Reuther also spoke that afternoon, immediately following Lewis. “I am for civil rights as a matter of human decency, as a matter of common morality, but I am also for civil rights because I believe that freedom is an indivisible value, that no one can be free unto himself,” he said. “And when Bull Connor, with his police dogs and fire hoses, destroys freedom in Birmingham, he destroys my freedom in Detroit. . . . Let us understand that we cannot defend freedom in Berlin as long as we deny freedom in Birmingham. This rally is not the end, it is the beginning. It is the beginning of a great moral crusade . . . to finish the unfinished work of democracy.” Nelson Lichtenstein, Reuther’s biographer, later described it as “a good speech” but also noted that it might have marked “the end of something.” In Lichtenstein’s analysis, “two decades of such talk had long since devalued Reuther’s brand of social democratic rhetoric. Indeed, the summer of 1963 may well be taken as the moment when the discourse of American liberalism shifted decisively out of the New Deal–Fair Deal–laborite orbit and into a world in which the racial divide colored all politics.”
At the end of a long day of festivities that began with loudspeakers on the Mall playing Little Stevie’s “Fingertips (Part 2)” and ended with King’s “dream” oration, dusk settled softly over hallowed ground and more than a quarter million people trudged back to buses and trains and cars that would carry them home to New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Atlanta, and Detroit. King and Reuther and the other leaders of the march were invited to the White House to meet again with JFK. The last time they had all been there, on the day before the Walk to Freedom in Detroit, the president had expressed his concern that a demonstration in Washington might backfire and hinder civil rights legislation. Now the march had succeeded without serious incident, and King had electrified the nation with his speech, overwhelming all else that was said that day, and here in the Oval Office he not so subtly tried to redirect the spotlight by asking the president if he had heard Walter Reuther. “Oh, I’ve heard him plenty of times,” Kennedy said.
It did not take Berry Gordy long to realize that his first recording of King had been rendered irrelevant and essentially unsellable on the first day it was to go on sale, overtaken by the speech in Washington. Who cared about a dream in Detroit that no one outside that city even knew about when there was now a stronger version becoming the talk of the nation? Perhaps the Washington Post had utterly missed the moment in its main story, but King’s words reverberated in a way that few had before, and within a week his speech took on a permanent title, “I Have a Dream.” If the Detroit dream was suddenly obsolete, the sequel from Washington was certainly worth a recording, though this time the difficulties went beyond financial bickering over royalties. Motown and two other recording companies who pressed recordings of King’s speech, 20th Century-Fox and Mister Maestro, ended up being sued by King and the United Civil Rights Leadership group that organized the march for infringement of copyright. “If these infringing records are allowed to remain on the market, they will severely damage the ability of the Council for Civil Rights Leadership to obtain funds derived from the proceeds of the marketing of recordings of the plaintiff’s speech, I HAVE A DREAM,” they argued in court papers.
King himself eventually provided an affidavit in the case, offering some facts that illuminated how he differentiated this speech from what he said in Detroit. His lawyers were arguing that the fact that the Detroit speech was not copyrighted did not taint his rights to the second speech, and that Gordy in hindsight was taking advantage of his immortal phrase. “On June 23, 1963, following a peaceful willing assemblage of thousands of people through the streets of downtown Detroit, Michigan, I delivered a speech in an auditorium called Cobo Hall to the participants in said peaceful walk,” his affidavit said. “The speech which I gave in Detroit as hereinabove described was recorded with my consent by Berry Gordy Records, a division of Motown Record Corporation, 2648 West Grand Boulevard. . . . During the course of said speech as recorded by said Berry Gordy Records, I said the phrase or words ‘I have a dream’. . . . My speech in Detroit was not entitled by me ‘I Have a Dream.’ The use of said words as the title for the excerpt from my Detroit speech was done by Berry Gordy Records . . . after said Berry Gordy Records saw the widespread public reception accorded said words when used in the text of my address to the MARCH ON WASHINGTON.”
While the use of the “dream” phrase and other wording was similar in the two speeches, King argued in his affidavit, the Washington speech “in its complete text was a completely distinct and different address from my address in Cobo Hall in Detroit. . . . While many of the words and phrases in the latter part of my August 28th Washington [address] were similar to these in the latter part of my Detroit speech, there are many words in the latter part of my Washington speech which are not identical to those in my Detroit speech. My consent to the recording, distribution and the sale of any excerpt from my Detroit, Michigan, speech was and is not regarded by me as a sound recording of the text of the speech . . . delivered by me on August 28.”
Gordy sent a telegram to King after the suit was filed stating that he had been operating under the impression that King’s lawyer, Clarence Jones, had said they could go ahead with producing the album, but “if this is not true we will remove our album from the market immediately. The removal of this album will represent a financial loss to us but we are prepared to do this as our contribution to the cause of unity among civil rights organizations.” Instead a deal was worked out and Motown was able to produce the record, with a better royalty arrangement for King than he and his organization had for the now all but forgotten Detroit recording.
• • •
Among the few thousand Detroiters who participated in the March on Washington were two members of the City Council, Mel Ravitz and William T. Patrick Jr. The two local politicians, one white, one black, stood together on the Lincoln Memorial steps after the event, hand in hand, and sang freedom songs, then returned to Detroit with an even deeper commitment to push open-housing legislation they had cosponsored that summer. Patrick was the lone black member of the council. Ravitz, with a sociology doctorate from Wayne State, had spent his academic and political careers studying the dynamics of a city and ways to improve the lives of its residents. The troubles of Detroit, past, present, and future, were his life’s calling; he saw not only what was happening but what was to come. His expertise was in neighborhoods, their pathology and means of restoration. In the midfifties he had worked for Detroit’s planning commission attempting to turn around an east side neighborhood along Mack Avenue.
Ravitz, known on the council as Mr. Egghead, had the look of a professor with his horn-rim glasses and pipe. He was at once passionate and clear-headed. His sympathies were with the poor and forgotten citizens of Detroit, but he saw the complexities and interconnections of problems that could not be solved with the magic wand of good intentions. He wrote a paper for the Alpha Kappa Deltan, the magazine of the Sociology Honor Society, in 1958 that foretold the problematic effects of the urban renewal going on in Detroit. Blacks, he predicted, would “slip into nearby middle aged neighborhoods. From these neighborhoods many whites have been and are continuing to depart. They are leaving behind many substantial, well-cared for houses.” The problem came with the economic disadvantages of the new residents: “Some Negroes as well as whites who cannot afford them are buying them anyway and then quickly forfeiting their land contracts. . . . Sometimes several families buy a home originally built for one family and overcrowd it with two, three, or four families to handle the down payment and monthly installments. Such overcrowding not only accelerates the out movement of the middle class whites that have lived there, it also discourages Negro middle class residents from remaining permanently. (Obviously whites can leave more easily than Negroes penned in.) This kind of housing and economic pressure helps transform these middle aged neighborhoods into the slums of the next ten years.”
When he was elected to t
he council in 1961, Ravitz sought ways to deal with this urban dilemma. He held landlords partially responsible for the problems in the slum areas and proposed that if they would not adequately maintain their properties, the city should confiscate the rents they collected and use the money to make necessary improvements. In the long run, the only reasonable way to solve the larger problem of white flight and the flow of money and a tax base away from the city, he felt, was to develop a metropolitan government and to get the major industries, especially the Big Three automakers, to feel a larger responsibility to Detroit and its social well-being. The landlord bill never passed, the metropolitan government concept never reached fruition, and the Big Three’s commitment to the city was uneven and in any case overwhelmed by something else: the decades-long withdrawal of auto factories and jobs to other cities and states and eventually countries.
Patrick, with a law degree from the University of Michigan, had been a pioneer in Detroit politics, the first African American to serve on the council in the twentieth century. Since his election in 1957, he had worked in tandem with Ravitz on issues of economics and race. During the recession that hit Detroit in the late fifties, he helped establish a committee designed to keep working-class Detroiters from losing their homes to repossession. He also pushed for the integration of the police force, supported Commissioner Edwards in his attempts to reform the department, and joined with Mayor Cavanagh in implementing a commuter tax to ease the city’s financial difficulties.
To Ravitz and Patrick, their open-housing legislation was more than a matter of urban policy; it was part of the inexorable movement for equality and civil rights. Their proposed ordinance was a tougher local version of what Romney and his two Democratic predecessors had tried to accomplish on the state level. Any person who discriminated in the sale, lease, or rental of housing because of race, color, creed, national origin, or ancestry would be in violation and subject to thirty days in jail or a $100 fine enforced in Traffic and Ordinance Court. The guts of the bill, and by far its most controversial aspect, was that it outlawed discrimination by an individual homeowner, meaning someone wishing to sell a house or rent an apartment could not pick and choose who to sell or rent to on the basis of race. The only exemption would be for a single room in a private dwelling.
Houses divided. No issue more clearly revealed the racial fissures in Detroit. On one side were white homeowner groups who said they were fighting on behalf of individual rights and the sanctity and safety of their neighborhoods. On the other side were African American churches and social groups, white and black religious leaders, and the Detroit Commission on Community Relations, which had been established twenty years earlier, after the 1943 race riots, to try to bridge the racial divide in the city. In August, a few weeks before the March on Washington, the commission had endorsed the Patrick-Ravitz bill by a six-to-one vote, following months and years of compiling incidents of racial discrimination in housing. A recent case involved the travails of Raymond Roberson, who had been trying without success to rent an apartment in the area near Gratiot and Seven Mile Road.
Roberson was black and blind, a piano tuner who worked for Grinnell Brothers out of their branch on Kelly Road. He told the commission that when he arrived in Detroit late in 1962 he contacted forty or so real estate brokers and was told that they would not or could not rent an apartment to blacks. One broker suggested that he look at a flat near Gratiot and Faircrest, which he did on a Sunday, but by the next day he was told that someone else had already put down a deposit. An investigator from the Urban League followed up and learned that when neighbors found out that a black man was looking at the apartment they put pressure on the owner and broker not to rent it to him. In his next effort, after being read advertisements in the newspaper, he started making inquiries over the telephone, describing himself as a blind piano tuner. Only one landlord agreed to meet with him, but when he arrived with his driver and got out of the car, the landlady claimed that she was sick and refused to talk to him, and when he called back the next day she said the apartment was no longer available. One case out of the multitudes—Roberson never found an apartment in the area near where he worked, according to commission documents.
Opponents of the Patrick-Ravitz bill mobilized against it not only by pushing for its defeat but by presenting an alternative bill that would allow them to keep discriminating in the name of a property owner’s “freedom from interference.” Historian Thomas Sugrue, a leading expert on the dynamics of race in Detroit, noted that at that time “a growing number of white Detroiters believed that open housing advocates were part of a conspiracy that linked together government bureaucrats, civil rights organizations, and liberal religious groups, many influenced by Communism or socialism (terms used interchangeably) who sacrificed white homeowners to their experiments in social engineering for the benefit of ‘pressure groups’—repudiating, in the process, property rights and democratic principles.” Transcripts of two council hearings on open housing, one held that June, another in mid-September, underscored Sugrue’s analysis.
Thomas Poindexter, president of the Greater Homeowners Council, claiming to represent 250,999 voters, said that the legislation was politically motivated and that any member of the council or community relations commission who was also a member of the NAACP had a conflict of interest. There was no need for the Patrick-Ravitz ordinance, he argued, because blacks were well off in Detroit and some of them could “afford better homes than I can buy.” Donald Sargent of the National Civic Association said blacks and whites had different “instincts” and that whites would welcome blacks into their neighborhood if they “would observe our marriage customs.” Mr. Underwood of the Northeast Council of Homeowners said that a secret government was behind the legislation and that churches that supported it should have to pay taxes. Mr. Dodge of the Wingate Homeowners Association said communists were behind it. Mr. Lutz of the Stoepel Park Civic Association called Patrick’s views “slightly subversive.” Mr. Christie of the Gratiot-Connors Property Owners Association said the community relations commission was “an integration commission of do-gooders and witch hunters and should be abolished.” Mr. Sullivan of the Greater Belmont Civic Association talked about genetics and said open housing was another step toward a classless society. Mrs. Fulks of the Redford Civic Association called it a step toward thought-control socialistic legislation. Another opponent was Orville F. Sherwood of the Michigan Committee for the Protection of Property Rights, who had also been the administrator of the Grosse Pointe point system and a paid organizer for the John Birch Society.
On September 26 Mayor Cavanagh came out in support of the Patrick-Ravitz bill. “To my fellow citizens of Detroit: I have been asked repeatedly to state my position in respect to open occupancy. In order to make my position clear, I have decided to issue this statement: I could have remained silent on this important issue. To do so would have been politically expedient. I cannot in good conscience choose this course. I believe that discrimination is evil. It runs counter to everything that I have been taught about my religious obligations and my obligations to my fellow citizens. The open occupancy ordinance in my judgment is another step along the road to true understanding among Detroiters. Detroit is not and shall not be another Birmingham. Detroit has long been admired throughout the country for its mature race relations. The Detroit Approach substitutes words for bricks, peace for violence, tolerance for bigotry, and understanding for hate.”
The next day a letter arrived in his office from W. G. Morneweck, who lived on Fielding Street in northwest Detroit. “One question all of you mayors, councilmen, lawyers, preachers, priests and from Kennedy down how near colored section do you live? When you fellows practice what you preach I will listen and not before. . . . Teach the colored to be like white folks and we will live with them. I worked about 23 years at Fords was foreman and I had colored and white. The time of race riot here two or three of the colored boys come to me and ask me what I thought of it. I told them they will
never get along till colored and white are Christian.”
Nearly three hundred people crammed into the council chambers to watch the proceedings when the vote was taken on Tuesday, October 8. The bill was defeated seven to two. Patrick and Ravitz were the two in favor.
In response, some disappointed local civil rights activists began spreading leaflets they hoped would reach around the globe. They were upset about the open-housing vote, but their target was not Poindexter and Sherwood and the cluster of homeowner opponents but the establishment, Mayor Cavanagh and Governor Romney and the Detroit Athletic Club big wheels who had been working on a grand scheme to sell Detroit to the world. “America does not deserve the 1968 Olympics,” the brochures read. “The Olympic Games represent fair play. . . . Fair play has not become a living part of Detroit and America for all citizens.”
Chapter 16
* * *
THE SPIRIT OF DETROIT
AVERY BRUNDAGE, PRESIDENT of the International Olympic Committee, was coming to Detroit, and Richard Cross regretted that he would not be there to greet him. Cross, a blue-chip Detroit lawyer who had risen to the top of American Motors, replacing George Romney as chief executive officer when Romney became governor, had to be in California for a speech to western auto dealers on the day Brundage returned to the city of his birth. A few days earlier, from his law office high atop the Penobscot Building overlooking the Detroit River and his downtown domain, Cross had written a letter to the Olympic potentate expressing his hopes for the visit. He addressed Brundage with the familiarity of an old associate, but also in the ingratiating language of a lawyer trying to close a deal, just as a decade earlier he had made his reputation by negotiating the merger of Nash-Kelvinator and the Hudson Motor Car Company into American Motors.
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