Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  Notwithstanding Denby’s aversion to Ford and its foundries, the impending Depression caused him to change his mind about the company. When he heard that they were hiring, he was among the five hundred in line for fifty to one hundred jobs. When a representative informed them that they had hired the men that they needed, Denby thought it was just a ploy to get people to leave in order to hire those who stayed. Along with hundreds of others, he stayed. The pushing and shoving forced the company to call the fire department, which doused the men with water. Because it was the dead of winter, soon their clothes were frozen as hard as bricks. Denby said, “That’s the first and last time I went to Ford to look for work.”24

  Nor was Beulah Alexander Young conflicted about allegiance to Henry Ford. In the early years, there were no black women working at Ford. In fact, it was not until 1946 that gender was added to the UAW-Ford nondiscrimination clause. Young, like many others who were involved in the women’s club movement, had a clear choice in the upcoming elections, giving her support to Murphy. From her bully pulpit at the Detroit People’s News, the paper she owned, Young could state her case like few others. She must have done a good job, because her husband, Dr. James Percy Young, was later appointed city physician by the victorious Mayor Murphy.25

  At that time, one of the main purposes of the clubwomen was to counter stereotyped negative news about the black community. Young was a tireless advocate for a more positive reportage. Among her colleagues in this endeavor were Mamie Bledsoe and the indefatigable Nellie Watts. Even the black publications were taken to task for their penchant to report only on the sensational stories, many of them justifying the practice on the grounds that it sold papers. As the Depression loomed, the women began to focus less on negative media coverage and more on the diminishing prospects of employment, particularly for black Detroiters. The clubwomen, black and white, were concerned about the decline in employment, the lagging new car sales, and the decrease in construction. Major building projects—such as Albert Kahn’s Art Deco Fisher Building and two connections to Canada via the Ambassador Bridge, a project in which a black engineer, Cornelius Henderson, helped to develop structural steel—were a boon to the city’s growth and employment. During Herbert Hoover’s administration, the clubwomen reported that Detroit was the city hardest hit by the Depression.

  10

  WHITE BALL AND THE BROWN BOMBER

  In the late 1920s, before the Great Depression, when black Detroiters weren’t preoccupied with making a living, they found a measure of relief in following the Detroit Stars baseball team and their rivals in the Negro National League. Only a boxing match featuring Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, could compete with the feats of Turkey Stearns on the diamond. Having Turkey slugging the ball and running the bases, however remarkably, were not enough to tilt a contest between the Stars and the team from Saint Louis in the spring of 1926. The Stars lost the game,17–16.1

  Richard Bak, in his book on the Detroit Stars, found an interesting connection between the Sweet trials, the second of which ended in 1926, and the Stars. At the time of the trials, Moses Walker was an officer of the baseball club and at the same time vice president of the Detroit Chapter of the NAACP. Bak suggests that, as an arbiter between these entities, Walker may have solicited funds from the well-paid baseball players to help in defraying the legal expenses of the trials.2

  Whenever the Stars were in town and appearing at Mack Park or Hamtramck Stadium, it was always a festive occasion, particularly when they were playing against one of the stellar teams in the Negro National League. For baseball fans, this was a great opportunity to get away from their mundane, depressing routines. The excitement at the game always intensified when Norman “Turkey” Stearns flew around the bases, his arms flapping. Equally entertaining were his teammates: Clarence “Spoony” Palm, Christopher Columbus “Crush” Holloway, and Leon “Pepper” Daniels. Even when they weren’t scoring many runs and winning ball games, the fans could count on the amusing antics of the team’s manager, Elwood “Bingo” DeMoss.3

  By the summer of 1926, Stearns had been with the Stars for three years. If there were a collector’s baseball card for the lefthander, it would highlight his lifetime batting average of .352 in the black leagues and .313 against barnstorming white major leaguers. He led the league seven times in home runs and hit an astonishing .474 in playoff games. Stearns, a native of Alabama, hit more home runs in the Negro Leagues than the incomparable Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard.4 His statistics in 1927 were typical of his all-star performances: He played in more games (82), had more at-bats (301), more hits (113), the highest average (.375) and hit more home runs (20) than any of his teammates. He led the team in doubles, triples, and stolen bases.5 These statistics compared favorably with those amassed by Ty Cobb, the racist Georgia Peach, who in 1926 was both a player and manager of the all-white Detroit Tigers.6 He vowed never to play against black players. Cobb’s salary was $50,000 a year, and Stearns was lucky if he earned more than $1,000 for a six-month season, playing about half the number of games afforded by white leagues. Then for the other six months of the year, the players had to find other employment. Despite their celebrity status, many of them accepted jobs at the auto plants. Like other black workers, they were relegated to the wet deck or the paint department.

  If the Detroit Stars had one fan who was always in attendance at their games no matter how well the team was doing, it was Henderson “Ben” Turpin. He was hired as a police officer on August 1, 1927, and assigned to the Third Precinct on Gratiot Avenue. Many of his off-duty hours were spent keeping up with Stearns and the Stars. There may have been other black police officers in the city, but few could match Turpin in stature. “From all accounts,” wrote Cheryl Wells, “Turpin’s off duty time was spent pursuing his love of baseball and supporting the Turpin’s Athletic Club and still he found time to volunteer his supervision at the neighborhood theater.” Though he earned enough money to live in some of the better neighborhoods, he chose to live in Black Bottom, where his club was located.7

  His record as an officer of the law was unrivaled. In twenty-five years of service, he received only two demerits. “One of these was for shooting a Purple Gang hit man while off-duty on October 14, 1929 at 11:30pm.” After the hit man pulled a gun and aimed it at him, Turpin shot Louie Bryant, a member of the notorious gang, which sold booze during Prohibition. Turpin was charged with first degree murder, but a Recorder’s Court jury acquitted him, and he later received a Meritorious Citation for “Exceptional Bravery.”8

  Turpin, Stearns, and John Roesink, the owner of the Detroit Stars, must have endured unrelieved grief when the news reached them that Mack Park had gone up in flames on July 7, 1929. The fire blazed for hours and was officially ruled an accident. Hundreds of fans, trapped behind a chicken-wire screen, were rescued by members of the Stars. The disaster was a terrible setback for Roesink and the team. They played the remainder of their home games in Dequindre Park. Despite the tragedy, Stearns appeared unperturbed as he continued to compile impressive box-score numbers.

  Among the black Detroiters saddened by the fire was fifteen-year-old Joe Barrow. When he wasn’t working out at the gym, he rarely missed a game at the park.

  Joe Barrow was his birth name, but he would achieve international acclaim as Joe Louis. Black Detroiters watched Louis’s meteoric rise from a stumbling amateur at the Brewster Center gym to become heavyweight champion of the world. Before he was anointed the Brown Bomber because of his ability to knock an opponent out with one punch, he put in hours and hours of hard work and training. After obtaining a job at Briggs auto-body plant, earning $25 a week, he quit school. The work was backbreaking, leaving him with little desire or energy to work out in a gym. “I pushed truck bodies to the sprayer on the assembly line. The tape would come off the body covers and land on the floor sticky side up. The tape would gum into the dolly wheels, and you’d get a real workout pushing those truck bodies. I would leave the factory around five o’clock, go home for di
nner. Working that hard kind of made me forget about boxing.”9

  Louis did not forget about the Purple Gang. According to him, the gang, composed of Jewish members, operated on the Detroit River, held close ties to Al Capone in Chicago and mobsters as far away as Louisiana. It was Turpin who intervened when Louis was being recruited to be a member of another gang on the east side. His intervention rescued Louis from the clutches of a crew of hoodlums, all of whom ended up in prison.10

  Turpin wasn’t the only person looking out for Louis. John Roxborough and Julian Black, despite Louis’s unpolished skills, recognized that he was a diamond in the rough and took him under their wing. The Roxborough family came to Detroit in 1899. Now with ties to a number of unsavory businesses, none more lucrative than the numbers racket, John had been a star athlete at Eastern High School, along with his brother, Charles. In order to complete the makeover, Roxborough moved Louis into his home and helped him refine his table manners and eating habits. Roxborough had some of his suits altered to fit his young fighter and made sure he had the best boxing equipment. All he needed now was a good business manager, a task Black assumed, and a top trainer—enter Jack “Chappie” Blackburn, who was a stern trainer, and as Barney Nagler wrote, “he looked the part. A bony face, marked by a scar on the left cheek and set off by beady eyes that peered out of angular slits, he appeared as an instrument of discipline. Usually taciturn, he was informative and kindly where Louis was involved. He knew boxing as a serious business and instilled in his pupil an early devotion to the course.”11 The work overalls worn at Briggs were replaced by Everlast boxing gear, and rather than punching a clock, Joe began tearing into a punching bag. He left his stepfather, Pat Brooks, and his brother, Deleon Barrow, at Ford while he set out on a journey to fame and fortune.

  It took Louis about three years to establish himself as a top-ranked amateur. He often told reporters he couldn’t remember his first bout, which must have been in the early 1930s. Prior to pulling on the gloves to face an opponent, Louis devoted many hours to learning how to move in the ring, mostly from Holman Williams. He put his prodigy through hours of rigorous training and footwork at the Brewster Center. After a grueling session with Williams, Louis would go to work at one of the jobs he held, even sometimes delivering ice. Invariably, young black boys waited outside the gym wanting to help him carry his boxing gear.

  Louis was accustomed to the attention and allowed them to tote his gloves and other gear. One of the skinny kids stood out from the rest; he could walk a block on his hands and was very nimble on his feet. “When he moved to New York, I missed him,” Louis said. “He was a real nice kid. His name was Walker Smith. Later they changed his name to ‘Sugar Ray Robinson.’”12

  By 1934, when Louis was launching his professional career in the ring, the Negro Leagues were barely making payroll, and the devastating fire at Mack Park in 1929 hadn’t helped matters. During the bleak summer of 1931, with unemployment spiraling off the charts, few Detroiters, black or white, had the money to attend a ball game, whether it was to watch the Tigers at Navin Field or the Stars at Dequindre Park.13 Instead of lining up to see Stearns play or even to see Louis fight, people spent their time in the many bread lines throughout the city.

  The collapse of the Negro National League in 1931 was a blow to the Detroit Stars. A few of the players became teammates on the Detroit Wolves of the East-West League. “The league was founded by Cumberland Posey . . . he combined the Wolves with his other team, the famed Homestead Grays.”14

  Black baseball fans in Detroit in 1935 had no choice but to enjoy the Detroit Cubs, a barnstorming semipro team. They had no league affiliation and very few players of the caliber the Wolves possessed. After Joe Louis knocked out former heavyweight champion Primo Carnera and then Max Baer in 1935, he gave serious thought to owning a baseball team—he often said that if he hadn’t become a successful boxer he would have tried to play ball. That dream never became a reality, though he did sponsor a softball team called the Brown Bombers. This was about as close as boxing would come to baseball, and as Louis ascended to become a champion, the Negro Leagues became a fading memory.

  11

  THE TURBULENT THIRTIES

  My heart is aching

  for them Poles and Greeks

  on relief way across the sea

  because I was on relief

  once in 1933.

  I know what relief can be—

  it took me two years to get on WPA.

  If the war hadn’t come along

  I wouldn’t be out of the barrel yet.

  Now, I’m almost back in the barrel again.

  To tell the truth,

  if these white folks want to go ahead

  and fight another war,

  or even two,

  the one to stop them won’t be me.

  Would you?

  —LANGSTON HUGHES, “RELIEF”

  Depression. The word captured both the economic and psychological condition in America, and black Detroit was doubly encumbered. It was a time when “white people had less money to spend on themselves, and practically none to spend on Negroes, for the depression brought everybody down a peg or two,” wrote Langston Hughes. “And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.”1

  There was wide confirmation that black Detroiters suffered the most during the Depression, which arrived officially on Black Monday and Black Tuesday, October 28 and 29, 1929. “Of all the sufferers,” wrote Paul Kellogg, “perhaps the Negroes, as the newest comers to Detroit, were hardest hit. A social worker in a Negro district told me of their predicament, but it was set down in cold figures at the City Department. Of the 4,029 families given relief that November, 1,118 were colored, or 28 percent. These included 5,137 persons out of the 86,000 colored population in the city. More than one out of twenty, in the old hard phrase, ‘were on the town.’ . . .”2 In too many instances, being on relief failed to halt the marshals with orders to evict. Thanks to Joe Billups, one of the first and most notable black leaders of UAW Local 600, many evicted families had their furniture returned to their homes soon after the marshals placed it on the sidewalk. To guard against the marshals or deputy sheriffs returning, Billups left someone behind to alert the office of the local, a tactic that he had perhaps acquired while a member of the Communist Party or the Auto Workers Union. It was a game of cat and mouse, and the Unemployment Councils often came out on top because the landlords had to pay the marshals or deputy sheriffs to return for a repeat performance. In an interview, Billups said, “So few landlords would pay it again because the same thing would happen all over again.”3

  Evictions were a nationwide concern. They surfaced in literature, nowhere more gripping than in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which activists come to the rescue of the evicted, much as Billups did in Detroit.4

  The dozen or so Unemployment Councils in the city were not the only extension of the Communist Party. There was a sizable contingent of militants in the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR). Among the more prominent members was the poet Langston Hughes, later to be president of the organization. In 1930, the league was forged out of the remaining members of the American Negro Labor Congress with the purpose of further galvanizing and radicalizing the black community. Central to this effort were the theoretical ideas put forth by Harry Haywood, who a generation later would settle in Detroit. His manifesto called for full black liberation and was forcefully backed by the Southern delegates to the founding conference in Saint Louis, where no voice was more fervent than that of Mary Dalton, one of the Atlanta Six, a group of communist organizers charged under Georgia’s Insurrection Act and facing capital punishment.5 By 1935, the league had run its course and morphed into the National Negro Congress. This radical progression eventually set the stage for the emergence of a number of black labor leaders, of whom few were as charismatic and bellicose as Coleman Young.

  Young, like many of Detroit’s luminaries, was born in Alabama and followed that straight line of migration to t
he city in 1923, close to the time that Judge Murphy was adjusting to his position in Recorder’s Court. Young was five years old, the son of a tailor who set up his shop in the heart of Black Bottom. On Saturday’s he had a part-time job cleaning Dr. Ossian Sweet’s clinic, which at that time was located above Ike Portlock’s cleaners. Young recalled in his autobiography that an additional responsibility was to answer the phone when Sweet was off “to lunch with his lovely nurse, Miss Smith.” While minding the office, he remembered, “It occurred to me that a dollar was an exceptional amount for a man to pay a kid for an hour or so of secretarial work, but it also occurred to me that Miss Smith was an exceptional lunch companion.”6

  In 1936, Young was eighteen and working as an electrical apprentice in the Ford Motor Company electrical program. Although he excelled in all the tests, a white man with lower scores, whose father was a foreman at the plant, got the only job available. Young was dispatched to the assembly line. Motivated by the unfair results of the electrical program, he was eager to join the year-old UAW. It didn’t take long for Young’s maverick nature to get him in trouble. Suspected of being a union sympathizer, he was accosted by one of Ford security chief Harry Bennett’s goons. Young decked him with a steel rod, ending his days at Ford. Following his dismissal, he had several menial jobs and hustled in the pool halls while maintaining a radical outlook and militant attitude that was quite compatible with that of the Rev. Charles Hill, pastor of Hartford Avenue Baptist Church. “Reverend Hill was an old-time hellfire and brimstone preacher whose moral convictions carried him to the presidency of the Michigan branch of the National Negro Congress (NNC),” Young wrote. “The NNC provided a progressive forum for black working people, and it naturally acquired a political accent, but it was Reverend Hill’s simple passion and courage that drove the organization and inspired young ideological upstarts like me.”7 Much of Young’s affection for the union movement came from the influence of the Rev. Hill, whose church hosted the founding of Local 600, which eventually became the largest union local in the world. He admired the minister’s defiance of Henry Ford as well as Ford’s minion, Donald Marshall, whose job it was to see that Ford workers toed the line and voted Republican. Ford once wrote Reverend Hill to inform him that he would fire all the members of his church who worked at Ford if the church continued to be used for union meetings. “Reverend Hill told Ford to go to hell,” Young wrote.