Devil's Night

by Ze'ev Chafets

  Most suburbanites (and some Detroiters) have never heard of it, but the Shrine is a powerful force in the city’s political life, a place where church and statecraft intersect. Its Black Slate endorses candidates, and sometimes runs its own. In the summer of 1988, in the Thirteenth Congressional District’s primary, the Black Slate put its muscle behind one of Jaramogi’s most faithful followers, Barbara Rose Collins.

  At first glance, Collins seems like an improbable militant. She is an ample, almond-eyed woman with a round, pleasant face and a cheerful manner. But, despite her jovial appearance, she is, in her own words, the political creature of Jaramogi and his church. Professionally she uses her American name, but at the Shrine she is known as Makunda Najuma Fela. “That means daughter of a king, lovely to behold, and violent,” she explained. “I chose that last name—violent—because the time may come when we have to defend ourselves. The people who call me Makunda are the older ones, the ones who came through the struggle with me.”

  In 1973, the Shrine and the Black Slate played a key role in the election of Coleman Young. Now, they were hoping to accomplish the same thing for Collins against one of the mayor’s closest allies, George Crockett. Young, who is politically indebted to the church, was officially neutral; but even with the mayor on the sidelines, few of the city’s political pros thought that Collins had a chance. Crockett was the incumbent and incumbents are rarely beaten in general elections, let alone primaries. It would take all of the Shrine’s energy and commitment to defeat him.

  The Thirteenth District is a mixed bag. It is about 75 percent black and includes the WASP suburb of Grosse Pointe; neat, working-class neighborhoods, once known as “the black suburbs,” in the southwest part of Detroit; and the city’s east side, perhaps the poorest urban area in the country. On the Saturday before the election, I accompanied Collins to a settlement house meeting there, not far from the neighborhood where she was born and raised.

  “Most of this city is like a national disaster,” she observed on the way to the meeting. “Drugs, crack, assembly lines shutting down—it all comes here first, the good and the bad. Whatever happens in America happens here first—Detroit is like a laboratory for the rest of the country.”

  Collins was especially upset by the absence of black-owned stores along the crumbling business streets. “This is a phenomenon of the black community in Detroit,” she said. “It’s really a question of racism. Businessmen have learned that the blacks will go where they are—to the suburbs.”

  Black economic self-sufficiency is one of the basic teachings of Jaramogi. The Shrine runs cooperative ventures based loosely on the Israeli kibbutz model, and it encourages its members to go into business. “We thought we could get it through political power, but we’ve learned that we need economic power, too,” Collins said. “Anytime you don’t have a major department store in a city this size, you know you’re oppressed.” It was a strikingly American criterion for oppression—the absence of a downtown Macy’s—but not a frivolous one; a great deal of the money earned by Detroiters is, in fact, spent in the suburbs.

  There is a strong strain of Calvinism in the Shrine’s doctrine. “Jaramogi says that blacks have a different mind-set from whites because of slavery,” she explained. “When you work for massa, you work slowly, and that’s not good if you’re trying to hold a job. White people declared blacks to be inferior—and when we act it out, we turn that myth into a fact. If you are willing to work hard, you can accomplish anything you want. And if you have a black city administration, it’s our fault if the city deteriorates.”

  Collins’s campaign was largely based on her ability to deal with this deterioration. She contrasted her local expertise with her opponent, casting Crockett as an apathetic absentee representative who spent most of his time dealing with foreign affairs. “People over here are interested in issues that are close to home,” she said. “I care about Third World issues, too; Jaramogi teaches us that nothing is as sacred as the liberation of black people. But first things first.”

  Foreign affairs were not on the minds of the hundred or so blacks who came to hear Collins that afternoon at the settlement house. They were the substantial burghers of a disaster zone, and the candidate focused on their concerns.

  “You sit on valuable land,” Collins told them. “You don’t like the way it looks, do ya?”

  “No!” they hollered in unison.

  “This was a beautiful area. What went wrong in Detroit? We lost our jobs and our young boys went to sellin’ drugs. And a new type of slavery took over—welfare. We’re supposed to be urban, but we’ve become rural—that’s how much vacant land we have here. Politics is power and there ain’t nothin’ wrong with it. Either you have it or you give it to someone else. We need to go up yonder where the money is, to Washington, D.C. And I need to get you excited.”

  There were shouts of “Amen” and “Tell it, Sister Barbara” from the crowd. One by one they rose to testify to the difficulties of daily life. They complained about the lack of police protection, the city’s failure to demolish dilapidated houses, and the shortage of jobs. Collins listened with sympathy and, from time to time, jotted down a note.

  An elderly woman in a white hat and pigtails rose and began talking about the new city airport that had opened nearby. “They say it’s supposed to provide jobs,” she said, “but if it provides jobs to the colored people like the highway does—forget it. You don’t even see a colored man digging a hole for a tree out there.” The audience murmured its agreement.

  “It’s a disgrace, it’s the county’s fault and I’ll look into it,” the candidate promised. Once again, there was applause and scattered amens, but this time there were a few boos as well.

  A man in a white painter’s hat rose from his seat and pointed his finger at Ms. Collins. “It’s very hard to see you when you’re not running for office,” he said. “You only come around at election time. What do y’all do on that council?”

  “We can’t get a loan from a bank to put a roof on our house,” yelled a woman.

  “Why don’t you folks on the council do somethin’ ’bout these drug houses?” called an old man. And, all of a sudden, everyone was shouting at once.

  The chairlady, an officious woman with a large gavel, began banging for order. “You people just be quiet,” she said in a shrill, school-marmish tone. “Nobody has the right to talk unless I tell them to.”

  At this, a stout woman in a floral dress stood up and shook an admonishing finger at the chairlady. “You don’t know how to talk to people. We’re not children, we’re citizens,” she said, and the crowd applauded. The stout woman turned to them. “I don’t know what y’all are so excited about,” she told them. “I been sitting here for a hour’s time and still didn’t nobody say ‘Thank God for bringing us here today.’ How many get up on Sunday morning and say, ‘I’m a child of God’?” This seeming irrelevancy struck a responsive chord; people began to nod and say “That’s right” and “Tell it.” In Detroit, religion is never irrelevant; amens syncopate the beat of the gavel at every public meeting.

  Collins sensed the new mood of the crowd and smiled benignly. She is a church lady, and this was familiar turf. She began gathering up her notes and shoveling them into her oversized purse—it was early afternoon, and she still had a number of campaign stops. “Good luck, everybody,” she called to the luckless inhabitants of the east side. “God bless you and don’t forget to vote.”

  In marked contrast to Collins’s frenzied effort, George Crockett was not even campaigning for reelection. Three days before the balloting, the waiting room of his office on Woodward Avenue seemed more like that of a small law firm than an election headquarters. Two secretaries typed quietly at their desks. One or two constituents sat leafing through old copies of Ebony.

  Crockett had come back from Washington the day before. At the airport, he asked a cabbie about his chances and was told “Everything’s cool.” That was the extent of his polling. He planned to con
fine his campaign to a rare Sunday morning visit to his church. Like his old friend the mayor, George Crockett belongs to a generation of secular revolutionaries for whom religion is a matter of only passing concern.

  The congressman’s self-confidence was based on more than the calculation that incumbents seldom lose. He is a legendary figure in Detroit, one of the founding fathers of what is viewed as black liberation. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1909, he studied at Moorehouse College in Atlanta, and then took a law degree at the University of Michigan. In 1944, he came to Detroit as director of the UAW’s Fair Employment Practices Commission. Two years later he went into private practice, specializing in civil rights cases, and he became a partner in the first major integrated law firm in the United States.

  As a lawyer, Crockett developed a reputation as a radical. He represented Carl Winter of Michigan and other American communists in a celebrated case in New York in 1949, and went to jail himself for contempt of court when he vocally maintained that the judge was hostile to his clients’ civil rights. He defended suspected subversives, including Coleman Young, before the HUAC, and worked as a defense lawyer in Mississippi in the sixties. Whites in the Detroit area say that he is a communist, although he calls himself “basically a socialist.”

  In 1966, George Crockett was elected to a seat on the city’s Recorders Court. Three years later, he became involved in an incident that secured his place as a hero of the liberation movement.

  The incident took place in March 1969, less than two years after the riot. A white policeman was killed by gunshots from the New Bethel Baptist Church, where a group of black militants were meeting. The police counterattacked, fired into the church and then broke through the doors. They arrested more than 140 people, some of them women and children, and held them in a police garage overnight.

  In the charged atmosphere of Detroit, this kind of mass roundup could well have set off another riot. At this point, however, Judge Crockett intervened. He set up court at police headquarters, released 130 of the detainees against whom there was no evidence and, more controversially, nine who, nitrate tests showed, had recently fired a weapon. Crockett based his decision on the fact that the tests had been administered while the suspects were being held without counsel, a violation of their constitutional rights.

  The judge’s ruling enraged the police department and the prosecutor’s office, which was fine with him. “Can anyone imagine the police invading an all-white church, rounding up everybody in sight and busing them to a wholesale lockup in a police garage?” Crockett demanded. The tough rhetoric, no less than the quick justice, won him the admiration of the black community.

  Eleven years after the New Bethel incident, following the resignation of Congressman Charles Diggs, Jr., Crockett was elected to Congress. He was already seventy, and he proved to be a less than energetic legislator. Now, in the summer heat of primary week, he was noticeably tired.

  In person, Crockett is an impressive, somewhat distant figure who had a hard time getting used to white people calling him by his first name when he went to Washington. Despite his socialist leanings, he has a decidedly bourgeois life-style (he and his wife, a physician, are leaders of Detroit society), which has removed him from the grinding realities of the east side.

  I asked Crockett about the charge that he had neglected the gut issues of poverty in his district, which has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the country, and had spent too much time on foreign affairs. He looked at me through thick glasses, like a wise old owl, and shook his head. “I don’t think of Detroit as very poor,” he said.

  A few days earlier, in a special report on the thirteenth District, the local NBC affiliate had called him “George Crockett, Third World congressman”—a reference to both his ideology and the devastation of his district. Crockett chose to take the reference as a compliment.

  “Third World?” he mused. “Well, there’s something to that. Detroit is the black capital of the United States. When I first ran for City Council, back in 1965, I predicted that within ten years Detroit would be a majority black city with a black leadership, and I was right. One problem of postcolonial societies is a lack of prepared leadership cadres, especially in places like Angola and Mozambique, which were under Portuguese rule. We’re not quite that bad, but there’s room for comparison.

  “We had a white outflow that I’m not aware has been duplicated in any other metropolitan area in the United States,” he continued. “There is urban-suburban animosity because whites lost money in running, and because they still want access to the library, the symphony, the ballpark, and getting to them is inconvenient. So, in that way, too, there is room for comparison to a postcolonial situation.”

  Crockett’s district includes the decidedly first-world suburb of Grosse Pointe, but he is not exactly a familiar figure there. “I’ve been there twice I think, since 1982,” he said. “Those people don’t really need a Congressman.” He smiled with a grim satisfaction. “And never in their worst dreams did they think they’d get me.”

  There were a couple of white candidates from Grosse Pointe on the primary ballot, but Crockett didn’t take them seriously; nor was he particularly concerned about Barbara Rose Collins. “In past years, I got about ninety percent of the vote,” he said. “This year I’m up against a Barbara Rose Collins, a real tough candidate … so I think maybe I’ll get, oh, eighty-five percent.” The hero of New Bethel leaned back in his seat and smiled the confident smile of a politician with a safe seat.

  But Crockett was smiling too soon. On the Sunday before election day, Collins pulled a last-minute surprise. Hundreds of reinforcements, dispatched by Jaramogi, arrived by bus from Houston and immediately hit the streets to “leafletize” the Thirteenth District for the Shrine’s favorite daughter.

  “You should have been in church when the people came,” she said at her headquarters on election night. “It was a holy explosion. It scared Crockett to death. That’s when his workers started spreading the word that I have a lot of Jews supporting me so they could get diamonds out of South Africa. They said I was for apartheid.” She shook her head at this absurdity, her “Barbara Rose for Congress” straw hat almost spinning off her flowing black hair.

  The entrance to the Collins headquarters was guarded that night by bearded men in white shirts with identifying arm patches who form the Shrine’s security detail. The room was packed with modestly dressed women and neatly groomed men. They milled around the television sets and greeted one another with African salutations. An out-of-town friend of Collins regarded the scene with interest. “This fascinates me,” said the lady. “We don’t have anything like this in New Jersey.”

  As the early results came in, it became apparent that the race would be very close. Fried chicken wings—the national cuisine of Detroit—were passed around, and Collins chewed on one reflectively as she went over the figures with several aides. Suddenly she set down the wing and began singing: “Nobody told me that the road would be easy, nobody told me that the road would be easy.” The others took up the song, and the room filled with gospel fervor.

  Only the candidate’s mother seemed unmoved by the reverent mood. A spry, energetic woman dressed in modish good taste, she listened with wry dispassion as she sucked away on a black olive. When the hymn was completed, she punctured the silence. “Olives make you sexy,” she said loudly. “I told people that at my New Year’s party. Normally, now, black people don’t eat olives. But they ate up every one that night.” She laughed and took a big sip of Old Granddad from a paper cup.

  The candidate’s mother gazed at the political groupies in the room. “People are just like cattle,” she remarked. “Barbara, this is the slowest campaign. Where are the results, girl?” Collins shrugged, and her mother turned to a press photographer for a discussion of horse racing.

  Around eleven, the numbers began to roll in. Crockett had won—but by only a couple of thousand votes. The voters he considers “not very poor” had come out for Coll
ins. If it had not been for the two white spoiler candidates, who siphoned off a small but significant number of potential Collins voters, the hero of New Bethel might well have lost his seat in Congress.

  The guards stood at stoic attention while the Shrine’s campaign workers wrapped up their chicken wings and ballot sheets. There was disappointment on their faces, but it mingled with an unmistakable look of optimism. Like Fred Williams, they knew that things were building up on the streets of the Black Capital of America. For the moment, the secular revolutionaries were still in control, but there would be a next time. Two years from now, Crockett would be older, the city’s problems more acute, and Detroit might be ready to send to Washington a smiling Christian woman whose name means violence.

  Chapter Five

  THE HOSTILE SUBURBS

  There is a lovely park across the street from Dudley Randall’s house, on the west side of Detroit, but at three in the afternoon it was deserted. At the curb, almost directly opposite the house, two very tough-looking young men sat in a late-model Pontiac. They passed a bottle between them and gazed out the windows, as if they were waiting for someone.

  I rang the bell and Dudley Randall had to open several locks to let me in. At seventy-four he was a stooped, tired-looking man with bifocals, dressed in a flannel shirt and khaki trousers. His living room was lined with books, the walls were covered with African art and there were National Geographic magazines and anthologies of poetry stacked on the coffee table. Above a bookcase I saw a plaque, signed by the mayor, proclaiming Randall the Poet Laureate of Detroit.

  Randall looked out his front window and gestured at the car in front. “I moved across from the park because I thought it would be nice,” he said. “But those two sit there every day and drink whiskey. And then they urinate in the bushes.” He made a sad face, offered me a seat and took one himself.