“We Must Complete JFK’s Unfinished Task,” blared the banner headline in the last November edition of the Chronicle. The subhead, linking the fallen president to King, was “Kennedy Gave Us a Dream.” Sheffield, the labor leader, and Keith, the activist lawyer, were among the prominent Detroit blacks who believed LBJ was up to the task of continuing that dream. Like Walter Reuther, they had opposed Kennedy’s choice of Johnson as his running mate at the 1960 Democratic convention, but they now believed he had proven himself, as he promised he would do in a meeting with black leaders the day after his nomination. Sheffield said, “All that I have seen since that time indicates that Mr. Johnson meant what he said when he told us the day after his nomination in Los Angeles that if the Negro people just gave him a chance he will do more in the field of civil rights than has been done in the last one hundred years.” Keith had met with Johnson “in two or three instances” since he became vice president and found him to be unequivocal in his support of the civil rights bill, “and he was also clear in terms of the essential dignity of man and a man’s worth, regardless of race, creed, or color.”
Early that Sunday afternoon, Earl Ruby left the dry-cleaning store he owned at the corner of Livernois Avenue and Curtis, not far from the University of Detroit. He was listening to the news on the car radio when he heard that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot and killed. The assailant was identified as the owner of the Carousel Club in Dallas. It was Jack Ruby, Earl’s older brother. The Ruby brothers, whose original surname was Rubenstein, had grown up with eight siblings in the rough-and-tumble of the Maxwell Street neighborhood of Chicago. Jack and Earl were close, Earl would say later, so close that Earl, who moved to Detroit and opened the dry cleaner in 1960, had loaned Jack $16,000 with no expectations of getting the money back—so close that Jack called him from his Dallas jail cell a few hours after his arrest on November 24. Shortly before Earl Ruby died decades later, Jack Lessenberry of the Toledo Blade asked him what Jack had said in that call. By then there had been countless theories about Ruby’s motives. Voluminous books had been written theorizing about his connections to the Mafia, his dealings with various mobsters who might have ordered JFK’s killing, including Detroit-based Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who had been the criminal target of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. The role of Jack Ruby in the Kennedy assassination would take its place in the mythology and mystery of the event, part of the endless debate over who, what, and why. Earl Ruby was in an assisted living center in suburban Detroit when Lessenberry talked to him in 2003. His colorful older brother had been dead for thirty-six years. What did Jack tell him from the jail cell? “Earl, I think we’re going to get a lot of good publicity out of this!”
Tony Ripley of the Detroit News had been among the journalists in the room when Oswald was shot by Ruby as he was being led out toward the basement garage. The world saw it on live television; Ripley saw it with his own eyes. Ripley seemed to be everywhere that year, a chronicler of America’s unraveling. He had covered the assassination of Medgar Evers, the church bombing in Birmingham, and now the tragedy in Dallas. The day after watching Ruby shoot Oswald at point-blank range, Ripley found his way to Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth to report on Oswald’s burial. The only people there were cops and federal agents and Oswald’s mother, brother, widow, and two young daughters. No one to carry the casket. As Mike Cochran, the local correspondent for the Associated Press, later recalled, Jerry Flemmons of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram turned to him and said, “Cochran, if we’re gonna write a story about the burial of Lee Harvey Oswald we’re gonna have to bury the sonofabitch ourselves.” Ripley joined them. The cheap wooden casket was carried to its grave by a motley crew of newspaper hacks, with Detroit represented. “I was so close to history I could not help but reach out and touch it,” Ripley explained a year later in a speech at Michigan State.
• • •
George Edwards was in Washington the week of the assassination. On November 21, the morning Kennedy left for Texas, the Detroit police commissioner was on Capitol Hill testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee as it considered his nomination by the president to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. His days as Detroit’s top cop were nearing an end, or so he hoped. Edwards had the support of Michigan’s two senators, the chair of the Michigan Bar, the state attorney general, leading African American lawyers led by Damon Keith, and influential Detroit civic leaders, including most of the men who had made Detroit’s Olympic case in Baden-Baden, led by Mayor Cavanagh, Councilman William Patrick, Richard Cross, and Martin Hayden and his editorial department at the Detroit News. But a counteroffensive against the nomination had taken shape, led by conservative Tennessee lawyers with apparent behind-the-scenes assistance from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Tennessee was one of four states in the Sixth Circuit along with Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan.
Using information supplied by Hoover’s agency, the Tennessee opponents reached deep into the past to argue that Edwards was not qualified. They noted that his father, who had been a major influence on him, had been a well-known socialist in Texas, and that Edwards himself during his college years had participated in groups that included communist members and then served as a radical labor organizer, arrested for disturbing the peace during a 1936 autoworkers strike at the Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Company, where he was organizing with Reuther. The Memphis Commercial Appeal called him “an unfit man, a sycophant of Walter Reuther.” Sheppard Tate, head of the Tennessee Bar, used a more lawyerly vocabulary. Describing the Sixth Circuit as “one of the great courts of the nation,” he lamented, “I would not want to see anyone appointed to it who might in any way create a lack of confidence in it.”
In the wash of the Kennedy assassination, confirmation hearings seemed beside the point, and it took another three weeks for the Senate to return to the Edwards issue. The Judiciary Committee, with a Democratic majority, approved his confirmation on December 11, despite the opposition of the chairman, James O. Eastland, a conservative segregationist from Mississippi. Soon thereafter the full Senate debated and voted. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who had known Edwards since the late forties when he was mayor of Minneapolis and Edwards was on the Detroit Common Council, stood strongest in support. “If there is any one quality that George Edwards has above all others it is his deep sense of social justice and his sense of fairness,” Humphrey said. Those attributes, he added, were apparent in the transformation of the Detroit Police Department under Edwards, which had become a model for the nation.
Edwards was confirmed, and his resignation as police commissioner became effective a week before Christmas. Cavanagh accepted with “great regret” and appointed his chief of staff, Ray Girardin, a former reporter who had once covered the cop beat for the Detroit Times, as the new commissioner. Edwards had once explained to an old friend that he had stepped down from the Michigan Supreme Court and taken the police commissioner’s position in 1961 with the hope of quelling rising racial tensions in Detroit, “which made many of its leaders feel that they were sitting on a keg of dynamite.” He had also hoped to “make the Constitution a living document in one of our great cities.” Now, two years later, the experiment was over. He could not know how a race riot four years into the future would obliterate his efforts.
• • •
The clubs of Detroit were uncharacteristically quiet in the nights after Kennedy was shot. People still came out, and singers still performed, but the acts were as subdued as the scene at the tables. On Wednesday night, November 27, the eve of his thirty-fourth birthday and the night before Thanksgiving, Berry Gordy celebrated at the 20 Grand with his mother and father, all of his sisters, and Marvin Gaye, the husband of Anna. The featured act that night was Johnny Hartman, a smooth singer with perfect phrasing who earlier that year had recorded an album of jazz ballads with saxophonist John Coltrane. Hartman made his way around the club encouraging others to sing, including at one point a waitress. He eventually handed the microphone to Gaye, wh
o was in exquisite crooning mood and stole the show with “(I’m Afraid) The Masquerade Is Over.” Gordy’s girlfriend, Margaret Norton, was pregnant that November, and when their son was born four months later he was named Kennedy William Gordy. First name for the fallen president, middle name in honor of William Smokey Robinson.
Gordy had been working that week on a new song to commemorate Kennedy. One day he was writing lyrics in his office with his sister Esther when a visitor was ushered in. It was Lincoln Perry, a black actor better known as Stepin Fetchit. No one could have seemed more out of date in 1963 than Stepin Fetchit, lazy and slow and seemingly discombobulated, unable to do anything right, a black man who played to negative stereotypes and was a hit with certain white audiences. The distance from Stepin Fetchit to Martin Luther King or Malcolm X seemed oceanic. But Perry always insisted that he had been misunderstood. He told Gordy that his character was pimping white audiences just as slaves had once done with their masters, pretending to be incompetent—“puttin’ on the old massa”—as a means of escape. Gordy not only listened; he let his visitor help him with the song. The result was “May What He Lived for Live,” sung by the majestic Liz Lands, who with her operatic voice reached F-flat an octave and a half above middle C. The song was meant for JFK but sadly had a revival five years later when Lands sang it at the funeral of Martin Luther King. The writing credits listed Berry Gordy, Esther Edwards, and W. A. Bisson, apparently another pseudonym for Lincoln Perry.
May what he lived for live
May what he lived for live
May what he strived for
May what he died for live.
The memorial song’s finest moment would come late the following August in Atlantic City, when Joe Lieberman, a young assistant to John M. Bailey, chairman of the Democratic Party, distributed two thousand copies of the record to delegates on the floor of the Democratic National Convention.
In the days after Thanksgiving, when the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers played to a 13–13 tie in their traditional holiday game, if someone had walked around Detroit asking citizens if they knew Richard Lane, few would have been able to come up with an answer. But Night Train Lane—that was a different matter. Everyone knew Night Train. Since his trade to the Lions before the 1960 season, Lane had become a Detroit institution, an all-pro defensive back renowned equally for his nose for interceptions and his punishing tackles, especially a stiff-armed clothesline takedown that he used so menacingly the NFL soon made it illegal. Lane, then thirty-five, was at the tail end of a brilliant career that had begun with the Los Angeles Rams in 1952, when he set a rookie record of fourteen interceptions. It was also during that rookie season that he acquired one of the great nicknames in American sporting history. Some thought it was because he was afraid to fly and instead caught trains at night to get from city to city. Others thought it was some evocation of his intensity as a ballplayer, like a locomotive pounding toward the opposition. The most commonly accepted notion was that “Night Train” was coined by Tom Fears, a Rams teammate, who enjoyed music and nicknames in equal measure and often played a recording of “Night Train” in the locker room. However it came to Dick Lane, the nickname fit.
In a town bubbling with talented black musicians and lawyers and preachers, Night Train was one of the precious few star black athletes. The Lions had been among the first NFL teams to bring on black players when they signed Bob Mann and Mel Groomes in 1948. Mann was a brilliant receiver out of the University of Michigan who led the NFL in receiving yardage in 1949 but left the Lions deeply embittered a year later when he was asked to take a pay cut even while two recently drafted and untested rookies were signed for nearly twice as much money. It would take another decade—more than ten years after Jackie Robinson—before the baseball Tigers, owned for decades by Walter Briggs, an auto body magnate and overt racist, signed their first nonwhite player, and that was the Dominican Oswaldo (Ozzie) Virgil, who broke the color barrier when he took the field at Briggs Stadium on June 6, 1958. Virgil at first felt apart from Detroit’s black community because he was a black Latino and not an African American. The Tigers were still virtually all white in 1963 but brought up outfielders Gates Brown and Willie Horton before the season was over.
Lane was not just a Hall of Fame–caliber player; he had become a major figure in black Detroit since his arrival three years earlier. He was the proprietor of El Taco, a popular restaurant on Dexter Avenue, where the new chef was Arthur Madison, who had made his reputation cooking for the Ebony Room at the Gotham Hotel. Ads for Dick Night Train Lane’s El Taco ran frequently in the Chronicle, specializing in fine steaks, shrimp, chops, and whole barbecue chickens. Lane was also a regular on the club scene, hanging out at the Flame Show Bar and other joints with the singers and night owls. And now, since their wedding in July, he was the male half of the most talented couple in town—the husband of Dinah Washington, the great blues singer. They shared a spacious apartment at 4002 W. Buena Vista Street, about a mile from El Taco in northwest Detroit. When Night Train married the Queen of the Blues, he called himself “the lucky seventh.” Dinah Washington had done a lot of living, and a lot of marrying, in her thirty-nine years. He was her seventh husband. “Unforgettable” was her hit tune in 1959, and unforgettable she was, with her diction so clear and direct, her voice so easy, ranging high or low, the touch of Alabama (she lived in Tuscaloosa as a girl) in her effortless notes. She was among the most popular singers of the fifties, though not immune to critics, some of whom would have preferred that she stay pure to the blues and not delve into popular music. She could sing almost anything, and did, from “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” to “Cry Me a River” to “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” but onstage in front of the microphone she could effect an entrancingly personal connection with men in the audience. Night Train Lane had been one of those men.
In early December Dinah returned to Detroit from an out-of-town gig for a weeklong tribute to Night Train built around events raising funds for a scholarship program in his name. She had just made the news again, when a beautician in Las Vegas filed a $70,000 lawsuit against her for critical comments she made about wigs he had prepared for her: between songs, she said, one customer told her that her wig “looked like a rat.” While the beautician claimed he had suffered from anxiety because of her comments, Washington told friends in Detroit that she was the one damaged by it all. Now she was happy to be nestled in Detroit with Night Train and looking forward to a holiday break with her family. She had just finished Christmas shopping. She was sick of being on the road, she told James Cleaver, a local photographer, and was eager to settle down in Detroit. Cleaver thought she seemed “full of life, exuberant, displaying her own inimitable brand of humor.”
On the Friday night of December 13, while she stayed back at the Buena Vista apartment, Lane drove to Detroit Metropolitan Airport to pick up Washington’s two teenage sons from previous marriages, George Jenkins and Robert Grayson, who were coming in from a New England prep school. The couple then spent the night watching television in their pajamas, with the boys in another room, a quiet night for Night Train. Their bags were packed, as they would all leave the next day for Chicago and the Lions game that Sunday against the first-place Chicago Bears. They fell asleep at about 1 a.m., and at 3:45 Lane awoke to the buzzing of the off-air television set. He found his wife lying on the floor next to the bed, unconscious. Lane called Dr. B.C. Ross, who drove out to the apartment but could do nothing to revive the singer, pronouncing her dead at 4:50 a.m. “She’s gone,” Lane told her sons, who had awakened and were looking on from the next room. Soon thereafter Detective William Chubb from the Homicide Bureau arrived with two patrolmen. According to the police report, they interviewed Dr. Ross, who said that he believed “the subject had injected an unknown type of pill. There was an unlabeled bottle containing about 50 orange and blue pills on a night stand beside the bed.” The pills were sent to the morgue along with her body for an autopsy by the medical examiner. She was foun
d to have barbiturates in her blood, more than double the amount of amobarbital and secobarbital. She had been taking several prescribed drugs to handle her anxiety and try to lose weight. The death was ruled an accidental overdose. At last I am free, she had sung, no I don’t hurt anymore.
The shock of Dinah Washington’s death was felt most deeply in Chicago, where her career began, and in Detroit, where it ended prematurely. Berry Gordy had spent many nights listening to her at the Flame Show Bar, entranced by her sultry persona. She was a close friend of C. L. Franklin and a frolicking older sister of sorts for Franklin’s singing daughters. One of her last performances in Detroit was at Cobo Hall, in the presence of Martin Luther King, at the rally on June 23 where he delivered his first version of the “dream” speech. Before her body was flown back to Chicago for burial, there was a memorial service at Reverend Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist. The church could not hold all of those who wanted to pay respects, and the curbs outside on Linwood and Philadelphia were lined with mourners. Inside the bronze casket, surrounded by a veritable garden of floral arrangements, Washington was dressed in a white mink stole and white gloves, with a diamond tiara on her head and bejeweled slippers on her feet. The High Priest of Soul Preaching handled the sermon, and Ziggy Johnson emceed the entertainment portion of the service. Ziggy too had come from Chicago and was often credited with discovering Washington. He had heard her sing in an amateur contest when she was only fifteen. He watched her leave behind the choir at St. Luke’s Baptist Church in Chicago and helped her become the singer for Lionel Hampton’s band for eighty-five dollars a week. From then on, she and Ziggy were close. She always called him Ziegfeld. “I just happened to be around when she burst upon the entertainment field,” Ziggy said at the memorial service. Detroit was also instrumental in her rise: her first solo performances away from the band were at the Paradise Theater, down the street from the Gotham Hotel. Lovi Mann, the organist at the 20 Grand, who had accompanied her many times there, played the church pipes, softly rendering a medley of her best known songs, and the New Bethel choir featured a soloist whose voice soared and sank and soared again with soulful emotion as Night Train watched, arms folded, eyes dazed, from the front pew.
Once in a Great City Page 32