Black Detroit Read online

  DEDICATION

  To my mother, Katherine Brown, and the countless other

  Detroiters who made me feel at home, no matter where I was

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  FOREWORD by Rev. Dr. JoAnn Watson

  Introduction

  1. Cadillac, “The Black Prince”

  2. The Blackburn Affair

  3. Black Abolitionists

  4. Faulkner and Flames

  5. Early Years of the Black Church

  6. Black Arts in the Gilded Age

  7. The Pelhams and the Black Elite

  8. Detroit and World War I

  9. Dr. Sweet and Mr. Ford

  10. White Ball and the Brown Bomber

  11. The Turbulent Thirties

  12. Boom Town

  13. Breakthroughs

  14. From Motown to Showdown

  15. A Brand-New Beat

  16. Bing and Bang

  17. March to Militancy

  18. The Motor City Is Burning

  19. Our Thing Is DRUM!

  20. Under Duress from STRESS

  21. Muses and Music

  22. Coleman and Cockrel

  23. Postindustrial Blues

  24. A Mayor and Malice

  25. Emergency, Resurgency

  26. Kwame Time!

  27. A Spark of Redevelopment

  28. Dhaka in Detroit

  29. A Looming Chimera

  AFTERWORD by Ron Lockett, Executive Director of the Northwest Activities Center

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: A Son Remembers

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  PHOTOS SECTION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY HERB BOYD

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  FOREWORD

  By Rev. Dr. JoAnn Watson

  Detroit was barely a century old when African American fugitives fleeing bondage began arriving from the South. By the 1830s, a considerable number had settled in Detroit.

  Thornton and Ruthie Blackburn had ingeniously freed themselves from captivity in Louisville, Kentucky. The attempts to capture them and return them to their slave owners was met with serious resistance by the city’s growing abolitionist movement. At the forefront of this movement were black stalwarts such as William Lambert, George DeBaptiste, and William Webb, joined by a coterie of white supporters.

  Securing the safety of the Blackburns and facilitating their flight to Canada was not done without violence and turmoil, sparking the city’s first racial disturbance. Herb probes this incident with precision, noting in the aftermath of the riot the stabilizing forces that would be a beacon to others seeking refuge from bondage.

  From this antislavery foundation, the fight for black self-determination remained evident during the Civil War when African American soldiers from the city were among the first to be deployed as units against the Confederates. A plaque in downtown Detroit commemorates the members of the First Colored Regiment, many of whom died bravely on the battlefield in South Carolina. Other returning veterans would be among the formidable civic leaders fomenting an emerging black middle class after the war.

  In its treatment of the Gilded Age, Black Detroit shows how such social and cultural mavens as Azalia Hackley, Fannie Richards, and members of the Pelham family placed their stamp on other aspects of self-determination, whether in the arts, education, or journalism. Gaining a foothold in business, as the Pelham family did, cannot be excluded in a discussion of black Detroiters and their push for self-reliance and independence. Black Detroit also showcases that same striving for self-determination in the world of entertainment, as well as through the remarkable accomplishments of such inventors as Elijah McCoy, the “real McCoy.”

  The vitality of that age is extended into the new century, and we witness the role of the city’s African American population in the shaping of manufacturing, working as stevedores on the waterfront, in the foundries, or on the assembly line of the nascent automobile industry. When the Great Migration gathered steam, Detroit was a focal point, and the arrival of countless numbers of migrants was the social engine that gave rise to the National Urban League. Black Detroit astutely recounts the pivotal role played by such social engineers of that organization as John Dancy and Forrester Washington. It was instructive to learn that they were also key figures in the anti-discrimination quest in employment and during the housing turbulence of the 1920s, being particularly forthright in their defense of Ossian Sweet and his family in the trials and tribulation they endured integrating a neighborhood on the city’s east side. The Sweet family’s insurgency was indicative of the black residents’ determination to break the chain of the restrictive covenant that bound them in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley.

  Black resilience in Detroit was never more decisive than during the Great Depression, and Black Detroit charts the rise of black workers during this time when they emerged as more than just rank-and-file members of the automotive unions. Horace Sheffield, Buddy Battle, Marc Stepp, and Chris Alston are just a few of the union activists highlighted in the book. They would be the nucleus of the next generation of labor leaders, with none more prominent and unforgettable than Coleman Young. Black workers were at the point of production when Detroit was known globally as the “arsenal of democracy,” and some of that same leadership before World War II was instrumental in the political breakthroughs that occurred in the fifties and sixties.

  Although the civil rights movement is best noted for the marches in the South, Detroit and its activist community are not ignored here, and Boyd cites the march in the city in 1963 as a precursor of the March on Washington weeks later. The hue and cry for jobs and justice during that historic march found its first iteration in Detroit, with the Rev. C. L. Franklin among the drum majors.

  I was impressed to see that my mentor “Reparations Ray” Jenkins was mentioned because he was among the prime movers and indomitable forces in the struggle for reparations.

  Throughout Detroit’s history, black Detroiters have been ever vigilant when it comes to overzealous police, and the successful fight against STRESS (Stop the Robberies and Enjoy Safe Streets) was emblematic of that resolve. Coleman Young’s election as the city’s first black mayor was exemplary of the ongoing efforts of black self-determination. At the same time the brutal excessiveness of the police was being stifled, activists on the campuses and in the factories came together and created a critical mass that evolved into the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; this story is one that Black Detroit discusses with unique insight.

  In fact, from this moment on, whether describing the music of Motown, the political formations of the late sixties, advocacy for reparations, or analyzing the subsequent setbacks of the seventies, Black Detroit is an unswerving witness. This tome is impeccably researched and shows that Herb Boyd “knows where all the bodies are buried.” Black Detroit is a unique blend of social, political, and economic urban history. Many of the work’s recollections are similar to my own. As such, in many ways, this is my story, and I am sure that many Detroiters, black and white, will feel the same.

  Rev. Dr. JoAnn Watson

  Professor, Wayne County Community College District

  Associate Pastor, West Side Unity Church

  Radio-TV Host, Wake Up Detroit!

  INTRODUCTION

  At four years old and only a few hours removed from a peanut farm and cotton patch outside of Tuskegee, Alabama, I was terrified riding a train for the first time. I clutched my mother’s hand and shook with fear, not knowing what to make of the huge metallic beast with steam shooting from the engine, making a noise like a bull elephant. My anxiety began the mo
ment a man in a blue uniform yelled, “All aboard.” The train gradually gained momentum, and my nerves settled down as I watched the Alabama landscape riffle by like a deck of cards. When my eyes weren’t following the passing scenes outside the train’s window, they were locked on my new traveling shoes, still somewhat uncomfortable for someone accustomed to being barefoot. My mother told my brother and me that the train would be taking us to our new home.

  We were part of a great migration of African Americans leaving the South. We were representative of those who were fleeing the multitude of Jim Crow restrictions, the inequality of sharecropping, and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan and other night riders. There was chatter and excitement from the other black travelers. The buzz overheard was no more comprehensible than the evening sounds of the crickets and cicadas that I heard back home.

  “We’re in Detroit,” my mother exclaimed as she awakened us, wiped our faces, and collected and packed away a few items in our cardboard suitcase.

  It was 1943. Michigan Central Station was a grand room with chandeliers suspended from the ceiling. The light from the morning sun beaming through the big windows was almost blinding. There were more people moving about than I had ever seen in one place. In the station were men and women dressed in military uniforms. Charles, my brother, was particularly fascinated by them and repeatedly had to be pulled away from the attraction.

  After Mother found a scrap of paper in her purse with some numbers scribbled on it, we boarded a bus that took us through downtown Detroit. With my face pressed against the window, I saw tall buildings and lights that seemed to be everywhere. The Fox Theatre glistened with blinking incandescent bulbs that encircled the marquee like a brilliant necklace, and around the corner a Camel cigarette advertising billboard puffed smoke rings from a man’s mouth. In the streets were trolleys, buses, and all kinds of automobiles. We were a long way from the life I had known in Cotton Valley, a very long way.

  As in many cities, Detroit’s black community was quartered near the river, which in the past had been a point of departure for fugitive slaves hoping to cross into Canada. Our first real residence in Detroit was near the storied section called Black Bottom. There we joined many of our neighbors who also had migrated from Alabama. All newcomers had at least one relative who had previously moved to the Bottom, someone they could call on, much like the Iraqi Chaldean Christian community that would later settle on the upper east side of the city. The main thoroughfare in the Bottom was Hastings Street, where blacks patronized the primarily Jewish businesses.

  We moved to the north end of the city before we had an opportunity to meet many of the notables from the neighborhood, such as Joe Louis and his onetime manager, John Roxborough; Coleman Young, the first African American mayor of Detroit; Sunnie Wilson, businessman, nightclub owner, and host extraordinaire; and Ben Turpin, the city’s first black police officer. The North End, as it was called, wasn’t as congested as the Bottom. Oakland and Russell streets had their bars, pawnshops, beauty parlors and barbershops, funeral homes, and nightclubs. From the standpoint of music, particularly the blues, there was no comparison to Hastings Street or Saint Antoine. The blues that emanated from every keyhole and peephole on Hastings was rather muted on the North End; only from Lee’s Sensation, Phelps Lounge, Champion Bar, or the Chesterfield Lounge was there a similar beat. During my youth in this neighborhood, I was in close proximity to the city’s most richly endowed African Americans on Chicago and Boston boulevards. The flamboyant Prophet Jones, Congressman Charles Diggs, Motown mogul Berry Gordy Jr., tap dancer extraordinaire Lloyd Story, and several doctors, including Remus Robinson and David Northcross, were among the neighborhood’s black notables. This neighborhood, with its lavish homes built by the legendary Detroiters Henry Ford, Walter O. Briggs, and James Couzens, was later named the Boston-Edison Historic District.

  Every two or three years, we moved to one of the other neighborhoods of the 139-square-mile city. From North End, we moved to the far west side, near Eight Mile Road. At one time, the six-foot-high concrete wall a block away separated the white and black communities. We were the second black family to live on our block. Across the street from us was an Irish family, on both sides were Italian families, and the remainder of families on the block were Jewish and members of other ethnic groups. I would be among the first black students to attend Edgar Albert Guest School. I also enrolled in Mumford High School for one year, where there were racially insensitive students. For the most part, whether on the block or in school, our blackness was for our neighbors an object of derision and insult.

  After my mother and stepfather separated, the house that they had purchased became too much for my mother to handle alone. We returned to the North End and then the Bottom and bounced from one basement apartment to another, always a move or two ahead of the landlords or bill collectors—even though, like other hardworking Detroiters, my mother left home at the break of day and returned after sundown. In addition to various other positions, she worked in Detroit’s suburbs as a domestic every day of the week. My mother ran the kitchen at Hall’s Department Store on the city’s west side, where she got me my first job. I also worked there running back and forth for stock from the sales floor to the warehouse. At MOPAR, a company owned by the Chrysler Motor Company that made small electrical automotive parts—very similar to Ex-Cell-O, where my mother had worked—I did a little bit of everything. The variety of tasks I performed there prepared me for the versatility required when later I was hired at the Dodge Main automobile factory in Hamtramck. There I was a “swing man,” which meant that whenever someone didn’t show up for work, I was the replacement. From the assembly line to the wet deck, where I worked a buffer taking the shine off the cars’ first primer coat, to guiding cars off the final ramp, I had to be ready for practically every job in the plant. Thankfully, the veterans there often rescued me whenever I was less than ready.

  Eventually we landed in the Jeffries Projects, which were near the Brewster Projects. It was there that I met many of the creative musicians who would later populate the blues and jazz world, who would be the performers and producers at Motown Records, as well as those who would become star athletes, political activists, and budding intellectuals.

  Long before Motown Records was founded by Berry Gordy Jr., the groups and individuals who would be the mother lode to his empire were my playmates or schoolmates. We lived across the hall from Smokey Robinson’s cousins and were privileged to hear the Miracles creating and rehearsing the songs that would bring them international fame. When we weren’t invited to their rehearsals, our doors were wide open, and we experienced the seminal notes of “Shop Around,” “Get a Job,” and “She’s Not a Bad Girl.” The prolific songwriter Lamont Dozier also lived in the projects, and the Supremes were in the Brewster bricks, as we called them. Demonstrating a mind-set of determination, all of these talented individuals worked their way from the projects to respectable superstardom.

  The many luminaries from Motown are but a small number of the city’s significant individuals whose contributions have had a global impact in industry, government, international diplomacy, education, entertainment, literary and performing arts, and sports. Less-well-known Detroiters also deserve recognition. William Lambert and George DeBaptiste dedicated themselves to the abolitionist movement and provided peerless leadership as conductors on the Underground Railroad. The great inventor Elijah McCoy at one time called Detroit his home. Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis and his good friend and boxing immortal Sugar Ray Robinson spent their early years in the city. Poet and publisher Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press provided a forum for such prominent writer/poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez. After serving more than six years in prison, Malcolm X joined members of his family in Detroit and subsequently became the national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam. The late track star Henry Carr won two gold medals at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.

  Almost from the cit
y’s inception, African Americans were vitally involved in its growth and development. However, early on, the majority of African Americans were in bondage, and the impact of their unpaid labor was either minimized or denied. Without compensation they tilled the soil, helped to construct the first buildings, labored as blacksmiths, drove the wagons, fired the ovens, forged the steel, built the stoves, hauled the ashes, cleaned the chimneys, and were among the crews of stevedores on the docks. Black Detroiters cleared the land, broke the rocks, poured the cement, paved the streets, and laid the rails, basically turning a wilderness into the foundation of a city.

  At the turn of the last century, emancipated black workers were the very vortex of the industrial age. Having migrated from the plantations of the South, many of them took on the most onerous tasks in the automobile plants, often being consigned to the most dangerous and lowest-paying jobs.

  When presented with an opportunity, they became teachers, lawyers, inventors, doctors, nurses, and businesspeople. They also became artists and artisans, making considerable contributions to the city’s prominent place in the nation’s cultural pantheon.

  PROMINENT FAMILIES

  It is not possible to discuss Detroit’s history, particularly the contributions it has made to world culture, without a thorough, comprehensive analysis of the city’s black residents. In this volume, I touch on every aspect of the city’s glorious history, from its promising beginnings in the early eighteenth century to the latest issues of solvency. Members of notable black families—the Lamberts, Pelhams, Barthwells, Diggses, Hoods, Keiths, Wrights, et al.—have maintained a continual connection to the city, honoring the provenance that has enriched their lives. We recall the forthright and unwavering commitment of the Lambert family during the early stages of the abolitionist movement in the city and elsewhere. We remember how instrumental the Pelhams were in several walks of life, none more crucial than their newspaper the Detroit Plaindealer. Barthwell family members were also successful entrepreneurs, with a chain of drugstores, and the Hoods were notable for their political and legal leadership for generations. They are featured among the fearless freedom fighters highlighted in Black Detroit. The city’s pedigree of struggle has been annealed in the fires of resistance that began in the 1830s with the Blackburn case, and it found resonance a hundred or so years later in the resolve of the Sweet family and in subsequent civic disturbances. The struggle for self-determination was tempered by the race riots in 1863 and 1943 and crested in the rebellion in 1967. When the vicious arm of the police force, through Stop the Robberies and Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS), sought to impose its will on young black men in particular, that fight-back spirit once again surfaced and halted a burgeoning retrenchment.