Devil's Night

by Ze'ev Chafets

  Mrs. Bogle seemed nonplussed. “To whom? Why, to everyone,” she said, climbing out of her car for a closer inspection.

  Inside, on the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, the deserted clubhouse seemed fairly unimposing—thick green carpet on highly polished wood floors, flowered easy chairs, a closed veranda with a view of Lake St. Claire. But its charm lies not in its decor, but its membership.

  “Who can belong to the Little Club?” I asked.

  “Anyone who’s lucky enough,” she said. “We have around three hundred members—it’s the most exclusive club in Grosse Pointe.”

  The Little Club’s initiation fee is $10,000, and monthly dues are $175. “That doesn’t seem exorbitant—unless you belong to a lot of clubs,” she observed. Most of the members are old-time Grosse Pointe people, although the club was, on that very day, in the process of accepting its first Jewish member, the director of the Detroit Institute of Art.

  A quick cup of Protestant coffee and Mrs. Bogle was back behind the wheel, pointing out local landmarks. The Alger home (“General Russell Alger’s daughter was the first woman to go up in the Wright brothers’ flying machine”); the house of a childhood friend, actress Julie Harris; and the Merkle house, which once belonged to one of the town’s most prominent families but is now owned by two decorators. “Which is the way of it all,” Mrs. Bogle observed with weary sadness.

  As she headed west toward Detroit, she occasionally pointed out one of the remaining mansions of her girlhood, which were scattered among newer, very substantial, ten- and twelve-room brick homes. “Some of these are originals,” she remarked. “And then you get the mix of these funny little … poops.”

  Past Fox Creek, she turned down Alter Road, generally considered the border that divides the Pointe from Detroit. It was midday, but she immediately locked her doors. “Might as well take some precautions,” she said warily, although no one was in sight.

  On the Grosse Point side of the street there were medium-sized brick homes; on the Detroit side, dilapidated frame houses, some of them boarded up. They were divided by a canal that runs the length of the street and by a chain link fence on its bank. Grosse Pointe wasn’t able to build its flood-control wall, but it has achieved a measure of physical separation from the black giant to the west.

  Detroit’s proximity is a matter of grave concern to many Grosse Pointers. There had been a recent public controversy over the closing of a movie theater, just outside the city limits, that had attracted black patrons. “When your neighbors get funny, do you stay or move?” Mrs. Bogle asked rhetorically.

  “What do you mean by ‘funny’?”

  “Different from you,” she said in a silly-question tone of voice.

  From Alter Road, Mrs. Bogle turned back to the east, heading away from the city, toward Provencal Road, “the last really nice street in Grosse Pointe,” across from the Detroit Country Club. She seemed to know every house on the short street. “That’s Kathy Ford’s place,” she said. “Henry bought it from my cousin. There’s the Williams home—you know, Soapy, the former governor. This one belongs to another cousin. And that is Bob Zeff’s house. He’s the only Jewish gentleman on the street. He was Kathy Ford’s divorce lawyer …”

  Each of the homes on Provencal had a story. This one was the site of an adolescent party, that one the scene of an elegant affair, still another the residence of a local celebrity. “It is really a nifty street,” Helen Bogle pronounced.

  “What makes a nifty street?” I asked.

  “One that is established and doesn’t have too many surprises,” she said. By that standard, Grosse Pointe is a nifty city indeed.

  On the way home, Mrs. Bogle shifted her perspective for a moment to the national scene. The presidential election had just ended with George Bush’s victory, of which she thoroughly approved.

  “We had a party for George Bush at grandmother’s house a few years ago,” she recalled. “I like him very, very much.”

  “That’s not surprising,” I said. “He’s the first president from your class since Kennedy.”

  Helen Livingstone Bogle was not happy with the observation. “The Kennedys?” she said. “They tried to worm their way into everything. They were pushy. And I don’t know anybody of any race who is pushy and gets away with it.”

  In the fall of 1986, the pushiest black man in Detroit, Coleman Young, gave an interview to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The occasion was Detroit’s No Crime Day, and the interview, which has become legendary, went like this:

  CBC: … it’s so incomprehensible to us. I mean, you’ve had what, nine hundred and twenty-five people shot this summer?

  Young: You know the figures better than I do.…

  CBC: What would happen if you went door-to-door and started collecting all the guns?

  Young: Well, then people wouldn’t have guns to shoot at each other. I have no problem with collecting all the guns if it is done like you do it in Canada. But I’ll be damned if I’ll let them collect guns in the city of Detroit while we’re surrounded by hostile suburbs and the whole rest of the state who have guns, where you have vigilantes, practicing Ku Klux Klan in the wilderness with automatic weapons. I am in favor of everyone disarming; I’m opposed to a unilateral disarming of the people of Detroit.”

  When the mayor’s remarks were reported by the Detroit media, an angry cry went up from Grosse Pointe to Melvindale. Here was another example of Coleman’s paranoia and suburb-baiting. Statistics on the number of suburbanites (i.e., whites) shot by Detroiters (i.e., blacks) were brought forth; furious denunciations of the mayor appeared in the letters-to-the-editor columns of the Detroit papers; and even some of Young’s supporters admitted privately that this time he had exaggerated.

  It was, indeed, hyperbole—the residents of Detroit are in no immediate danger from the dowagers of Grosse Pointe or the crew-cut patrons of Tom Coogan’s barbershop. But less than an hour up Highway I-96, in Livingston County, there are some good ol’ boys who wouldn’t mind teaching the mayor of Dee-troit what the business end of an M 16 looks like.

  Livingston County is within commuting distance of the city, but few of its seventy thousand residents work there, or even visit. To them, the glitzy northwest suburbs and the ethnic enclaves to the east are almost as foreign as the black metropolis itself. Cross the line from Oakland County to Livingston County and you cross into a rural America right out of Faulkner.

  One Saturday night, a street-smart reporter and I drove the forty miles north to check on a report that some of Detroit’s white police officers were attending the Ku Klux Klan cross burnings that are a regular weekend attraction in Gregory, a little town in the poorest part of the county. The reporter, who is white, covers the mean streets of Detroit with a fearless professionalism; but the eerie rural darkness was something else, threatening and oppressive. When we passed a sign, just outside Pinckney, advertising a survivalist camp, he instinctively clicked the locks on his car doors, just like Helen Bogle had on Alter Road.

  Survivalist camps were in vogue in 1988. That summer some entrepreneurs opened a paint-ball facility in an abandoned factory complex in Detroit where suburbanites could don army fatigues and take part in simulated urban violence by shooting one another with paint guns. The gallery was originally called Little Beirut, which sparked an outraged protest from Detroit’s large Arab population. The name was changed, but the idea caught on, and hundreds of people came into the city each weekend to play Dirty Harry.

  The owners of Little Beirut argued that their mock battlefield offered nothing more than good, dirty fun; and, in any event, it was in Detroit, where Coleman Young’s police force could keep an eye on it. But a survivalist camp in Pinckney was a different proposition. “They’ve got army trucks out there and a tank,” said a local law enforcement officer who met us in Gregory. “They say they shoot paint at each other, but you’d swear it was automatic weapons from the way it sounds.”

  The officer sat at a table in the back corner
of the Gregory Inn and ate the turkey-and-mashed-potato special. It was raining that night, and the place was full of hunters in dripping parkas. Tacked to the walls were posters advertising farm auctions and an ad for Carol’s Plucking Parlour and Slaughter House.

  “I don’t know how the rain is going to affect the cross burnings,” said the lawman. “I don’t know if you can burn a cross in the rain or not.” He spoke with a neutral curiosity, as if he were discussing a possible rainout of a softball game.

  “Do you know where they take place?” the reporter asked.

  “Right down the road,” he said, gesturing with his head. “Cross burnings aren’t illegal up here. You don’t even need a permit. This is Klan country.”

  The Klan and other white supremacist groups have been a prominent feature of Detroit’s political culture for decades. The city’s modern founding father, Henry Ford, was also America’s most outspoken Jew hater, a man whose picture hung on Adolf Hitler’s wall. And in the 1930s, Detroit’s best-known Catholic clergyman, Father Coughlin, was an open defender of Nazi racist doctrines.

  Ironically, Coughlin began his public career when the KKK burned a cross on the lawn of his church, the Shrine of the Little Flower. In those days, there were said to be two hundred thousand Klan members in Michigan. A Klan offspring, the Black Legion, was a power in city politics, and the New Republic estimated that the group carried out some fifty murders between 1933 and 1936. The Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, another nationally known bigot, was headquartered in Detroit. Ford, Coughlin, Smith and the Black Legion found fertile soil in the religious and racial xenophobia that Eastern European Catholics and southern whites brought with them to Detroit; they, in turn, created the climate for the race riot of 1943, the bloodiest of its time, in which thirty-four people died.

  The modern repository for this legacy of racial violence is Livingston County, where there are hundreds of active Klan members and thousands of sympathetic fellow travelers. Robert Miles, who lives in Cochatca, near Howell, is the closest thing to a celebrity that the county can boast. Miles once served as a national grand dragon of the Klan, and he is a beloved figure in white supremacist circles. He advocates the establishment of an Aryan nation in a part of North America, which would presumably be created in the image of Livingston County.

  The Klan is not the only hot organization up there. Not far from the Gregory Inn was a devil worship church, and townpeople claim to have sighted their breeders—young women who produce babies for the cult—shopping on Main Street. “I don’t go near them or their church,” said the lawman. “I hear they have animal sacrifices, and that’s against the law I suppose, but devil worship isn’t illegal around here, either.” Livingston County is nothing if not tolerant.

  Local law enforcement personnel spend most of their time combing dirt roads for poachers, breaking up bar brawls and performing other mundane police tasks. There were only three homicides in the county in 1988—less than on a fast Saturday night in Detroit.

  “The people out here, they moved here most of ’em because the KKK keeps the corruption out,” our host said. “Most of them are farmers, and they like the peace and quiet.”

  The last time the Detroit reporter had been in Livingston County, he had attended a holiday party at the home of some acquaintances. “They had a big sign,” he recalled. “It said ‘Don’t shoot Jesse Jackson; we don’t need another national holiday.’ And these were liberals.”

  “We don’t need another national holiday,” said the lawman, savoring the punchline. “Don’t shoot Jesse Jackson. Ha, ha.”

  Jesse Jackson is not likely to venture into the Gregory Inn anytime soon. There are only three black families in the entire county, a statistic that is closely monitored. “Why would any blacks want to live up here?” the reporter asked, and the lawman shook his head. “Got me by the balls,” he said.

  It was still raining heavily but our guide had promised a cross burning, so we headed down D-19 toward a small farmhouse with a traffic light attached to its roof. When we arrived, the light was red. “Hate to disappoint you but it looks like the burning got rained out after all,” said the lawman. “They use that light as a signal. When something’s going on, it’s green. And usually, when there’s a burning, there are hundreds of cars out here. Looks like you picked the wrong weekend.” There was genuine regret in the officer’s voice, like a Floridian apologizing for unseasonably cold weather in January. He was not a member of the Klan himself, but outsiders had shown an interest in his territory, and he was sorry not to be able to oblige.

  Instead he took us for a ride to Hell. Howell is the county seat, but Hell, Michigan, is the spiritual capital of Livingston County. Presumably its founders intended the name as a joke, or as a tourist gimmick. A general store stocks postcards with captions such as “I’ve been to Hell” and “Why don’t you go to Hell?” But with hundreds of gun-toting Klansmen on the loose, and a Satanic cult just up the road, the jocular name seemed spookily appropriate.

  “Doesn’t anyone object to this kind of stuff?” asked the reporter. “I mean, how about the people who live next door to the devil worship church?” In the city, people have been known to picket unwelcome neighborhood incinerators, but the ethic in Livingston County is live and let live. “People around here stay out of each other’s business,” said the lawman broadmindedly.

  The rain began to let up and we cruised out of Hell, searching the back roads for an alternate-site cross burning. We passed through a quiet little town whose residents all come from Kentucky, drove by the devil worship church to look for signs of activity, and went by the survivalist camp, but we didn’t see a single burning cross that night.

  Half an hour and many miles later, we were about to turn in when we met another patrol car coming down a dirt road in the opposite direction. The two stopped side by side, and the lone officer in the other car rolled down his window. He was glad to goof off for a few minutes and to engage in some friendly banter.

  Hoping to salvage the evening, our host did a little fishing. “I hear rumors that your chief is in the Klan,” he said. “Know anything about that?”

  “Yep, I heard that one too,” said the cop. “But I don’t know. I don’t like niggers much myself, but I ain’t in the Klan.”

  As cops always do, the two men got to swapping combat stories. “Tell them about the time you busted that beer party,” the other man said, and our host laughed modestly.

  “Hell, it was just a bunch of teenagers having a party,” he said, in the tone of the man who captured Dillinger. “Some dickhead and a bunch of his friends, including a guy in a wheelchair, were making a commotion. And their dawg was barking his head off.”

  “He wanted to shoot that dawg,” said the other cop.

  “Yeah, I sure did. Anyway, these kids started mouthing off, giving me a hard time, so I grabbed the guy that was giving the party and dragged him out in his front yard. In the rain. And I put that dickhead down on his knees and made him recite the Lord’s Prayer. Right there in the yard.” He laughed and his friend laughed. Police work, done right, has its satisfactions.

  “Made him say the damn Lord’s Prayer,” said the lawman, shaking his head. “Right in the damn yard.”

  “Yeah, but you still should have shot that damn dawg,” said the other. “That’s what you shoulda done.” The two cops raced their engines and thought about the lost opportunity. Then they put it in gear and headed down the dirt road in opposite directions, looking for poachers.

  My friend the reporter and I drove back to Detroit. It was late, but the city was only forty minutes away, and we couldn’t wait to get back home.

  Chapter Six

  “THANK GOD FOR MAYOR COLEMAN YOUNG”

  In the fall of 1988, shortly after the Collins-Crockett campaign, a Detroit television station ran a profile on Mayor Coleman Young. Young’s relations with the local media have been stormy, but the documentary was highly complimentary, and the mayor seemed to be enjoying himself. The high p
oint of the show came when he discussed his warm personal relations with former president Jimmy Carter.

  In 1976, Coleman Young had, typically, done the unorthodox and endorsed the unknown Georgia governor early in his campaign. Once in office, Carter reciprocated with generous federal assistance. Young talked about the strange friendship between a white southerner and the militant mayor of Motown. “He is a very moral, very religious person,” said Young, and his eyes crinkled and shoulders shook in the mirthful gesture that usually precedes his one-liners. “Now, I’m not immoral, but I’ve never been accused of being too moral, either.”

  It is one of the few accusations he has escaped during a public career that spans almost fifty years. Young has been called a communist, a radical and a crook, denounced as a heartless big-city boss and a ruthless dictator. In the suburbs he is considered a black racist; in the city, following his refusal to support Jesse Jackson’s presidential bid, some people labeled him an Uncle Tom. There is only one thing that everyone agrees on: Coleman Young, who was first elected mayor of Detroit in 1973, is a formidable and fascinating man.

  Many Detroiters can never remember another mayor. Kids at the Whitney Young elementary school believe it is named after Whitney Houston and the mayor—a not-unlikely supposition in a city where Young’s name adorns everything. There is a Coleman A. Young community center on the east side and a seventy-five-acre Coleman A. Young civic center downtown on the Detroit River. Accomplished schoolchildren receive financial aid from the Coleman A. Young Scholarship Fund. The mayor’s picture hangs in virtually every city office, like the visage of some postliberation African leader—photographs of the young Coleman, handsome enough to have earned the nickname “the Black Clark Gable” in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood; or of the older, Big Daddy Coleman, light-skinned and gray-haired, with a Redd Foxx twinkle in his eye. Young’s name is inscribed on the stationery of city officials, and on their personal calling cards. And a few years ago he had it plastered in huge letters on the tower of the Detroit Zoo, which is located in suburban Royal Oak. This was vintage Coleman Young, an in-your-face gesture to the white suburbanites he loves to taunt and harass.