There were competing conferences that week. Franklin, trying to keep alive his Detroit Council on Human Rights, sponsored an event downtown, the Negro Summit Leadership Conference, that attracted nearly three thousand people, most of whom came to hear Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the congressman from Harlem who was a frequent visitor to Detroit. Powell’s rhetoric was anything but tame. He called for unity among black activists, criticized Mayor Cavanagh for making what he called only token black appointments, and focused on the Cynthia Scott case as an example of police brutality. The crowd to hear Powell made the event seem more of a success than it was. Most black ministers in Detroit declined to promote the rally or have anything more to do with Reverend Franklin, and his attempt to stage a motorized version of the Walk to Freedom—Franklin billed it as a Ride to Freedom—drew barely one hundred cars and drivers. Rather than a rejuvenation of his June glory, this November fizzle marked the end of something. The High Priest of Soul Preaching would not disappear after that, but his days as a leader, or self-styled leader, of civil rights in Detroit were over. A few years earlier Franklin had curtailed his circuit flying out of physical fatigue. Now the mental stress of trying to bridge so many factional divides had worn him out and prompted him to recede again.
The counterconference sponsored by Cleage seized on the “Grass Roots” label after Franklin discouraged radicals from participating. Detroit’s grassroots contingent had coalesced around the Cynthia Scott shooting and a philosophy or theology of black liberation. Along with Cleage, its leaders were Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, and the Henry brothers, Milton and Richard, who came out of Cleage’s church and founded the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL) and the Michigan Freedom Now Party. Seeking to build a revolutionary movement in the city, they held organizing and strategy workshops for two days at Mr. Kelley’s Lounge and Recreation Center, a popular music hangout often frequented by Motown artists. Workshop sessions were led by the Boggses, Don Freeman of Cleveland, Gloria Richardson of Cambridge, Maryland, and William Worthy of New York. One eventual result was Cleage’s decision to run for governor of Michigan on the Freedom Now ticket the following year. The conference was staged at King Solomon Baptist Church, about a half mile from Motown headquarters. Anthony Fierimonte, a young Detroit police officer, had been assigned patrol duties outside the church that day. His orders, he said later, were to place “No Parking” signs in front of the church “and get the hell out of the way” so that members of the intelligence unit could snap photos of Malcolm X and other attendees. Instead, as buses and cars pulled up, Fierimonte started greeting people—“Welcome to Detroit! How are you?”—until two undercover cops grabbed him. “And I sat in the police car and they called me every name in the book. ‘You know who this fucker is? You piece of shit!’ They were trying to see all the people and get pictures, and I was blocking the view.” After five hours of speeches inside King Solomon, the conference concluded with Malcolm X. His speech, among the most significant of his career, was later titled “Message to the Grassroots.”
Detroit Red was one of his old nicknames. And Big Red. Red from the tint of his hair, Detroit from his days there in his late twenties. Born in Omaha as Malcolm Little, son of an itinerant preacher active in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Malcolm grew up mostly in Michigan, near East Lansing. After his father was killed by a streetcar and his mother was declared insane and sent off to a mental institution in Kalamazoo, Malcolm eventually left for Massachusetts to live with a sister. He fell into a life of drugs and crime there and in New York and ended up in prison, where he converted to the Nation of Islam, a variant of Islam but one that viewed whites as devils, conceived in Detroit in 1930 by Wallace D. Fard, a mysterious peddler who disappeared four years after arriving in the Motor City, leaving only his religion behind. When Malcolm was released from prison in 1952, he took a bus from Massachusetts to Detroit to live with Wilfred, his oldest brother. He found work first at a furniture store, then at a truck factory, and finally with Ford Motor Company at the Lincoln-Mercury plant, the same assembly line where Berry Gordy Jr. had worked. Wilfred’s home was strictly Muslim. He went by the name Wilfred X and was secretary of Temple No. 1 in Detroit, run out of a storefront not far from a hog slaughterhouse. After quitting the auto job, Malcolm X quickly rose up the Nation of Islam hierarchy, and by November 1963, when he returned to Detroit to speak at Reverend Cleage’s grassroots conference, he was not only the second most powerful black Muslim behind Elijah Muhammad, who had succeeded Fard and moved the headquarters to Chicago, but also a threat to Muhammad and far more political. His “Message to the Grassroots” was the clearest presentation of his black militant theology, which he connected to revolutionary movements in Africa and Asia, something larger than the American condition.
Five months earlier in Detroit, King had used the geography of American states to evoke his dream; now Malcolm X used it to identify the enemy: “And when you and I here in Detroit and in Michigan and in America who have been awakened today look around us, we too realize here in America we all have a common enemy, whether he’s in Georgia or Michigan, whether he’s in California or New York. He’s the same man: blue eyes and blond hair and pale skin—same man.” Where King evoked the dream of the sons of former slaves and former slave owners someday sitting down together, Malcolm X offered a vision of people of color somehow finding unity among themselves: “Argue it out behind closed doors. And then when you come out on the street, you pose a common front, a united front. We need to stop airing our differences in front of the white man. Put the white man out of our meetings, number one, and then sit down and talk shop with each other.” There were about twenty or thirty white people sitting in the pews of King Solomon Baptist as Malcolm X spoke. They had been segregated into a separate section.
Not long after expressing his desire for black unity, Malcolm eviscerated King and the leaders of the marches in Detroit (Cleage aside) and Washington. He started by differentiating “house Negroes” and “field Negroes,” the terminology of slavery, and placed himself and the black nationalists with the “field Negroes” and King and the integrationists with the “house Negroes.” There had never been a successful revolution without bloodshed, he said: “You don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. Only kind of revolution that’s nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution based on loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet, you can sit down next to white folks on the toilet. That’s not revolution.” He called King a “fallen idol” who “became bankrupt, almost, as a leader,” after the Birmingham desegregation campaign, which Malcolm described as a low point in the civil rights movement. When Birmingham failed, the black masses started to take to the streets and talked about marching on Washington. It was then that influential whites started manipulating the movement to take control and stifle a black revolution.
“It was the grass roots out there in the street. Scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C., to death. I was there. When they found out that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in Wilkins, they called in Randolph, they called in these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, ‘Call it off.’ Kennedy said, ‘Look, you all letting this thing go too far.’ And Old Tom said, ‘Boss, I can’t stop it, because I didn’t start it.’ I’m telling you what they said. They said, ‘I’m not even in it, much less at the head of it.’ They said, ‘These Negroes are doing things on their own. They’re running ahead of us.’ And that old shrewd fox said, ‘Well if you all aren’t in it, I’ll put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it. I’ll endorse it. I’ll welcome it. I’ll help it. I’ll join it.’ ” That is when the Council for United Civil Rights was formed, Malcolm X said, with money from white millionaires and the
UAW.
His version of history continued: “Soon as they got the setup organized, the white man made available to them top public relations experts; opened the news media across the country at their disposal; and then they begin to project these Big Six [civil rights leaders] as the leaders of the march. Originally, they weren’t even in the march. You was talking this march talk on Hastings Street—is Hastings Street still here?—on Hastings Street. You was talking the march talk on Lenox Avenue. . . . That’s where the march talk was being talked. But the white man put the Big Six head of it, made them the march. They became the march. They took it over. And the first move they made after they took it over, they invited Walter Reuther, a white man, they invited a priest, a rabbi, and an old white preacher. Yes, an old white preacher. The same white element that put Kennedy in power—labor, the Catholics, the Jews, and liberal Protestants, the same clique that put Kennedy in power, joined the March on Washington.”
This diluted the march: “It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What you do? You integrate it with cream; you make it weak. If you pour too much cream in, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it will put you to sleep. This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it. They didn’t integrate it; they infiltrated it. They . . . took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. They ceased to be angry. They ceased to be hot. They ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all. You had one right here in Detroit—I saw it on television—with clowns leading it, white clowns and black clowns.”
The March on Washington was controlled so tightly, he said, the bosses would not let James Baldwin speak because they feared what he would say. “They controlled it so tight—they told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make; and then told them to get out of town by sundown. And every one of those Toms was out of town by sundown. Now I know you don’t like my saying this. But I can back it up. It was a circus, a performance that beat anything Hollywood could ever do, the performance of the year. Reuther and those other three devils should get an Academy Award for the best actors ’cause they acted like they really loved Negroes and fooled a whole lot of Negroes. And the six Negro leaders should get an award too, for the best supporting cast.”
Some of this was irrefutably true; what differed so vastly were interpretations of meaning and motivation. Baldwin did not speak. John Lewis had to tamp down his radical rhetoric. White religious figures joined Reuther in the leadership. Money from white liberals and labor unions shaped the course of the event, including its relocation from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. What motivated all this? Malcolm X would say white manipulation to hold back the black masses. The Kennedys and Reuther would say they were dealing with political reality, doing what it took to keep the civil rights bill alive. In either case, black intellectuals in Detroit understood the impact of Malcolm X’s message to the grass roots. In tone and substance it marked a break from the past and laid out a path for the black power movement to follow from then on. Whether or not Malcolm intended it, noted Manning Marable, his biographer, his life was “fundamentally changed” by this address, just as King’s had been by his “dream” speech. The content also reinforced whispers already being heard in Detroit and Chicago and New York that Malcolm was breaking away from Elijah Muhammad and his less-confrontational brand of Nation of Islam. The Michigan Chronicle hinted at this in the lead of its article on the speech: “Fiery Malcolm X, as of this moment the No. 2 man in the Black Muslim movement, in spite of widespread rumors to the contrary . . .”
Ofield Dukes, who covered the civil rights movement for the Chronicle, wrote in that same issue about the power struggles that were dividing the black community in Detroit. He took note of the two competing conferences hosted by Cleage and Franklin and reported that many black leaders refused to attend either of them: “Recent events clearly indicate that the schism between the various segments of Negro leadership is widening. Even the so-called splinter groups are breaking up into factions. Traditional organization is threatened by internal problems and external competition for recognition and position in the leadership hierarchy.” The causes were complex, but the vindictiveness and envy were real, Dukes wrote, and served no larger purpose. “Watching this leadership struggle from one end of the social spectrum is the white power structure. And waiting at the other end to contribute to disunity and destruction of responsible Negro leadership is the white subversive element whose aims are to take command and exploit the situation. . . . Class differences in the Negro community also contribute to the murky leadership picture. Most Negro leaders come from the so-called Negro upper class, as reflected in Detroit’s NAACP board of directors as well as in the Negro members serving on the local Urban League board. However, it is the lower class Negro stratum that experiences the brunt of racial discrimination and segregation. The noose of prejudice is around the neck of the lower class Negro.”
Dukes called the Freedom Now Party an exercise in futility but also had critical words for what he saw as the hypocrisy or timidity of the labor movement. “Reuther was big on the national scene but the Wayne County UAW was not to be seen in the Patrick-Ravitz open housing ordinance,” he wrote. This underscored what Dukes saw as a tendency among white liberal labor leaders: “The closer to home a race issue is the less vigorous the union can afford to campaign on its behalf. Labor leaders champion legislation which will have little immediate effect on white workers. But championing an anti-bias housing law is another matter.” There was one exception, he pointed out. Reuther’s aide Bill Oliver, who had been one of the UAW officials who carried money down to Alabama to bail Martin Luther King out of jail, also testified publicly in Detroit on behalf of the Patrick-Ravitz bill. “Nothing is more frightening than ignorance in action,” Oliver had said.
• • •
One week after the competing conferences of Franklin and Cleage, there was a third major convocation in Detroit. This one had nothing overtly to do with politics or civil rights but attracted more attention in the black community than either of the previous gatherings. For the first time ever, the full collection of Motown artists entertained the hometown audience the same way they had thrilled concertgoers around the country since that October day thirteen months earlier when the first Motortown Revue hit the stage of the Howard Theater in Washington.
Little Stevie Wonder, the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, Kim Weston, Martha and the Vandellas, the Contours, the Marvelettes, the Temptations, comedian and emcee Bill Murry, Choker Campbell and his big band—all on the bill at the grand old Fox Theater on Woodward Avenue for the weekend of November 16 and 17. The second annual nationwide tour had been more difficult than the first, with uneven support and money-handling mistakes along the way, but this homecoming was both a financial boon and a morale boost. The crowd started lining the sidewalk at nine that Saturday morning and filled the theater both days. It was the largest attendance at the movie house in five years, according to William Brown, the Fox’s general manager. And much like the Walk to Freedom at the start of the summer, this two-day celebration was staged without incident. A celebrity coffee before the first show attracted not only Little Stevie but also none other than Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, who came out of Detroit and used to eat those scrambled-eggs-and-steak breakfasts at the now gone Gotham Hotel.
In October 1962, when the Motortown Revue headed off on its first tour, Mayor Cavanagh spoke about the economic spirit of the city without mentioning Motown. Now, in a letter to Berry Gordy Jr. welcoming the hometown performances at the Fox, he understood the meaning of the music. “The cast and sponsors of the Motortown Revue are to be congratulated for their part in the revit
alization of ‘live’ musical revues,” Cavanagh declared. “It is particularly pleasing that one of the most popular revues to cross the country in the past few years is completely composed of native-born Detroiters. . . . The fine work that these artists have done to make Detroit the national center of the single record business has done much to enhance the reputation of our town.”
Smokey and his Miracles closed the last show. “Is everybody ready?” he asked, as the band launched into the first notes of “Mickey’s Monkey”—and the place went wild. A one, a two, a one two three four—Lum de lum de la iiiii. Everyone up from their seats, dancing and singing along.
Chapter 18
* * *
FALLEN
THE FOX THEATER rocked with Motown stars, and the Flame Show Bar closed in the same week. It could be said that the Flame begat Motown. The Flame is where the Gordy sisters worked the cigarette and photo concessions and introduced their little brother Berry to the managers and artists who helped him get his start in the music industry. It was at the Flame that he first saw Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington and Della Reese and Sam Cooke and Billy Eckstine and Jackie Wilson, and it was from the Flame that he later hired Maurice King and many of the jazz musicians who became Motown’s house band, the Funk Brothers. All that left to hazy history now, a jewel of black Detroit gone—like the Gotham Hotel a year earlier. And like the Gotham, “it died without pomp or ceremony, without trumpets . . . or a final requiem,” according to a notice in the Chronicle.
Some clubs have a deeper meaning. They are not just another venue, but home. The warm colors, the stage above the bar, the rhythm and flow of the place late at night, women dressed to kill and killers dressed to charm, Ziggy Johnson at the microphone, introducing artists and leading the audience in the Soft and the Chick-a-Boom—that was the Flame. The Hottest Place in Town. The Most Beautiful Black & Tan in the Midwest. Continuous Entertainment. Up to five shows a night. Call the joint at TE2-8714. Find it at 4264 John R at the corner with Canfield. The lights went on in 1949, followed by fourteen years of lush night colors before the neon drained to empty gray, the site flattened to make way for yet another medical center parking garage. If this decomposition was unavoidable and perhaps even necessary, part of the life processes of a city, that reality made the loss of the Flame no less painful, a void in the culture of Detroit that could not be replicated.
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