Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  With the addition of another child, the two-bedroom Ross apartment was suddenly too small. Still, Fred and Ernestine felt that they were lucky to have it. Detroit was still trying to regain its balance after a race riot in June 1943, one of the worst the country had ever seen. Strained relations had resulted between the races as poor whites and blacks competed for the same kind of jobs and even housing. The Rosses’ lives were stable, though, and Fred and Ernestine were thankful for as much. However, their world was rocked when he was drafted into the army in May 1944, three months after Diana was born. This was a tough time, but they did what they had to do to get through it. So, during the almost two years he served on the island of Luzon in the Philippines—as an MP, handling prisoners of war—Ernestine supported her daughters by teaching basketball and adult sewing classes one year and kindergarten as a substitute teacher the next.

  The war ended and Fred returned home to Detroit in February 1946. Once back, he first worked at the post office and then returned to the American Brass Company. By this time, Detroit had become a northern mecca where black people, escaping uncertain futures in the South, could achieve financial security by working in factories and manufacturing plants. What had been middle-class white communities in the heart of Detroit were quickly taken over by working-class blacks, competing for jobs on automobile assembly lines. “I remember it as being a place where we didn’t have a lot in terms of money, but we were wealthy in hope,” said Fred Ross. “We had a lot of hope.” It was in this hopeful world that the Rosses settled to raise their two children, both bright, precocious girls who showed signs early in life that they had inherited their parents’ focus and intelligence.

  In 1949, Diana Ross was a skinny five-year-old with long black braids and large questioning eyes when her mother enrolled her in Balch Elementary School. She wasn’t a particularly pretty child—she was a better-looking infant, actually—but she was distinctive, with the biggest eyes anyone in the school had ever seen. Her smile was broad and toothy, and she smiled a lot. Here’s how she described herself in her memoir, Secrets of a Sparrow: “a waiflike child with vibrant energy, vital, curious, full of piss and vinegar and wildly excited to be alive … she wants love. She feels everything and misses nothing.” Indeed, she was a happy little girl living a relatively easy life, contrary to the portrait of despair and poverty painted over the years about her. The Motown publicity department’s notions of how “ghetto girls” lived probably applied to some of their other female artists, but not to Diana Ross. The Ross family had a more stable life and was better off financially than most of its neighbors. Ernestine was remembered by one of those, Lillian Abbott, as “the consummate mother, always at home sewing and cooking. She kept her daughters fastidiously clean; their dresses crisp and starched, their hair carefully woven into braids and curls.”

  But even taking into account her family’s stability, material possessions and good looks, what most distinguished Diana was her determination at such an early age to make herself the center of attention. Indeed, it was as if a seed of ambition had been planted by the time she was five. For instance, teacher Julia Page recalled that when Diana and her sister appeared in the school’s production of Hansel and Gretel, Diana was to hold a flashlight in front of her and sing a children’s song. However, the little girl insisted on shining the flashlight on her own face “as if it were a spotlight,” recalled Page, “just to make sure she had her moment. She wanted that moment.”

  Page remembered that Diana was always the one to set up and inspire class programs because, as the teacher put it, “She had an uncanny ability to organize and include her friends in little productions, even though it was clear that she was to be the star of the show. She loved school and the excitement it provided, and the attention she generated for herself there.” In 1982, almost thirty years after leaving Balch Elementary, Diana donated a large sum of money to the school for renovations and other improvements.

  Of course, the Rosses were always conscious of that which they could never escape: racial intolerance. The children knew it existed, even if they hadn’t seen much of it in their own mostly black neighborhood—at least not yet. There was still time to be exposed to its ugliness as adults. “My world was two blocks long, back then,” Diana once remembered. Still, as little children, they certainly heard about racism and sensed its evil. How could they not? Every night on the television news and in newspapers there were images of white police officers shoving black demonstrators, black children being sprayed by fire hoses, crowds heckling demonstrators, whites throwing bricks at cars, Freedom Riders being blocked from entering “whites only” areas and then being placed under arrest. Their parents could only protect them so much from these images. It was a horrible time, and anyone growing up in the midst of it had to in some way be informed by it. “I knew from an early age that regardless of what I wanted to do, what I went after in life, my journey would be harder than others,’” Diana would recall. “That’s because black people have to strive harder. Yes, at times it’s been difficult … A part of me comes from our cruel past, from slavery, from the days of lynchings and segregation. I will never take my freedom for granted. I will never take my blackness for granted. I will never take my humanity for granted. I know that as a black woman I remain in bondage.”

  “Fight like you never fought before”

  By 1950, Ernestine’s sister, Virginia Beatrice—Aunt Bea—had moved into the Ross home; she would remain for years, a second mother in the family. Ernestine had given birth to three more children: Margarita—known as Rita—Fred Earl Jr. and Arthur—nicknamed T-Boy. The children would be raised as Methodists—Fred’s religion.

  While the three girls slept in the back bedroom, the dining room had been converted into a sleeping area for the two boys. Fred, still working for the American Brass Company, started moonlighting as what he calls “a shade tree mechanic, meaning I had my own little garage in a back alley and I was rebuilding automobile transmissions back there three days a week for extra money. In all, I think I was bringing in maybe sixty-five dollars a week. Meanwhile, I think I was taking classes at Wayne State University at that time. I had a sensible plan, always.” Ross’s “sensible plan” for raising his family certainly seemed to be working. It was a good life, for the most part. The children had a little backyard, and they loved playing games with each other. But it was still a scary neighborhood. Who knew what was going on out there? Fred and Ernestine tried to shelter their children from the real world, but the fact that there was a woman who sat on her stoop in front of the building crying all night long was a reminder that things weren’t always light and easy on St. Antoine. “I can still hear the sounds she made,” Diana would recall, “the sobbing and screaming all through the night. Everybody let her cry. I lay beside Bobbi in the double bed and we put our hands over our ears to block out the sound, but it didn’t work. Nothing would drown out her agony.”

  Diana was a rough-and-tumble tomboy and, she has said, “a real close friend to all the bullies. We used to kill chickens in garbage cans. We’d kill rats with bows and arrows. I was the protector of the family.” Her brother Chico once told this author, “Man, she taught my brothers how to fight, that’s how tough she was. My mother said that Diane was an unstoppable force as a kid, always running and jumping and squealing.” School chums, like McCluster Billups, tell stories of young Diana, all skinny arms and wiry legs, rolling through a crowd of schoolchildren, over the hedges, and onto the grass in a scuffle. “She didn’t like being pushed around and wasn’t afraid to do something about it,” he said. “You knew not to mess with her. She could take care of herself.”

  Ernestine didn’t encourage Diana to fight, though. In fact, she would become angry when she’d hear that her little girl was in the streets roughhousing with the other kids. “I’m serious, Diana. No more fighting,” she told her when her daughter was about eight. There was enough violence in the world, Ernestine said. “What, Mama?” Diana wanted to know. There was still ti
me for the children to remain innocent, Ernestine apparently decided. “Just never mind,” she told her. “Now, go play.”

  In the mid-1950s, the Ross children were finally exposed to the horror of racial discrimination in the South. There was certainly racism in the North, but in the South it was much more blatant, violent … and inescapable. The Rosses still had many relatives in Bessemer, Alabama, on Ernestine’s side of the family and, from time to time, the children were sent to visit them. Diana recalls seeing signs above water fountains, over restroom doors and even at the entrances of movie theaters, WHITES on some, COLORED on the others, most often in the balconies of so-called “white” theaters. During one trip, the family took a Greyhound bus from Detroit and had to change seats in Cincinnati in order to move to the back of the bus. At restrooms, they had to use those designated COLORED.

  In 1952, the Ross children found themselves living in Bessemer for almost a full year when Ernestine became ill. They were very confused as to why they had to leave Detroit, and their questions went unanswered. They didn’t know at the time that she was even ill, and wouldn’t find out until they were all young adults, but she had tuberculosis. She checked into the State of Michigan Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Howell, Michigan—about fifty miles outside of Detroit—for treatment. “I hadn’t known what to do with the kids when Ernestine took ill,” Fred told this author.

  I was trying to get some of the relatives to take them, but everyone wanted to split them up. I didn’t want what had happened to me and my siblings to happen to my kids. It was the one thing I had fought against all my life, splitting up my family. As it turned out, Ernestine’s sister Willie said she would take them all. God bless her. That was a lot of work for her. I drove them down there, myself. And I paid her some money to keep them for about a year, about thirty dollars a week.

  “I don’t think I understood why I had restrictions down there,” Diana later recalled of her time in the South. “I just thought that was the way life was, and put it out of my head. Children, they don’t understand racism. They’re too busy being children.”

  When Diana’s mother recovered in 1953 and returned home to live, so did her children. Diana’s siblings remember a lot more about their time in the South than Diana does and, in fact, when she wrote Secrets of a Sparrow she had to consult them to find out what had really happened in her life at that time. She feels today that she purposely blocked many of the details because they are too painful to remember. It was easier to believe that what was going on in the South really didn’t involve her and her family, that the racism experienced down there was unique to that area.

  In August of 1955, though, the Ross children became aware that the world beyond their protective cocoon was sometimes a dangerous place. Bobbi raced through the front door with a copy of Jet, the leading—and, really, the only—black weekly magazine. She was clearly upset and opened the magazine to a horrifying article, with all of her siblings circling around her. A concerned Diana took center stage, reading aloud for the gathered children.

  It was at this time that the Ross family learned of Emmett Till, a black teenager from Illinois, just fourteen, who had gone to visit relatives near Money, Mississippi. A Chicago native, he was somewhat brash, big for his age and fairly naïve about racism, at least the kind of horrifying and hateful bigotry found mostly south of the Mason-Dixon line in the mid-1950s. Till’s mother, Mamie, understood that in Mississippi race relations were a lot different than they were up North. Prior to his journey into the Delta, she cautioned him to “mind his manners” with white people in Mississippi. “If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past,” she told him, “do it willingly.”

  Diane read the story to her wide-eyed siblings.

  One day, the very precocious Emmett went into a store, bought some candy and, on his way out, either whistled or said, “Bye, baby,” to the wife of the white store owner. A few days later, two men came to the cabin of Emmett’s uncle in the middle of the night—the owner of the store and his brother-in-law. They kidnapped the boy and drove him to a weathered plantation shed in neighboring Sunflower County, where they brutally beat him and gouged out his eye. A witness later said he heard Till’s screams for hours until the two men finally ended his suffering by shooting him. They then tied a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire. It was to weigh down his body, which was dropped into the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, the boy’s body was found, the corpse unrecognizable. His uncle could only positively identify the body because of an initialed ring Emmett had been wearing. Amazingly, when the case went to trial, the defendants, though having readily admitted to killing the boy, were found not guilty by the all-white, all-male jury. Its foreman later explained, “I feel the state failed to prove the identity of the body.”

  As the Ross children gathered around that article in Jet, it was as if they had just been awakened to a truth that awaited each of them. There was a menace outside the world they had come to know, and that menace had a name. Racism. The threat was to become even more real and personal for the Ross children with the sudden death of a close relative.

  Diana’s elder cousin Virginia Ruth was the daughter of her aunt Willie. She would often welcome the Ross children into her home outside Atlanta. They all loved their time away, but one child felt an especially deep connection with Virginia Ruth. When Diana visited, Virginia would take her to choir practice at the local church, and she would play with the other children in a cafeteria in the basement—at least that was where she was told to go. Diana, though, was drawn to the music upstairs. She would slip away from the other children and listen to her aunt singing with the choir. Virginia was a talented woman who had for years been encouraged by many to pursue a career as a professional vocalist. Diana was riveted by the strength and power of her aunt’s voice, and would sit in the back of the church during rehearsals, humming along until she knew the words, at which point she would begin to sing. Virginia Ruth would see Diana at the back of the church, and smile at the little girl, who tried to duck out of view. She knew her niece felt the magic in music, as she herself had for years.

  Diana felt that her cousin was different from much of her family. Virginia Ruth was somehow … refined. In these difficult times, she had managed to attend college and had become a teacher at Spelman College in Atlanta, commuting from Bessemer. It may have been the confidence that came from her cousin’s schooling that bestowed on her such grace. But, whatever it was, Diana recognized it and was forever changed by it. She saw in her favorite cousin an ability to elevate herself beyond what had been expected. Her cousin had a style all her own, a dignity of self to which Diana was drawn. Virginia Ruth offered a glimpse of another kind of black woman altogether—one with a fire burning inside her. Indeed, the image of Virginia Ruth would stay with Diana for many years to come. Yet, those same qualities that so inspired Diana were not welcomed by many in the South, and it may have been those very traits that made her cousin stand out in her racially tense Georgia community.

  One horrible night, Virginia Ruth’s body was found on the side of the road. It was said that she’d been in an automobile accident, yet there was no damage to her car. It was just parked on the side of the road. Ernestine was devastated by the death, almost inconsolable. The family was convinced that Virginia Ruth had been killed by the Ku Klux Klan. The children were in complete disbelief that such a terrible thing could have happened to someone in their close-knit family. Diana was deeply affected by Virginia Ruth’s passing. “I was a little kid,” said one of Diana’s brothers, “but I remember that there was a lot of scary mystery about Virginia Ruth’s death. It affected us, it really did. It was the thing no one wanted to talk about, but the thing that was always there.”

  Shortly after her cousin’s death, Diana came home from school with a large bruise on her cheek. “What in the world happened?” Ernestine asked, very concerned. The two were in the family’s bright kitchen, and Ernestine was preparing
dinner.

  Diana collapsed into a chair. “A boy hit me hard, Mama,” she cried, according to her later recollection. “He called me a name and hit me! And you told me not to fight, so I didn’t.”

  “What name did he call you?” Ernestine asked as she went for the ice.

  “Nigger.”

  Ernestine stopped what she was doing and faced her daughter. In that moment, it was as if she realized that her children had seen too much, been exposed to too many examples of the recent violence against blacks for her to not awaken her child to some harsh realities. She knelt down before her and grabbed her by the shoulders with a sense of urgency. “You listen to me,” she said. “Don’t you ever let anyone call you that, do you hear me? Don’t you ever let anyone hit you and call you a nigger, do you hear me?”

  “But, Mama! You said—”

  “I know what I said,” Ernestine told her. “I’m changing my mind. I want you to fight, Diana. I want you to fight like you have never fought before if anyone ever calls you that again. Do you understand?”

  Diana became frightened. She had never heard her mother talk like this before—to encourage her to be violent. It was so out of character for her, Diana simply didn’t know what to make of it. She looked up at her with a confused expression.

  “Don’t ever let anyone make you feel bad at yourself,” Ernestine concluded, now with tears in her eyes. “You fight. And you’d better win, too. Because if you don’t, when you come home, I’m the one who’s gonna whip your butt.”

  The Brewster Projects and the Primettes

  In 1955, about a year before Diana entered Dwyer Junior High, the Rosses moved to larger quarters, a new home at 635 Belmont Avenue in Detroit’s prosperous district, a former Jewish neighborhood turning black. It was a pleasant community of two-story town houses, well-trimmed lawns and front porches decorated with flower boxes. It was while living on Belmont that she met the handsome fifteen-year-old uncle of one of her friends. She and her friend, whose name was Sharon, would watch this young man rehearse with his group on their front steps. His name was William Robinson—“Smokey”—and of course he would go on to become one of the most prolific of Motown’s songwriters and recording artists.