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https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/be582aafcc320293318cc28364111700.JPG
296aa19127ca73e48e35bdece3e84e10
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
A language of the resource
en-us
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/20/2019
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Ann Kraemer
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Ann Kraemer was born in Detroit, Michigan and during the summer of 1967 was a student in the School of Social Work at University of Michigan. Her time spent helping the people of Detroit influenced her decision to continue working with young adult groups and support groups and later working with Coleman Young in the Neighborhood Town Halls.
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
Bree Boettner
Interview Place
The place where the interview was conducted.
Detroit, MI
Date
The date of the interview in MM/DD/YYYY format.
06/18/2016
Interview Length
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00:28:31
Transcriptionist
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Julia Westblade
Transcription Date
The date of the transcription in MM/DD/YYYY format.
07/14/2016
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>BB: This is Bree Boettner with the Detroit Historical Society Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Today is June 18 and we are at the museum and I am sitting down with Ann Kraemer. Thank you, Ann, for sitting down with us today.</p>
<p>AK: I am glad to be here, Bree.</p>
<p>BB: Okay, we’re going to start. Can you please tell me where and when you were born.</p>
<p>AK: I could tell you that. I was born in Detroit, Michigan in July of a long time ago.</p>
<p>BB: You don’t have to put a year, that’s fine. [laughs] “Of a long time ago.” I love it. You were born here in Detroit so your parents lived here. What did your parents do? What were their occupations?</p>
<p>AK: My Dad worked for Internal Revenue Service.</p>
<p>BB: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>AK: And my mom was a homemaker and mother to we five children.</p>
<p>BB: Wow. Older siblings, younger?</p>
<p>AK: Younger. I am the eldest.</p>
<p>BB: You’re the eldest. Fantastic. Where did you live in July 1967?</p>
<p>AK: At 10210 Second Avenue. At the corer or Glen Court a block from Chicago Boulevard, I believe.</p>
<p>BB: What were you doing in 1967?</p>
<p>AK: In 1967, I was a student in the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan. During the summer, from approximately May until August I was assigned to a field work experience at Moore Elementary School on Oakland and Holbrook.</p>
<p>BB: And what did you do in that position?</p>
<p>AK: I worked as a school-community agent in their program.</p>
<p>BB: How old were your siblings? You have four younger siblings; how old were they at that time?</p>
<p>AK: Oh dear.</p>
<p>BB: IF you can’t think of specific ages, roundabout ages is fine.</p>
<p>AK: Like 24, 22 –</p>
<p>BB: Okay. So, older adults.</p>
<p>AK: 19, and 16.</p>
<p>BB: Sounds good, sounds good. What do you remember about Detroit in the 1960s? Before 1967, describe how the city looked and how it felt.</p>
<p>AK: Oh, I liked the city. Yeah. Even when I grew up, I have fond memories of taking the street car down to Hudson’s. Everything revolved around going down to Hudson’s. I loved it.</p>
<p>BB: The toy floor is infamous. I’ve heard stories.</p>
<p>AK: The Christmas one. Oh, it was just unbelievably beautiful. And then as a teenager slash young adult, Detroit was the happening place to be -</p>
<p>BB: [at the same time] I can imagine.</p>
<p>AK: -I truly enjoyed it.</p>
<p>BB: Along with visiting Hudson’s, what other fun activities did you and your siblings do in the city? What occupied your time?</p>
<p>AK: The library. We spent a lot of time at the Detroit Public Libraries. Going to the movies, that kind of thing.</p>
<p>BB: Did you –</p>
<p>AK: And dances. I went to a lot of dances.</p>
<p>BB: Did you feel any racial tensions in your early life and in your 20s?</p>
<p>AK: No, not really. I attended Wayne State before I went to U of M and that was a somewhat diverse campus, so.</p>
<p>BB: So it wasn’t something new for you.</p>
<p>AK: Right, right.</p>
<p>BB: I just wanted to clarify that. What was your community, the area – You grew up on Second Street.</p>
<p>AK: No, I did not grow up on Second. That’s where I was in 1967.</p>
<p>BB: So where did you grow up?</p>
<p>AK: In far Northeast Detroit near Seven Mile and Meringue.</p>
<p>BB: Can you describe your neighborhood and community for us?</p>
<p>AK: It was a kind of a blue-collar neighborhood. All single family homes. The area was predominately Catholic, heavily Italian and Polish.</p>
<p>BB: How would you describe the relationship between your community and the government? So your community and the city of Detroit or were there any tensions of any sort that you saw?</p>
<p>AK: As I grew up? Yeah, a couple of things. With one exception, there was never anyone from the Detroit City Council who lived on the East side. They were all Northwest siders, or lived on the Northwest. And that was always a sore spot. You know, why do we vote but not have any representation. That was one thing. The other thing was that it was not the most welcoming area for African Americans. It was not.</p>
<p>BB: So we’re going to come up to ‘67, how did you first hear about the riots? When they first broke out, how did you hear about them?</p>
<p>AK: I received a phone call because I was working at Moore Elementary School, the school system called the school community agent and she then called – there were two of us assigned to work at the school with her. So they called and they wanted to know what we had heard or had we heard and if so what had we heard. And because both the other student and I lived in the area where the –</p>
<p>BB: Where the riot broke out. And being somebody that was in that area when it broke, how would you classify the event? Some people like to call it a riot, some call in an uprising, others call it a rebellion. How did you perceive the event?</p>
<p>AK: More of a rebellion.</p>
<p>BB: More of a rebellion. Can you tell me some accounts of what happened or what you saw?</p>
<p>AK: Oh yeah.</p>
<p>BB: That’s okay. You can take your time.</p>
<p>AK: We were asked by the school system, I guess it was called School-Community Relations Department - Go into the community surrounding our schools and try to get an estimate of how many homes needed baby formula, any kind of supplies for little ones because the stores in the area had been burned down or looted. And then likewise on the other end of the spectrum, any disabled or elderly person that might need oxygen replacement, anything like that where they could not leave their home to go to another part of town and get it. So with the single exception of July 24, we were, I think at least ten straight days, we were on the streets talking with people, finding what the needs were. And through my wonderful boss and the fabulous principle, trying to make plans to meet the needs, it was good. The school had a very good relationship with the community so we were asked if some of the kids from the community, teens, could be of assistance to us. So they did, they’d come up, “Miss Kraemer, [laughs] we’re taking care of you.” Kind of thing. The kids were absolutely marvelous in reaching out to us. The other thing, oh nuts, I forgot what you had asked. Alright, this is what we did for ten or twelve days because the community was so tight. On a Saturday, I went back to Ann Arbor to spend the night because it really was very hot here. There was lights out every night. The helicopters – I was on the top floor of the apartment building where I rented – the helicopters were right on top of us so when we finally weren’t going to go to work, I went to Ann Arbor. Low and behold, about eight in the morning, didn’t I get a phone call from the Public School Office, the central office of School-Community Relations saying where is your boss? The actual employee. And I said, oh, she went fishing with her husband in Canada. Where is your colleague? The other student from U of M. I forget where she had said she was going. They said, Well, the federal government has declared you a disaster area and Chrysler is coming in with its trucks in an hour or two to bring all sorts of food and supplies. We need you to go over to the school and open it up and round up some kids to help Chrysler unload all of these supplies. So I believe one of the maintenance crew came in as well as me. I worked again with these wonderful teenagers from the area and we unloaded the trucks. I got the school open and we unloaded the trucks.</p>
<p>BB: Wow.</p>
<p>AK: It was something.</p>
<p>BB: Did you see any – there are so may various accounts of 67 but did you see any of the actual uprising? The rioting, the looting. Any memories of actually seeing that or were you more on the front lines of aid?</p>
<p>AK: More on the front lines, however, what I did see. I went out early in that week, the week of the 23. I went out on Oakland surrounded by the teens to see what was going on and what the needs were. The National Guard was driving their tanks down the street and I saw this young guardsman shaking his rifle like this as he went by and then it went off.</p>
<p>BB: Like, by accident?</p>
<p>AK: Yeah. By me. By accident but by me.</p>
<p>BB: Did he hit anybody that you know of?</p>
<p>AK: He hit the building but there was –</p>
<p>BB: Surreal.</p>
<p>AK: Yes, it was quite surreal. And I also remember on the 23, backing up a day. The day that it started. I was taking one of my godchildren to the zoo that day. It was his birthday and I said we’ll go to the zoo and when I came home is when I received the phone call about what’s going on. Well, I then went to church. It was the Sacrament Cathedral and the pastor was a chaplain. An army or a guard chaplain, and he said from the pulpit, This is a very – I’m trying to think of how he put it – a unique experience because I’m here and all around us on Woodward, everything was devastated. And he said, And I will be leaving to go and work as a chaplain to the guard that has been brought in to assist with this. It was those kinds of experiences I had rather than actually watching somebody. I saw some of the loot, don’t get my wrong. Kids would come in and they all of a sudden had shoes and several of our kids were missing and I went down to police headquarters to find out. Gee, the family is not able to locate their son James, can you help? And being Caucasian, and I was carrying a briefcase, they thought I was a lawyer so the police were very kind to me in terms of. They did help me to locate the boys and girls that we could not find. So it was more that kind of thing.</p>
<p>BB: So, just a few more details. Because you did have five younger siblings, were your siblings living in the area at the time?</p>
<p>AK: They were all living in Northeast Detroit. I take that back. One of them was married. One, maybe two were married, but one was living in Roseville.</p>
<p>BB: Do you know of any accounts they may have had in relation to the riots? Did they call you to be like, Oh my goodness, what’s going on? Or anything like that?</p>
<p>AK: Right, my dad was quite upset. He knew exactly where I was living and Second to Twelfth is -</p>
<p>BB: Yeah, very close. Dad was worried, huh.</p>
<p>AK: Right.</p>
<p>BB: That’s good to know. There was, after the event, how did you see the city of Detroit change?</p>
<p>AK: Immediately after the event, there was such a coming together of the community. It just strengthened us. Strengthened it even more so immediately after. Also, shortly thereafter was the development of New Detroit and then some more community based organizations designed for Caucasians to work with Caucasians to understand that we also had a big part in creating the tensions that lead to the rebellion.</p>
<p>BB: How did your position at the school pan out after the event?</p>
<p>AK: That was -</p>
<p>BB: Cause I could imagine that would be an interesting transition.</p>
<p>AK: It really was. A week or two after the event, we were called back to Ann Arbor. There were lots of students placed but most of them were dealing with what most social workers to is therapy. None of them worked and my colleague and I and, like, two others were sitting there and we had worked through it every single day. They gave us As and we said, for what? We did was social workers are supposed to do. We did respond because we really were in the middle of the situation both in our living situation and in our fieldwork.</p>
<p>BB: Some serious experience you got on that resume quite early. [All laugh]</p>
<p>AK: It really changed the whole – people were like, “You were there?” Yeah, we were.</p>
<p>BB: So I have to ask, how did that affect your work after? Because you were a student and you were learning about social work at that time and you were faced with an event that dramatic in the city of Detroit, did it affect how you went forth in your career and how you worked with the community?</p>
<p>AK: I think so. I think I got such a good grounding in what to do through the person I reported to and the principal. I had such a good ground in the community work so that I wound up being hire to do that kind of work in subsequent years.</p>
<p>BB: What was your position afterwards once you graduated?</p>
<p>AK: I worked organizing teen groups. I’m sorry, young adult groups after that and then I worked with a program to organize church people to support poor people through the – friends offer rides. We organize groups of men and women, primarily women, to support poor people involved with the welfare system. So I did that for a number of years.</p>
<p>BB: Fantastic. You’ve got some notes. Anything imperative we need to discuss?</p>
<p>AK: Well eventually I worked with the Neighborhood City Hall. I worked for Coleman Young. I was the manager of the Neighborhood City Hall. </p>
<p>BB: And how what was --</p>
<p>AK: The mini mayor.</p>
<p>BB: Yeah, and what did that entail? What did that work entail?</p>
<p>AK: That entailed working again with the community responding to all of their concerns. Representing the mayor if there was something coming up that he was not able to attend.</p>
<p>BB: Just a few more questions to wrap up. What was the impact of the unrest in July 1967 on you and your family?</p>
<p>AK: I would say, it was challenging for some people in my family.</p>
<p>BB: Do you want to elaborate on that?</p>
<p>AK: I went to my parents’ home one night. Neighbors – in those days you didn’t move 93 times. You bought a house. You stayed there. This was your neighborhood. Everybody’s kids were your kids. What you probably heard as a younger woman is that when you went out, if you did anything wrong, there were three neighbors to tell your mother. It was all the time. I went home, I saw these same people with guns. “Let them come into our neighborhood. I’ll get ‘em.” Kind of thing. That was awful. That was devastating and it was made kind of more devastating and difficult for some members of my family because they knew I didn’t feel that way so I was kind of the oddball. It was a challenging time for everybody for different reasons but you grow through it. And everyone changes appropriately, positively. </p>
<p>BB: Fingers crossed.</p>
<p>AK: No, I mean, they did.</p>
<p>BB: Oh, they did, okay.</p>
<p>AK: Oh yeah, oh yeah.</p>
<p>BB: Good. It was a good change.</p>
<p>AK But it takes time for all of that to happen.</p>
<p>BB: So we talked a little bit about how the city changed but one of the facets of this project is trying to educate the next generation about this topic, right. So, is there a message you’d like to leave for future generations about Detroit before, after, and during 1967 and how they can grow from that information?</p>
<p>AK: One thing is I felt that the field placement that I had was, I was so fortunate to have that because the principal at the school where I had worked had made a decision to have a school that had a bell shaped curve of students. It did not, it was kind of a flat curve and so he set in motion a number of changes in the school that would help the kids learn and become stronger, better educated members of society. And it was working in the school community program by involving the parents of the children and the community around really backed that up. We had so many programs working with that community. And if I could say anything to the next generation, it would be that. It’s most difficult to enter any place without a preconceived notion of what you will experience and what the people there will be like. Once you get through that, if you can get through that, and see that goodness and strength of people, you will be able to help to develop a strong community. Strong communities lead to strong cities and I think that would be the message that I would like to leave. I am not saying that I did not know people who acted inappropriately, people who destroy other people’s property and businesses but I am saying that the goodness and strength of the community far outweighed that. They just couldn’t see it. All you could see was the destruction. The fires and everything. It was awful. A few days ago I went to lunch with a woman who I only knew from one situation from church, period. And something came up about, I don’t know how it came up, “Where did you used to live? Where did you used to go to church? And I said, “Oh well.” And when I said, “In ‘67 I went to the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament,” and she said, “Well I did, too, Where did you live?” I said, “Second.” Well she lived just a few blocks away in Highland Park and she said, “Oh yeah, the blackout, the helicopters, the tanks.” She said, “I could never forget it.” That’s not the kind of message I want to send forward but it is something I will go to my grave remembering.</p>
<p>BB: That’s kind of all the things that I wanted to discuss.</p>
<p>AK: Not.</p>
<p>BB: Not anything you can think of:</p>
<p>AK: Not that I - well, I’ll say one thing and you can decide whether to leave it in or not, but the day I was called in Ann Arbor to come back to Detroit and open up the school I stopped at this one young man’s home because I knew that if I could get him on board, the others – he was like the leader of the group and he’s a big guy. Real big. Well this was early on a Sunday morning when I went knocking on his door and I knocked and knocked and banging and the police came up and they “What are you doing?” They thought I was a prostitute. So I will remember that time, too.</p>
<p>BB: Did you have to turn and be like, I’m just trying to get a muscular guy to do some lifting?</p>
<p>AK: They’d heard everything at that time.</p>
<p>BB: I’m sure they had. Well that’s a fun little snippet. Well, I did give you my contact information so please don’t hesitate if you have any further stories you’d like to add to your oral history, please just email them to us. We’ll definitely add them to your profile and I will end this for us. So thank you so much for sitting down with me.</p>
<p>AK: Thank you. </p>
Original Format
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audio
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
28min 31sec
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Bree Boettner
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Ann Kraemer
Location
The location of the interview
Detroit, MI
Video
A link to the video
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rA1royug0zc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Ann Kraemer, June 18th, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Ann Kraemer discusses her role as a field work student at the School of Social Work for the University of Michigan. Kraemer and her coworkers went through the neighborhoods making sure families, children, and the elderly had the supplies they needed and then organized the distribution of supplies.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
07/19/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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audio.WAV
Language
A language of the resource
en-US
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Oral History
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Ann Arbor
Community Activists
Gun Violence
Michigan National Guard
Moore Elementary School
Volunteers
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https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/a52b7e44e6f25782354903a7f97c0ee7.jpg
8b948fb5f090391e0cdb925f4ea39cd6
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
A language of the resource
en-us
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/20/2019
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Jerome Pikulinski
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Jerome Pikulinski was born May 20, 1955 in Detroit, MI. In 1967 he was a contract training director for the City of Detroit’s War on Poverty. He was living in Dearborn, MI in 1967.
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
Lily Wilson
Noah Levinson
Interview Place
The place where the interview was conducted.
Detroit, MI
Date
The date of the interview in MM/DD/YYYY format.
08/14/2015
Interview Length
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01:00:02
Transcriptionist
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Robert Lazich
Transcription Date
The date of the transcription in MM/DD/YYYY format.
07/03/2016
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p> [INITIALS OF INTERVIEWEE:] JP</p>
<p>[INTIALS OF INTERVIEWER:] LW</p>
<p>[REPEAT INITIALS EACH TIME EACH PERSON SPEAKS]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>LW: Today is August 14, 2015. This is the interview of Jerome Pikulinski by Lily Wilson. We are at the Detroit Historical Museum in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project and the Detroit Historical Society. Jerome, can you start by telling us when and where you were born?</p>
<p>JP: I was born here in Detroit, Michigan in 1938 -- born in a house, not a hospital.</p>
<p>LW: In July of 1967, where were you living, specifically what neighborhood?</p>
<p>JP: I was, at that time, in Livonia, Michigan.</p>
<p>LW: What were you doing for work then?</p>
<p>JP: At that time I was an employee of the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, Wayne State, University of Michigan. I was deployed as a contract training director for the city of Detroit’s War of Poverty. I was based on the Wayne State University campus and developed a core training staff there to later carry out the mission.</p>
<p>LW: What was your day-to-day job like during that time?</p>
<p>JP: Well, I had an all minority staff except for one lady, a white lady. I had to train people to be trainers. I had all the resources of Wayne State University, the various departments, to deal in general semantics, to deal in the perception laboratory, to deal in the video training facility. I had done some work earlier with Michigan Bell Telephone. They had asked us to work with their white staff who were having difficulty training new minority members. I put together a program that changed the perceptions and attitudes of trainers. It gave me some credibility in behavioral terms and on working on this complex problem. We also involved community people in the sensory reactor element. We used to use the term “training up.” It was an opportunity for people in the community to speak to others about what they felt, what they thought what was needed in the way of training and the like.</p>
<p>LW: So how did you go about changing the perceptions of the people you were training to work with minorities?</p>
<p>JP: Well, the first thing we did is have regular meetings with them --- personal, it was more like let’s have lunch, let’s have somebody be a speaker, let’s plan an event. But we had people on campus people who were experts on general semantics. So we played games with them about what do things mean and what are the different meanings of things, how do we give expressions to our feelings, how do our feelings affect how we name things. Then we also had on campus a person who had access to a laboratory where again it is perception. You know this room with the false dimensions and it is the rotating, wobbling figure that shows we are conditioned to perspective since birth. We ran them through all those kinds of things and we were really raising doubts in them about “what do you know?’ We weren’t telling them anything, we were asking them how do you know, can you be sure, how do you feel about what you’re doing. The graduation program, we went into the television facility and we fed them back images of themselves responding to various teaching situations. We got a general recognition on the part of the people that, “my God, we’ve got to look at this differently” and they were looking at it differently. Well, we didn’t have any long term follow up but it was perceived to have been a success.</p>
<p>LW: This would have been white people that you were working with?</p>
<p>JP: Yes. Ladies.</p>
<p>LW: All white women?</p>
<p>JP: All white women.</p>
<p>LW: You were attempting to – what was the end result, what was the end goal of the project?</p>
<p>JP: We wanted them to accept the differences that they were experiencing with the new black candidates things which they had not experienced before with the previous white people they had trained.</p>
<p>LW: What year did you begin that project?</p>
<p>JP: That was done about the spring of ‘66.</p>
<p>LW: From your perspective, what was the biggest challenge between the white and black communities in Detroit right at that time in 1966?</p>
<p>JP: I think Detroit was reacting to the immigration (laughs) migration of so many people from the south who were coming in and the statistics were explosive and phenomenal. There were other problems but this was a new experience for Detroit to have this migration. In the literature today there are many analyses of how migrations affect culture and give rise to conflict.</p>
<p>LW: So you felt that what later happened what happened in July of 1967, do you think that was also –</p>
<p>JP: You know, I was very much surprised and the reason I was surprised --- coming out of Wayne State University and the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations I thought we all had a pretty good handle as to what was going on. I mean, the Community Action Program was in place and we really had guys like Ron Haughton who had negotiated in California under Pat Brown the Cesar Chavez Protests. Here we had in our own community an outstanding leader in terms of racial economic issues and I think we were really surprised. I don’t think we expected that. I will say this, though – these are now only commentaries. One of the things that was of concern as we look back on this was the political decision making with respect to the use of force in conflict resolution, an optimism that somehow this would work itself out and it did not work itself out. It was inflammatory and explosive. That was one part of the picture. The other thing that we learned later is that groups like SLCL, SNCC, Core, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress on Racial Equality. Later, when I was involved in the spring of 1967, there were people who asked me to help them identify which of these groups might be operating in Detroit. This is a problem we have in managing what would ordinarily be very difficult relations with a minority group, whether it’s a black community or a Latino community you add the element of political activists you have an explosive situation. You do not have a rational alternative. You like to believe you could compromise but there isn’t any end state; it’s an ongoing conflict. Those groups have an investment in a staff point of view and a charter point of view in continuing their activities.</p>
<p>LW: Tell me a bit about those groups and your knowledge of them.</p>
<p>JP: Much later I came to understand that but early in the spring to help identify at least one of those groups. I don’t recall which it was because some people went to an organizing meeting of one of these groups and identified their work.</p>
<p>LW: What were they doing?</p>
<p>JP: Well, community meetings were very difficult -- this even goes into ’66 into ’67. There would be public meetings when government officials tried to explain things to people and there were activists who would take the stage and take the microphone. It was very conflict-oriented, so I don’t know what more can be said about this but the tactics that these groups employed were violence – not full force, but they were inclined to use violence.</p>
<p>LW: These were predominantly black or white groups?</p>
<p>JP: No, these were black groups.</p>
<p>LW: So, the Southern Christian Leadership, you said?</p>
<p>JP: Southern Christian Leadership Conference, I think – SCLC.</p>
<p>LW: Student Nonviolent --</p>
<p>JP: Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress on Racial Equality.</p>
<p>LW: Those were actually groups of black people in this area in Detroit who actually did use some form of violence to make their case.</p>
<p>JP: You know, the interesting thing is I think they were promoting this. It’s just like Al-Qaeda. There is a core management group that trains the next cadre to go out and shed blood, so to speak – to engage in conflict. So it’s very hard to say that those groups themselves were exercising violent techniques but they were encouraging it and feeding it. It’s like what we see in Ferguson – In Arlington, Texas we have a problem right now, in fact I’m going to meet our police chief at the end of this month. This black youth problem is very difficult. It’s a sense that youth is hard to deal with and minority youth is even harder to deal with. Where drugs and alcohol and the like come in to play it can be even more complex. We have a situation in Arlington, Texas where we had a guy who must have been under the influence of drugs running into a Buick dealership and jumping on cars, driving his car through a gate, finally driving his car into a dealership. But the people who are going to look at this, they discount all that. “Black Lives are Very Important.” So, no matter what, you never shoot anybody. From the point of view of law enforcement and the like -- just like these trainers, for example. We got a problem that we need to train police officers in psychiatric concepts. That’s one of the things I’m going to talk to the police chief about in Arlington, Texas. I’ve run for office in Arlington many times so that was one of my planks the last time around, which was to train a new special class of police officer. They said, “Well, we have people who are negotiators.” I said, “No, not negotiators. People who understand how a body of energy, a person, translates in anger, aggression, hostility and all these things and how you can possibly diffuse some of that.” The problem of the people who carry out violence is a spectrum. It’s anything from people who are promoting it to people who are likely candidates among which or among whom violence can be encouraged.</p>
<p>LW: Did you feel that groups that were condoning violence were condoning or encouraging violence in the ‘60s, do you think that was a major challenge against the type of work that people like yourself was doing to try to break down some racial barriers? Or what do you think the biggest challenge was if not that?</p>
<p>JP: This really started with the strategies that civil rights groups were using in the South to provoke violence. It’s the whole thing of “I’m innocent. I didn’t do anything. But you came and beat me on the head.” But of you march down a Southern street it’s like yelling “Fire” in a theater. Culturally, these people who organize this … there’s a legend that LBJ suggested to some of these black leaders that he needed something like what was taking place in the South to carry out a civil rights legislative program. It really gets to be hairy.</p>
<p>LW: So, in terms of violent activity, you think that some of that, that the precedent for that was set down South?</p>
<p>JP: I really do. I think that was the staging area for that. Because there were people who fled the South. They brought with them their attitudes and hostility.</p>
<p>LW: I want to go back to the project you worked on back in 1966 in the spring.</p>
<p>JP: We had a staff of about … there were four key trainers and I had 4-8 of these community people. That lent credibility to what we were doing. In race relations you always get this thing of “You don’t know what we’re doing. You’re trying to teach us and tell us what to do. We will teach you.” That’s a “training up” kind of concept. I had this group and I had a house on the Wayne State Campus. We would hold regular meetings and sessions and I would have people that were faculty from Wayne State come over as my resource people. So some of the same sorts of things that we did with the Michigan Bell trainers we tried on this group. We really wanted to get their perceptions as clear and clean as we could possibly do it before they went out. In other words, I was in conflict with a number of people at that point because they said I was irrelevant and I was not really promoting change. I was so much of a technician that what I cared about was training a group of people who could go out and work within the community. I jokingly say this was the establishment counterrevolution program that never really succeeded. This is also the period of Vietnam and enclaves and a lot of social experimentation and thinking about culture and its effect and conflict in war. We exposed these people to all these operations. I was in conflict. I had a white woman, a staff member, several people said she was a well known communist in Russia. This is why I don’t put some of this stuff in my resume. I started out doing some doctorate work at the University of Michigan. They didn’t like me. They told me they didn’t like my association with things I had done – you’re not the type of guy we have in the business school. Maybe that’s another discussion. Anyway…</p>
<p>LW: Sorry to interrupt. The Wayne State faculty, were they black? Were they black faculty that came and contributed?</p>
<p>JP: No, they was only one guy – Leonard was his name – a political science guy. One political science guy was always looking in and offering advice and suggestion. He’s the only minority faculty member. These faculty members were all white.</p>
<p>LW: The people you were training and the community members…?</p>
<p>JP: Were all black.</p>
<p>LW: The workers you said were actually going to train were an all white group, majority white women.</p>
<p>JP: No, I was preparing a core black staff to work with the community action centers and groups out in the community. The curriculum was “Culture of Poverty,” the next one was “Communication and Communication Skills.” We even had a communication specialist who had a philosophy that was really neat. She would persuade people that they were not being changed, they didn’t need to change. Their personalities were fine; you are wonderful. She did a great job of bringing people out as communicators. So in the communications thing, we really tried to build confidant communicators. So if we put messages out into the community these people would do it. Now you have to remember there are people around me who are saying “Hey, we need change. We need action! We need political stuff.” Here I am going, “Now wait a minute. I’m training these people to be in effect change agents.” We didn’t use that concept at the time. But I was in great conflict because I was taken on and said that I was irrelevant and I wasn’t doing my job.</p>
<p>LW: Who was saying that?</p>
<p>JP: Primarily my black communist staff member undermining me. Because it was a real issue. The discussion at that time was what role does structure play in our communication and is it just a matter of process. That was one of the things that she was driving home. Here I am structuring. We need to have more handholding meetings. Those are the kinds of things that explode all over the place. They are much harder to manage and they aren’t well directed or easily directed. So actually I had to put together with the help of some of my staff, my secretary, documentation so that I went before a number of administrators who wanted to hang me but they couldn’t hang me because we were doing the job. They want to knock me out of this chair.</p>
<p>LW: With regard to the way you were training the black staff to go out into the community, what were some of the things you found to be more effective in terms of not necessarily training them, but what were some of the things that they could do once they were trained and going out into the community?</p>
<p>JP: We got this far: before you train in the community, you train the community action staff. We actually had first meetings of community action staff. We were training the war on poverty people to think through the problems that they were confronting. We were creating the next level of people. What’s the culture of poverty? It involves aggression, it involves hostility, it involves despair. So even side-by-side you have some of the most heart wrenching problems in society, some of the most vicious kinds of problems that you have to deal with. We wanted to discuss with the staff people that they were working in this environment of a culture of poverty. These are the things they are dealing with. These are the givens, the things we want to change. We really want to move behavior in the direction of constructive ends. We didn’t get that far. Let me go back to my story. This conflict was so great that I overcame the resistance from administrators and the subversive element on my staff. I beat that. The next thing I couldn’t beat was all this sentiment that “this is irrelevant, that this has nothing to do with solving our problems.” I was the victim of a community tribunal. You wouldn’t believe that this would happen in America. This is the problem with collective bargaining and conflict resolution people. They believe they can negotiate the settlement. We might be heading in the wrong direction but we’ve got peace today. Are you with me on this? People with interest in conflict management what they want to do is get the fire down to controllable levels. They don’t expect that they will ever be able to put the fire out.</p>
<p>LW: So what were you being accused of?</p>
<p>JP: I was irrelevant. I was not addressing the problems that the community felt were important. That’s where that stage of the community people became the spokespeople, not the administrators, not the rational people. </p>
<p>LW: So there was resistance to the method of training black community action staff to go out into the community? There was resistance against that?</p>
<p>JP: Yes, in a structured way. What they really wanted was, let’s have more meetings. Let’s have people discussing things. Well, what the hell are we going to do? We’re going to put people out there who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about? We don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re going to be out there as agents of change? What the hell are we doing? I would not buy that. I said we have to know where we’re going and what we’re doing.</p>
<p>LW: Who in particular was resisting this? You don’t have to name names if you don’t want to. But who was resisting this program? It sounds like there was sort of an overhaul of the program.</p>
<p>JP: Well, I’m going to jump ahead and say that the guy that they chose to replace me was Conrad Mallett. I don’t know if you know Conrad. Conrad was elected to the Michigan Supreme Court at one point. My claim to fame was it was under Mallett’s leadership that things in the training program fell apart, the violence and everything erupted. I had frequently said my claim to fame was “the community never rioted while I was there. They were too busy beating me up.” That’s not intended just to be smart. From a collective bargaining point of view, it is necessary – and I still believe this today, whether you are talk about the white community or the black community – once they have a constructive, sound program they have to stay with it. Even at the price of violence you have to do that. Because if you don’t and you agree to a sham or a shambles, which was what happened in Detroit in terms of conflict resolution, that eventually the whole process just went out of control. Now that’s my editorial.</p>
<p>LW: So you think from your perspective that there was a link between the demise of this community action program and rioting that took place in July 1967?</p>
<p>JP: No, I don’t think the community action program … I was the second to the last white guy to be driven out of that program. The last white guy was a Jewish guy. He was head of a youth program. Finally, the community action program was a totally black program. It seemed that to me the white community, including guys like Mayor Cavanagh, were just like backing off. I’m saying that when you’ve got an explosive situation, you don’t back off. Excuse me. I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve gone through formal sensitivity training, combined faculty, University of Michigan, Michigan State psychiatrists and the like all involved in stripping you down and pulling your plug. On the way to authenticity and the like there are many steps, many masks that people wear. The Community Action Program in a more authoritarian regime, we probably would have gone after the activists and the organizers as they do in Turkey and Syria. We democratically minded people don’t like picking off the disruptive activist group.</p>
<p>LW: So the groups more inclined towards violence like you mentioned …</p>
<p>JP: If you prune the trees the crop will come in a whole lot better. As a person, I really wanted this opportunity to speak because subsequent years I’ve gone through many years reflecting back and I don’t put this in my resume. This is part of one of the most significant life experiences that I had as a man 25, 26 years old. I think I didn’t know what I was getting into. In fact, when I took on this responsibility they called my wife in and they told my wife, the two of us together, “Jerry is in a very dangerous position.”</p>
<p>LW: How long were you working for the Community Action Program?</p>
<p>JP: What’s that?</p>
<p>LW: How long were you working for the program?</p>
<p>JP: It was probably from the time we formulated it, all this took place in a six month period. We moved the operation from the Wayne State University campus over to a community action center on West Grand Boulevard. Now during that time my office was broken into here on campus and all my stuff was gone through. Then we moved to the other location and it was broken into and all the films and any of the graphics and things we were doing there it was all disrupted. So I had two break-ins.</p>
<p>LW: Why do you think there was such resistance and such hostility over what was presumably a positive program to get people employed and to give them resources and tools?</p>
<p>JP: It might have been better if we really had the employment objective. The Community Action Center philosophy was more like returning government to the local level and to the people and hearing the people. That’s why I say the Vietnam policy of creating enclaves where in fact there are communities that are peaceful and orderly. That was too high minded. It might have been better to be training them for jobs, which is where it all went. You know, I’m jumping ahead, from that experience I was appointed Deputy Director in the Michigan Department of Labor by Governor Romney. Then I became Governor Romney’s Manpower Planning Staff Director. I went out and tried some statistical techniques in the Muskegon area and got a lot of recognition for a non-political approach to allocating resources. Milliken came in – I was invited to join the governor’s office. I’m not a politician even though I play with all those guys. I don’t make political decisions. I’ve always been a staff guy. My friends in Texas were looking for a guy to put Nixon’s Manpower Revenue Sharing into Dallas-Fort Worth and I was invited by a Democratic governor to come down to Texas. We did set … we got local elected officials to understand that they were responsible for the employment Manpower development training of people in their areas. I set up centers, just like Community Action Centers but they were employment centers, through North Central Texas. I’ve gone a long way to answering the question. Did we have the right objectives in the Community Action Program, could we have done something better? Yeah, I think we could have. We made a mistake. But we should have pruned the bushes, taken out the bad guys.</p>
<p>LW: The bad guys in this case were…</p>
<p>JP: It’s very hard to get these bad guys in our system.</p>
<p>LW: Who were the bad guys, in your opinion?</p>
<p>JP: This is strictly a value judgment. There are no bad guys. Those people who contributed to increased levels of conflict and promoting conflict are the people we need to contain. The reason I hesitate is because I’m not a fascist. I’m not a Nazi. I really do believe in our republic – notice I said “our republic.” We need to pursue the best, fairest most honest policies with respect to how government operates. I think we have failed miserably.<br /><br />[phone rings]</p>
<p>[recording resumes]</p>
<p>LW: I believe that you were talking about the people who resisted this type of program, this community action plan, the people you felt were sort of the biggest challenge to you implementing this program. We were talking about the people who created conflict.</p>
<p>JP: It’s very hard because I was irrelevant to their doctrine, to their beliefs.</p>
<p>LW: I just want to clarify, we’re talking about groups like the Southern Christian Leadership, the student non-violent youth groups, right? These committees and groups who you felt were using violent tactics …</p>
<p>JP: They were promoting --</p>
<p>LW: They were promoting violence, condoning violence, whereas the community action groups were much more about community outreach -- at least that was the intent.</p>
<p>JP: Community outreach and sharing government. One of the things I did with my budget is I arranged a conference with the University of Michigan with key political leaders, white brothers and black brothers, there were discussions about how single member districts could possible help. I don’t recall clearly whether we had single member districts back then. But one of the offshoots of this community strategy philosophy was to create more awareness about bringing government down to the local level. One of those alternatives is the electoral process and single member districts. That was one of the offshoots of this whole effort – I wish I could recall of their names but they were key guys. One of the guys involved in it became the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Manpower.</p>
<p>LW: I just want to clarify: this was someone who was part of –</p>
<p>JP: At that time he was head of the Office of Economic Opportunity here in Michigan. He was one of the guys who participated in that. I don’t know if you think this way, but you know there are people who operate in fronts – are you familiar with that kind of political logic of fronts?</p>
<p>LW: Explain to me what exactly what you mean.</p>
<p>JP: Well, what it means is there are some guys over here running around yelling, Black Panthers and they have guns and carry clubs. Then we have some other guys that organize marches. Then we have some other guys who are having inflammatory meetings. They go and engage the political process. Then we have some guys that work with the business community, like B’nai B’rith and the like. This then becomes a front; B’nai B’rith benefits from having these guys who carry clubs. To understand how all those organizations spread out and what they do.<br /><br />[phone rings]</p>
<p>[recording resumes]</p>
<p>You know, I have had so many blessings about experiences. I also worked in Saudi Arabia under – I worked in a kingdom. I was loved by the Saudis. They would have gotten me a Saudi wife and everything. I had to decide whether I was an American and a Christian. Very few men decide that.</p>
<p>LW: I want to wrap up by talking about because we’re just about out of time. I do want to talk about how you think some of the activities and the upheaval that it sounds like you experienced and occurred within the community action program, how you think that may or may not have impacted the events of 1967?</p>
<p>JP: It could have. This was an arena of conflict where they were winning. The control of the community action program as a whole was a victory. Taking the whole, we want it all. So you have this unbounded, unbridled kind of aggression that grows. It’s really hard to say what happens when you are a nice guy. I told you I went to sensitivity training. There’s a time not to be a nice guy. There really is. [People enter the room]. I’m sorry. You see, the ladies in our family are interested. [Introductions made] This has been an exciting discussion.</p>
<p>LW: So, just to sort of wind down. Is there anything else that you remember about Detroit specifically in ’67 or in relation to you work in ’66?</p>
<p>JP: I mentioned I was replaced by Conrad Mallett. He was a favored son of the black community. Eventually he was elected to the Michigan Supreme Court. At the time Conrad was a really nice political guy. I think your questions and comments help me a little bit. We covered a great deal. I’ll tell you what the riots meant to me. What they meant to me was that I went and got my shotgun because of our family store. It was on the west side of Detroit, just up there in Grand River and the like. You could hear the gunshots and the firing. The burning did not necessarily move into our shop at that time, though my uncle was later a victim of a robbery and an aunt was murdered. We experienced that racial conflict. A 15 year old with a 38 special is a very dangerous entity. The climate was such that one time we took arms. We took a shotgun out and maybe like the Koreans – maybe because we’re Polish or something, I don’t know – but like the Koreans in the Los Angeles area we stood on top their stores with shotguns.</p>
<p>LW: So this was something that you participated in during the riots in ’67</p>
<p>JP: Yes. This was happened most recently in Ferguson. People now were about to be victims a third time have armed themselves and were standing by their property and shops.</p>
<p>LW: So what property – you said you were living in Livonia in July of 1967.</p>
<p>JP: But my uncle and aunt had a family store in the west side of Detroit – Campbell Avenue. In fact, I drove through there on the way here because that whole community is just a bunch of empty lots.</p>
<p>LW: What kind of store was it?</p>
<p>JP: It was a grocery store. It was a grocery store in which many members of the family had worked over the years.</p>
<p>LW: What was the name of it?</p>
<p>JP: It was Joe’s market.</p>
<p>LW: It was on Campbell Avenue, you said?</p>
<p>JP: Campbell and Rich.</p>
<p>LW: So, during the rioting in ’67, how was that store affected?</p>
<p>JP: I don’t know how to describe that. The riots affected us as individuals. The business was not affected.</p>
<p>LW: So when you were talking about what the riots meant to you, you got a shotgun and went armed to the family store. So explain that a little more to me.</p>
<p>JP: There’s not much depth to that. That is really a feeling that it is over within a quarter of a mile of where you are, if violence is a quarter of a mile away or less, you are well advised to take action.</p>
<p>LW: Did you ever have to shoot your gun?</p>
<p>JP: What?</p>
<p>LW: Did you ever have to shoot your gun?</p>
<p>JP: No.</p>
<p>LW: So the store was not rioted. Was it near stores that were rioted, that were looted?</p>
<p>JP: I don’t understand.</p>
<p>LW: Was Joe’s Market, the grocery store that your family owned, was it in an area where there was looting and rioting going on?</p>
<p>JP: No. What was true at that time was that all these small grocers on the west side of Detroit were being robbed. Black youth were robbing these stores. That was one of the reasons. That’s where the retail business goes by the board. That’s part of the deterioration of a community. That’s about all I could say about that.</p>
<p>LW: Is there anything else you want to share why we’re still on the record?</p>
<p>(New Interviewer: Noah Levinson): One of your positions – you might have talked about this while I was out of the room -- you worked in you said you were appointed by Governor Romney I believe to head up – I forget.</p>
<p>JP: There were two things: first off Deputy Director in the Michigan Department of Labor.</p>
<p>NL: Yes.</p>
<p>JP: Lansing-based, legislative oversight and some other oversight functions. And then I did some work with Census data and the like. We put together a resource allocation scheme for a given geographical area not political decisions. Not political decisions but decisions with respect to educational requirements, unwed mothers and all. It was very well received. I got a certain amount of recognition. So the governor moved into a role where I was staff planning director. Well, it wasn’t the governor who did it, it was one of his staff guys. It was a black guy who did that – a very fine man, Dave Dunfitt. Was a critical resource -- He’s an example of what you want in the way of a black leader. He later became a controller, budget director for the Manpower Administration in Washington.</p>
<p>NL: Did you work closely with the governor in your role in the state labor department?</p>
<p>JP: Nobody really works that closely – the question is how many governors are there? There are people who exercise influence on decision making. One of the things I did do and am really proud of – I drafted and lobbied with the Farm Bureau an agricultural labor commission board. The reason I did that is that Michigan really had a lot of conflict with respect to the migrant stream. The U.S. Department of Labor was creating issues with respect to housing, child care, education and pretty soon the government’s good intentions stir up the people because they want political support. I figured that the way to settle that down was to create a body within the state where we talked to migrant people and their representatives, farm groups and the like. I lobbied that. Nobody else knew it. I just did it. I did it with the Farm Bureau. When you get the Farm Bureau to agree to something like that it’s no problem. No, Governor Milliken came in, Romney went to HUD. Governor Milliken came in and I was invited to join the Executive Office and to leave Labor. As I mentioned to you earlier, I have always seen myself as a policy program specialist, not a politician. I don’t do much lying. I don’t like it. But ’67 it was just a nightmare. Excuse me, that’s not very analytical; ‘67 was not expected, going back to earlier conversation. That was not supposed to happen. We had a plan. There was a community action program and the federal government was funneling money in. I had the first OEO tactical assistance grant for training in the United States. Detroit was the first such experiment. That’s probably worth noting. Also, when I was interviewed by some people – I don’t know who they were with, Congressional committee, CIA. I had a day long intensive interview with a recorder. I’ve been interviewed that way a couple times. That was the end of my role with the community action program. That’s the last thing I did.</p>
<p>NL: So, with your background being in policy and programming, could you speak to – were there certain policies that didn’t exist or that were in place that you can see in hindsight being key contributors to … oh, okay, cool, I guess we already talked about that.</p>
<p>LW: Do you have anything else with regards to programs that maybe did or did not work?</p>
<p>JP: Well you know, I think that what happened in the country was that the country saw a need for HUD - Housing and Urban Development. The policy framework then moved – you know, the policy part of that had been, “Let’s put expressways in and let’s have urban renewal.” Housing and urban renewal was another whole approach, a political approach, to let’s find some housing for people, let’s have a more humane approach to how we manage central city people.</p>
<p>LW: You also mentioned too had the community action program continued or been re-evaluated that employee or employment driven programming would have---</p>
<p>JP: We did say that, we did cover that in the sense that, were jobs more important, a better incentive, you know? The one thing that is so true, it’s a political reality, there is no one single black person. There is no generic type. We need to understand just as there are these fronts – there are fronts, Black Panthers over here with clubs and the B’nai B’rith kind of thing, businessmen, Jewish leaders working to build good will and then there are other groups around there. There’s a whole spectrum of political approaches to addressing the needs of the black community –There is a whole spectrum, some of them totally led by the black community --the Black Panthers. If you have a Black Panther policy, “White Charlie shouldn’t be voting. We should promote more Black voting. We should have more control. We can decide where we go.” The B’nai Brith kind of thing is “We all need to work together. We need to build cooperation. We all live in the same world.” The black people you meet are spread throughout that spectrum so there are probably four or five different strategies. One of the things that troubles me very much is we lose the good black kids. In fact, when I meet with the police chief I want to talk about gang management. Gang management – well, there’s another whole thing to this period. The student unrest and student demonstrations, that’s a tactic used in civil rights is to get the students all stirred up and angry and demonstrating. It’s a lot easier to do that and we had student demonstrations that were going on in that period of time. I think that really we should have come away from that – and this is where your work is valuable – we should have come away from that with lessons learned. You say, “Well yeah, we did learn something. Jobs are more important than trying to build community good will.” Yes, improving housing and urban development is another building block. But I don’t think that it’s all through. We’re not done with it. We have not solved this racial problem here in the United States. But your work will point to that.</p>
<p>LW: Perhaps. I hope so. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with us?</p>
<p>JP: No, I would just say that Dean William Haber, Bill Haber at University of Michigan School of Arts, he was a guy who passed on my employment with the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations. He interviewed me and he said, it was one of his favorite sayings, “If you’ve got the answer, you’re wrong.” The reason your wrong is that it is a process. It’s something that will work out. There is no answer to this. This was Bill Haber’s idea -- just the opposite of who I am and how I am. I really think that Bill Haber may be right but there needs to be people who will bring about structure and take the risks. I told you I paid the price for trying to set some quality standards in the process. No, I don’t have anything more to say. I’m just pleased you guys are doing this study and really would like at some point to be able to learn more about what you have learned so that I can add it to my background. What do you envision in the way of production and the like?</p>
<p>LW: I’m going to take us off the record now. I’d like to thank you while we’re still recording for your time and we can wrap up off the record, okay? But thank you so much. I really appreciate it.</p>
<p>JP: Well, you are quite welcome.</p>
<p>[TIME STAMP END OF INTERVIEW 1:00:02]</p>
Original Format
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audio
Duration
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1hr
Interviewer
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Lily Wilson
Noah Levinson
Interviewee
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Jeromone Pikulinski
Location
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Detroit, MI
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1PYO16N5Nhk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Jerome Pikulinski, August 14th, 2015
Description
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In this interview, Pikulinksi discusses his work with the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations and running the Community Action Program. He discusses the goals of this group, its successes and failures. He also talks about conflict resolution and other broad concepts.
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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07/05/2015
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
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audio/WAV
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Black Panther Party
Community Action Program
Community Activists
Governor George Romney
Volunteers
-
https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/files/original/2de667dda93c6a7f3e3ca0092955bc8d.jpg
a1af5fc6830e3cb021c88546b07e18ed
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Sandra Smith
Brief Biography
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Sandra Smith was born in Detroit in 1944. She lived in places like Ferndale and Dearborn, but constantly spent time in Detroit as a volunteer for a church. She lived in Pontiac, during the unrest in 1967, and saw the impact the events had on Pontiac as well as Detroit. She later started an open classroom program to promote diversity in local schools.
Interviewer's Name
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William Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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05/31/2015
Interview Length
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00:58:22
Transcriptionist
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Hannah Sabal
Transcription
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<p>WW: Hello, my name is William Winkel. Today is May 16<sup>th</sup>, and I am sitting down with Sandra Smith for the 1967 Oral History Project. Thank you very much for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>SS: You’re welcome. It’s enjoyable to do this.</p>
<p>WW: Can you please start by saying where and when you were born?</p>
<p>SS: I was born in 1944. I was born in Detroit, downtown, one of the hospitals down in Detroit. My parents lived on Montrose right off of Grand River in Detroit. They had a duplex there.</p>
<p>WW: Did you grow up in the city?</p>
<p>SS: I grew up in the city only until I was about three, four years old, and my parents—so my father could be closer to the airport, to Willow Run, where he was going to be running a flight school, and where there were new houses being built—so we moved out there.</p>
<p>WW: Okay. What was it like growing up in Dearborn?</p>
<p>SS: It was close to Mayberry RFD, if you want to be real. It was like a real neighborhood with kids playing out in the street. When the lights came on, you had to go home. People were neighbors. Wasn’t a whole lot different when we were in Detroit, quite frankly, when we were on Montrose. I was a little smaller, and the difference was on Montrose the houses were so close together, literally, my grandmother would yell across to the neighbor to ask to borrow something, and they would stick their hands out and hand things back and forth, because the houses were built so close together and you always had the garage in the back. But we had, I remember, when I was little, the very, very much the same thing there. These wonderful old houses, they were just grand. The basement on our house on Montrose—I used to be able to ride my tricycle in the basement because it had these wonderful Terrazzo [2:23??] floors and you could ride, but you didn’t dare fall into a door; it wasn’t hollow, it was solid as a rock and things like that. But in Detroit it was very much the same. It was that very friendly neighborhood, people would walk in the streets and kids would play out and people would walk on the sidewalks and say hello, and I remember as a kid we used to play out all the time.</p>
<p>WW: Was the neighborhood in Detroit interracial or was it all white?</p>
<p>SS: As far as I know it was all white.</p>
<p>WW: Okay. And was it all white in Dearborn, I’m guessing?</p>
<p>SS: Yeah, oh yeah. Dearborn we know is all white. There was Arabs, no problem moving in. Asians, there were moments. There were no blacks living in Dearborn at all. It was not interracial. It was white. By the way, we’ve had a Muslim community in Dearborn for as long as I can remember, since I was a little kid. From our church, our youth group, we used to go over and visit the mosque, it was on the east side of Dearborn. We used to go over and visit the kids over there and they used to come visit us, and I grew up working and being with the Muslim community, learning about the Muslim religion years ago.</p>
<p>WW: You spoke about how your family moved to Dearborn in part so your family could be closer to the airport?</p>
<p>SS: Yes.</p>
<p>WW: Could you talk about what he was doing there?</p>
<p>SS: Well, he was part of the original army air corps. He went into World War II and went into the army and they had this new group that was starting, and they found that he tested out very well, and he became part of the original army air corps. One of the fun things is I’ve got his little thing that wrote out all the different things every time he flew—</p>
<p>WW: His log book?</p>
<p>SS: His log book! I’ve got his original log book, and he literally with the group there, I can tell you how they flew the planes over. They had to fly all the planes over. And they go down into South America, down to one of the Caribbean islands, over the [5:03??], it was really cool. He flew in some of the most famous battles that they had over in Western Europe. David, what kind of plane did dad fly?</p>
<p>David: B-24.</p>
<p>SS: Okay, B-24 and one of the things they did—</p>
<p>David: Is that the Liberator?</p>
<p>WW: Yeah. Wait, B-29?</p>
<p>David: No, B-24 is the Liberator.</p>
<p>SS: And one of the things that he did, he was the captain, and one of the things they did is they would tow the gliders, the pilots in the gliders. Gliders had no engines whatsoever, and they had to be on tethers. They’d take them in, and at a certain point, they’d let go, and they would glide down into enemy territory. And he was involved in a lot of battles. And the interesting part is they didn’t have a lot of guns or anything, and they were sort of like flying, hoping they wouldn’t get hit. But one of the things he did was during the Battle of the Bulge, they got all these people that took all these people in, and then things went sideways in the Battle of the Bulge, and it became evident that a lot of people that they brought in were not ever going to see the light of day again, they were going to be killed. So he and his men defied orders and sort of commandeered the plane without orders and went back in and literally got hundreds of men out. I know when he died, we can’t believe the number of people that were at his funeral that said, “Your father saved thousands of lives. There’s lots of us alive because they brought our dads back.” He loved being a pilot, would’ve loved being a commercial pilot, except he had glasses. He’s always needed corrective lenses since he was a kid. And the army said that was okay, however, commercial airlines would not allow someone to be a pilot if they needed corrective lenses. So he couldn’t be a commercial pilot. So he decided to start a flight school.</p>
<p>WW: And what did your mother do for a living?</p>
<p>SS: My mother was an artist. She was originally an elementary school teacher in Detroit, taught several, three or four different schools in Detroit. She originally had gone to school, graduated from Wayne, but then she went to what was the Society of Arts and Crafts but is now the College of Creative Studies, and her field was art. What happened was, flight school was going well except I had a younger brother, and he developed cancer when he was a year and a half old and the doctors said he only had six months to live, and they suggested that my parents stay with him, let him have a Christmas, just be with him as much as they could because he’d be dying in a few months. So my dad ended up leaving the flight school, and my mother was doing the art, and they started a small art school in our basement, which eventually grew enough that they moved into a small shop over in Dearborn, and eventually they moved into a big enough company that it took up a block and a half over on telegraph. So that’s what they ended up doing.</p>
<p>WW: So you grew up in the 1950s. Going into Detroit—did you go into Detroit often?</p>
<p>SS: Oh yeah. All the time. We were probably there once or twice a week at least. From the time I was little I’d do things, I’d play golf from the time I was little. My uncle was the designer of literally almost all of the Detroit golf courses. So when I was little I used to go and sit with him on his little golf cart, and when he went around to inspect, I’d golf. Went down to Belle Isle a lot. I remember going out and sitting out at Water Works Park and watching the boat races, the old hydroplane races, which because my grandfather worked at the old Hudson’s—love the old Hudson’s—we used to go down there at least once a week, just to go visit the old Hudson’s. One of the fun things about downtown Detroit then, especially going to Hudson’s or Currents, because you always got to dress up and wear white gloves, wear all the dresses, everybody got dressed up, it was kind of special. But spent lots and lots of time in Detroit. Belle Isle was one of my favorite places. In fact, all through my years going up, and both of my kids, their whole life, they got to spend lots of time in Detroit. I went to Wayne State, and started at Wayne State in 1964. Was in the art school, was there in the evenings, and sometimes I’d be there until 3 o’clock in the morning. That was a time when a lot of the area behind Wayne, getting over toward the Lodge and that, there were a lot of older houses that were being torn down and abandoned and we’d park over there, and I’d walk out to my car at 2 o’clock in the morning. There was one day when it was 1964, and I always went to school at night, and one day I had a class early in the day, I had something to do early in the day, so I was down there and now I don’t have another class until 7 o’clock at night, and I literally walked down Cass all the way to downtown, just walked downtown, looked around, saw thing, went and visited somebody I had met, turned around, and came back. Just walked up Cass. I felt very comfortable in Detroit.</p>
<p>WW: Awesome. When you were growing up in the fifties, and going into the sixties, did you notice any growing tension in the city?</p>
<p>SS: I didn’t notice tension. I noticed things sometimes weren’t as nice as they—things were being let go. Buildings just didn’t look as good anymore, and sometimes it would just feel uncomfortable because it’s like you got a building that’s kind of run down that I notice more than anything. I grew up in Dearborn, which was not a mixed-racial city, and my dad always said I was the contrarian in the family. I was very comfortable with anybody. There were times where I would have somebody, if I was down in Detroit, I can remember there were a couple of times when there were some people that were black that looked like, “What are you doing here?” Or they looked like, I don’t know, but I’d walk up, say hello, and start chatting. I worked with Father Coughlin, I volunteered with Father Coughlin over in the old church in Corktown. And I remember the first time he showed up, he gave me hell. “What the hell are you little white girl from Dearborn doing here? You think you’re going to be a do-gooder, you’ll come in for the day, and then you’re not gonna come back.” He just read me a little riot act, like I was this terrible person, and it was like, “Okay, I’m going to show you.” I think I spent about six months, I’d show up there as much as I could. Grabbed a couple other people I had met down at school or whatever, and we’d go down there, and he loved to give us assignments that he knew would just drive us nuts. One of the assignments he would give us is he would give us names of these homes, the addresses of these homes, that we were to go in and help the mother. And he purposefully gave us probably some of the worst places, that were some of the hardest ones that he thought would be to work with. We’d go, “Okay, we’re here to help with the kids, what we can do.” Try to do as much as we could, and things like that. I cannot believe these people—I mean, Father Coughlin sent us so I guess it’s okay—but we’d take the kids and just take them out to play so mom would have a little time to do something for herself, and didn’t try to do the do-gooder stuff, just what can we do? We get somebody, a mother who hasn’t got a husband to help her, and she needs some time to herself to get things done, so we’d do whatever we could, and pretty soon, Father Coughlin decided that I was okay, and he started giving me things to do and treated me like I wasn’t the “bad white person who was showing up, the do-gooder from Dearborn that was showing up to do stuff.” I wasn’t fighting him anymore. I spent a lot of time over in that old Corktown area.</p>
<p>WW: Do you remember what church that was?</p>
<p>SS: It was just Father Coughlin’s church in Corktown, very famous church.</p>
<p>WW: St. Anne’s?</p>
<p>SS: No.</p>
<p>WW: Okay. No worries.</p>
<p>SS: It’s the Irish church that they always have, on St. Patrick ’s Day…. I never remember. But I just know it as Father Coughlin’s church over there. That was a hard-hit area, economically. That’s one of the reasons we were over there, it was like, “What can we do?” There were people over there and it was Spanish, black, there were Mexicans, it was a real mix of people. They were always just sort of aghast. I mean literally I was out by myself, or I might have another young lady with me, and we were out there by ourselves and never even thought about that there was, you know, that we needed to worry about anything. We just went and did stuff. I guess that was what surprised them. It was like, “Okay! We’re here! Let’s go!” Just, you know, “What can we do?”</p>
<p>WW: Did something in particular prompt you to start doing this charity work? Or were you just motivated to do it?</p>
<p>SS: I had heard about him, heard him talk about something that was going on, I think we may have had a trip, our church group might have gone down there, and saw some things and he said “Hey, here’s some things that you can do.” I think that’s what we did, we went down with a church group, with a youth group, and he said, “Here’s some things that we need down here.” And so the next week I showed up, and he was like, “What are you doing here?” And I said, “I’m here to help. What can I do?” Seemed like the right thing to do. I was not one of those people that was popular in school, probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I was bullied, I can tell you all kinds of lovely stories about things that happened in school and people that did terrible things to me, and boys that would make you think you were really popular one day and invite you all to sit down at dinner or at lunch, and you think you’re finally going to be the “in person” and they dump tomato soup on you to embarrass you. I wasn’t the popular kid and decided there were other things in life worth doing and I did them. I want to thank them, a couple of kids I went to school with who made me feel so bad because I never achieved what I thought I could when I was in high school and went way past what they did when I got older because I had the motivation and I knew I could do it, and now I didn’t have to live with their constraints. I just always felt that everybody ought to have a chance. Even though I lived in Dearborn, I was very, very motivated as to why we ought to have a mixed neighborhood. I was involved in integration stuff, did a lot of marches. My parents were not quite as happy about some of the things I did. I moved out and lived with our minister and his wife for a while because my parents weren’t happy that I was working on integration issues, including fighting our mayor when there was the big brew-ha with the family, I was there with the family when the thing happened that caused the mayor, Mayor Hubbard, to go over to run over and hide in Windsor so he wouldn’t get indicted for obstructing justice and allowing his police to not help what they thought was a black family moving in and it turned out to be a black family that were movers that were moving somebody in, it wasn’t even a black family moving in. I was involved in some of that. I just thought everybody ought to be who they were and it was okay. And you shouldn’t be labeled. I felt like I had been labeled when I was a kid, and you shouldn’t be labeled. Everybody should be able to do whatever they want, whoever they were, and live up to their potential. I was my own little champion. </p>
<p>WW: Going to the 1960s, your grandparents’ meat market, was that still on Grand River?</p>
<p>SS: No, the meat market, it was gone, I think it was gone by the time I was a little kid, it was already gone. My grandparents had moved out to California. By the time I was four, they had moved to California and the meat market was gone. My grandfather and my uncle, who then ran the meat market, they’d gone. But I owned, in the 60s, I got married in ’65, and my husband’s parents owned a—my father-in-law was a dentist—they owned a dry cleaners in Ferndale, and they branched out and bought one right on fashion avenue in Detroit. So, my then-husband and I managed both of those dry cleaners. The one over on fashion avenue—fashion avenue was wonderful back then, that’s when you had all kinds of designers, Beagle [21:49??] was there, it was a great spot. Louis the Hatter was right next door, it was really quite the interesting place, a neat place. It was right by the university. It was between the university homes and Palmer Woods were kind of right in that area. We were known for doing custom work with our dry cleaning, one of the things we did was we had a whole fleet of vans and we’d deliver, we delivered all the way down to the Fisher building and down there. We delivered all over Detroit. So we were right in the heart of everything, even though I lived here in Ferndale. We lived here in Ferndale and then we moved down to Pontiac, so I was actually up in Pontiac during the riots, which was interesting. I got to see both the Detroit area and the Pontiac, what was going on.</p>
<p>WW: We’re going to move into ’67 then. So you were living in Pontiac then. How did you first hear about what was going on?</p>
<p>SS: I wasn’t in Pontiac, I had just come back from Chicago. Was over at my in-law’s over in Battle Creek, and we got a call on Sunday morning from the manager of the dry cleaners and said, “There’s riots here, there’s riots going on in Detroit.” I don’t know if he actually called it riots, but he says, “There’s this thing going on down here in Detroit, and we’ve been broken into.” Into the car, and driving back from there, and you’re not thinking too much about it, like okay, a break in. We would always drive Southfield expressway and come across 8 mile, because we lived in Ferndale. And when you get up to the eight mile rise—and we’re coming through Detroit on Southfield, nothing. We came up on that rise, and I always remember coming up on that rise, and as we came up on that rise, all I can think of is seeing—just, the whole city was on fire. It was just heart-stopping, like “Oh my God, there’s my city. What the hell is going on?” You can’t believe it. You know what it’s like when you see a house fire and you see all that black smoke? Think of that probably multiplied by a hundred. It’s like just the whole city—and when you saw it, all of a sudden you start realizing what you were feeling all along. Shortly afterwards we got to the point where there’s that choking feeling, and it was like, “Holy God. This is not good.” It happened at like, 1 or 2 o’clock on Saturday morning?</p>
<p>WW: Sunday morning at—</p>
<p>SS: --it was like 2 o’clock in the morning—</p>
<p>WW: --3:55 in the morning.</p>
<p>SS: So we’re coming through by before noon, probably ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, and it is just already just, wow. Drove in, and just went, “Oh my God.” At that point you go, this is really scary. When you see the smoke, you don’t know how much is covering the city. It was just mind-jarring. We drove up eight mile, went to Livernois, and cut across to the dry cleaners, and we had a full glass wall—you know, you had big sheets of glass wall—we came and one of the things we had, if you’ve ever seen dry cleaners, one of those trolleys to hang clothes up, those clothes all went right there along the glass wall. Well the glass wall, like three or four of them were already knocked out. Our manager—I can’t remember his name—he’d already been there, he’d already had someone in, they were putting up, trying to put wood up on the ones that had already been broken out. But they literally had come in and literally taken all of the things out. Probably the most jarring thing that I can remember was, other than coming up and seeing the smoke, when we first saw what was going on, was we were there trying to make sure everything was all closed up, everything was safe, sweeping up and things, and while we were there—and it’s bright daylight, mid-afternoon on Sunday, and some of our windows were not broken out, so you could still see out, and across the street were places like Claire-Perone’s [27:25??], you know all these nice shops were there. Just as I’m looking at the window—and there’s nobody on the street, no cars at all—all of a sudden, two cars come up, going north across the street, pull up across the street, I think it was Claire-Perone’s, one of the designer shops, one of the dress shops there—pull up, and it’s the first time I have ever felt uncomfortable about seeing somebody black. All of a sudden, these young black kids got out, and there was just a demeanor about them that just looked menacing. And they got out, they had bats, whatever it was they had, big pipes and all kinds of things in their hands, and they just all jumped out at once. And they went right to the windows, and started smashing the windows. There had to be at least six of them. Another car pulls up behind them, they get out, and they literally just smash those windows and immediately started going in and just pulling everything they could, throwing it in the cars, they were getting back in the cars, and they could not get in the cars for all the stuff they had in there. So they’re literally holding on, doors are open and they’re holding on to the outside of the cars, trying to drive off. It was crazy. But no worry about anybody around, nothing. They just went in and started, and you just stood there and for me, it was really jarring because I have felt so comfortable around everybody, and I suddenly felt fear, and I’ve never felt that before. And I guess it pissed me off, more than anything, really made me angry, that they made me feel that scared. Broad daylight, middle of the day. And pretty soon other cars came up and started hitting other buildings, not even thinking about us. Harry the Hatter’s next door, I had no idea, all I know is what happened across the street. It was just like, okay, let’s just go back in. I can’t remember if my husband called the police, but I have a feeling they were probably busy. I think he may have called the police, but I think he remembered them saying, “Uhhh, we’re kind of busy. That’s fine, but there’s a lot of stuff going on,” sort of blew us off. Okay, we’re on our own. At that point, we’re there and we’re thinking, what are we going to do? We’re all closed in there, and it still felt like, okay, I feel safe. And probably a half hour later I start hearing what sounds like cars behind the building. Cars stopped behind the building and next thing I hear is pounding on the back door. After seeing what was out there, I started feeling really uncomfortable. They literally smashed in and tore off the back door. I think at the time, I’m thinking, “I didn’t even know that was there!” but for some reason, before we got the place, whoever had had it before had put in like a metal jail—</p>
<p>WW: A metal gate?</p>
<p>SS: A metal gate! It was a thick metal gate, and it was locked. And all I can remember is going back to the door and there was this hand that came through and I just went up and I just said, “Get out! We’re in here! Get out!” And I heard, “I’m sorry, ma’am!” and they took off. All I can remember is seeing that hand, and again I was so angry because I saw that hand come through, and I didn’t care what came, but I do remember seeing this, no shirt, this black hand came through. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been bothered at all, like, ehh it’s a black guy. But there was something about it, after seeing what happened over there, that just felt so intimidating and so scary.</p>
<p>WW: But you remembered his pleasantries! “Ma’am.”</p>
<p>SS: Oh yeah, “Sorry, ma’am!” and he was gone. I remember just sitting there for the longest time, just shaking, thinking, “Oh my God.” But it wasn’t like they were going to get the people, they weren’t doing anything. That was interesting. That night we went back home—he was a teacher, first-year teacher, and this was before teachers had unions, and we qualified for government subsidized housing. So we lived in a brand-new housing project on the north edge of Pontiac that had just been built. So we’re living literally on one of the townhouses that was literally just right up against the city. And by the way, it was hot, there was no question. It was hotter than hell. It had been hot all week. I remember we had gone over to Chicago, and it was hot before we left, so hot you’d have a bad thunderstorm and it’d get hot and muggy. It was really uncomfortable that week. It wasn’t any better in Chicago, either. So no air conditioning in these places, so that night we sat up with our next-door neighbors, and we were playing cards in the house. At the time, this was so—what was going on in Detroit, and nobody knew what was going on in particular, you’d hear all kinds of stories, oh my God, are they coming out? That’s was the worst part, you’d hear all these rumors on the news reports and everybody was like, what’s going to happen? We’re up in Pontiac and playing cards, went upstairs to make sure the windows were open upstairs, and all of a sudden we realized it had come up to Pontiac too, because we’re sitting upstairs and we can see the flashes and hear the gunfire outside. Oh crap. Just hang tight here, we’re okay, nothing we can do. We were not far from probably the least prosperous area, a not good area of Pontiac, and apparently some people decided that they would take advantage of the situation. It was exciting. The next day, my brilliant husband and one of the guys that worked with us decided they’d go out in the delivery truck and go. They went out saying oh they had some deliveries they had to make. Are you kidding me, you stupid? They decided they’d go up around Grand Boulevard, they went up and into not particularly good spots they should’ve gone into, and I was not with them, but I heard lots of stories from them about having to stop often because there was a big TV sitting in the middle of the road, or people running across, but they were talking about the people going in, just what looked like nice people, somebody battering the window of a store, and they’d be carrying out TVs, and they’d get it to the middle of the street and they couldn’t carry the TV anymore, so they’d drop it in the middle of the street. They were telling me all kinds of stories about what was going on, all the looting. Yeah they had stories down there. I thought, “Oh my God, they’ve died down there.” He said, “Well, we almost picked it up—well, the TV was just sitting right there…” I almost killed him. It was a frustrating time. It ticked me off that people would take, and I know they were angry, but what you had were some people that just caused unbelievable damage. It just really bothers me.</p>
<p>WW: How did your dry cleaners fare the rest of the week?</p>
<p>SS: We just closed. Closed up for that time. I don’t think there was anything open during that time.</p>
<p>WW: No, I mean did it get broken into again?</p>
<p>SS: No, it never got broken into again. No, we were fine, just that one time. It was literally those clothes right there, those people’s clothes, whatever was against the window. What they did, like they did with the stores I watched them loot across the street, they got the easiest stuff, that they could get easily. Yeah, Livernois was good pickins’! That was the big money stuff! It was good stuff there! A lot of them came, and, “Hey, let’s go down to Livernois,” but they all seemed to stop at Livernois. That was as far as they went, there and Outer Drive, nothing seemed to go beyond Outer Drive.</p>
<p>WW: How long did you keep your dry cleaners open after that?</p>
<p>SS: It’s still open. Oh yeah, it’s still going. I don’t own it anymore, but they had it up until—my husband and I divorced in ’82—’81, but the dry cleaners is still there. Harry Hatters isn’t still there, but the dry cleaners is still going.</p>
<p>WW: How do you interpret what happened in July? Do you see it as a riot, or what do you see it as? There is no wrong answer.</p>
<p>SS: The heat didn’t help one little bit, no question. If you’ve been through one of those summers. It had been the year before, let’s see, ’67, yeah that year, and the year afterwards, we had some really, really hot uncomfortable weather. People didn’t have air conditioning, buildings didn’t have air conditioning, it was really hot. I mean it was just muggy, crappy hot. I think you had some people that were just angry about everything in the world. I understand there were a lot of people in the black community that this was when a lot of things were going on. I was involved in a lot of things that were going on with Martin Luther King and all kinds of things that were going on at that time. And it was already that, things were not good. It just happened to be the perfect storm. You had a lot of people that felt like, “Hey, they’ve got…” whatever. People that just got caught up in the whole thing. Like my husband had said, when he saw people, these little old ladies running across getting the TV they had always wanted, or the toaster, or something else. What was so bad was they were destroying their own community, destroying the places they lived. And I know they were angry, part of it was there was this anger, and there’s no question, there were shopkeepers that always took advantage. You’d see them even where we were and it’d be frustrating to be shopping and see shop keeps that were obviously charging more and taking advantage of people and weren’t really nice to people, and they went after them, but then they started going after nice black man that had a business there, too. Sort of went nuts. It just sort of spiraled out of control. It’s frustrating to see how much of our own community we took apart, because they were angry. Their anger actually ended up being one of the worst things they could do to themselves at the same time. I just see it as being, it just boiled over and everybody got involved. The answer is, I think it was just a lot of frustration, and I can understand the frustration. Having been someone that’d been in a totally different way—and I’m not saying it’s anything like what the black community went through down there, the poor black community—but having the feeling that you can’t do what you want to do, or you’re not good enough, and you don’t get this, or you don’t get that, it’s going to cost you more to do this—you know, there’s a point at which I could see where that could get real frustrating. It was even more frustrating to see just what ended up happening.</p>
<p>WW: How do you see what happened then affecting the city now? Do you think it still lingers over us?</p>
<p>SS: Part of it is we—these areas that we talk about, these big open areas in the city, those big open areas are not from—you know, everybody says they’re from the crash and all that, but I got news for you. They literally became big open areas back in ’67. We literally had big areas around West Grand Boulevard, they had just bulldozed them down. It became just this big vacant area. All of a sudden there wasn’t anything there. I know one thing that happened, no question, there were a heck of a lot of people that were really, really embedded in the community and loved the community and said, “That’s it, I’m leaving.” And we’re not talking just white people. I know people that were black that said, “When I can, I’m getting out,” and they did. That’s one of the tough parts of what I see with Detroit now is so much of the brain trust that was down there, so much of the heart of the city and the people that were there that just loved the city just said, “okay, that’s enough. I don’t feel safe anymore. I want out.”</p>
<p>WW: What did you do after 1967? Did you continue to live in Pontiac and operate those?</p>
<p>SS: Ran those. I started teaching school, taught preschool and we still ran the drycleaners, but I was teaching school. Taught some in Bloomfield, then preschool, worked with the people that started the early education program in Ferndale. Did that, ended up running –one of my parents decided that you shouldn’t wait until you’re too old to enjoy life, you get to take over the business in Dearborn, so I started running their business in Dearborn, ended up doing that until we sold that. Did a lot of things. Ended up being a marketing strategist.</p>
<p>WW: How do you see the city now? Are you hopeful for what’s going on?</p>
<p>SS: I think it looks wonderful. I’ve been down there. I was down there, I got dubbed the Tree Mother for the tree planting over when they were doing the Hantz Farms. I’m out there, carrying around the trees and telling people to plant holes, or find the people that had holes and plant trees. There’s a lot, long way to go. Downtown is looking amazing, there’s no question. It’s exciting to go downtown. Getting out into the communities, it’s going to take a lot of work, with little pockets here and there. We’ll have to, but I think we’ve got to think outside the box. Just like the Hantz Farm, they had to fight to do stuff in the open areas. It is not going to come back as this great urban city. There is no way you’re going to bring all these people back into the city, there’s no way. There isn’t enough work there for them to do anyway if we did. I think we need to think outside the box in terms of different kinds of things in different areas. I love the idea of having areas that become think tanks for young new entrepreneurs, the idea of taking some of those areas like the tree farm, or literally doing some urban farming. Taking some of those areas, and even if they have some houses in the area—for instance, I was down in the area where the urban forest is, and it’s real interesting to see what’s happening with the houses there. The people are starting to feel better about them, they don’t have all this blight around them anymore, people aren’t coming in and dumping garbage, even with what they have, and they’re doing some fixing up on their houses. What’s really interesting is finding out tax values and how they’re going up, the value of those houses if you wanted to sell one is going up, so they’re feeling better about things, but I think the idea of taking some of those areas that really were hurt—I mean you can see a lot of that area, lately I went through some of that area and just went, “My God,” there was a lot more that was lost from the crash a few years ago when the housing development went right down the tank, but then I went, no, this has been vacant for almost forty years! Over forty years! It’s been vacant from when they had to bulldoze everything down from when we had the riots! This has been like this all along. I think that’s one of the things I see. For me, to talk about Detroit, my kids, my son was born the day that Martin Luther King died, they kept telling me he was a riot baby, but he was conceived a week or so before the riots, so we won’t call him a riot baby. But he was born the day that Martin Luther King was shot. Almost to the minute, as a matter of fact. And my kids, both of them—he’s the oldest one, I had a daughter three years later—I still brought them back. They lived in Detroit, I had them back in Detroit all the time. My son as he was growing up, he loved to do photography and things, and he was always prowling around somewhere in Detroit. At least once a week we were down at Belle Isle, they got to experience Detroit and all, the good and the gritty. They’d go with me down to father Currant’s church, and he’d say, “You’re bringing the kids?!” and I’d say, “Hey, I’m not going to get someone to watch my kids while I’m volunteering. They’re coming along and playing with the kids there.”</p>
<p>WW: It’s amazing.</p>
<p>SS: Ferndale is an interesting microcosm. Ferndale has a whole black community that is kind of part of Ferndale, the township, which was actually constructed after the war. I remember when I was a kid, they used to put [50:37??] huts there, right over on Eight Mile and Wyoming and in that area. They housed a black community. People coming back from the war and things like that, it literally was created as a black community. Ferndale was one of those communities, where they’re all part of Ferndale school system, and we’ve community that, I think we were the first communities in the northern states where the federal government took away all of our money that the federal government gave us. They literally took it away because we weren’t integrated. They had a beautiful school within walking distance in that area, but that was the only part of the school district that was black, and so now we were integrated. I worked with a few other people and was one of the people that got us back to having federal money. The Ferndale school district, back in the sixties, early seventies was a little on the conservative side, and they were just fine. “You’re not going to give us money, fine! We’ll do it the way we want to!” because the federal government wanted them to bus students in, and things are still a little raw from the riots and everything else and people aren’t quite sure, and so myself and a few other parents who had kids in elementary school said we wanted to start an open classroom program in Ferndale where anybody from the city could be part of this classroom. And it was going to have a whole different design in terms of how things were taught. To give that to the Ferndale school district was like, “Psh, not a chance, you can spin it anyway you want, it isn’t going to happen.” So I remember going in the year before we started the school, I took my son who was then in kindergarten, took him, and another friend who had two daughters, one was his age, one a year older, and we went over to the school, Grant school, which was the all black school, and very stern wonderful tall principal that was there, and I remember him looking at us like, it felt like meeting with father Coughlin. Like, who the hell are you, these do-gooders, what the heck are you doing, you know? And I was so frustrated at not being able to come up with something and I remember at the time the two of us were considering literally putting our kids in over at Grant School. He thought we were nuts. I said, “I want my kids to have more than a white education. You’ve got a good program here.” I loved what he was doing, it was a killer school. We talked about the open classroom program, and he says, “You know what, if you were to take your open classroom program, I would be amenable to you putting your open classroom program in our school.” So we started talking back and forth, and the two of us and some other parents really started putting together a program, and we went to Ferndale schools with our proposal for the open classroom program, and the proposal that we wanted to put it at Grant school. And the kids would then be bused over to Grant school. He said he would make room for it, he would rearrange, and we could do it, and we took it to the school board and said, “This may be your opportunity.” And with the open classroom, kids from Grant were able to be in the program too, that’s the reason we were able to get so much room because a lot of the kids in the open classroom program were from the Grant school which were all black, became part of the program, so it was a really, really nicely integrated program. We went to the school district and said, “We’ve got the agreement of the principal on this, this is what we’re going to do, this is how we’re going to do it, and we think if you put that together, it’s possible that it will satisfy the federal government. You might get your money back.” We never had a second meeting, they agreed that day. It was the coolest program in the world, it was such a cool program. The kids literally learned problem solving and critical thinking, and you learned things like fractions by cookie, learned things by doing and learned everything in a whole different way, but the neat part was—my daughter went with one of the black kids from the open classroom program to prom. They were just good friends. She still tells me, talking about Rodney and things like that. And it was just so neat, at a time when there was just this tension all over, and it’s so neat to see the kids that were part of that program and they just all sort of became a neat little group of people. They learned that everybody was normal people.</p>
<p>WW: That’s amazing.</p>
<p>SS: Yeah. And one of the neat parts, Ferndale was one of those cities that was ripe to become an Oak Park or a Southfield, and suddenly change its color and its texture. I remember people talking like crazy about moving out, neighbors gonna sell cheap, and all of a sudden, everybody’s gonna sell, and I kept saying, “Hang on, hang on, everything’s going to be all right.” And the open classroom, you started having in all the neighborhoods, somebody had been with and knew kids, and all of a sudden, the black kids weren’t coming over there from these schools, they were happy that that was there, but you’d see friends coming over. Whatever it was, people managed to not suddenly fly. There wasn’t that flight kind of thing. No, “Oh, it’s going to destroy our city so I have to leave,” kind of feel.</p>
<p>WW: That’s amazing, again. Do you have anything else you’d like to add?</p>
<p>SS: Nope.</p>
<p>WW: Well thank you very much for coming out.</p>
<p>SS: I gave you lots to use.</p>
<p>WW: Thank you for sitting down with us today.</p>
<p>SS: You’re welcome. My pleasure.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>[TIME STAMP END OF INTERVIEW 58:22]</p>
<p class="Normal1">[End of Track 1]</p>
Original Format
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M4A on iPhone; converted to WAV; 1hr17min
Duration
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1 hr17min
Interviewer
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William Winkel
Interviewee
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Sandra Smith
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2pAdDMUkPi8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Sandra Smith, May 16th, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Smith discusses growing up around Detroit, and how she sought to be an active member of the Detroit community. She also talks about her experience at the family-owned dry cleaners during the unrest. More specifically, she talks about the looters she encountered in the city that day. She also talks about the open classroom program she sought to implement into schools after the week ended.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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06/14/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
Coverage
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||||osm
Pontiac, MI
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Business Owners
Dearborn
Detroit Workers
Ferndale
Looting
Open Classroom Program
Pontiac
Volunteers