom Matte Market, which really meant he was a fourth of a partner, because half of his share went to his nephew. And then he was a half partner in the store that the nephew ran.
WW: What was your childhood like growing up in the city?
MR: It was very nice. We went to Catholic schools. I mean even though we were in good neighborhoods and had good public schools, we went to Catholic schools in Detroit. A lot of our socialization was with our relatives. The Chaldean community tended to be a community that stayed together. A lot of the children that I played with were really our cousins or friends of our families. The other family that we lived with when we lived on Virginia Park, they had three boys, we were three girls. So they grew up as our brothers, and people thought they were really our brothers. I remember going to school, and the nun saying, well you know, your brother two grades ahead of you got an “A” today on a test. And I would say “That’s not my brother”. It was often confused because we lived in the same house. Growing up was really very nice. And Detroit was a great city. For me it was the 1950s. It was the fifth largest city, in Detroit. When I hear now that Detroit is like the twentieth largest city in America, that’s astonishing to me cause I remember it as being a very vibrant, vital city. I remember the street cars down Woodward Avenue. I remember going to the state fair at Eight Mile and Woodward. I remember Hudson’s downtown. I remember shopping a lot at Northland. Growing up in Detroit in the Fifties was great. I wish Detroit were like that today, as vibrant as it was when I was growing up.
WW: Did you feel comfortable moving around the city growing up?
MR: Yes, although we didn’t go too much to the eastside. Woodward was sort of the dividing line. You were either an east-sider, or a west-sider. The few times that I may have gone on the eastside, or went to Grosse Pointe, I think wow where am I. I also know that east siders felt the same way because when I went to the University of Detroit, there were people from the eastside attending U of D. I think some of the sentiments were the same. Woodward was sort of the dividing line. But for the parts of Detroit I did populate, I had no problems, including the downtown area.
WW: Going through the 1960s, did you sense any growing tension in the city?
MR: No, I really didn’t. I worked in my dad’s store, my two older sisters and my younger brothers, we all sort of took our turns at the store. I did not notice any tensions. What I remember from the Sixties, especially as we got deeper into the Sixties was a lot of turbulence, but not necessarily Detroit. It was the civil rights movement in the early Sixties, it was the assassination of President Kennedy, it was a woman’s lib movement, Vietnam was just starting to come on the horizon but not yet escalated until later in the Sixties, and then all of the Vietnam protests. And then I remember some of the rioting, or civil unrest, whatever you want to call it, that was occurring in other cities. I believe it happened in the Watts area of Los Angeles. I believe it happened in Newark, New Jersey. And I remember thinking I wonder if it would come to Detroit. You wonder, but not really expecting it, but it did. There was just a lot of things going on in the Sixties. The Sixties was to me, a tumultuous decade. I mean great things happened. I graduated from high school. I graduated from college. I started my career in education. But I remember the civil rights movement. I remember the assassination of both Kennedy brothers, and Martin Luther King, the woman’s lib movement, and all the Vietnam protests. This is at the time that I’m going into my early twenties. Early to mid-twenties.
WW: Going into that summer of ‘67, were you working at the store then?
MR: I had just finished my first year of teaching. I had graduated in college in ‘66 and I was working at a school district, in a school district in Warren, Michigan. So this was the first summer off after teaching, but we always worked in the store. If they were short help or we worked weekends. I mean we just sort of grew up in the store business. I can’t say like I remember specifically what happened that Saturday night into a Sunday morning when the riots or the civil unrest broke out. But I remember my father getting a phone call on Sunday morning because the riots had happened early Sunday morning, to not go to the store. That people were rioting, and that they were attacking businesses. So my dad did not go to the store, and they did not open up that Sunday morning. And then, my father’s partner Tom Matte, had a son who was in the Michigan National Guard. And the Michigan National Guard was activated. He’s older than me. He and his older brother, and some National Guard buddies of his, would go to the store and protect it during day or night whenever they were not on active duty. So our store was looted, the windows broken, the store was trashed, but the building was not burned. So my father was able to get back into business sooner than some other Chaldean or other businesses were able to. What I do remember was that he was did go to the store on Monday to look at the damage. Did not stay there real long, but I know he drove into the city. Well we were living in the city. He drove to the store. When he came home that afternoon, he sat in our family room and he started crying. And that was the first time I had ever seen my dad cry. I have seen him cry twice. That was the very first time. The second time was when my older sister Josephine was ill in the hospital. And then he composed himself and you know, he said you know, we’re just going to go back into business. On Tuesday he went back to the store and I did go with him. That was the first time that I saw the store, the windows were definitely broken in. We had a supermarket. This was not a corner grocery store. We were the first of the Chaldeans to have a supermarket in Detroit. And so it took up a half block. I mean we had a butcher. We had several cashiers. We had a produce person. So it was a fully operating supermarket. Not like you have today. The windows were broken. The goods were strewn all over the floor. A lot had been looted. The liquor counters, the cigarettes. A shopper at the store came in, walked in and started grabbing things off the isle, off the shelves that were still there. And I said to my dad, we called my dad Babo, which is Chaldean for dad. I said Babo he is walking away with stuff and not paying for it. I think my dad probably thought, he just lost it. He said, just leave them alone. There was no way he could've paid for it. He was just finishing the damage that was already done. But we were able to get back into business as I said, sooner than other stores. There was insurance, but the insurance did not cover all of the damage. You know, to rebuilding the windows, the doors, the shelving units, the coolers, the freezers, restocking the store. But the building was saved. But again I give credit to the sons of my dad’s partner, because they slept on the roof of the store with their rifles, and guarded the store during the daytime if they were not on duty. Either, if they were on duty, their buddies who were not on duty watched our store and you know, rotated the cycles. We were lucky in that regard. The other thing that I would like to add, is that because of what happened, and this is 1967. A lot of the chain stores, the bigger. I mean I remember stores like Big Bear Market, and Farmer Jack, and A&P, and just a lot of the chain stores, after the ‘67 riots, left Detroit. The Chaldeans stayed. They were the food delivery system for Detroiters. And several things happened at that time. In 1965, the Immigration laws in the US changed. The quotas were ended, which limited how many people could come from any specific country. And Iraq had a very small quota. In 1965 the doors were opened as long as you had someone to petition for you and sign an affidavit that you would not go on the public welfare system and they could sort of guarantee you existence, economic existence in America you were welcome to come. Well by 1967, more Chaldeans were coming to Detroit who were the relatives of the first pioneers that were here. So that’s one thing. Secondly, the Chaldeans had been in business for almost 40 to 50 years by then, because a lot of them had stores back in the 1920s. So they knew the business. They had the marketing skills. They had the business skills to own larger stores, and they had the capitol to own larger stores. And they had a ready workforce, all of their relatives who were coming to America who were looking for jobs. New immigrant arrivals, having the capital, and the business acumen of running larger stores, and they bought out the chain stores who were abandoning Detroit. The third thing is that the chain stores were leaving. So these three factors: The business knowhow, the necessary capital, chains leaving Detroit, and a ready workforce, allowed the Chaldeans to buy larger stores in Detroit and cement their footprint into the Detroit economic community even stronger than it had been before. I think a lot of credit has to go to the Chaldeans who stayed in Detroit and were loyal to Detroit. I know chain stores are now coming back. A store opened at Eight Mile and Telegraph area.
WW: Meijer.
MR: Okay Meijers, whatever store it was. But it’s right at the fringe of Detroit. In Detroit, but you go ten feet you’re out of Detroit. The Whole Foods in the New Center area, which is a great area, but the Chaldean stores are in the neighborhoods. They are not in the tonier parts of the city. I have to give the Chaldeans a lot of credit for that. They have stayed loyal, and I don’t think are given the recognition that they should be given, like Whole Foods, which I’m all for them too, because competition is good. But you know, they were given advantages the Chaldeans were never given.
WW: Did your father immediately choose to rebuild, or did he decide between that or leaving the city?
MR: No no, they rebuilt immediately. Within a week they were back in business. They boarded up the windows, then had the windows installed, replenished the shelves, or repaired them and replenished them. Probably within a week, definitely within two weeks, but probably within a week, they were operating. Maybe not at full capacity like they had been, but they were open. There was never any thought of leaving Detroit. The reason that my dad eventually sold the store was that his partner, Tom Matte had become ill and died in 1969. Actually on my birthday, which is how I remember when he died. His sons were grown up. One of his sons actually had a PhD in mathematics. Never went into the grocery business. The older and the youngest sons became partners and they opened up a store. They did want to leave the city. And they opened up a store in Dearborn Heights. So they didn’t want to continue. My younger brothers were too young to really take over a business. They were still in school. I think my dad would have stayed if the sons of his partner had been willing to stay. But because they sold, he couldn’t run the store by himself. Again, it was a supermarket. So they sold the store. My dad at that point retired.
WW: What city did your family move to?
MR: Well we stayed in Detroit until 1976. I got married and moved to an apartment in Troy. My parents, my dad had been in Detroit since they came to America in May of 1929. He moved out in 1978. They left the Seven Mile, Livernois area, and moved to Farmington Hills.
WW: How do you interpret the events in ‘67? Do you see them as a riot, do you see them as civil unrest?
MR: I just see them as part of the unrest that was just going on in the country. I mean I do call them the Detroit riots because that is what they were called at that time. But I just see them as an extension of the civil unrest and the demand for equality that was in the black community throughout the country. I mean this is when, where was it? Was it Alabama where they, George Wallace was going to close the schools in Mississippi where, was it Medgar Evers that was going to be the first black student to go into the University of Mississippi? I’m trying to remember my history. It was to me just a continuation of the civil unrest that was already going on throughout the country. I remember distinctly towards the end of 1969. This was very clear in my mind. I could not wait until January 1st of 1970. Maybe I was naive, but I thought maybe by some magic, if we started a new decade, life would get better. Because I just remember the Sixties as being the best of times and the worst times, to quote Charles Dickens. I mean, it was a great time for me, again, I graduated from high school, graduated from college, started a career. But there were the civil rights movement, the women’s lib movement, and certainly Vietnam. I was teaching in a high school at the time. I remember getting those bomb scares. That somebody was going to blow up the school. They were going to blow up selective service offices, because the draft existed at that time. Not long after you had the killings at Kent State University. Unfortunately nothing magic happened on January 1st, 1970. But I was hoping.
WW: Your father’s decision to stay in Detroit probably speaks for itself, but did he hold any bitterness through the attack on the store?
MR: No, my dad was a very even-tempered, quiet man. One of the things that I admire about my dad, and that people have told me about my dad, was that he wasn’t just a smart man. I mean I have heard people say if he had been born and lived in America, he probably would’ve been the CEO of General Motors. The quality that I most admire about my dad was that he was wise. Not just smart. There was never any bitterness. He was a businessman. The idea was just to get back into business as soon as possible. He was good to his customers. Would extend credit to them. We were always on the lookout for shoplifters too. For his loyal customers, and even just people off the street, he was a businessman and he was good. No, I did not see any bitterness. The idea was to get back into business as soon as possible. No, he was committed to the city of Detroit. Even today, even though I live in the suburbs, and most of my life is out in the suburbs, Detroit is still the center city. Detroit is still the focus of our lives. What I want, and you know I’m grateful for Downtown and Midtown, the neighborhoods have to change. The neighborhoods have to get better. And to me that’s the schools. All these young people that live Downtown and with Quicken Loans, that’s great but once they get married and have children, and the children become of school age, the only way you’re going to keep them in Detroit is to provide good housing in a safe neighborhood. In neighborhoods. Not along the waterfront. And you have to have excellent schools. Although I know Detroit is on a resurgence, I don’t think it will come back the way I knew it unless the neighborhoods and the schools get better. And that’s where the investments have to continue outward beyond Downtown and Midtown.
WW: Given that, are you optimistic for the city moving forward?
MR: I want to be. I want to be, and I think with good mayors and good city councils, which I hope we now are starting to see. I may not see it in my lifetime. It took 50 plus years for Detroit to go through the decline. It may take that long to come back. But I want to be hopeful, and if the right people, and the right amounts of money are dedicated to it, yes it could come back.
WW: Is there anything you’d like to add today?
MR: No.
WW: Alright, thank you so much for sitting down with me. I greatly appreciate it.
MR: Thank you.
WW: Hello, today is August 20, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am in Detroit, Michigan. I’m sitting down with—
CC: My name is Collette Cullen.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
CC: I’m glad to be here.
WW: Can you start by telling me where and when were you born?
CC: I was born in Detroit in 1953 and my family lived on Mural when I was born. When I was an infant they moved to Fairfield, which is at Finkel and Dexter. We lived at 15114 Fairfield.
WW: Was that neighborhood integrated?
CC: It was when I was—in my first memories of it. Yeah.
WW: It was?
CC: Yes and it wasn’t just integrated, it was primarily, our block at least, was primarily African American. It was maybe 70:30. So 30 percent Caucasian and 70 percent Black.
WW: What was it like growing up in that neighborhood?
CC: Well, it was my neighborhood. So, you know, you played outside until the streetlights came on. You played under the sprinklers. You would take Sugar Daddies and squash them between rocks. You’d go play in the field and climb up the middle of the sign, the big billboard, and it was like climbing Mt. Everest. You’d go over to the chicken shop and you’d peek through the back window and see them chopping off the heads of the chickens. Then you’d hang out at Greg’s Pizzeria, hoping that they’d be friends with you and maybe you’d get a free slice of pizza. Yeah, it was just our neighborhood.
WW: Growing up, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood or did you go around the city more?
CC: Oh, we went all over the city as a family. My grandma lived at Woodward and the Boulevard. We would just take buses on our own to see grandma. Or my dad would drop us off at the DIA [Detroit Institute of Arts] and we’d hang out at the DIA and walk down to Grandma’s. We’d go up to the avenue of fashion and go shopping. My friend and I, we would go down to the Six Mile area, which was much more affluent than our neighborhood, so we would go down there and rake leaves. My dad had a side business of black topping driveways and so we would go with him on the jobs. He would drive all over the city looking for work. When he would get those jobs, we would be his crew, bringing buckets of tar to put on the driveways. He’s squeegee it all in. So, yeah, we went all over the city.
WW: Did you feel comfortable as you were going around the city?
CC: I felt very comfortable going around the city. It was, you know, I love the city. I would go downtown with my friend. I mean, this is like an excursion downtown. We would get a bunch of bread and just feed all the pigeons or we would go to the fountains and jump in. You know, we’d just hang out downtown. Went down to Plum Street to see what all that broohaha was about. We went all over.
WW: Going into ’67, you were about 14 then?
CC: So I was 14 in 1967.
WW: And you were still living in the same house?
CC: We lived right at the corner of Finkel. Next to our house was a parking lot and then next—out our windows we could see all the businesses that were on Finkel. Finkel turns into Twelfth Street at the curve down by Linwood. There was grocery stores, banks, bars, cleaners. That was sort of our world view, always peeking out the window. Anyways, back to the question, what was the question, again, please?
WW: I was just asking if you ventured around the city and if—well, no I asked if you were still living in the same house, then. So you were?
CC: Right.
WW: How did you first hear what was going on in July?
CC: The way that I recall it is my brother Joe, who’s older than me, his friend Tyrone called him and said, ‘There’s a riot going on.’ I think Joe called my mom from his job and said Tyrone said there was a riot. It was a Sunday afternoon. It was hot out. My brother was home from college. We were hanging out on the porch, just watching the city go by. That’s my memory from finding out about it.
WW: Could you see any smoke or anything from your house?
CC: You mean when we first heard? I mean, we saw everything from our house. Buildings across the street from us burned. They all got broken into. Everything got vandalized and looted. It was like we could see the actual riot, we weren’t just in it. More than most people, we could see it all. People running up and down the street and the cars and the tanks and everything like that.
WW: You spoke about the houses across the street from you went up in fire?
CC: No, we lived at the budding of Finkel Avenue. Finkel is the business street so no houses went up in fire, but a couple of the businesses did.
WW: Oh, okay.
CC: But, the place where we did our grocery shopping, we saw the people break out the windows and come in with the carts and filling them with food and heading back down Finkel. We had an alley right next to our house so people were bringing goods and just leaving them in the alley so they could come back and do one trip and come back and get another. We left them by our bushes.
WW: Do you remember how your parents reacted to seeing all this? Or how your older siblings reacted?
CC: You know, I think what strikes me is there wasn’t a big reaction. I think that’s always been striking to me. You know, my dad was a World War II veteran so who knows what he saw. He also himself was in Detroit his whole life. He grew up in a primarily African American neighborhood himself. So maybe it changed the perspective. This was our neighborhood and our community and I don’t know. I don’t remember them being really reactive to it at all. I know that we stood outside on the upper porch and watched what was going on. I mean we were—had to stay inside, but I don’t remember them being that reactive. I know that, from my memory, at some point they got up early in the morning and they just drove around the city and looked at what was going on. Like they took a little car tour or something.
WW: How did you react to what was going on? Were you surprised by what was happening?
CC: No. I wouldn’t say I was surprised. How would I say? I know. It just—it didn’t—it never felt menacing to me and I don’t know why. That has always been interesting to me, too. But we were kind of wild kids. We wanted to get out into the mix. It was like, wait a minute, there’s stuff to be had out there, everybody else is out there. I don’t remember being afraid. More I think I had that sort of—I was kind of a spirited, bold kid so I was like, ‘Oh look what’s going on!’ As I remember. But, I also, you know, we had kind of a sort of chaotic house. A lot of drama in our own house. I always felt like the outside world matched our inside world or something.
WW: How do you refer to what happened in July ‘67?
CC: I am one of seven siblings and each and every one of us were in that house. We all saw it. We all experienced it differently. I’m saying that to sort of set the landscape as your perceptions get colored by other peoples’ narratives. But, my brother, my older brother, the one that was working at the Dairy Queen, and he’s the one that Tyrone called, and I was telling Tobi, downstairs, that during the riot, from his story, his boss called him up and said—here me, referring to it as a riot— but, his boss called him up and said, ‘Give them anything they want.’ So my brother started making banana splits and ice creams and just handing them to anybody that was out on the streets. They didn’t close right away. They just fed the masses. But, my brother always calls it Detroit’s alternative shopping day. I guess I always called it the riot. But, I mean, that’s what the media always called it, too. There was no other language for it. But, since then, from things I read, I think about it a little differently. But, it never felt racial to me. I will say that. I think probably because of what we went through. We were the only white family on our block by that time. Nobody came and circled our house and said, hey, hey, hey. My friend, Ann, at the cleaners, she was like this sweet woman that owned the cleaners, an African American woman. She was my friend and I would go over there when I needed a little money and run errands. She would give me a little quarter and send me up to the post office, or give me some little job to do so I could make a little money. But, she owned a business and her business was at risk. During the rebellion, the riot, or whatever, she stood in front of her business with a rifle. There’s a woman that was just like my heart of hearts and she’s standing out on Finkel with a rifle, but I just felt like if there was any problem, Ann would take care of it for me.
WW: How did you feel when the National Guard, and later the Army came in?
CC: How did I feel?
WW: Yeah.
CC: Well we didn’t see them directly. What we saw, I mean, I didn’t see them going up and down Finkel at all. But my cousin was in the National Guard and so at some point I remember that the tank pulled up in the alley next to our house. I don’t know if it was Eddy getting out and saying hi or if it was like he was just checking in on us. But a tank pulled up right next to the house. So anyways.
WW: After the riot ended, did you feel comfortable in the city still? Did the city change to you at all?
CC: You know, I’ve been doing a lot of writing about this and I’ve thought about it deeply through the years. It was a very pivotal year in my life because I went to a small, Catholic, parochial school. It was a community school. We went to school with—it was just dynamic. The people there were committed to social justice, activist, Catholicism. Everybody played basketball. The play that they did at that school was West Side Story. So we’re seeing on stage plays that talk about diversity. The basketball team won all-city that year. Judge Gershwin Drain was a graduate of St. Gregory’s. That was our community. It was like pulled from all over. That was our grade school. It wasn’t just that we lived in a neighborhood, but we were in this community called St. Gregory’s. Many of the people that lived in that neighborhood sent their kids to that school or stayed in that community because they wanted to be in that kind of environment. It was very diverse and they worked actively towards it. Now, I was at the age of 14 during the riots, right, and I had just completed eighth grade. Somehow, through some miracle—because we weren’t great academic students by any means, but I was one of the better students in my family—somehow, some way, I got accepted to Immaculata High School.
Immaculata High School was an all-girl, Catholic, elite school. Pretty much down at Six Mile and Livernois was a very affluent neighborhood. A lot of the judges and lawyers of Detroit, and political elites and their children lived in that community. The girls went to Immaculata. [Judge William] Cahalan, who was in the video, his daughter was there. I got accepted to Immaculata. Now, Immaculata’s at Six Mile and Livernois, you know, up by Greenfield. So, why I’m telling you this whole long story is I’m in the eighth grade, I finish eighth grade. I don’t get to go back to my community school, right. I’m accepted to Immaculata. The community school was maybe going to close. I get into this school where I don’t even fit. I don’t even know how people are supposed to act. I’m a girl from Finkel and Dexter. We’re city kids, you know. You grab a little candy, you do a little bit of shoveling snow for the old ladies to make some money. You scam for some coin downtown so you can go to Quickie Donuts because you got nothing. We were these like just ruffling city kids. Now I’m going to school with all these very beautiful, affluent people. It was diverser.
The reason I’m being so long winded with this is because I walked from Finkel and Dexter to the school that I went to. And so I walked the streets, or took the bus, the streets, to Immaculata afterwards. It was just like I was on this walking tour. I never felt afraid. I never felt intimidated. But, it was just something about, you know, there’s this whole ruin porn that goes on now. It was like a gawker at a roadside accident. It didn’t scare me, but I was influenced by it. I looked at it a lot. Just the same way when somebody behind us got murdered when we were kids. I used to go over there and just bring my little brothers and sisters and say, ‘Look, there’s blood on the sidewalk!’ But, one of the things that I think about a lot, so we’re in the riots, we see the riots. It’s worse on TV than it is right in front of us for some reason, which makes no sense to me. Because see, we’re living in a community. We have a family. We have neighbors. We love our neighbors. They love us. We have a church. I have Ann at the cleaners. So even though everything was going on right in front of us, I never felt threatened. But, the TV was scary. When we started seeing the images, it seemed like there was two worlds going on.
But back to this Immaculata piece, at the same time that the riot’s going on, for the first time ever, it’s more horrifying to me that I saw our president’s motorcade on TV, and him getting killed. And then I saw his assassin getting killed on TV. I’m seeing the images of the Vietnam War on TV. TV was powerful in that day. We didn’t have much TV access so lots of times we didn’t have a TV. We’d go to somebody else’s house so it was more riveting. All these people are getting killed. All these things are happening in the media that we never really saw that until that period of history. So that piece of it makes it really, really strange.
So now, was it scary? No, it wasn’t scary. Then I go to this very interesting school. An interesting piece of my life is that I always had a weight issue. While I’m going to this all girl school, I’m also getting—my family starts having me go down to—I have to go down to a diet doctor. So once a week, I was taking the Six Mile bus, going down, it curved down, it’d go down Twelfth Street, go down Linwood, blah, blah, blah. So I took a bus tour every week through Highland Park and down through Twelfth so I could get down to the doctor’s. It’s the visual of seeing all that that was so different. That was kind of compelling.
The other reason I mention the school is I didn’t know there were people that were different than we were. When we lived at Finkel and Dexter, we were all just poor people. We were all just barely scraping by working class people, whose daddies carried lunch boxes, who frequently got the food baskets from church, who had one pair of shoes to get through the school year, and maybe not enough toothbrushes. Then I go to this school so my own experience of the dichotomy of cultures happened simultaneously. Although that was a very lovely school, I barely could make it academically. It wasn’t so diverse, as embracing. But, it was when I was there—it was an all that kind of school—we did our concerts at Ford Auditorium and I’m a singer. What I remember almost more than the riot was—not more than the riot, but it was just this moment where I did feel traumatized was when they killed Dr. Martin Luther King. I was on a bus heading downtown. The riot was an anomaly, except now we’re seeing it on TV. We’re seeing Watts. We’re seeing it from all over the world. Now, Dr. King got killed. You could just, this pulse in the city that day, I don’t even know how to describe it. We had just had a riot and now the peacemaker, who had been advocating for peace and justice, got slaughtered in a city that’s already been traumatized through race and oppression. And that day was disturbing.
WW: Did your parents ever think about moving out afterwards?
CC: We did move out, but that’s what was so weird. They already owned the house. They owned this house. But, they didn’t move until after the riot, it’s like finally—or the rebellion or whatever—it was like my dad finally convinced my mom we could leave.
WW: Where’d they move to?
CC: Unbelievable. Grosse Isle. So you know Grosse Isle. Grosse Isle during the riot, the rumor is that they put the bridges up so no one could get across. But, the house, it was like the hut house. It was a falling down old farm house. In the summer of ’67 was the riot. I went to Immaculata for a year. In ’68 they sold the house on Fairfield and then moved to Grosse Isle. At some level, that was more traumatic. For me, I was a very independent, autonomous child. But, I was kind of wild. I was kind of like taken to the streets and so was my brother. We were kind of free souls. Maybe we were a little at risk, if that makes sense. Just, you know, at risk somehow of not following society’s rules.
But, we moved to Grosse Ile, and all of sudden I’m a 15 year old whose been taking buses all over, going anywhere she wanted, and I’m prisoner like I’m on Alcatraz already. It’s an island. I can’t get anywhere. I can’t even—I’ve told you already I love cookies and sweets—I couldn’t even get a candy bar without walking two miles. I couldn’t go anywhere unless I begged my mother to take me. Then, I went to an all white school. I’d never been anywhere where it was all white. That was like, does this make sense? That was somehow more unsettling. I didn’t know what the cultural norms were in an all white school. I knew what the cultural norms were in my neighborhood. That’s kind of what I’m saying. Like at Immaculata, I’m living at Finkel and Dexter, I’m going to this local Catholic school, I knew what the cultural norms were. Now all of a sudden I’m an adolescent. You’ve got to find your culture, your clan. I’m first put in an all girls school where I don’t know the cultural norms and once I figured them out, I don’t belong anyways. I don’t have the money to belong or even the prior knowledge to know how to conduct myself in it. There’s some sad stories that went on there. Then we moved from there. I now live on an island. We’re bussed off the island to go to Gabriel Richard. Now I’m at this all white Catholic school that kids are coming from—that was more traumatic for me. I didn’t know what the cultural norms were there either. I just wanted to come back to Detroit and that’s what I did as soon as I could. Plus, even academically, if this makes any sense, at St. Gregory’s, I was a decent student. At Immaculata, I failed everything. At Gabriel Richard, I was barely passing. It was like too much social-emotional pressure to know everything else. I mean, I passed. There was a lot of acting out on my part, at that point. A lot of acting out.
WW: Do you continue to live in the suburbs or live in Detroit?
CC: I think that’s a good question. I came back to Detroit. I lived in Detroit. I went to Wayne State. Before there were ever urban hipsters, I lived at my grandmother’s house. She let her grandchildren all live with her. There’s like 15 of us that lived with her down at the Boulevard and walked or took the bus to Wayne. That’s how I got through it. Then I’d go down to Grosse Isle and do cleaning on the weekends so I could pay my tuition and then I’d come back to Detroit and live at Grandma’s.
So moving forward to your question, and where do I live, I live in a ringed suburb, but it was an active choice. I think about it a lot because I always wanted to be in a community of diversity. There wasn’t any communities of diversity in Detroit. Plus, I’m an educator and there were no schools I could send my children to when they were born, in Detroit. People who stayed in Detroit of affluence knew the schools weren’t able to serve the kids because of many deep reasons. So I raised my family in Dearborn. But, I chose Dearborn because it is diverse because of the Eastern European population, its proximity to Detroit, its more working class background, and so, there you go.
WW: How do you feel about the state of the city today? Are you optimistic for it moving forward?
CC: Am I optimistic? That’s a good way that they word that question. Am I optimistic about it moving forward? I have a very interesting view of the city. I worked for the universities and I’ve worked for Teach for America so I’ve been in the schools in some of the most intriguing neighborhoods. I’m not talking I’m hanging out on Woodward Avenue down at Campus Martius. I’m talking I’m going into these EEA [EAA: Education Achievement Authority] schools watching these children’s educations get —not get. One day I drove out of a school through security and they opened the gate and the guy sitting on his porch picked up a rifle and shook it at me.
Am I optimistic? Am I optimistic? When we include all of Detroit, I’ll be optimistic. When we’re just keeping it sort of at the epicenter? No, I’m not optimistic. When I see that Wayne State—when I see people can’t afford to live in their neighborhood anymore because of the gentrification of midtown, no, I’m not optimistic. When I go into restaurants that are, “Oh, they’re all that” or when my friends who live in the suburbs are like, “Oh, let’s go to Detroit” I’m like, Detroit’s been there. I’ve been going for the last 40 years. All of a sudden because there’s a Whole Foods, you’re going into Detroit? I’ll be optimistic with projects like this where we’re asking deep and reflective questions. I am optimistic because of my children. I can see where—we didn’t just live in the suburbs. We lived in Detroit. They went to Belle Isle before it was made a state park. They went to the DIA. They went to the Historical Museum. They went to the riverfront. We were city people. This was our city. We went on our Thanksgivings down to Focus: HOPE. We went and fed people at the Mother Waddles soup kitchen. We went to urban churches. I go to a beautiful church now. If you want to be optimistic about Detroit, go to the nativity and see the kind of community they have there on the east side. Those things make me optimistic. I’m optimistic that my daughter, who’s lived all over the world, she’s lived in Germany and Amsterdam, she’s trilingual, I’m optimistic that she bought a house, not in midtown, but she bought a house right at the corner of—between Hamtramck and Detroit. She’s created a performance space that isn’t just like, “Oh, the artists are moving in and it’s an enclave” but she created a space called Joe’s Garage where she opens the door to Carpenter Street. She’s got all her music system and people come in and do music with her. I’m optimistic because of her. Because she understands that when any voice is oppressed, we’re all oppressed. See, I get very philosophical about this. So yeah, it’s all pretty. But, if I think the restaurant is really lovely, I ought to vet it. I ought to vet it with my eyes and if they’re not making equitable hiring choices, then I’m not being the right person to be in Detroit. So we all ought to be vetting the city and asking everybody to raise the bar. See, there I go, I can get very outspoken about it.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me. I greatly appreciate it.
CC: There you go.
WW: Hello, today is August 4, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am in Detroit, Michigan and I am sitting down with –
AN: Arlene Niskar.
WW: Thank you for sitting down with me today.
AN: Thank you.
WW: Can you please tell me where and when you were born?
AN: I was born in Detroit. I lived on Dexter Boulevard until I was 14 years old and then we moved to Oak Park.
WW: What year were you born?
AN: I was born in 1944.
WW: What was your Dexter neighborhood like before you moved away?
AN: Oh, it was lovely. It was just beautiful. You could walk anywhere to buy anything. There was bakeries and fish markets and fresh poultry stores where you could go in and pick out a chicken and there was the Dexter Show and dime stores where they give away goldfish on Saturdays. Half-dead goldfish to the kids that would come in. Oh, that was a big deal. There was a lot of drug stores. There was a malt shop called Danny’s. We hung out there when I got a little older. It was a lovely neighborhood.
WW: Was the neighborhood all white?
AN: Yes. Mostly Jewish.
WW: While you were still living there, did it integrate at all?
AN: When the first black family moved in to my neighborhood, everybody was in a panic. My father was so mad at the man that sold his house to the first black family. And everybody put up their signs and started moving and the whole neighborhood just changed in a short time. My junior high school, because I was on the Broad Street side of Dexter was already integrated. There were kids from Grand River and Elmhurst and farther down so it was all kinds of kids that I went to junior high school with.
WW: Do you know why your father and the other neighbors were so upset?
AN: I hate to say it but my parents were terribly prejudiced. I never realized it. They never said it to me until I brought a black girl home from school one day and my mother said to me after, “Don’t you ever bring that girl back into this house again. We’re trying to stay away from them.” It was terrible. It was just terrible. We had a black cleaning lady and, oh, my mother used to put her sandwich and drink on separate dishes and it was like the book The Help. That’s what it was like. It was unbelievable then.
WW: Did you witness any other signs of racism across the city?
AN: Did I witness any other sign of racism? Yeah, when I moved to Oak Park and they were going to move and it was all white again and then they were going to move people from Eight Mile on Meyers and integrate them, the kids, into the Oak Park High School and oh, everybody was all upset about that. Then, must have been in the Sixties where integration started and, yeah, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to think because you heard the news and it was all negative about integration. And then we had horrible governors in the United States, Wallace and — that were saying “We’re never going to integrate.” And then we started seeing on the news these poor kids. The Sixties was horrible. That’s all I can say. It brings back a lot of very bad memories. I’m so glad that my kids don’t feel that way and they were never raised that way.
WW: Going into the Sixties in Detroit, from moving around so much, did you sense any growing tension in the city?
AN: We moved in 1959. We moved –
WW: To Oak Park?
AN: Yeah.
WW: So while you were living in Oak Park did you come to visit Detroit at all?
AN: Oh yeah, I used to come back and visit my friends that hadn’t moved yet that lived off of Twelfth Street and Linwood.
WW: How did your parents feel about you doing that?
AN: Well, I used to go on – I was about 14 and I got on the bus and came back here and stayed at my cousin’s house and we had all kinds of friends then.
WW: Going into 1967, were you still living in Oak Park then?
AN: Yes.
WW: And how did you interact with what was going on?
AN: You mean when I was downtown here?
WW: Yes.
AN: In shock. I mean, really, talking about the day of my wedding.
WW: You can tell the story of your wedding.
AN: Okay. I moved in 19 – I believe ‘58 or ‘59 to Oak Park and graduated from Oak Park High School in ‘62. People stopped going downtown. They just stopped going downtown and we always would go down to Hudson’s and it was wonderful. I maybe was too young in my teen years to realize what was going on but the city was getting more and more integrated because my uncle lived on Glendale and nobody could understand – he lived there until the day he died and that was years later after everybody else moved and he loved his neighbors. But everybody out in the suburbs thought he was crazy and that was the mindset at that time. Thank God, it’s changed, I hope.
WW: What were doing on that Sunday the first day?
AN: Oh, that’s the day I got married. We were at the Book Cadillac. I was married at noon and everybody got downtown just fine but about 2:30, after the ceremony and the lunch, I went up to change and I came back down with my bouquet to throw it out to people and there wasn’t anybody left there. [laughs] It was crazy because my brother-in-law was running around telling everybody, “You’ve got to go! The whole city is burning down.” And then when we were driving out to Chicago and we were driving past Grand River in the downtown area, everything was in flames. And we just couldn’t believe that it could possibly be happening. It was just a shock and then driving to Chicago there were all kinds of National Guard trucks coming, racing to Detroit with State Police and we kept saying to ourselves, “Oh, it can’t be. It just can’t be.” But we had a lot of Canadian relatives that were just terrified because some had to come back through the city to go across the tunnel and people were in such panic going across the tunnel, my sister said they were driving on the sidewalks and cutting each other off to get in front of other people to get out of Detroit and you could go over to Canada but you had to be born in the United States to get back. They heard gunshots. She said it was so loud, the noise level was so loud driving down to the tunnel that they couldn’t believe it. My cousins were all crying. There was fire everywhere and screaming. And she said it was like being in a war zone. That’s basically what she said. And then my other relatives they wouldn’t even let them through the tunnel. They had driven so they drove through the Blue Water Bridge up in Port Huron.
WW: How do you identify what happened in the city? What do you call it? Do you call it a riot, do you call it a rebellion?
AN: It was riots. It was riots because my husband’s grandparents lived on Seven Mile and Livernois in a small bungalow and they could not believe their neighbors that were looting and bringing all this stuff into their houses. They just kept saying to us, “They’re schlepping things into their homes.” And they loved their neighbors and couldn’t believe they were a part of this. Nobody had a mindset like this. We couldn’t believe it was happening in Detroit. But then I found out that there was a previous riot that was horrible in 1920s?
WW: ‘43.
AN: ‘43? Oh. Okay, yeah. So, I just hope it never happens again.
WW: Did this event change the way you look at the city of Detroit?
AN: We were all terrified to come back down here. And we didn’t come down for years.
WW: Did it make you want to move away?
AN: Well, I felt safe in Oak Park. And then they integrated the Oak Park schools from Meyers and Eight Mile there was a group of homes where the kids went to Detroit schools but then they brought them to the Oak Park schools.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to share today?
AN: I think that’s exciting enough for me.
WW: Then, final question, how do you see the city today?
AN: Oh, it’s fantastic. It’s fantastic and I just wish that people would learn to get along and I think eventually, hopefully, when the crime level starts to go down –it’s still frightening. It’s still frightening to think that if you’re not in the downtown area where you feel rather safe, that there’s still all these things happening with gangs. Like, I think of that little girl that was with her friends and just drove down near I think it was Eastern Market and somebody shot them. He was never caught. This was a couple years ago. She was supposed to go away with her brother and decided to come with her friend and these miscellaneous shootings, you hear about them all the time and it’s very scary. And until people get educated, I don’t think things are going to change that much until the schools become better and the economy becomes better.
WW: Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
AN: You’re very welcome.
WW: Hello today is August 20, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project and I am sitting down with—
SS: Sheila Sharp.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
SS: You’re welcome.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
SS: I was born February 13, 1957 in Herman Kiefer Hospital.
WW: Did you grow up in the city?
SS: Yes I did.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?
SS: I grew up in central Detroit, west side. West side central.
WW: Which street?
SS: We moved a lot. I first started school when we lived on Euclid and John C Lodge. I started at Fairbanks Elementary School. From there, I went to Thirkell, from there I went to Crossman, from there Peck and Longfellow and Sanders. And then I went to junior high school at Hutchins, Hutchins Junior High. I went to high school at Northern, Northern High, which was on Woodward and Owens.
WW: The neighborhoods that you moved around in, were they integrated neighborhoods ?
SS: No, sir. No, basically, we had maybe an Albanian family here or there, a Chinese family here or there but it was mainly African American.
WW: What was it like growing up in that neighborhood in the late Fifties?
SS: That would be the early Sixties. It was fun during the time I was in elementary school. We used to play outside a lot, play tag and hopscotch, basketball, baseball. Different games like that. We didn’t watch much TV. When I got to junior high school, I was bullied a lot and that continued until I got to high school. When I got to high school, I joined the swim team and became co-captain of our swim team. And then pretty much stayed with the swim team and stayed out of trouble. There was always somebody who wanted to fight me all the time and I stayed swimming to avoid fights. I had good teachers, I also became pregnant at the age of fifteen, which wasn't very good back then. Nowadays, it’s commonplace. But I did manage to finish school and raise my son.
WW: Going back to when you were ten in ’67, how’d you first hear what was going on?
SS: When I was ten years old, I was in my cousin Gwen’s wedding. My cousin Paula and I were flower girls. At the reception, I danced and danced and danced. When her and her husband went off to their honeymoon, to the Pontchartrain Hotel in downtown Detroit, I stayed at my grandmother’s house that night. When I woke up that morning, there was a lot of commotion in the neighborhood. I didn’t know at that time what was going on but I found out later that day that there was a riot going on. I didn’t know what a riot was but from the way that everybody was acting, I soon realized that it was not a good thing. There was a lot of smoke in the air and I could see a lot of heavy smoke plummeting up into the air. There was a lot of fires burning and I was scared. I was scared that everything was going to burn including my grandmother’s place. I was sitting on the stoop on the front porch, people were coming down the block from Linwood Avenue to Lasalle Street. She lived on Monterey. They were coming down the street with all kinds of items loaded in their arms. I ran in the house to tell my grandmother what I was seeing and she came out on the porch and I know this is what she said, I’m commenting what she said. She says, “Niggers have gone crazy! Now they’re looting and burning up everything! Oh my god, what’s going to happen next?” I looked up at my grandmother and I asked her, “What is looting?” And she looked back at me and said, “Looting is when people break into stores and businesses and take things that don’t belong to them.” She told me to come inside, that she needed to turn on the TV and see what was going on out there. So we went inside and turned on the TV and the news was on every channel. We watched and listened to the news people and they said the police had raided a blind pig on the corner of Twelfth and Clairmount. I thought to myself, now remember this is from a ten-year-old’s perspective, I thought to myself, “What would a blind pig be doing on the corner of Twelfth and Clairmount? And why would police spray it with Raid? And why were people so angry about a pig? This had to be some special kind of pig.” Because we never had pigs in our neighborhood before. The telephone rang; it was my dad on the line, he spoke with my grandmother and told her what had happened the night before and that I should stay with my grandmother because things were really bad where my mom, dad, and brothers were at our house. My grandma got off the phone from speaking with my dad, she answered my question. I asked her about the blind pig. That is when I learned that a blind pig was an after-hours joint, a place where people went to party after the bars closed at night. My grandma told me that the police started beating up people who were at the after-hours joint and there were some young boys across the street on the roof and they were throwing bottles and bricks at the police and then everything went crazy. Then my grandmother, she says, “I knew it! I just knew it! I knew them damn cops would get theirs someday!” She was shouting and smiling and angry, all at the same time. I didn't understand why she would be acting that way about the police getting hit with bottles and bricks and things. She went on shouting, “It’s about time somebody put them sons of bitches in their place! They can’t keep treating us like they do!” I was really puzzled then because we had always learned in school that the police were our friends. Boy, I learned a lot that summer. That evening, the police came slowly down the block announcing over a loud speaker: “The city of Detroit has been placed under Martial Law. No one is to be outside of their homes from seven p.m. to seven a.m. or you will be arrested.” My grandmother quickly got me and herself inside the door, watched the TV to see what was going on around town. The TV was showing people looting, they were running with all kinds of things. We watched firemen put out fires that were huge. Some fires were more than just one building on the street. Later I learned it was Twelfth Street that was burning so badly. I became more scared than I was at first because my family was in the middle of the chaos. Our house was on West Philadelphia between Woodrow Wilson and Twelfth Streets. That was like, maybe a few- five, six blocks from Clairmount. The rioting went on for a few days more. My dad told my grandma to put blankets up to the windows so that the light would not shine through. I was attending summer school that year. We could not go, because of the riot. So we rode our bikes up and down the block. There was an ice cream store at the end of the block, at Monterey and Linwood streets and a lot of soldiers were sitting on the grass near the corner and some were standing in line to buy ice cream. Some of these soldiers looked very nice and spoke to us. I’d never seen a soldier before and I was fascinated with them because they had rifles. I heard some grown ups talking about the soldiers, they called them National Guards. And someone said, “If those National Guards tell you to do something, you’d better do it or they will shoot you!” I rode my bike as fast as I could to my grandmother’s place to tell her what I had just heard. She laughed and said, “Don’t listen to everything you hear people say. Those soldiers are not going to shoot you, they are here to make sure we don't get hurt while all this rioting is going on.” Days passed and things somewhat got back to normal. I went back to my mom, dad, and brothers. On the way home, I could see a lot of buildings had burned, some were still smoldering. I smelled the scent of burnt bricks in the air. Nothing much was the same. There were a few stores still standing that had not been torched by fire. Some places had “soul brother” painted on them. When I got home, my brothers were telling me about everything that was going on while I was at Grandma’s. They told me all about the shooting that was going on around the house. We lived in a four family flat on Philadelphia and Woodrow Wilson Streets, right there on the corner. My baby brother told me that he and my dad were walking down the street and gunfire had broke out. He said, “Me and daddy were walking down the street going home and somebody fired a gun. The police told us to get inside but we were not yet at our house. Daddy picked me up and put me on his shoulders and then a National Guard shouted for us to go inside and fired a shot over our heads.” I was hearing all kinds of stories from friends and neighbors; I was a little sad I missed all the action but from what everyone was saying, I was better off at Grandma’s house. The National Guard stayed around for a few days more. They had been staying at Hutchins Junior High School, that is where we were going to summer school at the time. The soldiers left and we returned to summer school. My classmates and I could not stop talking about the events that happened in the last few weeks. We all shared our stories with one another. I was telling everybody about an incident I had heard about. I heard that a little girl was killed on West Philadelphia and Twelfth in an apartment building by either National Guard or police gun fire. They had shot through an apartment window. Because her brother was near the window, he was lighting a cigarette, and they fired through the window, killing her. The little girl that was killed was one of my classmates’ little sisters. We all felt very bad for our classmate. When she told us it was her little sister that had been shot, she began to cry. It took things a while to get back to normal. We all stopped talking about the riots and began to concentrate on passing the class. [rustling of papers] That’s all I have.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me and sharing your story.
SS: You’re welcome.
TV: Hello, my name is Tobi Voigt, I’m with the Detroit Historical Society. Today I’m here with-
PB: Pat Burnett.
TV: Today is Saturday, August 20, 2016 and we are at the Detroit Historical Museum. Wonderful, good morning. Tell me a little bit about yourself. Where were you born?
PB: I was born in Detroit, Michigan. I hate to say the year, but I was born in a hospital. It was an African American-owned hospital called-what was it called?
TV: Dunbar?
PB: No, it wasn’t Dunbar. Name another one. Detroit Diagnostic. And the name changed, I think, to Burton Mercy. I’m not sure. But it was Detroit Diagnostic.
TV: Great, where did you grow up?
PB: Detroit.
TV: Where particularly, what neighborhood?
PB: The east side. I started off in what’s called Black Bottom. It was on Waterloo and St. Aubin. And we get together, a lot of us get together, and we still meet. We were the children of Black Bottom before what I guess you would call it the Urban Renewal Project. We didn't know what was going on, but we all moved. And I stayed on the east side, moved up Gratiot, north on Gratiot, when I was about 12, 11 or 12.
TV: So you spent the first 11 or 12 years —tell me a little bit about what Black Bottom was like, what do you remember?
PB: Black Bottom was pretty, what I can remember because they had the brick streets, there were oak trees, apple trees, cherry trees all along the streets. And we lived—there was a railroad track down below the ground up the street. We went to a junior high school that was Miller. I guess you’ve heard of Miller? Miller was a high school right before I went and they changed it to a junior high school. It was a pretty block, lots of kids. We all played together; everybody went to that school. I went to elementary school on the street called Arndt. At that time it was still some Germans that lived in the area and a lot of the streets were German streets like Arndt. And, what can I tell you? We played, we had big oak trees, apple trees, and eventually they came in and chopped the trees down. And that was because of the Dutch Elm Disease which we didn't know about until later but it changed the look of the street. And then right after that Urban Renewal started.
TV: Tell me a little bit about your family.
PB: My family?
TV: Who did you grow up with? Who were you living with when you were a kid?
PB: My family- mother, father, sisters-siblings-brother and sister. And we had cousins that came up from the South, they lived with us and they moved out. It was typical family environment. My mother used to teach school in the South and she came here when she married my father. She didn’t work, she was a typical housewife like most of the ladies on the block were typical housewives. The father went out and worked, my father was a factory worker.
TV: Do you know who he worked for?
PB: It doesn't exist anymore but it was an aluminum —what was it? It was an aluminum factory I think for years but in the records, I see he was called foundry man, which was a common name at that time. And I was born in the Forties, close to Fifties [laughing], hate to say that.
TV: So tell me a little bit, so when-
PB: Oh, so we walked up to this area [gesturing] right here, our doctor was here, and this was the cultural area. The Karmanos was called Michigan Cancer Society and the doctor was here -Doctor Shefferman- was here, he’s probably long gone, he was older then. And we would go through the library, my mother always took us to the public library [Detroit Public Library – Main Branch]. We always had library cards and we always had membership with book clubs so we got books. And we lunch in this area and we walked back. Or we walked to Tiger Stadium, at that time it was called Briggs Stadium.
TV: So when Urban Renewal, if you will, or they put in the Chrysler Freeway, your family, you said you moved up Gratiot. Tell me a little bit about the neighborhood you moved to and what it was like growing up there.
PB: Okay it was very mixed. I was 12, 11 or 12. I was still in school and I still went to Miller. So I took the bus back down there to Miller and then eventually went to Eastern High School. It was very mixed neighborhood. We didn't live too far from the city airport. And it was active then and we used to walk around. It was pretty typical and then the riots started.
TV: Do you remember which street you lived on?
PB: Pennsylvania.
TV: Pennsylvania, okay. Tell me a little bit about your experiences in 1967.
PB: ’67, see what happened in ’67, I can’t remember when it started, all of a sudden there were riots on the west side. It did not touch the east side but there were snipers on the east side that started shooting and they were on buildings. And it was a motorcycle club across the street on Gratiot. And we had to stay in, what I remember is the curfew. We had to be in-it kept getting earlier and earlier, before seven, before six, before five. And as a teenager, I went stir crazy. So, I told a big fib and I told these guys that came over from the west side to pick us up. I told them that the curfew was lifted. And they said, “Oh! Is it lifted?” “Yeah, I heard it was lifted,” just so I could get out of the house. And we went on the west side. We said let’s go on the west side to see the devastation. Because you saw it on the TV, what was going on. And we went over there and the guys had a slow leak. And then they found out the curfew had not been lifted. So everybody in the car-we had about seven or eight people in the car-they all got upset with me. And then the soldiers, I guess they were National Guard, they stopped us and they had the bayonets in the window. And we had to explain that we had a slow leak-
TV: In one of the tires? A slow leak in one of the tires?
PB: Right, and he went back and looked and he saw there oh, they really are having a slow leak. And he directed us to a gas station to get some air in the tire or– they couldn't do it, they all had bayonets. It was like a war going on. And we went to the gas station and there were guys in there stealing gas to do, what do they call it, molotov cocktails or whatever. And we left, we got the air-it was still a slow leak so nobody could fix it-and they took us back home on the east side. Needless to say, those guys never spoke to us again.
TV: So do you know what intersection you were at? You just remember it was close to the National Guard—
PB: I can’t remember. Right, it was on the west side because we took the freeway. That’s when we heard the sirens started. The sirens and the fire started. Police sirens, fire sirens, it just got dark and cloudy and looked like a war zone. And that’s when I got scared for lying too. You know, I wish I hadn't done it, second thoughts. The second thing I remember most about the riots, they kept saying, “It’s gonna be a long, hot summer. It’s gonna be a long, hot summer.” And that’s what I heard repeated, people saying that. My sisters lived on the west side, not far from the area where it started supposedly at a blind pig on the west side. And the snipers were on the east side and one day we walked down the ally because we thought it was safer to walk the allies. They said to walk the allies, not the streets. At that time, the allies were done up, they were really nice. People had gardens back there. We walked through the alley to the corner store and this guy came out and started shooting. He was the owner of the store. He started shooting at these two grown people, they were older than we were. And I was about 17. And they started shooting at them because they had just looted the store. And this was in broad daylight. I turned around and started running through the alley. Me and my girlfriend- the other girlfriend-jumped out of the way. And she said, “We should’ve ran like this.” But they were shooting at these specific people that ran in back of us and the lady was shot in the leg. I ran home and told daddy, he walked back up there to talk to the guy. The police were there by then. And the police just ended it by saying, “You can keep your gun if anybody robs your store.” We hadn't gotten to the store when these people-we knew the store owners, but he did not shoot at us. He was shooting there but you could how it could have easily been an accident.
TV: Yeah.
PB: They just shot them for looting. And that’s the biggest thing, the two incidents: when I lied about going to the west side and then the incident on the east side.
TV: So the incident on the east side, the store was on Gratiot then?
PB: No, it was on Shoemaker and—that’s probably a store still there. It was on Shoemaker and Pennsylvania, I think. Pennsylvania, McClellan, there was the Catholic church there, and then going down there was another store and then this store. We used to go walk to that store all the time. Corner store.
TV: Was there any other looting or was it just this one couple you think that took advantage of the—
PB: No, it was not a lot of people. It was just this couple and I don’t know who they were but one lady was shot. And the police arrived after we got back to the house. We only came one block, but we walked the alley and there was a store there. And we walked to the store and then this was happening as soon as we got to the store. We never entered the store. He came out and he was talking in a different language and he started going after these people. And I can’t remember what happened but we turned around and they followed us. We were running and I didn't know how to dodge bullets at the time—but that’s the most devastating thing that happened to us during the riots.
TV: So you mentioned early on about the sniping and the motorcycle-
PB: Oh yeah, I don’t know if the motorcycle gang, if there was a connection but we assumed it was. And the snipers were on the roof.
TV: Of the motorcycle club?
PB: Of the motorcycle club.
TV: Who were the patrons of this motorcycle club?
PB: I don’t know, they were all white because the neighborhood was mixed and so.
TV: And it was the white motorcycle guys on the roof?
PB: I don’t know. We don’t know—
TV: Okay, we don’t know but they were on the roof—
PB: We don’t know because some of the motorcycle guys we kind of knew, being in the neighborhood. But they used it, they were on top of the building, it was a low level building. There was a bar on the corner and they would just snipe, they would just shoot. And that was devastating. That’s why it was easier to walk down the alley. But we as teenagers, you know, you’re in the house all day in the summer and we wanted to go out. We were teenagers, we were used to going to Metro Beach, we were used to doing all kinds of things. So we couldn’t even go to Belle Isle.
TV: Did your parents-did your father or your mother find out about your trip to the west side or was that a secret?
PB: No, they never found out, they never knew that. That was before it got really bad it was restricted to the west side at that time, not the east side.
TV: So how did the things that you witnessed, both on the west side and in your own neighborhood, did it affect you at all?
PB: No, I think back about it only when they talk about the riots. You know, I was born and raised in Detroit and now they’re doing commemorations and it’s weird only because I’m part of history. I never think of it. It didn’t affect me either way. But it’s just, I know there was a lot of looting, a lot of people killed. Didn’t know the reason at that time but they said it started from a bar or a blind pig on the west side. And never knew until later that it was very political and it started after Martin Luther King was killed and I don’t know if it’s related?
TV: I think it was— Martin Luther King was killed in ’68 so it was before—
PB: It was before, yeah. And then the other riots started in—now my mother told me there was a riot here in ’43 in Detroit and she was here then.
TV: Did she have any particular stories about ’43 that you can recall?
PB: I never ask her about it, I never ask her—she only mentioned that when the riots started in the Sixties. Second riots or something. But that’s the only, those two events stand out mostly and the devastation of Detroit as you’re walking after the riots. How bad it was and how people used to write on the windows of stores, “These are owned by brothers” so that they won’t have to get smashed. But Johnson was president and Johnson had given—I still never got that clear, whether he gave the order to shoot to kill, I don’t know. They said that he gave those orders to shoot to kill. I never knew what happened there. But I didn't know anyone who got killed but there were lots of folks that were killed in the riot. But it seemed like, when I think back on it, it seemed like it was all summer but I heard it wasn't that long. It didn't take that long.
TV: But it felt like it was?
PB: Yeah, it felt like it was an entire summer and I was surprised to find out that it wasn't the entire summer but thinking back on it, it’s what it feels like.
TV: Interesting. Do you have anything else you want to add? Any other thoughts?
PB: Let’s see, what other thoughts I should add about the riots?
TV: Anything, your life, Detroit, then, now…
PB: I left Detroit before Coleman Young was mayor and came back and Archer was mayor, so I was gone for a long time. And things have changed a lot in Detroit and it’s coming back.
TV: Wonderful, well thank you for sharing your stories with us today.
PB: You’re welcome.
HS: Hello, this is Hannah Sabal. I’m here in Detroit, Michigan. The date is June 23, 2016 and I’m sitting down with Sheila Shelton for the Detroit 67 Oral History Project. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
SS: Thank you.
HS: Okay, can you start by telling me where and when you were born?
SS: I was born March 31, 1956 in Detroit, Michigan.
HS: And where did you grow up?
SS: I grew up on the northeast side of Detroit.
HS: And what was your neighborhood like?
SS: My neighborhood as a child was wonderful. It was absolutely breathtaking. We moved there, the trees actually met in an archway going down the street. You didn’t have to lock your doors. It was truly- the neighborhood raised the children. Everybody had their hands in it.
HS: Did you play a lot with neighbor kids?
SS: Yes.
HS: Okay. And was your neighborhood integrated?
SS: Yes it was when we first moved there. It was Jewish, white, and maybe two or three blacks.
HS: And what did your parents do for a living?
SS: My mother was a homemaker and my father worked at Ford’s.
HS: And where did you go to school?
SS: I went to school around the neighborhood, as a child. At McCullough Elementary School.
HS: And middle schoolm high school?
SS: Middle school was Winship, high school was Cass Tech.
HS: Awesome. And what year did you graduate Cass?
SS: ’74.
HS: And then did you go to school? Did you continue your education or work after high school?
SS: Yes, I furthered my education and I went down south, actually.
HS: Okay, and what college did you go to down there?
SS: Lawson State Community College.
HS: So where were you living in the 1960s?
SS: A street called Leslie.
HS: Leslie Street. And you were young at the time- how old were you in 1967?
SS: Maybe about 9, 9 or 10.
HS: And as a child, did you notice anything peculiar going on in the city before the riots?
SS: We actually were down the street, a couple blocks away, at my cousins’ house and they told us that they had heard it was going to be a race riot and that we should get home right away. Being kids, we obeyed the elders and we started to go home.
HS: Wow so they knew that there was going to be a race riot?
SS: That’s what they said. And how they knew, to this day I have no idea.
HS: So you first heard about it from your cousins and then do you have any memories or experiences from the riots?
SS: [laughing] Yes I do. My father was living at that particular time and we were curious so we said, “Well, let us walk up to Linwood and find out what’s going on.” So we did, we proceeded to walk up there. It was my father, my next-door neighbor, my sister, and myself. And when we got there, there was a lot of looting, people running up and down the streets, and we walked into a corner store and they were looting. Booze was all gone, all liquor was off the shelf. And I saw a game – my father had already walked out of the store. And I saw a game – I think it was The Game of Life – and I picked it up, and I went to my father and I said, “Daddy, can I have this game?” And he said, “No, baby, put it back. We don’t steal.” So I went back in the store and I put it on the counter, which now was completely empty. And by the time I put the game down, somebody picked it up. I proceeded to walk out the store and at that particular time it was like a glass window. And they used to have popcorn and potato chips on a little stand, I think sometimes they call it – well, I don’t know what they call it. But it was on like a little stand and this man was rocking it, and by the time I got right in front of him – he’s inside the store – he hit the window and the sheet of glass went and covered me. And I got cut up real bad. And my father, obviously, went in there to kill the man, but my neighbor said, “We’ve got to get these kids to the hospital.” So my father went home, as we were slowly walking to the house, and he got the car, and we went to the hospital. Now, being a child-I think we went to Henry Ford’s, I’m really not sure- but it was a lot of commotion in there. Gunshots, I remember some guy holding his hand out and it was bloody but the blood wasn't coming out and the doctor hollering, “Get him to a room; he has internal bleeding.” It was very hectic. I finally got waited on. they stitched me up and took me home.
HS: Did your sister or you neighbor get hurt when the glass fell?
SS: My sister also got hurt, but it was only on her heel. And that was followed by the army, who set up their organization in front of three schools- Durfee, Roosevelt, and Central. I remember the tents and the tanks coming down the street and we had a curfew. But before they got here, I remember these guys, they had a bank safe on top of the car, on top of the hood and it fell off. It had rollers on it and they proceeded to roll it down the street. And where they went with that safe, I have no idea. But when the army got here, they kind of calmed things down. Like I said, we had a curfew and I remember them standing on top of apartment buildings – because there was an apartment building not too far from us – with their guns in their hands, you know.
HS: How did your parents react to the riots? Were they scared or angry?
SS: I think, I really don’t know how they felt about it. They were originally born in the South. My father and mother came to Detroit for a better living. They were working people as far as I know. But my father didn't live too long after that and his lawyer told my mother, he suggested that we move. And the neighborhoods really weren't that bad yet – because he died in ’69. But she didn’t – she, you know, purchased the home, and we stayed there.
HS: And is your mother still living?
SS: No.
HS: Did she stay in Detroit the rest of her life?
SS: Yes, mmhmm.
HS: And at what point did you move out of Detroit?
SS: Well, the first time I moved was when I graduated. I went to Lawson State Community College. I went to stay with my grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama. Then I came back. I love Detroit, you know. There’s a lot of things that I’ve done, a lot of people, icons, that I’ve met here and Detroit used to be something to see. It’s sad to see it today. Like I can tell you, I met Marvin Gaye at the State Fair. I walked on Baker’s Bar on Livernois and Eight mile and met Stevie Wonder. I was in the choir when Nelson Mandela came to Detroit. Yes, I’ve talked to the owner of the Fisher building. Just so many things I’ve done here. Gladys Knight, Quincy Jones. He came to Hudson’s when it was open. So it was a lot, a lot of icons who came and I got the opportunity to meet a lot of them.
HS: So, you were about nine years old in ’67, aside from you saw the people stealing, did you have any idea at all, anything else that was happening?
SS: No. But I know afterwards it was a Catholic church on Linwood and it had a statue of Jesus and I think it’s still there today. Jesus was all white. And somebody painted his face black and it has remained black since that time. He’s all white but his face is black. And that church, I think is on Linwood and Grand, I’m not sure.
HS: Do you think they did that out of protest?
SS: Yeah.
HS: Wow.
SS: Because, reading your article, I didn’t know they were really protesting about the police department being all white.
HS: So a lot of people have different names for what happened. Some people call it an uprising, some people call it a riot. How do you perceive the events?
SS: When I was a child, they nicknamed it ‘Burn Baby Burn.’
HS: Really, I haven’t heard that.
SS: Mhmm, that’s what it was. And I had-I forgot about it because it was so long ago that I had a torn ligament when I moved to New York and a guy was working on my shoulder and I had this cut from the glass and he said, “Oh, where did you get this from?” And I said, “From the race riot of 1967!” And he stepped back and he went, “You were in a riot?” And I said, “Yeah, you maybe haven't read about it in your history books, it was called ‘Burn Baby Burn.’”
HS: Wow. So you would classify it as a race riot?
SS: I saw blacks running up and down the streets, looting the stores. I didn't see any white people, I didn't see the police. I saw people hurt at the hospital and afterwards, I saw disaster. Which Detroit has never recovered from.
HS: Could you elaborate on the changes you’ve seen in Detroit since then?
SS: Deterioration, some places look like a bomb has hit it. Lack of jobs, lack of communication, lack of skills. You know, when I lived here before, you would go somewhere like Oak Park and you could actually talk to someone and they could pass something across to you if you purchased something. Whereas if you were in the city of Detroit, you had this two-inch thick glass and you had to put the money underneath or slide the glass around in order to get your stuff, totally different.
HS: Do you have any words for future generations about what to do to fix Detroit, or advice?
SS: I’ve often thought, what would heal Detroit? I don't know. It’s hard sometimes when you listen to the news or read the papers and they’ll say they don’t have any money for the schools, the schools are deteriorating. And then the next day you’ll hear they’re spending seven million dollars for the dolphins at the Detroit Zoo and you go, “What is wrong with this picture?” So, I don’t know, I think they should have tried to make some type of amends a long time ago. It’s been, what did you say? 50 years?
HS: 50 years next year, yeah.
SS: That’s a long time to not try to do anything.
HS: I had a question, what was it? You mentioned that you heard the riots had started because of police issues. Do you think the relationship between the police and the public has changed at all since then?
SS: Well we had a- I used to work for the city of Detroit- under Coleman Young. We used to call him, ‘Uncle Coleman.’ So I think he changed that, he ordered that to work to be a police officer, an employee of the city, you actually had to live in Detroit. And I think that turned around somewhat, you know. But being the mother of a black son, you know, there are certain things that I might tell my son that you may not. You know, like if you see the police, you immediately pull over, hands at ten and two, do not move until he says, get your license. I don’t want you to be in an accident. “Oh, I thought he was going for a gun,” you know. So it’s certain things that they have to learn.
HS: That’s sad.
SS: Yep. [whispering] I’m going to Canada. [laughing].
HS: [whispering] I’m with you. Alright, did you have any other memories or words to share with us today?
SS: I wish Detroit could come back but it’s so much damage. I see they’re trying to rebuild and do things here and that’s nice, I applaud them. But the neighborhoods are suffering. I don’t know where you start?
HS: I don’t know, that’s a great question.
SS: Like now, even Flint. People forgot about Flint already. They’re not even mentioning it anymore.
HS: That’s true. Alright, well thank you for sitting down with me and sharing your story. It was really great speaking with you.
SS: It was nice talking to you as well.
WW: Hello, today is October 5, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am in Detroit, Michigan, and I am sitting down with Mr. Bill Goodman. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
BG: You’re welcome. I’m happy to be here.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when you were born?
BG: I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1940, April 1940.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?
BG: It was northwest Detroit. It was the area between, it was Green Acres. The area between Seven Mile and Eight Mile and just east of Livernois.
WW: What was that neighborhood like growing up for you?
BG: Well, it was, you know, for me, I experienced it as the only neighborhood I knew. It was single homes. It was, east of Livernois it was all white. It was middle class families mostly. People with mid-level corporate jobs, a few lawyers here and there, a few doctors here and there, that kind of thing. It was quiet, pleasant, and easy to take. As a kid I had no beefs with my neighborhood, back in those days. Other than the fact that it was a segregated neighborhood, and that was an issue to some degree, even in my childhood.
WW: What issues arose from it being a segregated neighborhood?
BG: I went to Pasteur School, which was on Pembroke and Stoepel, just west of Livernois. There was a small African American community that was in that school district, although it was, it bordered Eight Mile Road. There were a few, as a child, there were a few black kids in our school. We had a little neighborhood baseball team in the neighborhood that I grew up in, and the local drugstore sponsored our team. And [Boyan] the owner of the drugstore bought us little shirts that we wore as our uniform, and we recruited – one of our players was one of the kids that I knew in school, a black kid, and we wanted him on our team. His name was Melvin. And so, when the pharmacist, the store owner learned that we had a black kid on the team, he said, ‘No, this is only for children who live east of Livernois. You can’t be on the team if you live west of Livernois.’
So we had a little protest. We walked into his store, we all threw our shirts down and walked out.
WW: Was it successful?
BG: You mean, did the store owner give in?
WW: Yeah.
BG: No, no, he withdrew his support of our team, but we did have a slightly integrated baseball team anyway.
WW: That’s awesome.
BG: Yes, that’s one of my early protests.
WW: Growing up, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood or did you venture around the city?
BG: Well, in those days it was easy, even as a kid. I would take the bus downtown, even before high school. I’d get on the bus, take the Second Avenue bus or the Hamilton bus, the Woodward Avenue bus, all the way downtown, and then I’d go over to my dad’s office and go in and say, "Do you want to go to a baseball game?" or something like that today. In those days, all the games were played during the day, there were no night games. So, sometimes he’d say yes and sometimes he couldn’t, and then I would then get on the Michigan Avenue trolley and take it out to Tiger Stadium to the old Briggs Field, Briggs Stadium, and go to the game by myself. And then come back downtown and he’d drive me home at the end of the day. So, I think, and I did the same thing when I wanted to go downtown just to Hudson’s or something like that. I did that. And so, no, I wasn’t confined to my own neighborhood. I mean, I spent most of my time in my neighborhood, but no.
WW: You mentioned how easy it was going around the city, did you also feel comfortable going around the city?
BG: Yes! I did, and I’m sure my parents did too. I think I would be – I’m talking about when I was 10, 11 years old and I think parents of 10 or 11 year-olds today would be much less sanguine about their children traveling around on buses throughout the city of Detroit.
WW: So going into the Fifties, and later on in the Fifties when you were a teenager, did you notice any growing tensions in the city, this is at the point where the Civil Rights movement is starting in the South, or anything like that?
BG: Well, the Civil Rights movement really got going in the South probably about in ‘58, ‘59, several years after Brown vs. Board [of Education], and by that time I was in college. And yes, there were issues when I went to college, sure. When I was in high school, I wouldn’t say I noticed anything going on in the city in terms of racial tension or issues with the police department, which was really what the rebellion was all about.
Except that I know as a young kid, going around with my dad on weekends, he would get calls from people whose kids had, or husbands had disappeared, trying to track someone down to represent them, who was being held by the Detroit Police Department. And they hid prisoners like that often, and because he had a bit of a reputation as a civil rights lawyer, he would often get calls from black families which were often targeted for this kind of thing and get into fights with cops or at police stations – not physical fights, but arguments that I would observe, so I did see some of that.
WW: Did this interaction, this relationship between your father and the police department, did that echo the relationship that your community had with the police department?
BG: My community? Meaning northwest Detroit?
WW: Yeah.
BG: No. My community had a very sanguine, pleasant relationship with the police whenever we saw them, which was rarely.
WW: Growing up and seeing that positive relationship that your community has, between the police department and themselves, and then seeing the relationships that other communities have, was that a wake-up for you?
BG: Well, I grew up a little differently than many. I grew up being conscious and sensitive to these issues anyway, because my father was very conscious of racism and segregation and did his best to fight for civil rights, so I had a different perspective on things. He had a black law partner when I was young, a kid, George Crockett, who is well known in Detroit. And Crockett, who later became a judge, had a son, George the third, who also later became a judge. And George the third and I were the same age and became friends and he would come over to my, come visit our house from time to time, and I would – there was always a lot of very racist comments among the other kids on the block when they saw a black family visiting or saw me with another black kid my age. So I had some awareness of that through that mechanism.
WW: You mentioned the racist comments the kids in the neighborhood had.
BG: Yeah.
WW: Did they have those comments about Melvin on the baseball team?
BG: Melvin, no. Melvin was a good baseball player [laughs]. I mean, we all, they all knew Melvin and it wasn’t a social – we weren’t interacting with Melvin as social friends. Melvin just was a teammate, which was somewhat different. But to see, for example, a black family visiting our family, or having young George Crockett sleep over with me at my house, this was something that was taken somewhat differently in the neighborhood. Not by everybody, but by a few people.
WW: You mentioned that you did run into problems when you went to university. What university did you go to?
BG: I didn’t have have problems, I ran into them, that’s when the Civil Rights movement started to get rolling, and there were a lot of issues. I went to the University of Chicago. So, one of the issues while I was in the – well, one of the things that happened was the sit-ins started at that point in the South. So we started to boycott Woolworth’s, for example, and other chains that ran segregated facilities in the South. And we’d have picket lines in front of these places. There was a lot of tension around those picket lines. Those were days, you know, when the picket line had to do with strikes, not with social issues or political issues like Civil Rights. So, yeah, there was a lot that went on around that, and then the University of Chicago itself owned buildings that were racially segregated. And that was a huge protest, the fact that it was a sit-in at the administration building at that time. I think by then I was in law school.
Bernie Sanders claims to have been involved in that, I don’t know if he was. But he says he was and I’m sure he was. And he sat in at that time and a number of students were disciplined over it, and so on. So those were a couple of examples of the kinds of things that happened in my college experience that I can recall.
WW: What organizations did you do the picketing with? Was it a student group, or–?
BG: There were student groups. I’m not sure if I remember which ones they were. We had a political party called “Polit.” P-O-L-I-T. Maybe they did it, I don’t know. I don’t know.
WW: And when you went from Detroit to Chicago, remembering ack to your neighborhood back when children would make the racist comments and stuff, was Chicago along the same lines?
BG: What do you mean?
WW: How did they address racism? Or, how did you experience racism, or witness racism, in Chicago versus Detroit? Was there a difference, or was it the same strain?
BG: I’m sure it was the same thing. It was, you know, the northern racist United States of America. I mean, Chicago was more, I don’t know – I remember I went out on a date once, took a girl to a park and we had a picnic. And the Chicago Police Department rolled by and said, "White people never come to this park, you should get out of here." That was a small example, but a memorable one, since I still remember it.
The Woodlawn, 63rd Street was the heart of Woodlawn at that time, and it was, having never spent any time in New York or been to Harlem that I could recall. This was amazing to me, to see so many black faces walking up and down the streets. When I would walk up to 63rd Street, which was not often, but when I did and I was with friends, who would show their fear of being around so many black people, the people in the community on the street would react to that and make comments about that, "oh, all these white kids" and so on.
But I don’t think the nature of racism was any different between Detroit and Chicago. Detroit was segregated, and had a virtually all-white police department which was vicious to some degree, and Chicago was just more of the same but bigger.
WW: What year did you return to Detroit?
BG: When I graduated from law school, 1964.
WW: When you came back to Detroit, was Detroit the same city it was when you left? Or did you see any changes?
BG: There was a lot more political activism in Detroit at that point. There were progressive political organizing. John Conyers ran for Congress that year. First time, and he was running against Dick Austin who was the UAW [United Auto Workers] candidate for that particular seat. And Conyers’ campaign was a grassroots campaign, fought from the ground up, from my law firm, by the way, was a major part of it. That kind of thing was going on all over the place, because the beginnings, well, the Civil Rights movement had blossomed by ‘64 – I’d been involved a little bit during, while I was in school, by the way, in the South. And you could see, you know, political activism wherever you looked, in those days, at least among middle class and intellectual people, both white and black.
WW: And what did you do when you came back to Detroit, you had your law degree?
BG: Yeah, I worked for my dad’s law firm, for the Goodman- Crockett Law Firm. And I, basically, the law firm used to describe itself as a firm that engaged in a lot of political activism and supported itself by representing plaintiffs in personal injury cases. So I did both, but I did a lot of just of plain old auto accident, personal injury litigation, that kind of thing, yeah. That’s what I did.
WW: So while you were doing that, what political activities did you undertake?
BG: The first political client that I had – and this actually is a good segue into discussing the rebellion, I think – was a group called the Northern Student Movement. Did you ever hear of them? You did? I’m impressed that you’ve heard of them, that’s good. Have you talked to Frank Joyce, by the way? You should.
WW: I’m about to, yes.
BG: So Frank Joyce was, sort of an organizer of something called the Northern Student Movement here in Detroit. And he called me one day and he said that he’d gotten my name, he heard I was raring to go with political cases or something like that, and here’s the case. He and a group of his constituents who were members of the Northern Students Movement on the eastside of Detroit had gone over to the old Fifth Precinct on Jefferson Avenue on the day that was designated as “Tour Your Local Police Station Day” or something like that. And when they got inside, one of them, a fellow named Moses Wedlaw, asked to see the room where the cops beat the people up in. This was the question that was asked. So as they were then kicked out of the police station, as they left, they were all attacked in the parking lot, beaten up, charged with assaulting police officers and arrested. So this was my first political case I undertook. And basically got all the charges dismissed. We were in front of the judge on that case, was George Crockett, the elder George Crockett, who by that time was a Recorder’s Court Judge. A man of enormous courage in so many ways. And Crockett somehow dismissed all of those cases. If you ask Frank about it, he’ll remember. In fact, I’ve talked to him about it recently, he does remember.
So that was one of the things I got into at that time. There was a lot of, at that point, the anti-Vietnam protests were developing, and I represented a lot of anti-war protestors, both in Detroit and Ann Arbor and in East Lansing. There was quite a bit of activity in East Lansing over that. So I did those cases, and some police misconduct, police brutality cases. It was a very different legal environment back in those days, but we did a little bit. It was much harder, but we were able to bring such cases because in 1961, the United States Supreme Court decided a case called Monroe vs. Pape, which allows individuals to sue under the Civil Rights Act of 1871. It only took 90 years to be able to do that. So, yeah.
WW: So you primarily – this is a recap – you primarily defended left-wing activists and organizations, and then, when you were able to, you did police misconduct?
BG: Uh-huh.
WW: Okay.
BG: Yeah, I wouldn’t describe it as left – some of them were left-wing for sure, but, I mean, some of them were just student activists, protestors. I guess you could call them left-wingers, but they were just people who were waking up to the injustice and inequality and racism that surrounded everybody in those days.
WW: And, I forgot to ask, when you came back, what neighborhood did you move into in the city?
BG: Lafayette Park. Well no, first I moved on to East Jefferson, a place called River Terrace Apartment. And then we moved to Lafayette Park.
WW: And as you are doing this work, did you notice any tension in the community increasing? Between the police and the community?
BG: As I was doing this work? You mean back in that time? Well, I think that the story I just told you about the Northern Student Movement tour of the Fifth Precinct was emblematic of things that were bubbling up to the top at that time. People were getting tired of the cops arresting, targeting and arresting black youth primarily, and beating them up. This was something that was becoming untenable, or at least unacceptable. So to that extent, yes, I noticed it.
WW: Going into the summer of ‘67, was there any thought that Detroit could blow up like other urban areas were in the Sixties?
BG: You mean, did I have such a thought?
WW: Yes, you.
BG: Right, I mean, we all could look around and see. What ended up, well, Watts was in Sixty–
WW: Six.
BG: Six. I was in Watts at that time, just coincidentally. Well, I was in LA and just drove through Watts. And Newark was in ‘67, wasn’t it? Yeah. Ah, sure. This was not, I’m sure we talked about it. I don’t have a concrete recollection of a specific conversation, but yes, we, the answer is yes to that question.
WW: Okay. And then going into July, the night of July 22 and July 23, how did you first hear what was going on?
BG: I was visiting my parents, with my wife and small baby at the time on that particular Sunday. And we started to notice – we were in the house that I grew up in, and we started to notice that there were smoke all around us, coming from Livernois, which was the business area at that time. And it became very obvious very quickly that we were experiencing an urban riot, so-called. And leaving that neighborhood and driving south on Livernois, I remember seeing people climbing into the Grinnell’s, which used to be a sort of electronics/appliance store, and coming walking out with their hands filled with television sets and so on. And other stores as well. So that was the way in which I first became aware of it, yeah.
WW: Was this a shock to you?
BG: It was a little shocking, but yes, I was a little surprised. I don’t know if “shock” is the right word, but it certainly caught my attention. It concerned me to the extent that who knows what could happen? We lived at that time in Lafayette Park, as I said, close to Gratiot. There were a lot of fires on Gratiot. I did not view it then, I never viewed it as a situation that communicated racial animus. In other words, as a white person, I would drive through these black neighborhoods and no one would pay attention to me as a white guy doing that. It was more experienced as a protest, outrage, and lawlessness, really. It was a lot of lawlessness and all of that. So-called looting, real looting, yeah.
WW: Did you have any other issues while you were going home?
BG: No, no. When I got back to Lafayette Park, one of the people in the neighborhood wanted to organize a gun patrol – pull your guns out and march up and down the street, and I thought that was, to be blunt, just a lot of horse shit. I wasn’t about to get involved in that. So, no, I didn’t have any trouble.
WW: So from where you were in Lafayette Park, could you see a lot of the fires?
BG: I could see fires. Our offices were in the Cadillac Tower, at the time, on the 32nd floor of the Cadillac Tower, and I went up there, the next day I think, no matter where you looked, and our offices looked in all directions, I think maybe, north, south and east. We didn’t look so much west, but you could see fires ringing the whole city of Detroit. So, it was dramatic, yeah. In all directions.
WW: While you were going into work, what was downtown like on that Monday morning?
BG: I don’t remember. I’m sure it was dead, but I don’t have a clear, you’re asking me to summon up memories, that it’s too long ago. I don’t remember what downtown was like. Well, vaguely I remember that no one came in to work and it was dead, yeah. I was there. That’s right. Yeah, no one was at work. I remember that, yup.
WW: Why did you go into work?
BG: Well I, first of all, I wanted to take a look at the city from that vantage point, and secondly, I figured that, in addition to my workaholism, I thought that there might be something going on that we could work on, so I did. And, I don’t know when it was that I went over to Recorder’s Court, whether it was that day or the next day or two days, but shortly after that I went into court.
WW: Feel free to keep talking about it. You’re talking about Recorder’s Court?
BG: Yeah, I was close friends at that time with Justin Ravitz, do you know who he was?
WW: Yes, I do.
BG: And I don’t know if he called me and told me I should meet him over there, but he was involved, he and Kenny Cockrel were involved in organizing, or trying to represent people who had been swept up and detained during the early hours and days of this rebellion. Those people were being held, and there were thousands of them. And they were being held, as I’m sure you know, not only in the Wayne County Jail, and the Detroit Police Department lock up on the 9th floor, they were being held in the outhouses, in the bathrooms on Belle Isle, and on buses and in horrible places, under horrible conditions, nowhere to sleep. If you’re on a bus, nowhere to easily use the bathroom. All of these things were going on, and I’m not sure how I became aware of it, I’m not sure if Chuck, if Ravitz told me this or if I had learned elsewhere, but there was a need for lawyers in these courtrooms who, when people would be brought in to be arraigned, in front of these judges in large groups, we would go up to the groups and we would say, "We’ll be your lawyers." You know, take names, and people were happy to have lawyers. So then we would ask the judges to have personal bonds, reasonable bonds so the people did not continue to be held and routinely, all of these judges in Recorder’s Court would set expropriatory bonds. $25,000 I can remember, $50,000 bonds being set for curfew violations. This was the basis for most of these arrests. Horrible. And, you know, we all stood up and screamed and yelled about the Constitution but it didn’t –
There was only one judge in Recorder’s Court who paid attention to the requirement that bonds and that reasonable bonds be set, and that was George Crockett. And he was commended by the Kerner Commission later on because he was exceptional. He was unlike any other judge on Recorder’s Court bench in that way. He paid attention to the Constitution. He would not grant these outrageous bonds that would force people to continue to be held for long periods of time. So that was the issue that we were constantly fighting. And we got a lot of animosity from the cops for taking these positions and so on and from the judges and prosecutors and their staff. So anyway, that was that story about Recorder’s Court back then. Eventually I think almost all of those curfew charges were dropped. I don’t remember anybody fully, I don’t remember anybody being prosecuted and found guilty of any of those.
WW: You mentioned the outrageous bonds that you particularly remember. Were there any other, any individuals or cases that you remember that stuck out during those few days?
BG: Yes, there certainly was one. It involved a young kid named Albert Wilson who I think was 12 at the time. And Albert had lived in the area of Twelfth Street and Hazelwood. And he had gone into a store that was, you know, some kind of dry goods – maybe it was a little corner grocery store or something, I don’t remember. But he went into the store and people were taking stuff out of the store, and he was in there and a cop came in. And when the cop came in, everybody hid – ducked down behind things, walls, and so on. And cases, or whatever. So Albert, was I said he was about 12 at the time, I think, and he either moved or made a noise or dropped something, but the cop heard him and fired his gun. And Albert sustained a spinal cord lesion which left him a paraplegic. So we sued the Detroit Police Department over that shooting. And eventually, I don’t remember when we went to trial in that case, but we did try it and we got a verdict, a large verdict. It was the first verdict, I think, in Michigan in a personal injury case that exceeded a million dollars. So that, I remember that case very well.
WW: Wow. Do you remember how long you spent at Recorder’s Court?
BG: You mean how many days I was there?
WW: Yes.
BG: At least a week. A week, week and a half, something like that.
WW: Okay.
BG: And then I had a hundred, hundreds of clients, because I had signed up all of these people, so I had to retreat and then sort of deal with managing this overwhelming number of clients and cases, which as I said, for the most part were dropped, as far as I recall.
WW: What was the mood at Recorder’s Court? What was the atmosphere like? Because you mentioned that there was growing tension between the defense attorneys and the prosecutors and the judges and the police. Was it chaotic there, or was there–?
BG: Yes, it was chaotic. The halls, the hallways were chaotic. I was not a Recorder’s Court regular, as were some of the people who were over there. But what you saw during those days, as during, you know, throughout my experience at Recorder’s Court back at that time was that the cops and the prosecutors and the courtroom staff, the clerks, and the judges, were all very close and friendly and we as young lawyers were trying to do something a little different, we were outsiders and we were treated like outsiders. So I remember that. And I’ll never just forget the image of these large groups of people, often just still handcuffed or chained, being brought into court in front of these judges, and you know, these judges setting these horrible bonds for what were minor violations.
WW: You call out Judge Crockett for being exemplary. Do you recall any other judges that you worked with that did set these harsh bonds?
BG: I don’t remember very many names, so I hate to single anyone out, but one of the names I can remember from those days was Don Leonard. There was a Schemanske, I think it was Frank Schemanske over there at the time. I don’t know. I don’t remember any of the others.
WW: Okay. For you, do you remember when the National Guard came in, and then later, the federal troops?
BG: Yeah. I do. I don’t remember what day it was. What day was it?
WW: The National Guard came in on Monday and the federal troops came in on Wednesday.
BG: Wednesday. I remember driving around and just wanting to see what was going on in the streets and driving around with my brother. So we drove up Linwood, past Central High School, and again, there were all these people on the streets, and nobody paid any attention to the fact that we were white, although sometimes there would be a friendly shout or something like that. But I remember seeing either National Guardsmen or military people perched on the roof of the old Central High School or Durfee Middle School – Junior High it was called then. Or maybe Roosevelt. Perched on these roofs with guns pointed at the population in general. That was the image I had. Now, when it was exactly that we did that, that I don’t recall but it was a striking image and is still in my mind.
WW: You’ve repeatedly referred to what happened as the “rebellion.” Why do you interpret the events of 1967 as a rebellion?
BG: The Detroit Police Department was, at that time, racist, brutal, unlawful, you know, an institution that allowed for – basically declared war on the black community in the city. And as I said, it wasn’t simply a riot. This was something that was designed to say, "We are not going to take any more of this targeted racism from public officials, from the cops." And so I view it as an uprising or a rebellion more than a blind, insensate violence. No. I didn’t see that.
WW: And then after the rebellion has calmed down, did you begin to see the city differently? Or is Detroit still Detroit to you?
BG: Well, Detroit is still Detroit but whether I saw the city differently is a different question. I’m trying to think about that now for a moment. Yeah, I think that there was some political push back against the rebellion by the white power structure. That’s when the STRESS unit of the Detroit Police Department got rolling, one of the most bleak and sad parts of DPD history. STRESS was just awful, and eventually it resulted in the counter-reaction of the election of the first black mayor of the city, Coleman A. Young, in 1972.
WW: And then after the rebellion, did you continue working civil rights cases in the city?
BG: Oh yeah. Lots of them. And around, not only in the city, but outside the city also. Warren. Dearborn. Lots of places.
WW: Given that you were going around to all of these places, do you believe that the rebellion – how do you believe that the rebellion affected the metro area? If it did at all?
BG: Well, what happened, this is what, I’m sure you’re familiar with Sugrue’s book about Detroit and the structures that created structural racism, but it was obvious. Immediately what happened was, the white people who lived in the city of Detroit put their houses up for sale and moved to the surrounding suburbs. These suburbs which were all white and were created through various public policies, including the articulated racism of the Federal Housing Act and a number of other things, were all white, and they ringed a city that had been, hemorrhaged white population, and now became majority black and remained poor and without transportation as jobs and things fled the city. And housing became devalued and people who owned houses lost huge amounts of investment, and the city – I think ‘67 was the beginning of a very difficult period for the city of Detroit which has lasted until recently, in my analysis. I think Tom Sugrue’s book explains it well.
WW: Oh yeah. For sure. And the book you are referring to, for the record, is Origins of the Urban Crisis?
BG: Yeah. That’s the one.
WW: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share, any other memories you’d like to share from the rebellion?
BG: My mother owned a little antique store over in the Park Shelton Hotel, right around here. And she had an African American assistant named George Jordan, who, as soon as things started to get rolling, Monday morning, he took a bar of soap and wrote “Soul Brother” all over the windows of this antique store, and nothing happened to it. So I think that is interesting the way in which identity was perceived, at least, and the importance of it. That’s the only other memory that immediately comes to mind. I’m sure if I read my journal from back in those days I would find more, but, sadly I never wrote one.
WW: Just a couple of quick wrap-up questions. What do you think of the state of the city today?
BG: I think it’s complex. There is certainly growth and development, and it’s always heartening to see crowds walking around. I took a walk on the Riverwalk recently from, let’s say, Rivard down to the Renaissance Center and it’s exciting. It almost looks like New York City there. There were hundreds of different kinds of people out, extremely diverse and as many different ethnicities and races as we can gather in this city and it was wonderful to see it. People were comfortable with one another. So, those kinds of things you can observe progress. It’s not the old baseball team where you couldn’t have a black teammate. On the other hand, there are vast swatches of neighborhoods that are still blighted with houses that are vacant and being used as drug houses and all the rest of it. That’s not comforting to see. One would want to see development, you want to see the whole community pulled up and neighborhoods looking better than they have. And you do see some of that. So I guess on the whole it’s good. I think that the whole situation with water shut-offs is disgusting. That’s a political and financial crisis. The fact that the city of Detroit has been basically abandoned by the traditional role of government, the state government, the federal government, to solve some of these problems itself is distressing. Education is desperate. So, it’s complicated. That’s what I would say.
WW: Are you optimistic for the city moving forward?
BG: Well. I guess, slightly optimistic. I’m not jumping up and clicking my heels, but yeah, I see some progress
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
BG: My pleasure.
WW: I really appreciate it.
BG: Okay.
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.
WW: Hello, today is August 30, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This is the interview of Wayne Rudolph Davidson. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, sir.
WD: Thank you, sir. Appreciate the opportunity to be here.
WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
WD: I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1951. I was born at Trumbull Hospital. Trumbull Hospital was located—and is still located, but—the building is still there, but the hospital is no longer operating—off of Trumbull Avenue, and not too far from what was called Tiger Stadium, or where Tiger Stadium was, on Michigan and Trumbull. The Jeffries Projects were not too far—maybe a block or two over—but were being created at the time that I was born.
In 1951 that hospital was not a segregated hospital. It was a—blacks could come there and have their babies. Typically, before that time, I believe you had to have—there were a lot of midwives at that time. So my mother was pretty industrious, pretty aware person, so that's probably why we ended up there at Trumbull Hospital. So—
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in, in Detroit?
WD: I grew up in several neighborhoods. When I was a little kid, I can remember we lived on—not too far from here, this location—on Palmer and John R area. And I can remember—this would have been an apartment that my mother and father had by themselves, because when they came here, they had to live with relatives. And so I learned from my own research that that was the typical thing that somebody from the South would do. I probably need to bring that to your attention, that my parents were both—my father was from Kentucky and my mother was from Tennessee, and they met in Louisville, Kentucky, in the Negro Migration, and they moved up here, following the jobs. And so my father—my mother and father got here in 1950. The Fourth of July—that's what he'll tell you. He's still alive. He'll say "We got here on the Fourth of July and we went straight to a barbecue," you know, on the bus. And my mother was pregnant at the time, and so she's also athletic, and I think because of her athleticness, she lost the first baby. I would have been the second, but so—
So I remember a home on John R, Palmer and John R area, because as a little kid I would walk outside, or somebody would walk me outside, and I saw these cars, and I could remember these big, giant cars, you know, these shapes. I guess I probably would have been about two, three, or four, you know, a little kid coming outside with the parents, looking around, so I remember that scene sort of vividly. And then, subsequently, my brothers were born. Glen was born in '52 and Bobby was born in '53. And so I believe at that time we moved from that area down to southwest Detroit, a place called South Patricia Street. Right now, that house is still there. But at the time, I remember my brothers and I being in the yard and we'd be playing, and there was a yard—we had a dog—some sort of a dog—but the significant thing at that time was the freeway was being built. I-75 was being built. That house sits abrupt to where the freeway over in the Shafer area. And I can remember hearing a lot of noise and hearing a lot of heavy work and so that probably would have been about '54, '55, '56 timeframe.
So I think my father had bought the house—but I think somehow he may have lost the house, because at that time, blacks could not get loans from the banks so what happened was, he probably bought the house through what you call a contract—
WW: A land contract?
WD: A land contract, and probably didn't make the payment, so at some point, lost the house, because I know that's always been a—you could always sense at my household that's been a sore subject between my mother and my father. They sort of didn't talk about that a lot. If you asked questions about it then you'd sort of be put off.
So I believe after that, around '56, we moved from South Patricia to the Jeffries Projects. Now the Jeffries Projects went up earlier, in the mid-Fifties, part of urban renewal. I don't remember what floor we stayed on, but it was one of those things that you got in the elevator just like we get into an elevator to your office, and for little kids, it was a little exciting going up maybe five or six floors. I think the Jeffries Projects were at least 12 floors, I believe. So that was pretty interesting living there, except for on occasions, as the Jeffries Projects got older then the maintenance went down. So one of the warnings that we got as little kids was, "Be careful going into the elevator, because the elevator may not be there." And, you know, I know at least that I can recall, one occasion that some young kid pushed for the elevator and fell down. And fell down to the—because the elevator was not there.
So, those three places were the most vivid. And the southwest component always stuck out in my mind because my—even though my parents may have lost that house, my aunt lived not too far on Beatrice Street, and we would leave either our house on Patricia Street or the Jeffries Projects, and we would go there for Halloween and for special occasions, because I can remember having barbecues and the families would be there. And they'd be talking—this was my mother's side, so they would be talking about the family down all over Tennessee, and whether you were a Shirley or a Cheshire, you know, because they had two different fathers. So that sort of would be part of the discussion.
And we played baseball. We had a lot of room in Southwest Detroit, whereas compared to coming to the Jeffries, the room was, you were living more in a box. Matter of fact, this, your office, maybe if we tore down that wall a little bit, would really add up to being what the apartment size was in the Jeffries Projects. But on Patricia Street we played. We were out in the yard, playing with the dog. We had a lot of sunlight, and you had more room to run around. Whereas in the Jeffries Projects, where you had a lot of people living in a vertical unit, and you'd come down to get out of the—you didn't have—I don't recall having air conditioning. So in the summer you had to come down and sit. A lot of the ladies, the mothers would be sitting with their children in those areas. There were little small parks. But it was not as free, I would say, as having your own place and running around. So, I remember those places vividly. Southwest Detroit I remember because we went Halloween, going to get Halloween candy. There was a lot of—you know, you'd go and get an abundance of Halloween candy. That whole area was like wow. We couldn't wait for Halloween.
WW: The neighborhoods you grew up in, were they integrated?
WD: I know that—I don't think that question was one of the issues at the time, but I think—I don't think—I think Southwest Detroit was integrated with Hispanic people. I don't recall that ever being an issue of—I know that we had to—my parents were always saying, "We can't go here, can't go there." But I really can't define those neighborhoods—the Southwest Detroit neighborhood as being—I know that Hispanic people did grow up in those southwest neighborhoods. Anglos I don't—I can't recall.
WW: Okay.
WD: So—
WW: What did your mother and father do for a living?
WD: My mother was a homemaker, and she later—later she was educated. My mother had—she was trained. She went to school at Lane College in Tennessee—Jackson, Tennessee—and she was trained to be—at that time, they could only be homemakers. They would learn duties of taking care of other folks' homes, and my—she did not work every day. She worked periodically. So she spent most of her time being a mother and a homemaker.
My father, he came from Barren County, Kentucky. He was a laborer. He did not have any education. He went up—educated to the fourth grade. And then—Barren County, Kentucky—Rocky Hill, Barren County, Kentucky, where he lived at, the next school was 13 miles up, and 13 miles back. So he had no middle education. So he was always a laborer.
When he got here, he was always pretty industrious, so he worked his way to Louisville, Kentucky, and he learned the skill of making mattresses. So he talks about this periodically. 1945 is when he left the farm to go to Louisville, and he got a job putting mattresses together. And he learned that trade, and then he—that took him—he got good at that trade, so when he came in 1950, that's what the person who had trained him said, when you get up north to Detroit, you can go here and get a job.
About my dad, so 1945, he left the farm. He went to Louisville and he was learning how to—he always was industrious, so he got a job doing various things, but the one job that he took, that he brought with him to Detroit was being able to put together—working for a mattress factory. So when he came in 1950, he was given an address. And said, "Son, when you get off the bus, you can go over here and get a job."
So he came July the Fourth, in 1950, and the next day — which was a holiday. Then on the fifth—some time later he went to that address and he went to work. He said he walked past the place and said, "Hey, I can do whatever you need" and he gave a point of contact. Next thing you know he was working. And that place made whatever. I don't recall the name of the place, but they made nice, soft pillows and mattresses, and a couple of the pillows I remember distinctively, because I carried them around for years. You know, like a little kid, because they were so soft. Feather pillows.
So the wages were not very large: five cent hour, ten cent hour, whatever. But around 1952 he went to—someone had told him that Briggs was higher. Briggs was the—before Chrysler. So he went and stood in line, and at that time, when you got hired, the hiring—because this was a laborer deal—when you got hired you'd stand there and the foreman, just like you and I looking at each other, you ask me the question, "Where did you work last?" So my dad said "I worked at Jones Steel Place." And then he said "I can't use you." And so that's what the guy told my father. He needs this job so the next guy behind him was asked the same question, and so—but he was not black. So the guy said "I worked at Ford." So, okay, "Fill this paperwork out." And the gentleman went over.
So my father, he didn't go home—he got in the back in the line! And when he came back up, the foreman asked him the same question. He asked him the question again, "Where did you work last?" And this time my father said "Ford." And then my father said "Okay, weren't you here before?" He said, "You cats are all alike!" So he said "Okay, you're hired." And he gave my father the paperwork and he started to work at Briggs.
And then Briggs became part of Chrysler, and then the next—my father worked there for the next 30 years, until 1984—'83, '84. He's been retired from there longer than he worked there. But that's how he got hired there. So he did work, but part of the challenge was being laid off. You know, at those times the union—I don't know if you've ever worked for the union but this is a union town and they battle for certain things.
My father was laid off a lot and I remember when we were in the Jeffries Projects they would be laid off. And so when you're laid off, it brings a lot of challenges, because you don't have anything to do in the day. So him and his buddy would on the days they got their benefit, one would buy—on Tuesdays, Daddy would buy the beer and wine. If it's Thursday, then his buddy would buy the beer and wine, and they'd get together and make what they called a concoction called a Hobo Cocktail. And that would get them through that week of being unemployed. So that was not a good thing, because when you're sitting and you're unemployed, well you ain't got nothing to do. So finally Chrysler called him back to work in about 1957.
But the work was not here. It was in Twinsburg, Ohio. So he had—for the next two years he commuted from Detroit and the Jeffries Projects, where we lived at to Twinsburg, Ohio, which is not far from Cleveland. That plant is now closed, but that's where he commuted to, and worked. And so, subsequently, in '59 that's where we moved, for a period of time.
So—
WW: How long did you stay in Cleveland?
WD: We stayed in Cleveland from 1959 to 1965. That was eight years, so before I get to that, I wanted to bring up that—now going back to the Jeffries Projects, if you remember, rock and roll was going on at that time. It was starting to be big. Well, when you're in a close quartered area, people are need something to do. So most people would sit down. In the evening, they'd be outside. Well a lot of young people would be under the streetlights, and they would be singing. Because— and you know, creating doo-wop songs or whatever. Because they—you know, with the energy that young people have, and so some of the Motown folks grew up in that area in the Jeffries Projects and the Brewsters. So the same sort of scenario, because I was a lot younger, I would have been six or seven or eight—I would have been eight—and so my mother—I'd have been close to my mother. You're running up and you see these guys, you know, whatever they're doing. And then my mother would say "Wayne, Glen, and Bobby get back over here. They're over there making noise." Because mothers—that's what mothers think that kids do: make noise.
So that was a pretty interesting phenomenon seeing some of that as it grew up. I went to Poe Elementary School. Now Poe Elementary School is the school that—it's still there today—because I think I went there for at least two years. And I remember we would come out on—like folks getting ready for school now, and the mothers would walk you to school, and you had a brand new, whatever you've got on.
I bring this up because that was spelled P-O-E. My father is always—he grew up in Barren County in Kentucky, which is the area that the poor house is for the state of Kentucky. So you would hear that word all the time. If something was bad, he'd always be saying, "Well, I'm going to the po' house." You know, and so, when you go—when he's saying that about the "po' house" at home, and then you're going to "Poe" School, from a mental aspect, that's kind of bad.
Now another person who went to Poe School is Willie Horton. He used to play for the Tigers. I see him on occasion. And he grew up in the Jeffries. He's about ten years older than me. So I probably saw him. I didn't know him at the time. And also Gates Brown was there. I think Gates came later, but Willie, I probably saw him going to wherever he went with his baseball bat. So at that time, I was a little kid, sitting with my mother, or my brothers, and my mother controlled us—watching all these guys going to wherever they were going—the older guys.
So as far as I think that would have been the end of that timeframe of being in Detroit, because I remember my father couldn't—he felt that it was too much traveling to and from, so he came back from Cleveland one day with a moving van, and he wanted to move us with him to Cleveland. And it would seem reasonable that that would be okay. But my mother—most of my mother's family is here, was here. They all grew up and gravitated here too. My aunts and uncles lived here. My mother was a real family-oriented person. So it took him half a day to convince her to move everybody to Cleveland.
Because it would have been easier. Had some cousins who helped move, but my mother was real concerned about moving. Even though she had relatives in Cleveland—she had step-sisters in Cleveland, but her blood sisters were here. So that was part of the challenge. So we did move, and then we moved, and that's where we were at. So that was—but we'd come back each year. At least twice a year, and we had family and friends who lived in the Jeffries, so I still saw the Detroit scene, you know. I just didn't live every day here in the city of Detroit.
WW: On your trips back, in the late Fifties, early Sixties, did you notice any growing tension in the city?
WD: Well, I could say that I thought we—my family was also pretty sheltered, because my mother—I think my generation was a sheltered generation. When I say sheltered, meaning we were protected. And there was places—now, okay—talking along Trumbull, there were in the larger houses, there were white families. So yes, that was an integrated neighborhood. But I didn't—I never saw where—I never was engaged where somebody was tossing rocks at somebody, that sort of—or being hostile. Now as far as physical—being physical against anybody.
I saw—I think, you know, you had to be respectful for where you were at, but I didn't see where—I didn't feel that the environment was really hot. Now I can say later on it did, but—during that time frame from '59 to '65, I don't think I could say that I felt that way. I just know that my mother was always a pretty protective person, and sort of protected us from a lot of the whatever was going on. We just weren't supposed to be in certain spots.
WW: After you left Cleveland did your family come back to Detroit?
WD: Yeah. So we came here. We came back because my father got a job at the new—at Sterling Heights Stamping Plant. That opened up, and so when that opened up then the idea was, you didn't have to worry about my mother moving, or—she was throwing stuff in the truck to get going.
Matter of fact, '59, when we left, my mother had just had my youngest—my young sister. She was born in '59. So it wasn't that difficult. She was ready to come back. We came back—we moved on Blaine, between Fourteenth and Twelfth. Now, I can tell you, I thought all the other areas that we lived in were real industrious people. And between Twelve and Fourteenth, it was a little more—it was a little more—hotter or—there was a lot of things going on. There's a lot of street smart people that lived in that area. Put it that way. You sort of had to—I felt that I had to protect myself at all times. I went to Hutchins Junior High School. And that was on Woodrow Wilson. And so we had to walk home now. People were working. People were working, but you also felt that there was a lot of people who wanted to get things a little easier.
Now, here's the thing about living in that area. This is now Motown area, and I know this because in my own research, Motown was on Grand Boulevard. So within that one—and from—it was one point two miles from my house on Blaine. So within that area, many of the Motown stars lived there. So on these houses, on these duplexes, you'd see guys with perms—with hair that—I didn't see that a lot when I was here before as a little kid, as I grew up. And I didn't—it was—you saw that in Cleveland, but—I don't know. Cleveland, folks were a little more—the area I lived in was a brand new project area, and it was a little—it was not—it was very nice. It was a brand new area and it was—I couldn't say that people were hostile.
When I moved to Twelfth—on Blaine and Twelfth, I felt everybody was trying to be Mr. Cool. You know, I remember walking one day from school, this guy—this young guy had his—he had on chains, and he had on a wife-beater shirt. And he was kind of muscular, and he had a dog, a German Shepard. And he had on a chain, and he was using the chain and whatever to control the dog, and looked like he was looking for somebody. And you didn't—it's like you didn't want him to be—you to be the person he was looking for.
So that environment was maybe a little up-tempo. Plus all of the—there were many shops up and down—a lot of clubs up and down in that area. It's not to say it was non-industrious people, it's just that I was now looking through—I was 14 at that time so now things are looking different, you know. I sort of had to protect myself a little bit more. And I remember some guys tried to jump on my brother as we came home from school. And these guys were pretty aggressive, so this was in 1965. We stayed over there for six months. We came back right after school in '65. And we stayed at a four-duplex. And then in 1966 we moved to Pinehurst and Grand River. 12682 Pinehurst, on the west side, and my parents owned that house for 40 years afterward.
So one of the things that when we were living on Blaine, my mother, again, kept us kind of close-hold. We'd get up as a group and go to church in the car, family car. There was relatives who owned churches and we would go there. We've always had like a happy home; my mother was a happy homemaker. She could cook, so we didn't mind being at the house because there was food there, and it was wonderfully made. It's very few times that we went without. So she could do a lot with a very little.
WW: Going into '67 now, were you still—you were living at Pinehurst and Grand River, you said?
WD: Yeah. We had moved. Yeah. So we moved from that area on Blaine and Twelfth—between Twelfth—again, a lot of duplexes there, so multiple families. Matter of fact, going to Hutchins was the first time I even heard anybody really talk about sexual activity. There were two things, two conversations that I heard in school. Because I'm growing up pretty naive.
This girl was talking to this other guy about watching some family members in the house having sex and there was a fight, or a huge discussion on which group was the better group: the Four Tops or the Temptations. Okay, so that was going on for a 13, 14, 15 year old. Now, in my house sex was not being discussed, so that's why I remember this vividly. On television, at that time, you saw relationships, romance but they weren't getting all into what you'd see today, you know. So—
WW: As a 17-year-old, or a 16-year-old going into '67, did you anticipate or foresee any violence that summer in Detroit?
WD: No. So here's the—like my father, I was always working. When we moved over to Pinehurst, that was still an integrated neighborhood. Now I remember the day we moved in—or we moved to the house, or saw the house, our neighbors across there was two senior citizens, white ladies, who saw us as we pulled in. And after that day I didn't see them anymore, so I don't know if they moved or whatever, but our neighborhood was still integrated.
But at that time, white flight was—it was not what you'd call really evident because it was already going on earlier, in the Fifties. And then it's just that when we moved there, it was like whoa, wow, man, because we all had rooms, and it was a large wood-frame house, I think it was built in 1922. The person who—1926, I think it was. The person who sold the house to my parents had lived in the house for 40 years. Then my parents lived in it another 40 years and it was well taken care of.
So the neighborhood I lived in, I went to Mackenzie High School. I'd go down, walk to Fullterton, walk down to Wyoming. Take the Fullerton, take the Wyoming bus to Mackenzie. The neighborhood was integrated. We could walk—matter of fact, The Monkees was a big TV show at the time. Me and the guys that I knew, we'd be walking down the street singing their crazy songs, or whatever, and it was sort of like being in Happy Days, per se.
Jeffries Freeway was not built yet, you know. It was— there might have been some signs up but it was not built by—it was not being built at that time. Because it sort of like happened all of a sudden. It's like, when the riot happened, the freeway was being built. And the freeway divided what I'd call my portion of Pinehurst and divided it to the freeway in the middle, to the upper portion.
So now you've got to cross over one of those bridges, and there's—all of a sudden it's like it's changed. Because man, I could—you used to could ride—I think a young lady named Emma Kidd used to live up the street from us, and a friend of mine that I knew from the Jeffries Projects, he also moved up. Because we would see people that we knew, and we didn't know that they were there. Somebody said, "Hey, are you Wayne Davidson?" Yeah, I'm Wayne Davidson. "Well I'm Willie Jackson. Remember me from Jeffries Projects?" So you'd sort of meet people that you knew before because they were now no longer in the projects.
I think one of my friends had—Willie Jackson stayed in the Projects until he moved on Mendota, which was the next street. Michael Hall—his family moved to Inkster, and then they were able to get a house. And so these houses were now available, and they were being—people who didn't have houses before, were able to get into.
So there were white neighbors and many—there were a few mixed, interracial folks. And everybody was keeping their grass cut, and the places clean, because at the time, they were—people were working. My father worked all the time. People on my street worked. So there was no—what you'd—it was not a bad neighborhood. It was not a neighborhood like on Twelfth and Blaine, that had a mixture of people not working and people doing shady stuff.
So that would have been '66 because I was delivering—the Twin Pines Milk Company used to go up and down the street and bring people milk. Our house had a milk chute. You could order milk and you'd put it in the milk chute. Well, I worked for that guy. You know, and so this is, again, before the riot. So I got up every morning, got on his truck, and I delivered milk to the folks. I had young legs, and he paid me whatever every morning.
And I also had a paper route. I had a lot of white customers. And I'd go up and I'd make sure their papers were properly on their porches, that sort of thing. So I was kind of industrious. I cut a lot of grass, and that's how I knew the neighborhood a little bit. I know there was a guy two doors down from me, he was a white gentleman, he was older, he had a little dog. I was cutting his grass every week and he would pay me, or whatever.
So, yeah. The neighborhood was functioning and it was integrated. So that would have been '66, it was nice and peaceful. Then I guess the freeway was starting to get built.
I went to Mackenzie, so I remember you could ride our bikes. We would ride our bikes all over. Mackenzie is close to going out to the Ford Rouge Plant. I don't know if you ever seen—well, when I was a kid, that was massive, you know, and I worked there later, but I remember we rode our bikes over into Dearborn and then there was a gentleman tried to run us over with his car.
At that point—at that time, Orville Hubbard was around, so you know, you had to be careful, because he was saying one thing, and so we didn't know we were in that area, or whatever, because we were just riding bikes. So I remember that distinctively. That was the only time I can think of where I was just walking down the street and somebody tried to do something to me, or whatever.
So you could be walking—a lot of times, people did get into little scuffles, I guess you could say. I know a friend of mine, he—I think he—my brother and I went over to a friend's house and then this other friend of ours met us over there. Well, when we came back, the police picked us up. And they said that there was a complaint. A little white kid was scratched up, with some sharp object. And it wasn't me and my brother. So they took us—all three, with my friend—to the precinct, Twelfth Precinct, on Schaefer and Grand River. So we don't know what's going on. You know, but it turned out that my friend—they took us because my friend, the one that came later, because he had a sharp object in his pocket. So they search him, and they took everybody. And so my parents came down to get us and my father gave us a speech.
So I don't know whatever happened to that. I just know that I didn't do it. So when you ask about—I think there was one other incident where went to a party, and then somebody, the same person said something to a house—some folks in a house, who were white and then they started chasing them all the way to another place.
So other than that, I couldn't say there was any real hostility, you know, where people were really, like, pissed every day. Well, I don't want to use the word "pissed," but open, blatant, you know. So that would have been '66, '67.
WW: Going into '67, how—in July—how did you first hear about what was going on, on Twelfth Street?
WD: I can tell you where I was at. I was at the Fox Theatre. I can tell you—I got up—me—I got up there, it was a Sunday. I got up. We had made plans to go see Robin Seymour, if you recall, used to have—well, they used to have the Motown Revues. Okay. And that used to be in the winter when they were supported by the Motown Revues.
We'd go there, and we'd be seeing David Ruffin, all these guys. Guys who I grew up around—didn't know them, because they all lived on—between— not far from Motown. You'd see them looking fancy hair, fancy clothes, or practicing or whatever. Everybody else going out to work, they're out there practicing, so all these Motown guys, you'd see them on the duplex.
So we'd go to these Motown Revues, and I would be— because it was my first time, because Motown Revues were prominent in the winter time, and they had started '62, '63, '64. Well I was not old enough at that time, to go. But when I got back—'66, '67, those time frames, I was old enough to go on my own. And you could take the bus anywhere in the city, wherever you wanted to go.
So I would take the west side bus, which bus stop would have been over here and you could just go anywhere. I can remember being at that bus stop and you'd hear the record shop playing Aretha Franklin's music, and you'd be saying man. But the east side folks always looked a little different. That's always sort of one of the things. That it was more east side west side.
So '67. We get up. My friend Willie, Emory—yeah, it was three of us. Me, Willie, and Emory. Willie's still alive; Emory's passed on. We get up. We go to the—we're going to the— down to the Fox Theatre, and we're going to the—basically a Motown Revue, but it's only, it's been booked as Robin Seymour's Summertime Revue.
So we get down there and we're having a ball, you know, because now we see all of the Motowners and whoever was on the bill. It was a quiet Sunday, because on Sunday mornings here in Detroit, people were—you either were coming in or you were going to church. It was quiet, clean, you know, the buses going everywhere.
So we took the bus, and we go past Louis the Hatter, all these stores, Sibley's Shoes, you'd say, man I'm gonna get me those shoes, man, I'm gonna get me this, I'm gonna get me this suit. You go inside and you've got all these pictures of these stars on the thing. Say, man, I'm gonna get that, like [unintelligible] got!
So now we're down here. And everybody, just like when whatever type of music venue you were at, everybody's got their persona on. So it happens to be down in this, everybody's always trying to be cool, just like being a star. So you have to be careful, you don't want to bump into anybody, and start a little fracas. So they started the show, and Martha and the Vandellas and Smokey were the headliners.
So the next thing you know, they stop the show. And Martha and Smokey come out. They announce that there's a little—some disturbance in the city, and some of the bus lines are going to be having a problem. So the bus line I'm thinking about is the Grand River bus line, and when they mentioned Warren, well, guess what? The Grand River crosses Warren to get to go to west side. And we're saying, what the heck?
So after they make that announcement, well, I'm a knucklehead. I'm whatever—16, 17. I want to see the show. I don't know what's going on out there, because I paid my money to see the show. I cut grass, I done all this other stuff. And so the show goes on, and—
[break in recording]
And Martha—this is significant to music fans. On that show was a group called the Parliaments. You know who the Parliaments are? Okay, this is George Clinton and the Parliaments. At that time they were dressed to mirror the Temptations. They didn't look anything like what he looks like now. Because also his—he lived in my neighborhood. Or one of them—the small one named Fuzzy. So everywhere—in the city of Detroit you—it was not unusual for you to be living next to somebody who might have been a popular musician or whatever.
So in '67, at that show, George Clinton was there, and—with his group, called the Parliaments, and they were mirroring the Temptations, and the song that they sang was Old Man River. And they did an outstanding job, because George Clinton was also a writer for Motown. He sung the songs.
So I'm leaving that as a pinpoint for him, and his career.
So now, the show is over with, and we're trying—we're going outside. We had called—we come out from the show, we found that man, it looked like a war zone out here. And so now we're trying to figure out what to do. We're 13, 14, 15, 16 years old, trying to—we're not driving; the bus is our thing. So now we've got to get to a phone. We didn't have any of these—we had to find a—get some quarters and call.
So Willie called his step-father, and he came and got us, and he must have come down Davison to Jeffries to Chrysler and back to pick us up, and that way—we went back the same way, and as we went back, we saw the smoke and the fire. And he also had his pistol in the front seat, just in case there were some issues that he might have ran into.
Once we got home, then my father, again, made me paint the house. We had a white house, two stories—that's what I did. My brother was in Washington, D.C. He was a little more rambunctious. He wanted to come back and participate.
The little group we hung out with was about ten people, and about six of them had—you know, they could have a lot more flexibility than me and my brothers had. So they ended up going out and being involved with things, and they ended up either getting picked up and, I don't know how long they might have spent, but most—they might have spent a couple days in jail. Because they come back with all these stories or whatever. "Well we went down this road and they were burning this." You know, they were with groups of people who were part of the insane activities. So we sat around and we were listening to them. I was sort of glad that I didn't get involved, because most of those guys, they ended up not really doing well later on in life, so.
But, as we went up, all of those houses, all of those businesses along Grand River-Wyoming Area, all of those businesses that got burned out, many of those areas did not get rebuilt. Even Pastor's Cleaners, because many of the businesses were owned by—maybe folks from the Jewish community, and they employed black people. I remember Pastor's Cleaners, that was there on Fullerton and Meyers. It was owned by a Jewish family, but the person who worked the front, and Mr. Friendly, the person who took in all of the workload, was a black person. That's how he made his living.
So many of the people who may not have owned the business, but they earned a living from that, they lost their jobs, because no longer is that place sitting there anymore. So a lot of people didn't think about that. The further down you go down Grand River, the more destruction you could see, because, again, my uncle's shop—I think he might have—he might have— I know he put "Soul Brother" up on his thing. Now he—this is my uncle—G.W. Raspberry, at the time, he's—also was the first black person to put in—the S. S. Kresge store down on Woodward—he was able to start selling wigs out of there. So he was doing pretty well in the beauty care arena, so he, you know, quite truly, he didn't want his business being burned out.
So he suffered, but it was a lot of destruction all over, and many—you know, you could see—when I did was able to get out, you could see some of the smoldering in some of the places that just yesterday, you might have been able to go in there and buy something.
But it was a trying time. I don't—I didn't see—there was—I think the riot was more of an economic deal because of frustration, because there was no time that I ever seen or heard, where somebody like—"I'm coming after you," because I see you—"There's that white dude, let's get him." I didn't hear or see any of that. What I saw was people talking about getting televisions and that sort. Things that they didn't have. Getting things that they needed.
Now I'm a little bit of a historian on some of this stuff—the '43 riot was different, you know. People were actually going for people and attacking them. But the atmosphere was that people wanted stuff. That's what I saw, and that's what I heard. And afterwards that was what was the talk: that people wanted stuff. So—
WW: So is that how you interpreted it? You used the term "riot." Do you see it as that, or do you see it as a rebellion of sorts?
WD: Here's the thing about—I've grown since that time frame. The first time, it was definitely unrest. Because see, with me, it's—that was just part of it, because, you know, there were several events that happened afterwards, that were—I saw '67 as more economic. '68, when Martin Luther King was killed, and Bobby Kennedy—those were—and then with the Black Panthers and all of the race stuff—those, to me, were more race riots, where somebody was saying, "I'm going to get that guy." In '67 I don't recall anybody saying, "I'm going to get that person." They—I thought they said—I felt they were saying, "I'm going to get me a TV. I'm going to get me this. I'm going to get me that."
Even though I guess there was riots in '65, in L.A., that might have been the baseline. But I didn't feel that the '67 riot was the one where people were after a particular group.
I think they were after—they were frustrated, because, you know, it started because there was two Vietnam vets who had returned, and they were having a party. Well see, today, you get recognition. I spent 20 years in the service and I got another 16 years as a civil servant. Now they make darn sure that people come back from Iraq and all these places, that they have ceremonies and they are recognized. And during that time frame, Vietnam, that was not the case. People come home, they come and they want to drain down, they wanted the pressure, the stress—and so they were having a party. Because at that time, they had what they called blue laws. You couldn't buy liquor and all that stuff on Sunday morning. So they were at a particular place, a party, and then they got busted.
Now the cops, I can tell you, I've always been tall, but these cops at that time frame, they were tall and big, and they were shiny. Because they all—many of them wore leather, and they'd be riding horses and stuff. So they looked to be pretty intimidating. So the police at that time were pretty intimidating. So how that clash came about of these guys trying to come back from a stressful situation, without ceremony, and then—now they have ceremony now—it all breaks out into a riot, there on Twelfth and Clairmount—it was on Clairmount.
So that's part of that challenge there. Is I didn't see it as "I'm gonna go get me some guy," you know. I didn't see it as that. I saw it was—because people in school was "Man I got my television, I got this and I got that." They didn't say "I got somebody's head," [laughter], you know, mounted up. I don't recall that. It's just that I didn't see it that way, you know. It was bad, it was rough, but when I reflect back on it I don't see where something—I've seen—in later years I saw people saying, "I'm going over here, and I'm going to do this to somebody else." So that's the difference, to me.
WW: Did your parents ever think about moving out of the city because of it?
WD: No. My—they worked too hard to get the house that they got. And matter of fact, it's a shame—that's part of the challenge now. My parents' house, even though the neighborhood was falling down, their house was still immaculately taken care of. And so many of the—see, those neighborhoods were intact.
They grew, and they—they built those neighborhoods, and the folks working, and they—part of the challenge is that you—many people—most people from black cultures do poorly with inheritance, because they're not—many people from white cultures understand inheritance. They understand that I'm supposed to go from here to there, and carry the family name. Well, it's a little different in black cultures, because sometimes everybody's going in a different direction, and sometimes they're not blood relatives, and you've got a lot of in-fighting.
So inheritance, that particular point in time was a time when people of color owned property, at the greatest—probably the greater time after the Civil War. And what happened is, you couldn't transfer that property down to the next person because they didn't know how to handle it. You know, because they're not used to transferring property. When I say the principle of property, like understanding wills—that sort of thing. You know, "Yeah, this is my mama's house," but then, if you don't pay the taxes on it, or if you don't cut the grass on it, if you don't keep it the way your mama did, then there's a problem. And so then there's—then the person becomes apathetic. Because well, "To hell with this." You know, so that's what I'm saying about that, from an economic standpoint.
If you look at many of these folks with European descent, these properties carry over generation after generation after generation because it's instilled in them. So I'm getting off the topic, but those neighborhoods were—that was the opportunity, because those neighborhoods were built for success. Because once you were able to—because now the banks were starting to lend money. It wasn't land contracts. There were actual contracts with a realtor and a bank and a mortgage company. You know, legitimate. But most people—my mother never shared—she took care of all the business in our house, so my father was not part of that, you know. He, uneducated, he didn't know about—he depended on my mother, and my mother took care of that stuff.
So those are some of the contributing factors, that—he did the work on the house, but my mother knew the paperwork on the house, how to maintain it. All those neighborhoods were like that—people were—they got these homes and they cherished these places because they worked—all these factories, working. But then the problem came in passing it on, because the next group of people may have not really understood what the role should be.
WW: Are you optimistic for the city moving forward?
WD: Yeah, I am. I think it's pretty nice that we've got a lot of this stuff that's being rebuilt. When I go, I see a lot of change, I see a lot of—I'm an optimistic person. When I left the city for a number of years and I'd come back to visit my parents, I would talk or speak with my wife and she'd go on, "This should be this, happening," in the Nineties, and it wasn't happening. It's only been happening recently, and I think it's good.
I think—because we would go to other places, and—I think part of the challenge of change is because we are a union town, and it's hard to change when you're union. You know, there's too many people involved. You know, entrepreneurs have to come in, have ideas, you get that idea implemented and you have less barriers to that. So I'm glad that these families—the Ilitch family and Gilbert, are leading the way. So I think there's a better—I think better days are coming, as the saying goes, with the father Gabriel.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I greatly appreciate it.
WD: I didn't mean to talk your ear off, but let me tell you about George Clinton. You see—he was at that show—his group was dressed like Temptations, after the riot. See, because this is my metaphor, or my picture. When I saw him the next time, he was dressed and acting in the chaotic fashion that he acts now. That's sort of how—that gives an illustration of—on that day—July 23, 1967, when I woke up that morning, George Clinton was a Temptation, per se. When I went to bed, that night, in that chaos, when I saw him again—him and his group were like they were now. Spaced out. So, with that, I'm done talking.
WW: Hello, today is September 8, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am sitting down with:
OU: Ola Takumbo Unger.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
OU: You’re welcome.
WW: Can you start by telling me where and when you were born?
OU: I was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1955.
WW: And when did you come to Detroit?
OU: I came to Detroit in June, June—July 1965.
WW: What brought you and your family here?
OU: My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she came here for treatment at the University of Michigan. And her sister lived here, so that’s why we ended up coming here to have some family support.
WW: Who came here with you and your mother?
OU: My siblings, which included two sisters—one who has cerebral palsy—and a brother.
WW: What was your first impression of the city?
OU: It was, ah, tree-lined streets, and homes, that was quite different from Chicago. A lot of homes.
WW: What neighborhood did you move into when you came here?
OU: I don’t know the name of the neighborhood, it was on Fourteenth and—was it Fourteenth? Sixteenth and Fourth, yeah.
WW: So just past Woodbridge?
OU: Okay. I don’t know [laughs].
WW: Grand River/Warren area.
OU: Grand River/Warren, okay.
WW: Was your neighborhood integrated when you moved into it?
OU: No.
WW: Would you like to share any experiences from growing up in that neighborhood?
OU: Yeah, it was a very friendly neighborhood. It was a neighborhood where you knew your neighbors. It was pretty safe. It was kind of different for me, because with my mother being ill, and my sister having cerebral palsy, I wasn’t able to enjoy going outside to play like I used to, like I was used to doing in Chicago. I used to go outside and play with my friends, jump rope all day long, play with grasshoppers, run to the store, take my sister for a walk. But when we moved to Detroit, our lives changed. The music was different - heard a lot of Motown music which I wasn't used to listening to. Everything was different. Being close to [unintelligable], that was something that was new for our family and the big thing about the Ambassador Bridge. So it was different but it was a very dramatic time as well and that was before the riot.
WW: Did you feel welcome when you came to the city of Detroit?
OU: I did. Yeah, I felt very welcome.
WW: Going in to ’67, did you notice any growing tension in the city, even though you were so young?
OU: No, I didn’t—I wasn’t aware of what was going on.
WW: Were you still living in that same house in ’67?
OU: Yes.
WW: Do you remember how you first heard about what was going on, on that Sunday morning?
OU: I looked out the window, and there were people bringing irons, I assume from Grand River, because we were very close to Grand River, and there was a lot of shops, furniture stores, and I just remember people. There was a wagon—someone rolled down the street with this wagon, and there were different sizes. So you had one size and then a smaller size, and I was looking at that and I was wondering, what’s going on?
And at that time, if I remember correctly, we didn’t have a TV. My mom was from a religion—Church of God—and it was a sin to watch TV. So we didn’t have a TV. I don’t even remember hearing a radio. But what I do remember very vividly is the alarm—the store, the corner store, the alarm going off all day long. And being told that the telephone wires were on fire so we couldn’t make a phone call.
So I felt trapped, because I was 12 at this time, and my mom was seriously ill by this time. Within a two year time, she had, I think it was the last stages of breast cancer. So she was home, she was an invalid, she was in the dining room area, and she could not get out the bed by herself. And then my sister, who was cerebral palsy, she can’t walk, she could talk, but –so I’m home alone with my family members, and I don’t know what to do.
And my sister was out on a date, and my brother, he was out, which I found out later on that day that he was in jail. So it was — I remember just watching, just looking out the window, feeling like it was the end of the world. And wondering, how am I going to get my sister and my mother out the house. Where were we going to go? And so I asked my mom, I said, "Mom, how am I going to—what am I going to do? How am I going to get you out of here? How am I going to get Barbara out?" And she told me not to worry about it. And I didn’t worry about it anymore. Just like that. I just stopped worrying.
WW: Do you know if your house was ever threatened by fire?
OU: We were surrounded, yes. We were surrounded by two, four fires, I remember being told. That’s why I was wondering, what am I going to do? Where am I going to take them, and how can I even get them out the house? And when you are surrounded by four fires, where do you go? At 12 years old, you can’t drive.
My cousins, they lived in another neighborhood, but I don’t know what happened to them, because we had no phones. No cell phones, definitely. [Laughter] And I don’t even know if we had a telephone. I don’t know if we had a telephone. Because back then, everybody didn’t have a phone.
WW: As the violence was progressing, do you remember seeing the National Guard or the police at all?
OU: No. I did not come out the house. I was too frightened to come out the house. I wouldn’t have came out anyway because I wouldn’t have left my mom and my sister there. So I didn’t see them. But I was a block or two from Grand River, so—
WW: Are there any other stories you’d like to share from that week?
OU: What I found out later, was that my aunt, my mother’s sister and my uncle, they were out of town, they had driven to Philadelphia, and they heard about the riot and they immediately turned around. And I thought that was quite interesting. To turn back around. They knew the danger that my mom was in, and her children, so they just turned back around. I remember that.
I remember—what I want people to visualize, is just being in a place where you can’t do anything. You just don’t know what to do, and it was very frightening, and I hope it never happens again.
WW: After the violence was over and everything calmed down, did the neighborhood feel the same to you?
OU: Well, it didn’t feel the same. And it wasn’t so much because of the riots, it was because by then, within, by Christmastime, my sister had been removed from the home, with cerebral palsy. My mom had to give her up, because she couldn’t take care of her anymore, and my mom was really in the stages of dying. By December 23 she passed away. So my life was traumatic just from what was going on in my household. Because I had to, when school started back up, it wasn’t like I was thinking about the riot or anything, it was like I had to go back to school and I had to rush home to take care of my mom. And then after a time my mom was going to be placed in a nursing home—I didn’t know what day it was going to be—and one time I came home and she wasn’t there. So the riot was kind of second fiddle to what I was going through.
WW: Do you refer to it as a riot, or what terminology do you use?
OU: A riot. That’s how I refer to it. Now, when I go back to the community, the homes are not there. The beautiful, tree-lined street that my aunt and her family lived on is not there anymore. The trees are knocked down, the neighborhood is pretty much abandoned. I think on her block there’s only that house that my aunt lived in. Used to be able to go walk through the alleys, drive through the alleys. That doesn’t happen anymore. So Detroit looked different.
WW: Are you optimistic for the city moving forward?
OU: I am. I’m very pleased with what, the progress that’s been going on, and the changes. People are coming back into the city, and it has life to it. So that’s a good thing.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I greatly appreciate it.
OU: You’re welcome.
WW: Hello, today is August 4th, 2016. My name is William Winkel. I am in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project and I am sitting down with—
VJ: Victory Johnson.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. Can you please tell me where and when were you born?
VJ: May 11, 1949.
WW: Where?
VJ: In Detroit, Michigan.
WW: Did you grow up in the city?
VJ: Yes.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?
VJ: I grew up on the west side of Detroit, off of Joy Road, Linwood, and I lived on Gladstone.
WW: Was the neighborhood integrated?
VJ: Not at that time.
WW: What did your parents do for a living?
VJ: My father, I don’t really know. I can’t tell you. I don’t know.
WW: Not to worry. Did you have any siblings growing up?
VJ: Yes. I had a sister and a brother.
WW: What was the neighborhood like?
VJ: Well, we lived in a four-family flat across from the playground. We went to school at Brady Elementary and I remember my first day when I was in kindergarten, they hadn’t taught me how to cross the streets yet. So my sister and brother were supposed to pick me up from school and bring me, you know, walk home back then, but they forgot me. I stayed at the light, at the cross light and it kept going red and green and I didn’t know whether to run across Joy Road. I remember this guy came up to me and said, “Okay, when the light turns green,” he didn’t say that, but that was in my head. He said, “Little girl, you can go now,” and I shot across the street and ran all the way home and I was crying and everything. I said, “Oh, they left me at school and this and that” and they got a whooping. From there, they taught me how to go on green and not to go on the red, but then from that day on, they came and got me from my classroom.
WW: Growing up in the city, did you explore the city more or did you stay in your neighborhood?
VJ: Well, as time went on, my grandparents—after that, we moved to an apartment on Elmhurst and Linwood. I went to the school across the street which was Roosevelt. It was an elementary school. It was Roosevelt, Darby, and Central, so you could go to elementary then go to Darby then go to Central High School. We lived right on the corner where you could look right across the street and see everything, the three schools. So if you were skipping school or something, you’re supposed to be in there, your mama could see. I went to that school and then my grandparents bought a house on Tuxedo and Dexter, so our family moved—it was a two-family flat, so our family moved to Tuxedo and Dexter. My grandma lived downstairs and we lived upstairs. My mom, she used to work at the Stanley Restaurant, Chinese restaurant from back in the day. Oh, I know what my dad did! He was in construction! He helped build the Renaissance downtown. They used to call him the Strong boss because he would take the people to the hospital if they got hurt and all that. He would be in the big tunnels that they have underneath the ground. He did that kind of work.
WW: Growing up in the city, did you face racism or—were your schools integrated?
VJ: They were integrated.
WW: Did you face racism in school? Or prejudice at school?
VJ: No, everybody was kind of all tied in. You know, as kids, we don’t really know what’s going on. But I do remember, when we moved onto Tuxedo, it was a Jewish family that lived next door to us. That particular section of Detroit was integrated. It was like crossing Joy Road and it was integrated then. They would celebrate their Christmases and have their little shacks out there, I forgot what they call them. My brother was a paper boy, and we played with the little boy next door. There were several Jewish families on the block.
WW: Do you remember when you moved onto that block, did your family face any push-back from white neighbors?
VJ: No. Because most of them were Jewish and we found that Jewish people, they receive us better, to me, than any other race, to me.
WW: Going into the 1960s, being a teenager, did you travel around the city more?
VJ: Yes, I did travel around the city more. I remember we used to go to River Rouge. We used to go to Edgewater Park. We’d catch the busses. Back then as a child, I didn’t know how—because my sister and brother would take me—that we’d have to go to like Woodward, catch the bus down, go to 7 Mile, and take 7 Mile down to Edgewater Park. As I got older, [unintelligible] and to the fairgrounds. To the fair, that’s what the Woodward Park was, to the fairgrounds on 7 Mile. That’s a bus depot now. Right before 8 Mile.
WW: Did you sense any growing tension in the city during the ‘60s, given the civil rights movement is in full swing and other social movements of the day?
VJ: Are we just basically talking about—we lived over there. Even after I got married, I moved in my grandmother’s house and I had a child. That’s sort of like when the ’67 riot kind of broke out. And I remember taking my child—my mom had moved to 7 Mile and Littlefield, so I took my child to safety because they really weren’t rioting over in those sections, but then I came back where the riot was. My grandmother lived upstairs. They were rioting, and they were tearing up all the stores on Dexter. As living over there, it seemed like you knew all of the store owners. It was like a George Reeves, drug store, and you could go in there and like Mother Obedience was saying, you could go in there and [unintelligible] or whatever and they would let you get it, knowing that you were from the neighborhood so it was pretty cool. They had some black-owned businesses, some cleaners and some little penny candy stores, they had a car wash and they had a bar over that way. It was really nice because I guess the Jewish people kept the property up, so it wasn’t like you’re moving into just dilapidated surroundings. I guess you would call it from Gladstone to Webb, we kept upgrading.
WW: How did you first hear what was going on in July ’67?
VJ: What was going on? I saw it on TV.
WW: Saw it on TV?
VJ: Mmhmm.
WW: Did it shock you, or were you expecting any violence in that summer?
VJ: No, I just remember it was very hot outside. It was hot, and the next thing I know I see people on my block and people that I knew going up on Dexter and they were breaking into stuff and tearing down the gates. There was a clothing store up there, so, yeah. It was just like moving slow. You see a few people, then you see a gang of people like that, and my grandmother, by her being there, she was Queen’s mother, so we were kind of looking out for my grandmother.
WW: Did you have any interactions with the people who were looting? Because you said you saw them on your street. Did you talk with them?
VJ: Yes. And they were running.
WW: Did they say why they were doing it?
VJ: They were like taking stuff from Dexter, then they’d run to their houses and put it in their houses then they’d go back and it was just all over the place. It was just weird-looking. Then some of the people that were doing the looting and all that kind of stuff were people that I knew, that I grew up with.
WW: Did you speak with any of them at all?
VJ: Some of them wanted to put things in—well, I was closer. “Can I put this here and I’ll be right back?” That kind of situation.
WW: During that first day when people were looting, what was the mood? Was it celebratory that there was looting going on? Was it anxious? Was it worrying?
VJ: I don’t think it was too much worrying. To me, it looked like it was just a relief, like a rebellion. We were rebelling against this, you know what I’m saying? It was like that, because they weren’t sad or nothing, they were just happy. I guess they were just happy because they were getting something for free, even though they were taking it. It was like the adrenaline was flowing.
WW: During that week, was your block threatened by fire?
VJ: No. We’re not too far from 12th Street, so as you saw it on television, then it was kind of scary because you were thinking, “Now, why are you burning up the people’s places?” Now that’s kind of weird, going in and breaking in and taking whatever you want, but then to set fires? You’re burning up your own self. That kind of rung the bell. If you just had time to just sit down and look at the TV and see actually that you’re burning your own self out. Because it’s only us over here, during ’67. The Jewish guys, the Jewish families had moved out. Just like my mom. She moved to 7 Mile and Littlefield. That was a more safer area, a more prominent area, where we were moving to.
WW: You mentioned the atmosphere of relief. When the National Guard and later the federal troops came in, what was the feeling of the block and the area then?
VJ: It was more of you had to tilt lightly type. If it was a curfew or whatever, and you were going against the curfew—because the people I’m talking about were like 18, 19 years old, because I was 18. We didn’t really care. So what? They ain’t coming over here. We aren’t really not doing nothing over here. It was more basically over on 12th Street or whatever. That wasn’t too far from us, but we just were nowhere in the area.
WW: Did you have any interactions with the National Guard or the police department during that week?
VJ: No. Then after my grandmother kind of told us that Queen was on the radio and all of that, telling us, telling the people to back away and that kind of thing, so that took a toll, too. Some people that I did see over there, now we shouldn’t’ be doing all this. Come on, now. We’re doing our own neighborhood. You knew the person that had the clothing store and the furniture store and all that. Then they ended up moving. Those same people ended up moving from Dexter and they went to 6 Mile.
WW: You said earlier that it felt like they were rebelling. Do you identify what happened in ’67 as a rebellion, or do you see it as a riot, or somewhere in-between?
VJ: I figure like some people just did it, and some people probably were backed up against a wall and they just couldn’t take no more and they say, “[exclamation]! I’m just releasing it and letting it go and doing whatever it is!” I think some people had reason to just explode. I couldn’t get jobs and money wasn’t flowing right so it gave them some kind of reason to outlet.
WW: Did you see the city differently after that? After that week?
VJ: To me, I felt like after 12th Street was gone that some of—let’s see—some of the historian of it left. You see 12th Street now, there’s nothing there. They burned it up. We burned it up. You could go down there and just have a good time and bar hop if that’s what you were into, and see all kinds of acts and all that kind of stuff. It gave the people something to do, an outlet to relax them, to have fun and enjoy themselves. But who did? You burned your own self out? I think if the police department would have handled it differently, it just wouldn’t have been—sometimes if you come in kind and gentle, and present it in a different way, then the person you presented it to wouldn’t be so angry, to want to retaliate against you. “Well, get out of here!” You could just come in here and say, “Okay, it’s such and such, everybody needs to go,” or whatever it is. Just handle it in a different manner and it probably would have went pretty well, but instead it incited a riot because it was hot outside and nobody had a fan [unintelligible].
WW: Afterwards, did you ever feel like not only moving off that block, but moving out of the city?
VJ: Did I move out of the city? No. I never thought about moving out of the city, moving out—no.
WW: How do you see the city today?
VJ: I see the city as they’re letting people—our people—instead of them paying money to destroy—the demolition—the areas, they’re letting those that are unfortunate go in there and loot—not loot, but take out the water heaters and just make a lot of blight. Instead of them just coming in and just paying for it to be torn down, to rebuild there. They just slowly letting us do it and saying that they’re trying to protect it, but in reality they’re not. They’re just setting things in place like if you call the police, “They’re taking stuff from this house,” then they’re taking a long time to get to the house, or to the building, or to the schools, or whatever. They keep saying all this money is going to the schools, but I see more schools—they’re closing them and going in there and taking everything out of them, and all that, that’s weird. That’s crazy.
WW: Are you optimistic for the city moving forward?
VJ: No. I live downtown, and they’re building up downtown as Mother Obedience said, so that’s why I’m saying it’s taking a slow effect in the neighborhoods. How about doing something in the neighborhoods? You want us to have gardens, [unintelligible], what black people really do. From us coming down south, we know about gardening and picking cotton and having cauliflowers and collard greens and all that, because we are of the earth. Now you’re telling us, “Okay, now you can grow your own food.” That’s sort of like taking us back to slavery, in a sense. Now downtown, they’re building it all up. You can’t even get no property downtown. It’s all booked up. They haven’t even finished it yet. Yeah, they’ll get back around to this like they always do. They’ll let us kill, steal, and destroy and then they come right back in to swoop it up, make it want they want it to be, and put a high dollar on it. Then there we are again, as they say, the ghetto. And the ghetto just means somebody moved in there before you did.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
VJ: Well, I would like to add that when Queen came over here, she fixed up this area. Martha Jean “The Queen” Steinberg. On the radio in 1967, she was on the radio telling the people to just sit down somewhere, take a break, don’t’ do that to yourselves. Then she reached out to [unintelligible] that really didn’t know anything about God, but it was on the radio.
WW: Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I greatly appreciate it.
VJ: You’re welcome.
HS: Hello, this is Hannah Sabal. The date is July 23rd, 2016. I am in Detroit, Michigan for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am sitting down with Virgil Taylor. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
VT: Hi, Hannah. My name is Virgil Taylor.
HS: Can you tell me where and when you were born?
VT: I was born in Detroit, January 18th, 1955.
HS: Where did you grow up?
VT: I grew up in Detroit. I was born on Hazelwood and what was then 12th Street. When I was 3, we moved to Elmhurst and 14th Street, which was approximately about, maybe a mile away from where Hazelwood and 12th was.
HS: What was your neighborhood like growing up?
VT: I lived in a lower-middle class/working class neighborhood. My recollections of the community at that time was that everyone kind of lived in the same area, within so many block radius. You kind of knew what people did or what their status was based off what block they lived on. Where I lived, which was around the block from Central High School, was a lower-middle class/working class neighborhood. Most of the people on my block were traditional nuclear families, primarily black, but we did have white people that lived on the block. There were a number of Jewish people that still lived on the block when I was a kid growing up there. That had been a traditionally Jewish neighborhood, and then there was a migration into that neighborhood of blacks and a migration of Jewish people from that neighborhood I believe to Oak Park.
HS: What did your parents do?
VT: My dad had been a laborer. He was actually a boiler maker. But my dad was stricken blind shortly after I was born, and my mom had been a housewife. But when my dad was stricken blind—my dad did go back to work, but my mom ended up initially working in the schools. Then after my dad passed in 1963, my mom went to work at United Way. But my mother didn’t have an education, so she went to work in some other types of programs that they had, helping other people in the community.
HS: All right. Did you go to Central High School?
VT: I did. I went to what was then their campus bordering Tuxedo and I want to say Calvert to the north, Linwood to the west, and La Salle to the east. That campus was then Roosevelt elementary, Durfey Middle School, and Central High School. I went to Roosevelt and Durfey exclusively. Central I did for two years, then I left Detroit and finished high school in Lansing at Lansing Sexton.
HS: So in the ‘60s, you were a young kid, a teenager. What did you like to do with your time?
VT: The typical kid stuff. There was a lot of activity in our neighborhood. I guess—and I didn’t know it as a child—but our neighborhood, strong foundationally. A lot of neighborhood block clubs and neighborhood organizations. Around the block from us, over on Webb Avenue, was Visitation which later became St. Martin de Pore’s, and after that, it doesn’t exist anymore. But the archdiocese over there was very, very strong. There was a rec center at Visitation, so we went there a lot during the summer months to swim at their recreational activities. I grew up across the street from what was New Mt. Zion Baptist Church. Very strong organizationally in our community, and they had a lot of programs for kids, recreational programs in the basement and the parking lot there. At Central’s field, there were ongoing programs for kids and families, and so the schools there, all of them, at night traditionally would be open until about nine o’clock for after-school programs. So for instance, my mom would go there to take flower arranging classes or cake decorating. Men went there to take shop classes. That was kind of just what was normal in our community. The kids would go for after-school programs there. During the summer months we would do usual kid stuff, but we had the Fischer YMCA. There was another YMCA in Highland Park. So as kids we would get on our bikes and we’d either go the schools—if they didn’t have open swim or recreational programs, Visitation did, or we would go to the YMCAs. But we were also pretty free. As long as you were home by the time the streetlights came on, we got on our bikes and went wherever. We’d go to Palmer Park, we’d ride our bikes all the way out to Rouge Park and go swimming there. It was a remarkable neighborhood. Interesting because I didn’t know as a child some of the things that were culturally remarkable at the time. The Nation of Islam temple was right there on Linwood; it was across the street. My barber was a member of the Nation, so when I went to the barbershop on Saturdays, the talk that I heard was largely from members of the Nation and some of the things they would talk about. But it never appeared to me to be—I mean, it was just people talking about a host of things, community issues and things of that nature. One of the barbers that was in there was a Baptist, and another was like a numbers man, so it was kind of a fascinating exchange, but I never thought much of any of it. It was just the normal discourse. The neighborhood, again, most of the women on my block were housewives, primarily. Some women worked, I guess. My friend Tony Luffborough, his mom worked in the plant. Many of the mothers were housewives on the block. I grew up in the neighborhood which I would think in the traditional American culture would mimic anything that you would think of. There were women on the block that kind of watched out for all of the kids and kind of tell on me when I did stuff. Most of the men in our neighborhood worked—not most, they all did. It was unusual for a father to not be in the home. My dad passed away in ’63, so there was no father in the home. That wasn’t the norm. This whole myth about black men not being in the home, no that was just not true. I can tell you why that happened, when it started to happen, but it was not true as a child growing up. Like I said, very traditional neighborhood. 12th Street as we called it, which is now Rosa Parks, was a retail strip. All up and down 12th Street were every kind of shop you could imagine: hardware store; the confectionary, which is a form of a party store; there were other party stores; barbershops; seamstress shops; and then there were little shops that lay on the outsides of those blocks, and a lot of times those were industrial shops, small factories, that I now know were lower-level tier four or five factories that provided things to the automotive industry. But they may be a shop that only has four or five employees. It was that type of community.
HS: Do you have any siblings?
VT: I have one brother, older than me. He’s five years older than me. My brother was the quintessential good boy—at least that’s what everybody else thought. My brother is pretty remarkable. He’s a professor now. He was the captain of the safety patrol, he was the captain of the cubscouts, so I came up always, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” He was academic and athletic all-American, you know, so here I come, clumsy little brother, but just a normal kid. My brother went on to graduate from MSU and he’s a professor at MSU now.
HS: I’m the youngest sibling of a guy who’s doing exactly that, so I know where you’re coming from.
VT: It’s not fun. It’s like you’re always, that’s the standard you’re held to. Especially when you know that this creature is far from perfect, but what they’ve perfected is the art of that image that they keep up in front of adults.
HS: Oh, yeah. I grew up in elementary school and middle school, “Why can’t you be more like Daniel?” Anyway, so ’67. You were about 12 years old at the time. How did you hear about the events?
VT: Walked out onto the porch that Sunday morning, and didn’t understand what I was seeing. It was chaos, it was chaotic. Richard Rudolph, one of my neighbors who lived across the street—who grew up in a different home. Richard didn’t go to school. The Rudolph family didn’t have grass most of the time. They put down sod but they wouldn’t take care of it. They were a nuclear family, but education wasn’t important. The block club used to have regular fits about the Rudolph family. Richard came running down the street and he had a tray of rings, and he was just giddy as he was running. He had been looting up on 12th Street. There were people running all over, and my mother came out. My mother was very much a disciplinarian and traditionalist. We weren’t going anywhere. She didn’t know exactly what was going on, but she knew it wasn’t right and we weren’t leaving the porch. So I witnessed the early part of the day from the porch. Our street, at that time, we had all down Elmhurst these beautiful Dutch elm trees that provided a canopy over the street. Suddenly the police were coming. The police were on firetrucks, which we had never seen. The police had on helmets we had never seen. There were two huge apartment buildings across the street from us, and something happened and the police came with like armored vehicles or trucks or something, and they surrounded this apartment. There was, I want to say, I believe there was gunfire. I know I remember them going in, and I know I remember them bringing young men out. I had seen these guys, but I didn’t know them. I remember them bringing these young men out of the building. All of it was pretty confusing. Having grown up—I was 12 years old. In my neighborhood, things had started to change the year before because I think what started happening was drugs were coming to the community. That started around ’65, ’66. Guys started going to Vietnam and coming back with mental health issues, though we didn’t know that’s what it was at the time, so they were coming back “not right.” That started creating chaos in homes. We started having home invasions, something we had never had. All that started occurring when young men went away to Vietnam and came back drug-addicted and with mental health issues. All of that started to just have a major influence in the neighborhoods, as I recall. I was too young to know any of the socioeconomic conditions. When I look back now, my mom—my mother grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She was born there at the turn of the last century. I think black people in particular from the south viewed life as difficult or challenging, but like I didn’t know we were poor. My mom and dad never let us know that. I didn’t know what poverty looked like. I ate every day, I had clean clothes every day, our lights never went out. This was just life. You didn’t think much about it. So when I discovered years later that there were major socioeconomic things occurring in the black community, I didn’t know anything about it as a kid and I was shocked. I was sheltered from that by my parents. But I do know that there was a drastic change that was starting to occur. Our house was one of the first houses to get broken into, and that was in 1966. My brother was going into his senior year, and I remember they had stolen our television and his clothes primarily, so someone had been watching him. As I recall, I think they stole his coat from school and got his keys out of it, that type of thing. Our neighborhood though, disastrous. The idea that someone would go into someone else’s house. Because I grew up in a neighborhood where you didn’t lock your doors. You slept with the windows open. You never thought that someone would come into your house. But the influx of drugs into the community started to change those dynamics. As I understand now, socioeconomic conditions, because there was not equity in jobs, even in the factories. I think as technology was taking hold and factories were changing, blacks were probably the first to be displaced. So I suspect that all of that, and then there was the cultural awareness that was taking place in the ‘60s, the revolutionary change, and I suspect that all had something to do with it, but I couldn’t tell. When people talk about was it a riot or a civil insurrection, for me it was a riot because the places I grew up with, the place I knew, those were the places that were destroyed and the people I knew that were doing it, that wasn’t civil unrest. Now maybe there were socioeconomic conditions that influenced it, but Richard Rudolph was looting. He had no social conscience about what he was doing. It was opportunity to go and steal.
HS: Just to get a little geographical context, Elmhurst and 14th, that’s only a couple blocks away from where the rioting started?
VT: Well, Hazelwood, where I was born, was only about a block away. I would say about six or eight blocks north, yeah. So it was close. Where it started there, on the corner of Clairmount and 12th Street, and if you would look at a map at 12th Street, the stores, the retail really went really north, but it went to some degree south. Elmhurst, Monterey, Richton—Richton would end the retail area. A lot of looting was taking place all along there.
HS: Are there any other things that you witnessed or experienced or did your mom just keep you at home?
VT: No, the 101st Airborne came and they took over my school. They took over the campus. The campus became an armed camp. There were helicopters, there were tanks—there was a tank on my corner. My mom made food for the soldiers that were posted there. My mom was very much a traditionalist, as most of the people in my community were. They frowned upon the rioting. They were very, very hurt, very, very angry, and very supportive of law enforcement and the military coming in to restore order, because this wasn’t what we did, as far as they were concerned. After, that was Sunday, I want to say about maybe Monday or Tuesday when it appeared that things had been quelled, we could leave and we went up to the field and the military was there. It was fascinating to watch. It was troubling to watch. I’m a kid, I’m 12, and I’m looking, my school’s been transformed into a military base complete with helicopters and tanks and soldiers on post and all of that. We were pretty conflicted. I was certainly a young man, I had started to become aware of the movement and the revolutionary concepts, but I was still, I was 12 years old. There was no one talking to one us about these principles or what had happened. It was kind of organic, taking place. So to go up to the school—like we have now Black Lives Matter and the whole police—I didn’t grow up hating the police. I was 12 though, bear this in mind. I wasn’t driving yet. But I didn’t remember my brother having encounters or talking about the police as bad people. That wasn’t part of our concept of the police. I grew up as a kid with the police coming to school to talk to us. Detroit back in the ‘60s had a policeman’s field day and a fireman’s field day. Those were big, big events that kids came from all over came to. Again, I wasn’t racially conscious, but I grew up in a black community, so I just didn’t give white people a whole lot of thought. I had white teachers, but I didn’t look at white people—I do remember though, there were two white guys coming down 14th Street with a shopping cart. They had been looting, and I remember people converging on them. I do remember that.
HS: People from your neighborhood?
VT: Yeah, well, I think they weren’t on my block, but they were from the general neighborhood, and they kind of chased them down. From what I recall it wasn’t pretty. What made them think to come over there is a little beyond me. It was a scene change. I guess things were already in process, but it was just a scene change. The neighborhood never recovered; it was never the same.
HS: How long did you stay in that neighborhood for?
VT: My mom moved from there—I went away to college in ’72, I went in the service in ’75—my mom must have moved from there around ’74-ish or so, because she was there, but when I went into the service, she had moved, so she must have moved in ’74, thereabouts.
HS: Did she move from the neighborhood just because the general deterioration or was there a specific reason?
VT: She was saying that things were changing, and then the landlord where we were living, where she had lived, she said if they went up on the rent she was moving, and he did. She didn’t need that house anymore, either. My brother and I were both gone, so she moved into a smaller apartment at the time. Things were changing. Nothing like what you’re dealing with now, but we weren’t as comfortable with her being there anymore by herself.
HS: That leads me to my next question: How have you seen the city change?
VT: I saw the city die. Detroit died in my estimation. That happened in the ‘80s. It was in a decline. I was gone, I went away to school, I was in the military, I came back. I was in East Lansing for a brief period as a cop myself, but I came back into Detroit. I owned a security company here; I used to do all the security at Joe Louis and Cobo Arena, most of the major events facilities around Detroit. Then I was in corporate America, but I was involved outside of the city and I lived in Southfield, but in the ‘80s, I want to say that Detroit literally died. It was pretty much a ghost town. I watched the disinvestment from this community. Nobody cared. And the people that stayed were two groups: the people who couldn’t escape and the people that lived off the people that couldn’t escape. Then, I want to say here in the last ten years, there’s been people that have had a vision. This is a lot of good property, this is an amazing place, so there’ve been people that have moved back in and taken advantage of the opportunities that exist here. I don’t personally think that’s a bad thing. I understand the sentiments of people who say gentrification and all of those things, and I don’t necessarily disagree. However, I think of the challenges that we have to be honest about—I was talking with some friends of mine about properties that we have seen—many of us could have bought some of those properties. You know, office space or retail properties or whatever, but we don’t have the wherewithal to restore them. That’s because of inequities in the system, because of inequities in finance and things of that nature. We don’t have wealth in the black community. So for people that would argue that you do, I would argue that no, you don’t. That’s historical, and that has been as a result of a whole host of—and I’m not the guy to scream “racism,” but I’m a historical freak, and that has everything to do with race in this country, and a white-male-centric perspective, and the establishment of a system that that’s what it has supported. It has denied certain other groups opportunities, breeding subsequent cultures that have not been able to function as well. And when there have been efforts for people to try and do certain things, there’ve been systems in place that denied those, so hopefully now we’re starting to look at things, but it’s going to take quite a bit to right that ship. You’re talking about hundreds of years of practice, of mentality, of ideology that are subsequently difficult to dismantle. It’s not a simple fix. I see great things for Detroit. I think that there are tremendous opportunities here. I see great things happening here. We’re twenty years out, I think. I think that there’s somethings that are going to be remarkable over the next five years, ten years, but I think we’re twenty years out. We’re in a scene change now in the nation, and this nation is going to have to come to grips with some things, and unfortunately, I think, you have people that are exacerbating age-old problems as opposed to trying to resolve them. It’s sad, but the thing that I think is good about it—because I have friends from all walks—I’ve been fascinated on social media to see some of my friends, and sometimes it’s like, oh my god, I never knew that you thought like that. And I think to some degree, some people are dismayed themselves, they didn’t know. As long as everything is kind of okay and it’s kind of comfortable, and what grandma and them were saying, that little racist stuff, it’s not me, I don’t really believe that, until it gets laid out in your lap and yeah, you do, because that’s what you grew up with. So subsequently, I think we, I always equate it to having a sore, a cut. First you got the wound, then you got the scab, and it’s got to heal. At least we got the cut now, it’s kind of scabbing, and it’s not pleasant, but I think ultimately, at the end of the day, my grandchildren will be benefitting from the pains that we’re experiencing, that we needed to do a long time ago. It just hasn’t been necessary, I guess.
HS: So you said that you saw the city die. In your opinion, what do you think killed the city?
VT: Disinvestment. I think that the auto industry was struggling already, technology was changing, this was the blackest city in America, and nobody gave a damn. There was no effort here, but you know, it wasn’t just here. I worked for America Financial in Wooster, Massachusetts. I saw something similar there. My ex-wife is from New York. Her family was like around Brooklyn. The textile industry—technology is, I think, the beast that nobody anticipated. What technology would do, and the speed that technology was able to eliminate the need for manpower has hbeen remarkable. I think no one will step up and say—like, when people like these modern politicians, “Oh, the jobs have been shipped over—” No, not true. Not true. Some of that is true to some degree, but the reality of it is that you have technology—first off, they create things now that once required twenty-seven parts requires one. And then they create something to create that part! Those are twenty-seven jobs that get eliminated. So you didn’t have, what you had not had, and I think this is a problem with our system of government, because you have elected officials and they have to pander to their constituents. They’re not necessarily the brightest bulbs themselves, but secondly, they’re going to keep telling the constituency something that’s just not true. You can’t get that job anymore putting that widget in there. That’s never, ever coming back because that widget doesn’t exist. Those shops that are talked about up around my neighborhood, those little shops that were rivet-making shops, they don’t need that. Those guys had good jobs, and they didn’t need a car. That’s not coming back, so you don’t have decent politicians that will tell you the truth. That’s never coming back! We’ve got to rewire our mindset, and that is a large part of the problem. This was a laborer’s town, this was a union town. Go down and drive around the teamster’s complex. I remember in the early ‘80s, that place would be packed. It’s a ghost town. Go down to UAW—ghost town. Because you don’t have that membership anymore. When I grew up, and I was talking about the schools having after-school programs that were for adults as well as kids, that’s because you had a thriving tax base. You had two million people here, working. They’re paying taxes that they can contribute to after-school programs. The schools are vibrant and all of that. You’re dealing with a shell of that. So I think, again, it goes back to the disinvestment in the community, and I get it. But you also have decentralization. You have conglomerates. I grew up in the music business, too. My uncle was the Temptations’ and the Supremes’ first manager, so I grew up in the Motown family. I was involved in the music business in the ‘80s. When I was involved in the music business, radio stations here were locally owned. Well, they got bought out by multi-national corporations. Those companies that were locally owned here were very attuned to what was going on in this community, the type of music that would be played in this community. These multi-national corporations took over, and they don’t care what our kids here. They couldn’t care less. “Hey, that’s kind of popular, play it.” One of the first things they did was fire all the DJs, because those were radio personalities. Martha Jean McQueen, she was the pulse of Detroit. She told women what to do on Fridays. She’s gone, and they did not replace her, so there is no community conscience coming from the radio. All those little things are the fabric of the community. The churches—the churches have become big business. They’re not social conscience, I don’t care what they say. They are not. They are businesses. I have a friend that went into—she’s a minister. Everybody in the church is a minister now. She was telling me that she was doing a women’s program. Under the Bush Administration, there was no separation of church and state. The Bush Administration started as opposed to you having grassroots organizations that the government would make grants to, the churches are getting that money. Then I said to her, “Do you get paid?” “No.” “Where does the money go?” “To the church coffers.” It’s going to the church? Pastor drives a Bentley! Something is wrong with this picture! The pastor that was at New Mt. Zion that was across the street from me, I wouldn’t have known him if he spit on me. He was not a celebrity. He was a pastor. He didn’t drive a big, beautiful car and he wasn’t carried out on a chariot or something. These are the things, but these are social phenomena. When I say that the city died, if you study history, it’s the same as Rome died or any major, you know. Lack of social conscience, lack of leadership, government interference, perhaps because there’s a need to keep people quelled, perhaps. I don’t know. All of those things, I don’t too much get into, but if you go back and trace the history, it makes perfect sense. If you wanted to create a monstrosity, what happened to Detroit in the ‘70s and ‘80s would be the perfect experiment. If I wanted to create a mutated society, do what you did here. Remove all the stores, remove all the economic opportunity, remove all of the everything, disinvest, and leave people to fend for themselves. What do you expect to get? You create a monster. You create a being that learns to survive. It ain’t going nowhere. The scary part is when people have to fend for themselves and are continuously being preyed upon, they start to develop a different mentality. Once there’s no more carcass on the bone here, what do you think they’re going to do? They’re mobile. Also, it impacts the mentality of people beyond that community. You know, I work with kids, I work with kids in communities from all over, and then people are freaked out in Warren or Sterling Heights when their kids are behaving the same way. Well, what do you think they’re going to do? What do you think they’re watching, “Leave it to Beaver?” They watch BET. They see the social phenomena, this music, this technology again, and it’s pervasive. Subsequently, it changes everything. I think that that disinvestment was the great sin. Racism was the other great sin. You had a lot of hostility on both sides, so one side is saying, “Y’all did this,” and the other side is saying, “Y’all did this,” and the truth is somewhere in the middle. There are greater sins on one side than the other. We just have not worked to heal our issues. I think that’s kind of where we’re heading, I’m hoping.
HS: Final question: What would your advice be for future generations?
VT: Get to know people. Really, conscientiously get to know people, understand people. Have some empathy. That’s been one of the greatest challenges, because as I tell people, the conversation of race is not easy. It’s not pleasant. But it’s necessary. I don’t have to agree with you, but I need to understand your perspective, and I need to respect you. I need you to understand me and respect me and hear what I have to say. I had a friend recently tell me, a white friend—I posted something on Facebook, and she basically said, “Well that’s invalid.” You don’t get to invalidate my opinion! Who told you you could do that? And that is far too prevalent. You can’t invalidate—it’s like me invalidating a position of yours because you’re a female. As a male, I cannot. I have no right, but conceptually, I need you to help me understand, and there’s some things I’m never going to understand, but I have to yield to you in some things, and then I need you to respectfully yield to me when I say as a man, I don’t get that. I’m not understanding. There is where we agree to disagree. Okay, I got you, let’s leave that alone, now. We got it out, let’s move on. We haven’t been willing to do that. We’re so busy telling someone else they’re wrong, and I’m right. The truth is probably in the middle, as in most things.
HS: That’s great advice. Is there anything else you wanted to add?
VT: Nope. I appreciate the opportunity.
HS: Well, thank you for coming in.
JW: Good Morning. Today is August 23, 2016. My name is Julia Westblade. I am here in Detroit, MI with the Detroit Historical Society’s 1967 Project. Can you tell me your name?
RN: My name is Ronald Navickas.
JW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. Can you tell me where and when you were born?
RN: I was born November 3, 1936 in Pontiac, MI.
JW: Did you grow up in Pontiac?
RN: No, I did not. My family moved from Pontiac, actually from Michigan to the state of Maryland when I was very little. We spent probably the first four or five years of my life in Maryland and then at the beginning of the World War II we moved back to Michigan to Pontiac and then in 1942, I believe it was, we moved to Highland Park, MI where I attended the schools and lived until I went into the service in 1954.
JW: What brought your family back at World War II?
RN: I think it was monies. Due to the fact that we were living on a farm in Maryland and when push came to shove the demand for workers was paramount here in the area. So my mother worked out at Willow Run. She was a line inspector when they were building the B-24s. My dad was a draftsman for Lincoln at that time and living in Pontiac, she had to commute every day from Pontiac to Willow Run and my dad rode the train from Pontiac to Detroit to his job.
JW: Did your mom continue to work after the war ended?
RN: Yes she did. My mother and father divorced when I was ten years old. We were living in Highland Park at that time. She continued working. She worked for Burroughs – at that time it was Burroughs Adding Machine Company. I have no idea what my father was. I think he was working for Fischer Body but I’m not sure at that time but we had nothing in common and he had departed and end of story as far as he was concerned.
JW: What was your neighborhood like growing up in Highland Park?
RN: Very diversified. A lot of different ethnic groups, in fact, I still meet with some of the guys I went to high school and grade school with even to this day. We had a very unique city. It was independent of Detroit even though it was surrounded by Detroit we had our own water supply, our own fire, our own police. We had two hospitals, our own educational system and it was the best of both worlds living there at that time.
JW: Did you primarily, when you were growing up, did you primarily stay in your neighborhood or did you explore around the city?
RN: Well, we could explore because we had a transit system at that time, the DSR, where we could jump on a streetcar, go downtown. We did a lot of walking in Highland Park. Everybody basically knew everybody. It was a situation where we were a little enclave very much – I would say not cloistered but we were a very proud little city.
JW: So you primarily stayed in Highland Park but did you go explore with the bigger city of Detroit at all?
RN: We did. Sunday back in those days was a typical Sunday drive. We would get in a car and we would of course drive over to Belle Isle and we would have to do the routine of going across the boulevard, getting to the bridge, and going under the tunnel and having to honk the horn. That was traditional. And then of course getting out and walking around Belle Isle and seeing what was and what wasn’t. It was always families that were out at that time, something that you don’t see that much of anymore.
JW: What were your impressions of the city at that time in the 50s and early 60s?
RN: I thought it was a box of gems to be discovered. It had anything and everything that would boggle your mind. Things today that we look back and we laugh at but, I mean I remember the huge stove down on Jefferson as you went going to Belle Isle and I was always amazed by that because I could never figure out who would stand there and cook on it. Going up the State Fairgrounds, you used to have car races there years ago and so many different aspects of the city that were just beautiful to go look at.
JW: Then you said you entered the service in what year?
RN: I went into the regulars in 1954, I was originally in the reserves. I was stationed out at Selfridge. I was an air policeman out there at 17 years old. Still wet behind the ears but I went into the regulars in 1954. Left Detroit. Went to San Antonio, TX. Did four years and was a nuclear and thermonuclear weapons mechanic when I was in the Air Force. Came back out of the service in 1958 and couldn’t find a job because nobody needed a hydrogen or atomic bomb repaired so I went to work for an armored car outfit and they were located on Seldon between Cass and Second. We had started out there as a rookie driver and worked my way up to a messenger were I had my own route and my own vehicle and everything.
JW: Is that where you were working throughout the 60s?
RN: Yes, I started there in 1958. It actually was 3 months after I got out of the service. I left there in 1969 and moved to Florida where I went and married my wife.
JW: Very nice. In the early to mid 60s, did you notice any tension in the city or anything?
RN: Towards the – about 1966 – correct that, I would say 1965, I noticed that there was a lot of stress and of course I think it was created by the Detroit Police Department. At that time they had a STRESS unit and it was looked upon as though it was a special tactics type of outfit who predominantly went after minorities which I didn’t see. Of course I was never involved in it but there was a lot of – I could see ethnic slurs, I could see tension in places especially when I worked in downtown Detroit. I worked all over. I worked from Eastern Market to Western Market. I worked down in the Port Authority and all the wholesale houses for all the produce companies and I could notice that there were attitudes then that were displayed that because more and more evident as time went on but when the civil unrest I’ll put it – it wasn’t a race riot as people want to call it in my opinion, it was an upheaval. We first noticed, it was a Sunday morning, I had finished playing golf at I can’t even remember the name of the golf course now. Anyway, Glen Oaks, I believe it was at 13 Mile and Orchard Lake Road, we were coming in off the golf course and noticed a huge, huge fire and at that time we went in to actually have a drink after our round of golf and they had the television on and we saw what was going on. I immediately left there and went home to get my family. Low and behold, one of my golf partners was my wife’s uncle and what I ended up doing was taking my family from Highland Park to Northwest Detroit to get them out in what I thought was a safe area. As I drove back into Highland Park, I could see madness. People breaking windows, just looting and I didn’t care what store it was. They were just grabbing anything and everything. I got my family out to my friend’s house. I went back to the house and it was all hell broke loose. I was in the house and I could feel the building, my house start to shake, it was rumbling and then I realized it was tanks heading from one of the armories down Hamilton through Highland Park and going down the Davidson and about a half hour or so afterwards, I heard the gunfire, the 50 caliber open up and that in itself was a very, very sobering moment. I stayed at the house. I could hear gunfire. Monday morning I got up and went to go to work and in the process I was driving down Hamilton in Highland Park. I was approaching Davidson and I saw an individual standing out in the middle of the street, armed and come to find out it was either a paratrooper from the 101st or the 82nd Airborne who was questioning me where I was headed. I was in full uniform and I had my sidearm on, my weapon, and I had another weapon in the vehicle to take with me. And in the course of it, he actually warned me not to go in which I totally appreciated. And then I noticed there was a sandbags off to one side and they had a 30 caliber machine gun trained on me and that sort of made my mind up. I wasn’t going to go into town. I turned around, came back, called into the office. I told them what had just transpired and come to find out all of the armored cars that we had with our company had been not commandeered but had been requested and taken over by the Detroit Police Department and the rest of the State Police, they were using them to transport people from point A to point B for safety reasons. When I finally did make it back into work, it was almost total devastation. Places that you would never feel that would be touched by any of this were gutted. Going past tall apartment buildings and windows smashed out and curtains flapping in the air. It looked like a bombed out city and there was still sporadic gunfire. In fact the Saturday after I was making a stop. My driver had gotten out to get the deposits from the company and as he came back out, he needed some other bags or whatever, I can’t remember, he went back inside and as I was sitting there doing some paperwork, I felt the truck rock and I thought he was back to drop off more money and there was no one there and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Did it I think two more times and finally he came back out. I opened the door and I asked him had you been out knocking on the door. He said no, I was inside. Come to find out we had taken three shots to the side of the armored car which came from a burned out building and we had no idea. We couldn’t hear the reports from the rifle because they were firing from inside. It was – even that, almost a week later, there was still chaotic conditions. There were still squads of police going after idiotic snipers. It was something that no matter who relates it, it’s unbelievable.
JW: You said you took your family to a friend who lived out of the danger zone, why did you then come back? Why didn’t you stay with your family?
RN: I think it was a little bit of, I don’t think it was false bravado, but I think it was a little bit of I don’t want anybody messing with our house. Because I was allowed, and legally so, to carry a weapon, I figured that I could protect the house. I knew almost every police officer on the force in Highland Park. I had three or four of them that were very, very close friends of mine and I figured if push came to shove, I could give one of them a call if something happened. Of course, that was the days with no such thing as a cell phone and you needed a landline and if I needed help, I could be there rather than just leave it open to somebody looting it. But I guess it was just, I wanted to protect the property.
JW: So did you stay alone in the house for the rest of the week?
RN: Yes, I stayed – I went and I picked up the family, I think it was about three days later I picked them up. Brought them back and I was totally, totally blown away by what we witnessed on our ride back from the Northwest side of Detroit to Highland Park. It was one stop that we used to have that our company used to service was Star Furniture which was on Livernois just south of Puritan and it was now just a smoldering hulk. There were so many things that you wouldn’t believe. Safes that we had in stores that had been melted right down to the concrete. The only thing left was the capsule that contained the monies. There was just things that I don’t even know how to describe some of it. I won’t say it was horrific or horrendous but it was unbelievable.
JW: As you were driving out to pick up your family, how far out did the damage go out?
RN: When I went to pick them up, I would say from where we lived, at that time we lived on a little one block street called Kirwood, it was between Pilgrim and Puritan, one block west of Hamilton. To drive out Puritan, I would say, if I went across Livernois to going toward Schaffer, there were signs of looting out about that far. I don’t know anything that transpired other than that area or from me going in town because I made no attempt to go anywhere else. I do know that the curfew was on. People were having, if you needed gas you had to get outside the city to buy gas. You couldn’t buy gas in Highland Park, you couldn’t buy gas in Hamtramck. You had to go north of 8 Mile because the idiot fringe was using it to make Molotov Cocktails so they figured they would restrict the flow. Well, where are you going and where are you going to get it. As far as any type of incendiary makeup fuels and oils and whatever, but as far as the devastation that I saw, I would say it would be to Puritan up toward Shaffer and that was it in that area, but heading into town, south of Highland Park, I never saw anything happen in the city of Highland Park.
JW: Okay,
RN: Which to me was a compliment to all of the people, all of the residents, but once I crossed from Highland Park into Detroit, it was a different world, totally.
JW: Did the Highland Park police stay in Highland Park or did they go out into the city and help there?
RN: They basically were protecting in the city, I don’t know if a few of them were handed off to other agencies. My buddies all stayed in Highland Park. My one brother-in-law had just graduated the day before from the Detroit Police Academy when this started and it was unbelievable. He ended up going to Vietnam and he said it was almost the same way when he saw what was happening here in the city back during the riots. Or I shouldn’t say he went to Vietnam. He had been to Vietnam and had come back and said it was just as chaotic here as it was there. Unbelievable.
JW: So then you said you stayed in the area until 1969?
RN: Yes.
JW: So why did you move?
RN: Number of reasons. The situation that took place created a carrying a gun. I almost killed a person.
JW: We can stop for a minute if you would like.
[End of Track 1 00:21:51]
[Start of Track 2]
RN: I had been making a stop and in the course of I had ten thousand dollars on me and an inebriated person who was joking at the time created a scene and in the process I was forced to draw my weapon and I found out at that particular moment that the gun had become mightier than me. I decided at that time that a change of venue would be best. Thank God it happened because I went into partnership with a friend of mine. We decided to go into business. We ended up – he was a Detroit Cop who had had enough, too, and we both moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida where I met my wife. We got married, lived down there, moved back here it was three years later, wasn’t it? Have resided in Michigan ever since.
JW: When you came back did you move back to Highland Park?
RN: No, Highland Park was on the demise then. People had used the terminology “White Flight” for reasons that I will never know. No, my wife and I moved back to Detroit. We hadn’t two nickels to rub together at the time so we moved back to 6 Mile and actually Seymour and Gratiot Detroit’s northeast side and we lived there for a period of time and then we moved out to Sterling Heights. Lived out there for 25 years in our house and we now reside in Shelby Township.
JW: How did you find the city when you came back?
RN: Changed. Drastically changed. Polarized. I see a city even today that is polarized but to me it’s just my opinion, I see a city that is following in footstep with our country. I don’t understand it but for reasons that certain factions have, it’s divide and conquer right now as far as I can see. I see a city that is building. I see a city that is predominantly putting a lot of rouge and lipstick on but I don’t see any substance. I see a town that right now has looking here, I can look across at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a place I used to go to when I was a kid in grade school, loved it. Still do. And my wife and I used to go for the Wassail Dinners years ago and now we hardly even come into the city and not for fear but there’s really nothing here that we would want to become part of anymore. And we’re members of the Detroit Zoological Society. We used to volunteer there. So many different things that we used to be a part of in this city and now sadly to say, we just don’t want to be a part of it and we feel in the past there was some commonality to it. I would go to ball games all the time. I would be at Olympia all the time. When I was a kid I was hung up on sports. Now I don’t even want to partake in any of it and it’s because of, I find, attitudes that – and it’s always using the same terminology. “White Flight.” It’s “You people did this and you people did that.” I don’t know why. I can’t figure it out and nobody can explain it to me.
JW: What do you think would need change in the city to change that view?
RN: People’s attitudes towards each other. I see there is so much I would say individualness if there is such a word. I see people today who think more of themselves than they do of the whole. I see more selfishness. I mean, think when you sit back and look at the city of Detroit, 40s and 50s when I was grade school and high school, it was nothing to jump on a streetcar and go from here to there. To go to amusement parts, we had so many of them around the area. Today, I mean, they reopened up Belle Isle and it turned into a beautiful park. Prior to that, if you drove over to Belle Isle, you had to be careful where you drove because of the broken glass. It was just the attitudes and we some that is still there. There’s a lot of beauty in this town. Beautiful stuff, but you only see about four different factions that are benefitting from it. Why do we need another hockey arena? We had one that was torn down, this one of course is on its last legs so we’re building another one. We’re going to have a soccer arena in town. Not we. Detroit’s going to have. And if you get a chance and just a plug for the, what is it? United States Baseball League out in Utica. Grassroots place, but people feel comfortable. People feel safe there. And to cross 8 Mile Road, I don’t know. I have no idea just what my own personal thoughts are about trying to create, it wouldn’t be a Utopian situation because you’re going to always have people who begrudge others something but just the decency towards each other would be appreciated.
JW: So do you have any wisdom for the city of Detroit?
RN: Yeah, don’t relive the past. Right now all I can say is that I enjoyed my time when I was here working here. I enjoyed my time visiting and seeing all the jewels that were on display for the city and for the people of the city. And now I just see, I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m not that knowledgeable in the English language, I’ll put it that way.
JW: Is there anything else you’d like to add or any other memories you have?
RN: Oh, memories? Geeze. I could start singing the song. No, I just, I do appreciate what you’re doing here because there’s so much of that year that should be remembered. Not for the tragedy that took place but things that took place with people actually coming together to help each other during that time. Everybody hears about the Algiers Motel incident. Everybody hears about so much negativity and there was a lot of people who bent over backwards, like in our neighborhood in Highland Park. The street I lived on, we had a diverse neighborhood. People, black, white, pink, purple, plaid. It was every group you could think of. And we all liked each other and even after the riot, or the civil unrest, let me correct that, even after that, we still liked each other. It wasn’t a situation where somebody held a grudge against you because you were of a different color. They liked you for who you were. Now that seems to have changed. If you’re of a certain color, you’re frowned upon. You are thought less of and I don’t think that’s right.
JW: Why do you call it a civil unrest rather than a riot?
RN: Well, I would say it’s a civil unrest of the simple reason that it was basically the whole city. It ignited so fast and spread so fast, I mean, when you say a riot, a riot had to me, my definition of a riot is something that happened in one locality. This was throughout the city. There were people who were just aching to get involved. I had stocks that I didn’t even recognize. I had about three or four places I had to go on Trumbull and we had no idea what was left, what customers we still had with the company. And I would have to call in to my office if a specific customer wasn’t open. Well, the day that I went out, that Saturday after the unrest, the reason, I was on the two-way radio and I was on Trumbull where I must have lost it was six customers in a row. And it wasn’t because they were closed; it was because they were no longer there. The buildings were torched, they were gone. Burned to the ground. They were still removing bodies from the basements of some of these stores where people had been looting and got trapped inside and it was something like I say. It was from here to there. It was a situation you had to experience. You had to sit there and say to yourself and say I can’t believe human beings would do this to each other and for what? And a lot of hate. A lot of hate came out of it but it was everybody. It wasn’t just one specific ethnic group. People shot for looting, I mean, it’s just. I told my wife, I still remember going into one store that was a customer, in fact, it was just around the corner from here. It was over on Third near Seldon and when I pulled up to make the pickup I noticed that the front plate glass window had been smashed out. It was boarded up. The brothers who owned the inner city market that serviced the area were being brought up on murder charges because the people who had come through, had broken the window out, jumped through the window and when they jumped through the window, the brothers were waiting inside with shotguns and blew them back out onto Third. Because of the attitude at that time, because they were protecting their property, the city didn’t see it that way. Or somebody didn’t see it that way and they were charged with murder. I’d have no idea what took place afterwards if they were found not guilty or whatever but it was a time that the city after all these years is still trying to heal. Hopefully it will.
JW: Alright, well, thank you so much for coming in to share your story.
RN: I appreciate it.
GS: Hello, today is July 15, 2016. My name is Giancarlo Stefanutti. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project and we are in Detroit, Michigan and I am sitting with Gerald Charbenneau. Thank you for sitting down with me today. Where were you born?
GC: I was born in Marshall, Minnesota in 1941.
GS: Okay. When did you move to Detroit.
GC: Oh, it was in 1966.
GS: Oh, okay.
GC: I grew up. I moved from Marshall to Oregon.
GS: Gotcha.
GC: Portland, Oregon. My dad worked in the shipyards.
GS: When did you move to Oregon?
GC: 1944.
GS: What was it like growing up in Oregon?
GC: It was pretty cool but I come from a working class family. My mother and father didn’t’ finish the sixth grade. My dad was a welder and my mother was an egg handler. I grew pretty much in public housing and then we finally bought a home when I was a freshman in high school or something like that. And even though I didn’t have any strong consciousness about my social class, it wasn’t a big issue, looking back I sort of see it as it is. I grew up there. I went to high school there. I decided I was an athlete; I played baseball and basketball varsity team. I was a good athlete. Pretty normal – I got voted to be the most typical of my senior class which ticked me off because I hated that idea but I got voted it. I wanted to be the, what did they call it, the person that was most witty but didn’t get it. My best friend got that and it ticked me off.
So anyway I graduated from high school and then I decided that I worked for a year to get some money and then I decided to go to college. I went to Portland State University and I majored in Political Science and minored in History and I graduated from there in 1964 and then I joined the Peace Corps. I went from Portland State to the Peace Corps. That summer I graduated in June and I went into the Peace Corps in August or September or something like that. I was sent to Columbia, South America. I was there 22 months. I had a three month training in LA and then we went on. From there I went on to Columbia and then I was there for 22 months and I worked as a – we had a program of organizing co-ops, cooperatives in Columbia so there were 38, 39 of us that went down and we went to different sites in Columbia so I was there for 22 months organizing consumer co-ops, marketing co-ops and things like that.
GS: That’s awesome. Just thinking about your community in Oregon, was it a very racially integrated community?
GC: No. No. un-uh. It was predominantly almost 99% white. And then the high school I went to was about the same. Clackamas High School is where I graduated from so there was hardly any diversity except for social class and gender, of course, but that was about it. The first time I encountered it, I used to read about things and I knew about African Americans but they were like in North Portland. I lived in a suburb of North Portland on the south side. I knew that there was a group that lived in – I had no awareness until I got into university but then I didn’t – I used to walk down the street. Portland State is right downtown like Wayne State so I would park and I’d walk down the main streets of Portland to get to Portland State and I would run into – they were doing urban renewal and I was one of those guys that would stand there and “This is great, this is wonderful.” It was exciting. And then I got involved with Mock United Nations and there were a lot of Africans in the program at Portland State University so I hung out with them a lot my junior and senior year. Probably the biggest thing that happened to me was to listen, to go see Martin Luther King, Jr. and listen to a speech by him which I found very inspiring and very motivating, got me going. But then I went into the Peace Corps because I was really into the idea that John F. Kennedy’s “Don’t ask what your country can do for you” bit. “Ask what you can do for your country” so I went ahead on that one. Some of my friends went to the South and Civil Rights but I went into the Peace Corps. Those couple guys went down there. So that was my first experience until I actually – well not really, in the Peace Corps I got transferred to a state or they call it a province in Columbia. When I got off the plane, I realized it was like 95% black so I spend twelve months in this city that was predominantly – and I worked primarily with black Columbians and then I realized that they were brought over about the same time to mine the mines for the Spanish and stuff like that. So that was my first direct contact with the black community.
GS: You said you moved to Detroit in ‘66. This was because of the Peace Corps or?
GC: Yeah, I got out in, I think, May or June of ‘66 and I when I got out I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and I’m the kind of person that just sort of falls into things and someone said “You’d be a good social worker,” and I’m going “What the hell is that?” We never saw one in Clackamas you know, like “What is that?” So I decided to follow through because I found out that there were three social work programs in the country that had a community development program. Community organization and community development and so I applied and Wayne State accepted me and gave me a little stipend and I loved to travel, of course, so I came out here and that was in ‘66. I came out here and moved into my – there was a little place on Alexandrine and Woodward. It’s right in the middle of gentrification right now and that’s where I first lived.
GS: How was that community compared to the community in Portland?
GC: Totally different.
GS: Totally different.
GC: I’ve always described myself as this little hick from Clackamas, Oregon who got dumped into Detroit, Michigan. You know, I got off the train at the depot and life was totally different for me. It was more rural where I grew up sort of semi-suburban world, public housing and things like that. It was just totally different and so I had a huge adjustment trying to get used to Detroit and living here. When I first moved here and fortunately I knew some of the people from the School of Social Work graduate program, they were very nice and found me that place to live and I made friends and little by little I got more adjusted to Detroit ‘cause I had that Peace Corps kind of philosophy where it’s always the same. You live and work in a neighborhood and the Peace Corps was like you don’t go down there and stay in a nice place where all the Gringos live. You go live with people and you try to be a native. “Go native” is a term that was used. That’s how I was here, too. I got involved. The program itself, I was in the community organization sequence of the Social Work graduate school. That was a pretty diverse group of guys and women so that was pretty good. Then I got placed on the John R and Adams down at the Central Methodist Church and I worked as a community organizer in the area of John R. Woodward East they called it. I can give you a history of the Cass Corridor but – I’ve been trying to do some history of that. Then I had a more direct encounter but my background in the Peace Corps really helped me to get involved and negotiate all of that ‘cause I just had the basic respect for all people. I don’t know where that came from so much but I had it so it didn’t make any difference to me. So I lived in that area of Cass Corridor and I worked just a few blocks away and then I was working with grassroots. We used to hang out in barber shops and numbers houses and bars and stuff like that and I was working with community groups and trying to organize tenants in some of those buildings. That was the beginning of gentrification and keep them in their buildings and things like that. We were trying to build a community organization that had enough power to resist that kind of thing. So that was my first contact and then I got very involved in all of that civil rights. I got very involved and marched with Dr. King in Chicago and Nashville and wherever. Washington, D.C. and the peace movement. I was also very active.
GS: So was your community in Detroit, the actual neighborhood, it was more integrated racially than Portland?
GC: Oh yeah. The one down in the Cass Corridor? Yeah, it was but there still was at that time in the late sixties, there were still a lot of white people there but they were mostly elderly and had been there for a long time and they were members of the major churches in the neighborhood. That Catholic Church, St. Patrick’s and Cass Methodist Church and places like that. So it was predominantly white. People who had this idea it wasn’t didn’t realize who was living there, of course. They painting it all like everything down in the inner city.
GS: You moved in ‘66 and you were only there for a year before the riot but could you sense, did you get an impression that there was any social tension within the city?
GC: Oh yeah, with my job, well that was sort of afterwards, I think. I was totally aware of it and very involved in it. In our classrooms we had African American teachers and we were really introduced to all of that kind of stuff and the conflicts that happen. The kind of discrimination and police brutality, all of those issues, we were really aware of it. That’s why I liked the program I was in because they really, really did focus in on that and direct us as social workers into that particular understanding of what’s going on in the city with race relations and things like that. And I used to feel more comfortable down here than I did in the suburbs. I felt safer, I said, well when I got mugged down here I know who’s going it but when I’m out there, I can’t tell if you steal my wallet. They do it more indirectly, like rich people just take your money. That’s aside.
GS: Where were you when you first heard that the riot had broken out?
GC: I had been hired, it was in between my first and second year of the social work graduate school and I had been hired by this organization called The Churches on the East Side for Social Action and they were a group of churches on the near East Side, east of Woodward and the center was like East Grand Boulevard around Lafayette. I don’t know if you know the area but it’s north of Belle Isle. Between Belle Isle and Mack on East Grand Boulevard. They wanted me to run this program, this youth action program that they had put together so they hired me to run it. It was an amazing program. It had about sixteen young people, probably 16 to 18, and it was mixed. It was black and white so it was cool. They had set it up so that these kids, we all lived together in one of these homes on East Grand Boulevard, they rented it for us and they went daily to work in the neighborhood to the churches and ran youth groups and youth activities and things like that. Recreational primarily. So that’s where we were on East Grand Boulevard just a little bit south of Mack Avenue. In between that and Vernor, I think it was in between and that’s where we were when it broke out.
GS: How did you hear about it?
GC: We heard about it through the TV and the radio.
GS: How was everybody reacting?
GC: We were very frightened and as the evening progressed, we were worried about if it was going to come our way and then what would happen and so as time progressed we got more and more frightened and the younger people especially so we all went upstairs to the attic of the building. I don’t know if that was good or bad. We went up there and stayed and we listened and we listened to the radio and we could hear, I remember hearing shots and then we could hear the shots come closer and closer and closer and as that happened we got more and more frightened. And then we would hear yelling and screaming and fire engines and stuff outside and we would look out the windows, primarily down East Grand Boulevard south to Lafayette and see people with grocery carts full of stuff. They were looting stores and stuff like that pushing grocery carts full of stuff up and down the streets. Eventually we went to sleep and then we woke up the next morning to tanks driving down the street right in front of us. That was totally like – totally floored us. All of a sudden these tanks were coming up and down the street and East Grand Boulevard which is a couple miles away from 12th Street in that way. And wow, that was frightening. And so finally we realized it was safe enough to go about our business so we resumed our work and that kind of thing. I never really went – I lived in the Cass Corridor right down the street here but I wasn’t living at home in my apartment. That would have been a little closer with a little more activity but I know that I couldn’t get around so I had to stay. They had the roads blocked off by police and state police and National Guard and US Army and all that stuff when that finally happened.
GS: When the National Guard and everyone else, the Army, came in, did you feel more relieved or were you more concerned?
GC: I was more concerned. I really wasn’t relieved. I really didn’t – at the time I didn’t really believe – I understood the police brutality and the nature of discrimination and things like that that were happening to black people so I wondered, especially brought in all these white people from the suburbs and other state police and the US Army and I’m going like, how are they going to deal with this? Are they going to use violence and really do a harsh way of doing it or are they really going to try to stop it and protect the lives of all of the people? So no, we were more concerned.
GS: Immediately after the riot, could you sense any change in the city apart from the destruction that was had? Any social change?
GC: Interestingly enough, yeah, there was. For example, they really got involved in and around the area where it started on 12th and began to tear down those buildings and started building new homes around in that area and that was primarily in my mind as I recall it where it started. They really wanted to fix up that place pretty quickly and that happened. And then over longer term, we had programs, social programs like New Detroit came into existence at that time right after that and that was a coalition of very, very influential people in Metro Detroit to try to begin to do some things to create social change in Detroit. And that was one of the outcomes of the whole process. My theory on it is that it takes something like that when people in power get threatened and all of a sudden they throw out these crumbs like New Detroit and some of these model cities some of these bigger programs, national programs, local programs, state programs. And so they started emphasizing that and so there’s more interest in it and more resources available and things of that kind. Over time, because I graduated with my Master’s degree and then came back a few months later and got a job as a community organizer down in Detroit. I work at a church and I ended up working with the elderly and got a cooperative building for them and a lot of those things we were doing in that neighborhood, organizing pennies. it was predominantly white still then. We were able to take advantage of some of those programs, state and federal programs and local programs to help do some of our community development projects in the Cass Corridor. It was slightly helpful but my basic insight was that what it takes to make the power structure do something and it took something like what happened to do that, to scare – I say they get threatened so they think better do something.
GS: A lot of people have different words to describe the riots. People say riot but other people say uprising or rebellion. Do you have another word for it that you would call it apart from a riot?
GC: Yes, I refer to it as a rebellion. I’ve always done that and in my teaching all the time we do, the classes sometimes go into things like that and students always use the term riot. I generally just stop and say, okay, I refer to it as a rebellion and explain to them why because it really bothered me. When I was here during the riot and particularly in the midst of it and then a lot of post-riot stuff, I listened – I was very tuned into a lot of black militants and as much as you could, the press, the social media and the press, their narrative was always based on the idea of riot. Well, the militants made me aware that it was much more a rebellion than a riot and there are arguments for that and I always bought into that that there’s a history to it and there’s a discontent that was in the city of Detroit and there was all this oppression that was going on in terms of police brutality. They used to have these squads that were very well known. They’d send around these squads of four and they had a lot of other things like that that would go around and engage black people very viciously and things like that. So that got brought up and then the discrimination, micro discrimination, macro discrimination. So people were really, really angry and so it took a little spark like raiding that blind pig. That’s all it took for it to erupt and so to me, it took on a rebellion and the bottom line is that by calling it a riot, I think you just reinforce the race society that black people are violent and just do things that are self-destructive and this just shows you that they don’t have the ability to pull themselves together. It just reinforces that idea that there’s no meaning to it and it had a lot of meaning for African Americans. The narrative that I found in the press and every place else was pretty much dominated by whites and black militants you had to go a ways. And there were some incidents like the Algiers Motel, I’m sure you’ve heard about that, which reinforce that idea of police brutality. So what do you expect for people that are living under those conditions since slavery. You just get tired. It was a hot night and people were like I’ve had it. BAM. So I think it was more of a rebellion. It always bother me why they referred to it – I thought it just sort of demeaned everything going on in Detroit. That’s my main point when I think about 1967. I was hoping I would be able to tell you that.
GS: Thinking about Detroit in present day, what are your opinions about the city?
GC: Wow, that it’s amazing. I’m totally amazed by – the other day we were down, we went to this over in North End, do you know where that is, because there’s urban farming and some activities there. I don’t know much about that because when I lived here down the street, I was very provincial. So we went over there to some community event and they were presenting some of the activities that they were involved in, urban farming and things like that. I was very – As I was driving in to park there right off of East Grand Boulevard and Oakland Avenue in that area, I couldn’t believe all these white, young people were riding around on their bikes and coming to this. I’m going Wow, that’s pretty amazing. And then when I go downtown, I love the River Walk and the Undercut and we spend a lot of time at the DIA [Detroit Institute of Arts], the Dally in the Alley. Whenever we get a chance, I live way out in the boonies and it’s a pain in the neck. I come down here because there’s nothing going on out there so I see a lot of stuff going on. A lot more, I call it more of “us” down there. White people. And wherever I go I see that as a positive thing and I’m very tuned into gentrification. We study it in sociology a lot and that process and seeing what’s happening in the Cass Corridor, now called Midtown. That’s why I’m trying to do some history of the Cass Corridor because the tossing out all of that history. When I was working down there, there would be these suburbanites that would come down like, Plum Street and they would try to get something going like that, get something happening. They’d put up this restaurants or this other thing and try to get suburban kids down and hang out there Fridays and Saturdays. Two or three of these things happened while I was down there. They didn’t quite catch hold but now it has. I don’t know what the tipping point is; I sort of study that. I always wonder what – North End, to me, is in the early process of gentrification, just beginning. I wonder what the tipping point is going to be, or if it’s going to be like it happened in Cass Corridor because when I was organizing, they were already starting stuff. They were trying to extend the hospital complex, then from the North, Wayne State University was coming down into the Cass Corridor. From the east it was the medical center, from the South was downtown coming up that way and then little by little, we were battling with them. For example, Wayne State was one of the most vicious groups because they would come in and buy a house on Cass Avenue down a little bit south from where their buildings were and then they would renovate it and then kick out the tenants. That was my job, our job was to try to organize them to try to prevent that from happening because they would fix it up and then of course they would raise the rent. At the time, the poor people couldn’t afford it so they were forced out little by little. That’s why we got the co-op; the idea the co-op would be that the people that lived there owned it. So it was the community ownership thing that they would own it and they wouldn’t have these absentee landlords that would just sell them out. But that’s when it started way back then. My daughter lately she’ll, “Dad, I was reading about Midtown. Weren’t you organizing that?” And I’d go, “No, actually, Lisa,” I said, “If I were down there, I’d probably be resisting it.” She goes, “ugh.” But it’s good in many ways. So good in so many ways. It’s not a simple black and white situation. What’s happening is good, the construction and the new things and the buildings and the new people coming down there. The issue for me is what happens to the poor people and what happens with them and how does – when I was at North End at this, it’s called One Mile but there was like – I kept asking them to what extent do you have community involvement and how are local people involved in your program? They introduced me to this woman who ran this local urban farm. It’s a community based urban farm right up the street so I talked with her for a long time. I know that they’re trying to do that with the hockey arena; there’s the big issue about community betterment developing a policy whereby these projects would have to include X amount, 10-20% of the money toward bettering the community and helping the people that live there have affordable housing and stuff like that. It’s a mixed bag but overall it’s a good thing. I just think that in one way they’ve done what they’ve always done: move the problem out. Not solve it, they just move it out to someplace out. I remember that they used to be downtown; there would be a lot of poor, skid row. And then they moved it over to Michigan Avenue. Then they moved up when they wanted to do something to Michigan Avenue they all moved up into the Cass Corridor. Now it’s all moved out again and I don’t have time to come down and study where – I wish I did have the resources and time. My university wants us to teach. It’s a mixed bag. It bothers me though; this is connected to the rebellion issue. Remember the Belle Isle issue? Whether the state should take it over or lease it? The big debate, even liberals like myself and colleagues and stuff were supporting the state to take it over and I was opposed to it. And then I ran into this guy at this conference at Marygrove and he was from New York and Shuman. And he ran the Shuman Center and he made this argument that the liberals are joining in when we support turning Belle Isle over to the state then what we’re saying is reinforcing this idea that black people can’t do it. That’s what worries me is this very basic idea that things keep happening. And now to what extent do local people get involved in gentrification and things like that. Because that idea is so powerful, empowerment of the people themselves. We did that when we did the housing co-op. We made sure, and it took us two years. Demonstrations and pickets to get the major construction companies to include black people in their construction and to have the whole thing run by the local people. That was big battle. That’s still the main issue for me of what’s going on in the city and it just bothers me that it’s overall it’s good what is happening but at the same time it’s not really solving the problem in my opinion. It’s just pushing it aside and moving it down and it’s just going to create more difficulties down the road.
GS: Anything else you’d like to add?
GC: I wanted to give you these two articles for reference. For example, this article having to do with revealing – the title is Revealing the Roots of a Riot. I think the key is that when I was trained in graduate school, you go to the roots of the problem and so that’s what I was attracted to and the black militants were, in my opinion, giving out the roots of it that kind of talks a little bit about it. And then here’s the basic question in this other article and it basically speaks to it. Basically what I’ve been saying probably more coherent. I don’t know. In case you – and that’s sort of what I use to pump my brain and my memory and stuff like that. When I get going, it comes back and it’s like getting on a bicycle.
GS: Okay, well thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
GC: Oh, it was my pleasure.
HS: Hello this is Hannah Sabal. I’m in Detroit, Michigan. The date is August 4th, 2016 and this interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am sitting down with Faye Reese today. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
FR: Thank you.
HS: Can you start by telling me where and when you were born?
FR: My name is Faye Evelyn Reese. I was born January 31st, 1944 in Memphis, Tennessee.
HS: How long did you live in Memphis?
FR: Probably about six weeks.
HS: Ah! Okay. Did your family move to Detroit?
FR: I grew up in Detroit.
HS: Which neighborhood did you grow up in?
FR: Southwest Detroit and the west side of Detroit.
HS: What was your neighborhood like?
FR: Well, when I grew up in southwest Detroit it was just a wonderful place to live. Small houses, people had moved up from the south during the war. I lived in a family situation which people might say now it takes a village to raise a child? I lived in a house with my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents, and two teenage uncles, and I was the first child, first grandchild, the first great-grandchild, so it was a wonderful experience.
HS: Was the neighborhood integrated?
FR: The school was integrated, the neighborhood was not.
HS: Which school was that?
FR: I went to Bollington Elementary, which I considered just a wonderful school.
HS: What high school did you go to?
FR: Central High School.
HS: What did your parents do?
FR: Well, my parents were both very young. My mother worked in a factory, my father worked in a factory.
HS: Did you have any siblings?
FR: No siblings.
HS: So just you.
FR: Just me.
HS: Fast-forward in the 1960s. Did you notice any tension in the city at all?
FR: Not really. I really loved Detroit. I grew up in good neighborhoods, I went to great schools, the teachers were very supportive, my neighborhood was supportive, my parents were supportive. You knew there were places not to go, neighborhoods that you couldn’t live in, but I grew up and went to integrated schools and always had mixed race.
HS: So the events of ’67 took you by surprise?
FR: No.
HS: No?
FR: No, I go back—I’m going to say they did take me by surprise. I was a police officer. But I didn’t see the discontent coming.
HS: So in ’67 you were working as a police officer?
FR: Yes. I joined the Detroit Police Department on December 6th, 1966. I was 22 years old. I had already taught school in Detroit, almost two years. I think the difference is when things happen today, it’s on TV, it’s on every channel. Everybody knows everything. There’s a camera every place. In 1967, communications were not like that. By the time you found out about something, it had already happened. There were very few people out there with cameras taking pictures of it. Even though I was involved, I was not really involved, not knowing the whole situation.
HS: What made you decide to join the police after teaching for a couple years?
FR: It paid more money. And I’m an adventurous kind of person, I guess. I started teaching in Detroit when I was 20. I was a certified teacher. I graduated from high school and college young. I didn’t have very much social experience, but I was a person who was always told, “You can do whatever you want,” so I never really put limits on things that I wanted to do in life.
HS: We’ve heard stories about how it was difficult to be a police officer as a black person. How was it being a police officer as a black female?
FR: I would like to say it was difficult, but it was not really. As I said, I was a person who simply said the qualifications are… and I’ll meet it. When I joined the Detroit Police Department, they had something at that time called the Women’s Division. All policewomen were part of the Women’s Division. We couldn’t be a part of any other portion of the police department. There were about ninety women in the police department. We didn’t wear uniforms at the time, although sometimes I think we were sort of crazy, most of the time we worked alone. When you’re 22….
HS: What were your responsibilities in the Women’s Division?
FR: We basically investigated crimes involving families and children, sex crimes—
HS: Domestic issues?
FR: Domestic issues, yes. Missing persons, missing children.
HS: What was the atmosphere like working for the police in the summer of ’67?
FR: As I said, I couldn’t discern that there were any other growing tensions than any place else. It seemed like a normal day. My friends knew I was a police officer. There wasn’t any, you know, they didn’t think that that was something strange or peculiar. People in the police department cared about me. I was only a police officer for three years, six months, and eighteen days. I’m still friends with policewomen that I haven’t worked with in forty-six years. I learned a lot, and, you know, I can’t say it was a pleasant experience, but it was a learning experience.
HS: Was there a specific precinct that the Women’s Division worked out of?
FR: We normally worked out of several precincts. 1300 Beaubien, the 10th Precinct, and I think—I want to say it was the 6th Precinct, and some others, but for most of the time that I was on the police department, I worked at headquarters, 1300 Beaubien.
HS: All right. Moving then into the events in the summer, specifically, how did you first hear about the events in July?
FR: That was probably one of the strangest experiences I’ve had. I don’t recall what day it was, but I think it was Sunday, and I think that the incidents that had happened happened on Saturday night. It so happened that I was working Saturday night. I was working the midnight ‘til eight shift. If there was a riot going on, even though I was on the street—as I said, communications weren’t—there was no radio—well, there was a radio in the car—but basically that was only dispatch. There was no radio. If you needed to make a call, you had to go to a call box, which was like on a telephone pole. I didn’t know anything about a riot. I had gotten home that morning. It was a nice sunny day, Sunday, I recall. I lived in the area of Davison and Petoskey. I guess it was sometime between eight and nine o’clock in the morning. I wasn’t sleeping. I had worked all night, I was just sitting on the porch. I saw a child—there was a hospital across the street from my house—and I saw a boy walking across the parking lot, Sunday morning, and he was dressed like he was going to church: he had on black pants and a white shirt and a tie, and he was carrying all of these shirts in plastic or cellophane. He was dropping them. I go, Hmm. Stores weren’t open back then on Sundays, so I go, well, that’s strange. What’s going on? Then I saw a car that went by and it had a sofa, a new sofa, in the truck. And again, it wasn’t like today—you couldn’t go to Art Van on a Sunday and buy a new sofa, and it wasn’t like somebody was moving because it looked like a brand new sofa. And I said, “What? What’s going on?” Then I saw another car go by that had some furniture, and at that time, my telephone rang, and my boss said, “You need to come back to work.” And I go, “Well what’s going on?” She said, “I’ll tell you about it when you get here.” That’s how I found out about The Detroit Riot.
HS: When you were driving into work on that Sunday when your boss called you, did you see anything else?
FR: You know, I think I took the freeway, so I didn’t really see—there weren’t a lot of cars on the road. I didn’t see anyone running, I didn’t see any crowds. I drove on down to 1300 Beaubien, parked my car. I still didn’t know anything. There wasn’t anything on the radio in the car about it, and when I got in, then that’s when I got some information that there had been some difficulty at night and they wanted me to go out and help in the 13th Precinct. Of course, I had been to the 13th Precinct, but I had never worked in the Precinct, so I got in my car and drove to the 13th Precinct.
HS: Where is the 13th Precinct?
FR: On Woodward between, I think, Warren and Canfield, Warren and Forest.
HS: So not too far from where we’re at now.
FR: Yeah.
HS: When you got into the station, before they sent you to the 13th Precinct, what was it like in the station? How were the police reacting?
FR: Well, it was kind of crowded and there were people being arrested and there was a lot of “booty” that people had, things that you would have bought at a store or something. Still I really was not sure what was going on. It wasn’t like there were people up and down the street or making noise or whatever. It was kind of eerie. They said, “We’d like you to help register the people we’re bringing in.” So I had a pad or something and I’m writing down names and what they did. Then it’s all sort of, you know, working the rest of the day. I didn’t see any fighting or hitting or people being beat up or anything like that.
HS: Just to clarify, when you were at the 13th Precinct, when they were bringing in people that had been arrested, you were recording their information?
FR: Yeah.
HS: Okay. Was there anything else that you witnessed or experienced during that week?
FR: As I said, you would think that something that has so much interest now would have been something really etched in my mind, but it really is not. It seemed like two or three days where it was very confused. Mostly, as I said, I was a 23-year-old black women, and I remember they said there was a curfew. I got off work, it was like twelve o’clock that night or something, and I had a brand new car. I had a 1966 Pontiac GTO. Beautiful car! And I go, hmmm, now, and I’m living in an area where there’s supposedly a riot going on, so I don’t really want to stop and have to talk to somebody, but yet and still, I don’t want to do anything that might get me stopped, because we didn’t wear uniforms at that time! It wasn’t that far, and I didn’t speed, I didn’t get caught, and I didn’t get pulled over. There was very little traffic. But again, I lived in the area near Russell Woods, and on Dexter was a very nice shopping area. In the next couple of days, I saw those stores looted. I can see smoke coming, and some of the stores that people that I had known, that I had shopped in, were looted, they were set afire. My neighbors were out with their hoses trying to make sure that no one set their homes afire. It was really a very confusing time, and it seemed like instead of so many people rioting, it’s like people went out to see the riot and became the riot. It wasn’t that they were particularly doing anything. They weren’t burning down stores, they were just like, “What’s going on?” So when they went out, then, of course, that’s when the riot was. I remember writing a letter to a friend of mine who was in Germany at the time. I don’t remember what I said, but I was telling her how sad I was that our city had come to this. I was sort of in the middle of this. I could understand people who had issues, but the incident that precipitated this, I really couldn’t see how that went along with having the riot. So many people, especially black business owners who had boutiques and barber shops and beauty shops and that sort of thing, their businesses were damaged, and most of the businesses never came back. That was very sad.
HS: Were you still living with your parents at this point, or were you on your own?
FR: Well, I lived with my mother.
HS: How was she reacting or feeling during this time? Particularly about you going to work during that week.
FR: It’s like mothers. My mother always worried about me being sort of, her only child, but she was a beautician and she—no, she didn’t have her own shop then. Her shop was on Dexter. She was working during this whole time, going to work. I really didn’t see her that much because I was out, and she was working when I came in. I was in for a few hours, took a nap, and went back to work. It was just a very confusing time. I ended up a couple years later leaving the police department, but it really didn’t have anything to do with the riot. It didn’t have anything to do with the police department, either.
HS: Could you tell me why you did leave?
FR: Well, I remember when I joined the police department, there was a policewomen—I won’t say her name—but she said, “I don’t think anyone should have this job more than three years.” I think at that time she had been on the police department for about seventeen years. I left at three years, six months, and eighteen days. The reason was, as I said, when I joined the department, I was not very worldly. I was a person who went to school, I did well in school. I had no siblings. I had never gotten into any sort of difficulty. But the kind of cases that we worked on—family issues—I had a mother who had killed her child and had said that the child was missing and we were out looking for the child. We found out that she had killed him. And I go, you know, I had such harsh feelings about that person, and I said, “That’s not my job. My job is to handle this case.” But I didn’t want to be the kind of person who fell apart. Because that wasn’t going to do me any good, and I didn’t want to be the kind of person who just didn’t care. I have hope for the human race. I believe in people, I believe in this country. I said, I just don’t want to be that person who thinks that everybody is bad. Let me leave while I still have my humanity.
HS: So the cases were just emotionally draining?
FR: Yes.
HS: How long did you continue to live in the city for?
FR: I moved immediately. I left the department in 1970 and moved back to Kalamazoo and became a director of a youth program there for a couple years.
HS: Looking back on the events, would you classify them as a riot? Or would you call it a civil disturbance, uprising, rebellion?
FR: I don’t think—and I’ve read various article where people have called them—and I don’t want to take this lightly because I don’t know how other people felt. I can’t say that people had not been in circumstances where they thought things were so bad that they needed to, you know, take to the streets. That wasn’t my experience, although I grew up in Detroit. My experiences were just different, and it wasn’t because I had any money or anything. I certainly did not, but I just grew up where people believed in me. I loved going to school. I just didn’t seem to have any personal problems. I would consider it a riot, but again, from the individuals that I saw, and the kind of things that I saw, I think it was many people just got caught up in the emotion. They got caught up in the situation. They, again, did not know what was going on so they went out to see, and, again, became immersed in the problem and became part of the problem. Unfortunately, those problems hurt the city. You asked me before, back in the ‘60s, did I notice all of these problems building up? I guess I really didn’t. I was really thinking that things were getting a lot better. After the riots, things did not get better. They continually got worse until a couple years ago when we declared bankruptcy. It went from, when I grew up in Detroit, a system or a city of 2.5 million people, where we lived in neighborhoods, and in your neighborhood you had just everything you needed. You had supermarkets and gas stations and beautiful movie theatres—after ’67, those things slowly went away.
HS: We’re going to expand on that in just a minute, but I have one question that I forgot to ask earlier. When you were at the 13th Precinct taking the information of people who had been arrested, the people that were arrested—what was their makeup?
FR: Racially?
HS: Racially, age, gender.
FR: Racially—gee, I’d like to say I remember a bunch of this, but most of the people seemed to be males, probably in their 20s. They weren’t strange-looking. I wouldn’t even say that they were criminals. Again, they were people who went to see the riot, or they were people who somebody had broken in or they broke in a business and things were there and they grabbed em, I think not even thinking because it wasn’t like they were in cars or trying to get—they took things that they wouldn’t even really need, you know?
HS: It was just opportunity?
FR: It was just there! It was in the moment. A crowd mentality and people in the moment do things that they would not do otherwise. I think, at least in the most part, I think that’s what happened. Afterwards, then, you know, people talked about their grievances and that sort of thing, but as it was going on, I think it was mostly just crowd mentality.
HS: Now expanding on what you were talking about just a little bit ago, how have you seen the city change?
FR: Well, I was not here to witness the change of the city. As I said, I left in 1970. I’ve never lived in the city since then. I returned to this area in 1985.
HS: How was it different?
FR: Again, just the population of the city. I was in the military and I was stationed for quite a period of time in Germany and people used to ask me about Detroit. I would tell them the good memories because I had so many good memories of Detroit. I would say, “Detroit is a city of neighborhoods.” I always felt that as a young person. Now people have trouble with transportation and they can’t get from jobs. I used to say, basically, if you can’t make it in Detroit, you can’t make it. But when I came back to this area, there were people who weren’t making it, and I don’t know all the reasons as to why they weren’t making it. But it was not the city of the ‘50s and the early ‘60s that I grew up in. The school system—I thought I received a wonderful education. When I went away to college I didn’t have any difficulty. When I came back, I became a teacher in the Detroit Public Schools. When I came back in ’85, I went back to teaching, and as a matter of fact, the same school. There was a big difference.
HS: Which school was that?
FR: It was Vanzel Farwell Middle School.
HS: How do you see the city today?
FR: I don’t spend a lot of time in Detroit, but from what I can see, it’s a city that I think is returning. I can’t say it’s returning; I don’t think it will ever be the city it was. At least, especially in the last couple years with all the building, with all the people moving back to Detroit, the waterfront, I think, whoa, this is great. I don’t think maybe in my lifetime that I’ll see it back, but I think it’s a different and a growing city, but it doesn’t appear to me to be treating everyone equally. I’m not sure exactly why that is. I see job fairs, I see places that say, “We’re hiring,” but it seems there are so many people still unemployed, and I don’t know if part of this—I think part of it is the school system, part of it is just our society, and part of it is transportation. The jobs are not where people live, and that’s going back to the old neighborhood. When you were a kid, you get work in your neighborhood, pretty much. But now you’ve got to go out to a shopping center, or you’ve got to go out to a mall, and it does not appear that that’s possible. Taxes are high. Public services certainly are not what they used to be. Automobile insurance—just the cost of automobile insurance. If they can’t afford to ride the bus, they certainly can’t afford to have a car and to have car insurance. I think until some of these issues and the school system—I tell people, you get a lot of young people in, but you won’t get those families, you won’t get the neighborhood back, until you get the school system back. People talk about it, but I don’t see really the emphasis being put on that.
HS: My last question for you is if you had advice for current and future generations of Detroit, what would it be?
FR: I don’t think I’m a person to give advice, but I can only say that you can’t go back, but even though I might have grown up in a Detroit that was not maybe politically correct, I loved the school system. Even as a young child, my teachers allowed me to be myself. They allowed me to be creative. As I said before, I lived in a generational household where everyone told me their story and told me about their history, which was my history. When they say it takes a village to raise a child, it does. I think we’ve gotten too far away from our neighbors and our community, so when you need help, there’s no one there to help you. You’re afraid of your neighbor, instead of rushing to your neighbor for assistance or your neighbor rushing to your aide. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t know those people; I can’t trust them.” I don’t know if we can get that back, but in order for this to be a community, it has to be a community. I think we’re getting further away from that rather than closer.
HS: I think that’s great advice. Is there anything else you wanted to add today?
FR: No. I’d just like to say that, you know, all of us have our stories. I don’t know if I have anything to add to the story of the Detroit Riot of ’67. I can only say that I was there. It’s not like watching it on TV as it is today. The communication at that point—you’re going from memory. We’re talking forty-nine years. But I know that I’ve heard people say things about what happened during the riots of ’67, but they weren’t there. I was there. I don’t know how you are politically correct. I don’t even know what you are supposed to say that happened, but from my point of view, what happened is there were issues. I may not have been aware of what all the issues were. I was living what I thought was a very fulfilling life. I think, again, many people got caught up in the riot who really, if you would have asked them at that time, “Why are you out here?” They might have said, “I’m out here to see what’s going on.” Not realizing that if four thousand people show up to see what’s going on and they’re all trying to crowd forward, this becomes an issue.
HS: Well, we definitely appreciate your perspective and your stories. Thank you so much for coming in.
FR: Thank you.
Then published again, called, "At The Time of The 1967 Detroit Riots", pages 67-68, Passager, Martin Luther King Issue, passagerbooks@ubalt.edu, March, 2008.
Then published again, called, "At The Time of The 1967 Detroit Riots", pages 67-68, Passager, Martin Luther King Issue, passagerbooks@ubalt.edu, March, 2008.