Black Detroit Read online

  18

  THE MOTOR CITY IS BURNING

  Ooh, the Motor City is burning, babe, there ain’t a thing in the world that I can do

  Don’t you know, don’t you know, the big D is burning, ain’t a thing in the world lil’ Johnny can do

  My hometown burning down to the ground, worser than Vietnam

  It started on 12th and Clairmount that morning, I just don’t know what it’s all about

  It started on 12th and Clairmount that morning, I don’t know what it’s all about

  The fire wagons kept comin’, the snipers just wouldn’t let them put it out . . .

  —JOHN LEE HOOKER

  In 1966, a small riot on Kercheval Street on the east side was a precursor to the major urban rebellion that rocked the city. To some degree, the discontent and volatility of the student eruptions were transferred to various militant groups and to people generally fed up with the systemic maladies that even the liberal promises and policies of Mayor Cavanagh could not cure. The spring offensive launched by the high school students evolved into a more heated showdown by the summer of 1966. The intersection of Kercheval and Pennsylvania streets was ground zero for the disturbance precipitated by the police, mainly by the notorious “Big Four” (a patrol car with four policemen inside) who accosted a group of black males on the corner, a gathering that to them, as in slavery times, constituted unlawful assembly. They were able to scatter some of the youths, but three of them were obstinate and determined to stand their ground. A commotion followed; it drew a crowd, forcing the police to call for backup. The presence of a hundred cops, many of them members of the TMU (Tactical Mobile Unit), a kind of SWAT team, was sufficient to momentarily halting an outbreak of violence. But soon Molotov cocktails and other objects began to rain on the police, allegedly thrown by members of the Afro-American Youth Movement. On the next evening, August 10, there was a tense standoff between the residents and the police, each side waiting for the other to make the next move. However, not a shot was fired, and rather than victims drenched in blood, both sides were soaked by a heavy rain that dampened the potential confrontation. These militants were not Black Panthers, who would emerge in the fall in California, but they expressed similar concerns. General Baker, Rufus Griffin, and Glanton Dowdell, participants in the Kercheval disturbance, were arrested, charged with carrying concealed weapons, and placed on five-year probation.1

  There is a standard narrative of the rebellion that exploded in the early hours of July 23, 1967: A squad of vice police raided an after-hours club, a “blind pig,” located on Twelfth Street and Clairmount. A celebration was under way for two Vietnam veterans who had recently returned home. More than eighty people were arrested. As the celebrants were being led into paddy wagons, an angry mob gathered and, spurred on by an agitator, began to hurl things at the police.

  “It was so chaotic in the streets that I was unable to get my morning papers to deliver,” recalled Conrad Mallett Jr.2 He said his usual routine was to arrive early in order to have the Detroit Free Press to his customers by six in the morning. Ironically, three days before the rebellion erupted, his father, Conrad Mallett Sr., Mayor Cavanagh’s executive secretary, had led a roomful of mayoral aides through a mock riot scenario. It was a profile complete with not only the conditions that might fulminate the disturbance, but also a plan of action. In many respects, Mallett was prescient.3

  During the melee, somebody smashed the window of a nearby clothing store. The vandalism spread like wildfire as looters broke into store after store, except those marked SOUL by African American proprietors. The fires came next. “On Monday alone,” remembered Arthur Johnson, then executive secretary of the local NAACP, “almost 500 fires were burning. Firefighters from as far away as eighty miles were called to the city.”4 Marcena Taylor, the city’s first black firefighter and soon to be first battalion chief, took part in extinguishing the flames. Motown singer Martha Reeves said she was onstage at the Fox Theatre in the middle of “Dancing in the Street” when someone rushed in and told her the city was on fire. She went calmly to the stage, made her announcement, and she and the Vandellas quickly packed their bags and headed for the next gig, in New Jersey.5

  In an attempt to halt the uprising, Johnson, along with good friend Damon Keith and Representative John Conyers, took to the streets. When they arrived at the epicenter of the disturbance, they were met with jeers and epithets from the crowd; the most stinging insults called them Uncle Toms. Conyers tried to placate the crowd with calming words blasting from a bullhorn, but that only incited them more, and eventually he and his cohorts were forced to run for cover. Unable to stem the tide of revolt, the men conferred and decided that the best thing to do was to head to police headquarters, where they were notified that the mayor, the governor, and Police Commissioner Ray Girardin had assembled to discuss what measures to take to stop the spread of chaos and destruction. “They were vacillating on whether or not federal troops should be brought in,” Keith recalled. “At one point, President Johnson called in from Washington. They put him on speakerphone, and he talked about sending a force in to deal with the violence. That’s how bad the situation had gotten.”6 It was so bad that even a civil rights icon like Rosa Parks, and her husband, Raymond, were not spared in the plunder and pillage. Parks, employed by Conyers, lived near the heart of the upheaval on a street that one day would bear her name. Not only was Raymond’s barbershop looted and their car vandalized, “One of the troopers threatened to hit him on the head with a rifle,” Parks said in an interview in 1980.7 The Parkses had traveled a thousand miles from night riders in white sheets only to be confronted by their counterparts in blue uniforms.

  Another associate of Keith, Johnson, and Conyers was Recorders Court judge George W. Crockett Jr., whose radical bona fides were incontrovertible. When hundreds of people arrested in the rebellion arrived in his courtroom, he once more demonstrated his unique way of administering justice. Lines of Detroit City buses, jammed with mostly black people charged with misdemeanors, encircled Recorders Court. With no more room at this location, the arrested were dispatched to Belle Isle, which after a while resembled a concentration camp. “I came into the limelight because I refused to set high bail to keep these people locked up,” he told a writer. “I let them go on their personal promise to come back when I got ready for them. The other judges were fixing bail at $10,000. To show you how brash I was, I sent a letter to each of the judges telling them what the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution required and what the Michigan Constitution required on reasonable bail. I was mad as hell.”8 Bail, in Crockett’s glossary, was a “security guarantee, not a tool of punishment and discrimination.”

  Jim Ingram, a columnist at the Michigan Chronicle, was not among those who stood in Crockett’s court. He had been released from custody after being arrested along with his brother and two other companions for allegedly being at a gas station where a ban had been placed on the selling of gasoline. “We were taken to the 7th Precinct, I knew that because the ride was very short and the doors were flung open and somebody started yelling, ‘Run niggers, run,’” Ingram said, recalling the incident for Eyes on the Prize, the documentary series on the civil rights movement.

  An officer started slinging us out of the van. I couldn’t see that clearly what was going on in front of me but I was the last one out of the van and I saw my brother in front of me being swung at. There were National Guardsmen on the right and police on the left and they were swinging rifles . . . and red pick ax handles and I was trying to dodge some of the swings. I don’t know how I got through there with only being hit hard one time with a rifle barrel and that’s what broke my right arm. We sort of ran I guess as fast as we could and tried to dodge those, some of them were really swinging quite wildly. . . . It was like I was going to myself, ‘What have we done?’ I mean they, we were guilty of Lord knows what in these guys’ minds, you know. I mean they were treating us like we were hardened criminals or something. And all we were doing was
attempting to buy some gas in a gas station. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.9

  Eleanor Josaitis was in the wrong place at the wrong time, too, according to her husband. He was pretty angry but mainly because his wife had dared to venture out into the chaos. At the time, she was an associate director of Focus: Hope, an organization that she had cofounded with Father William Cunningham to help the needy. “My husband and I had been down to the seminary where we had mass. We looked out the windows at all the smoke. The following day I came back and walked the streets with Father Cunningham. When I got home that night, that’s the only time my husband ever said a harsh word to me in thirty-six years. He grabbed me by the shoulders: ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’”10 During the five days of turmoil, forty-three people were killed, two white women among them, including Helen Hall. She was visiting Detroit on business from Illinois when she was allegedly killed by a sniper. Sniper fire, or the rumor of it, also took the life of the only black female who died in the riot, Tanya Blanding, who was four years old when she was killed by gunfire from a National Guard unit stationed in front of her house at 1756 West Euclid near Twelfth Street. Blanding was the rebellion’s youngest victim, and her death intensified the anger and resentment in the black community. A bullet from a .50 caliber machine gun ripped through her tiny body from a guardsman who mistook the flash of a match from the apartment where she lived for sniper fire. More than two hundred mourners attended her funeral, and no criminal charges were brought against the guardsman.

  Many whites, such as Joann Castle and her family, packed a few items and moved to safer turf outside the city limits. “An article appeared in . . . [the] newspaper saying that blacks were going to attack homes on Boston Boulevard,” Castle recalled in an unpublished manuscript. “Don [her husband] and Patrick Mason set down an edict: women and children must leave. Our neighbors from Taylor were on vacation. They called to offer us the use of their home. Rosemarie and I drove to Taylor with all the young children and spent one night. There was no time for preparations: grab your pajamas and go. There were two of us and nine children. We were upset that we were sent from our homes and drove back the next morning. There were rumors of cars of blacks on the freeways moving toward the suburbs. In reality, the freeways were deserted.”11

  Aubrey Pollard, Carl Cooper, and Fred Temple were the only three victims to get any semblance of justice as victims of the rebellion, and theirs came as a result of community activists organizing a people’s tribunal. A group of committed activists—Dan Aldridge, Ken Cockrel, Lonnie Peek, Glanton Dowdell, and others came together after the three men were killed by the police at the Algiers Motel on Virginia Park. They didn’t need H. Rap Brown’s fiery pronouncements; they were incensed enough by the “murders” and sought some form of retribution. When the word spread that Brown, the former chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee was coming to town—mainly invited by Aldridge and his wife, Dorothy Dewberry—thousands assembled at the Dexter Avenue Theater to hear him. They were not disappointed. “There was a town called Motown, now it ain’t no town,” Brown began. “They used to call it Detroit, now they call it Destroyed. I hear ain’t nothing left, but Motown sound. And if they don’t come around, you gon’ burn them down.” He had the crowd cheering with approval. And then he touched on the three dead men: “What happened at the Algiers Motel must not be allowed to be repeated. The tribunal to be held must be made legal by the people. If the murderers are found guilty, and they should be, the brothers should carry out the execution.”12

  The tribunal was originally scheduled to be held at the Dexter Avenue Theater, but Brown’s incendiary speech perhaps put a damper on that possibility, and a new venue was chosen: the Rev. Cleage’s Central United Church of Christ on Linwood Avenue. On trial were a black security guard and police officers Ronald August, Robert Paille, and David Senak. They were charged with killing the three young men in cold blood. A roster of notables from the activist community was selected to fill the roles of the various courtroom officers: Milton Henry was assigned to be lead prosecutor; attorneys Sol Plafkin and Russell Brown were chosen to defend the accused; and with a freshly minted law degree, the judge and moderator was Ken Cockrel. In the jury box was author John Oliver Killens, who had worked with Malcolm X in writing the principles for the Organization of Afro-American Unity; bookstore owner Ed Vaughn; and the esteemed Rosa Parks. As expected, to a great cheer from the more than two thousand people in the church, the officers were found guilty. It was the most satisfaction the victims and their families would ever get from the tragedy, because the officers were later acquitted in the official trial.13

  In the wake of the devastation, there were 43 dead citizens and 473 injured. More than 7,200 were arrested, a few for having mismatched shoes and naked mannequins. Some 2,500 stores were vandalized or torched. There were nearly 400 homeless families, and 412 buildings had to be demolished. The overall damages totaled between $40 and $80 billion. Among the losses were a popular nightspot, an irreplaceable bookstore, and nearly a block of homes after a gas station exploded. The police fingered one man, Michael Lewis, known as “Greensleeves” because of the apparel he wore that morning, as the culprit who started the civil disorder. A series of rallies and pressure from protesters was successful in getting his bail reduced, and eventually the charges were dropped, so the city fathers had to find somebody else to blame. For a while, bookstore owner Ed Vaughn was viewed as a suspect, even though he was out of town. They certainly couldn’t blame Julius L. Dorsey, a fifty-five-year-old private guard who was posted in front of a market when he was accosted by two black men and a woman. “They demanded he permit them to loot the market. He ignored their demands. They began to berate him. He asked a neighbor to call the police. As an argument grew more heated, Dorsey fired three shots from his pistol into the air. The police radio reported: ‘Looters, they have rifles.’ A patrol car driven by a police officer and carrying three National Guardsmen arrived. As the looters fled, the law enforcement personnel opened fire. When the firing ceased, one person lay dead. He was Julius L. Dorsey.”14

  Months before the Kerner Commission released its report summarizing a summer of discontent primarily in Detroit and Newark, the city leaders had already embarked on some of the remedies proposed by the commission and, to some degree, anticipated the concern voiced by sociologist Kenneth Clark, who viewed riot-commission reports with a jaundiced eye. During his testimony before the Kerner Commission, he said they were like “Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.”15

  Mayor Cavanagh had placed too much stock in media reports about the city’s tranquility. In the midst of the rebellion, still stunned, he called civic leaders together to form the New Detroit Committee. The following accounts were underscored by a gaggle of business leaders and corporate heads, none more prominent than J. L. Hudson Jr., president of Hudson’s, the city’s largest department store at that time and the third largest in the country behind Macy’s in New York City and Marshall Field in Chicago. With Hudson at the helm, Cavanagh and his committee members were mindful of the criticism emanating from black community activists, who, as they expected, would not be invited to this blue-ribbon affair, which in the end could only apply Band-Aids and symbolic gestures to the systemic problem. “One well-known militant, Milton Henry, told the committee members that black nationalists should be involved in the reconstruction of the city. Reverend Cleage outlined areas in which cooperation between blacks and the committee was possible. Lorenzo Freeman, a WCO [West Central Organization], however, disagreed with the idea of an interracial committee, saying it was ‘passé.’”16

  To mollify the complaints from black militants, three were added to the nine so-called black moderates on the thirty-nine-member committee, with former councilman Bill Patrick as president. To some extent, the inclusion of Frank Ditto also helped to assuage some of the criticism about th
e lack of community activists on the committee. “Frank Ditto and his work on the volatile east side of Detroit gained national attention and was featured in Time Magazine (June 13, 1969) as an example of ‘a black militant who can work in the upper echelons of white society while retaining their independence and the respect of the blacks on the street,’” observed Joann Castle, who was among those involved Catholics concerned about the city’s welfare. “It may be that Detroit was unique in the way blacks and whites worked together in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are many possible reasons for this, one being the city’s working class history and its strong union base.”17

  A rebuke came from the traditional African American organizations, such as labor leaders, various ministers, the Cotillion Club, and the Booker T. Washington Business Association. Even the Michigan Chronicle was neglected in the call. New Detroit was barely off the ground before it was met with a headwind of disgruntled citizens, each organization screaming about exclusion. Out of this rumbling resentment evolved the City-wide Citizens Action Committee (CCAC). Another organization that stood in opposition to CCAC was the Detroit Council of Organizations (DCO), headed by the Rev. Roy Allen, president of the Council of Baptist Ministers. “The DCO became the ‘voice of the ins,’” wrote urbanologist Sidney Fine, “just as the CCAC was the ‘voice of the outs.’”18