Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  Whether he was actually performing at the Inn or not, a rumor of his being there was enough to draw a flock of acolytes. As the club flourished, Eddins was able to bring in name acts, and soon the Inn was a crucible of modern jazz. For a score of years, into the seventies, it continued to be one of the city’s most significant night spots.

  Eddins, who died in 1993, left a legacy and template that Bert Dearing continues in the twenty-first century through a network of successful business enterprises, including a nightclub, a restaurant, and a theater. Entrepreneurship has been essential to the black community and its drive for self-determination.

  14

  FROM MOTOWN TO SHOWDOWN

  While the blues and jazz continued to occupy a large swath of Detroit’s cultural front, rhythm and blues with a tinge of pop was gradually gaining a foothold, thanks to Berry Gordy Jr. and the Motown experience. Meanwhile, there was a developing disharmony between the unions and the city’s black workers. “The merger of the CIO with the AFL in the middle of the decade indicated to many blacks a declining commitment to the battle for job equality . . . this came at the very time that the NAACP legal victories and the dramatic rise of Martin Luther King to public prominence signified a revolution of expectations that was spawning a new [militancy] among black Americans. In this context the old, still unsolved issues of job discrimination in the factories and the lack of representation in the highest councils of the auto union assumed a new urgency.”1

  A leading voice in this new surge, one willing to address the union’s recurrent ambiguity, was Horace Sheffield, a union organizer and a man well informed about the inner and outer workings of the labor movement. He spoke before the US Civil Rights Commission in 1960, three years after he had helped to found the Trade Union Leadership Council (TULC). His main complaint at that time was the general ineffectiveness of the UAW’s Fair Practices Department, which he contended was missing in action when it came to getting skilled jobs for black workers. Their presence in the plants had dramatically increased, but black workers still constituted a fraction of 1 percent in such trades as carpentry and tool-and-die making. “Even at Rouge where there were 12,500 black workers, fewer than 250 of them were among the 7,000 in the skilled trades. With blacks now 25 percent of the workforce at major Detroit companies like Chrysler and GM, the situation was becoming increasingly volatile, and their grievances about exclusion from the skilled trades represented one of the principal issues raised by TULC.”2

  While Sheffield and his comrades were shaking up things on the labor front, in 1957 attorney William Patrick Jr. integrated the city’s municipal chambers as the first African American member of the City Council. This was a harbinger of militant agitation on the horizon. Patrick’s victory was aided by support from the UAW-CIO as well as an impressive campaign team, led by attorney Damon Keith. The union had apparently been put on notice by Sheffield’s activism. That Keith had time to help Patrick is quite remarkable, since his main responsibility was to bring in business for his newly formed law firm, which included attorneys Herman Anderson, Myron Wahls, Joseph Brown, and Nathan Conyers, John’s brother. “I was doing a lot of community work with the NAACP, United Negro College Fund, with the churches, and so my name was being bandied around,” Keith told his biographers. “People were coming in to see me, and after I’d interview them, I would introduce them to Nate or Herman as clients.”3 Or to Wahls, who was not only a quite competent attorney but also a highly respected pianist. When he wasn’t in the courtroom, Wahls was refining his chops on the keyboard, brushing up on the latest compositions from the world of jazz, particularly bebop.

  With Patrick in the city council and Keith and his cohorts ready to take up the legal fight to level the playing field in the unions, Sheffield was further emboldened and was given additional support from stalwart labor activists such as Nelson Jack Edwards, Robert “Buddy” Battle, and Marc Stepp. With them on board, he could focus on strategy and tactics as they pushed the TULC into ever more militant demands for an end to the practice of relegating blacks to the lowest-paying and most onerous jobs. Since the end of World War II, the relationship between the union and black workers had been fairly cordial and respectful, but these warm feelings resulted from wartime necessities. Now the radical aggressiveness of Sheffield and his allies exacerbated the unraveling of unity between the workers and the union. Inevitably, the simmering resentment of white union members and leaders came to the surface, and the discord mushroomed into larger social and political issues as the decade came to a close.

  The essential problem had been summed up in “Big Boss Man,” a blues evergreen recorded by John Lee Hooker who sang, “Can’t you hear me when I call?”

  Whether the big boss man was a straw boss on a farm or a foreman in a factory, Hooker’s call generally went unanswered, much like the demands by Sheffield and his cohorts. Hooker’s blues plea was ignored at the point of production, and his music meant very little to the new generation of black Detroiters, their youthful impetuosity eager for a brand-new beat.

  15

  A BRAND-NEW BEAT

  Berry Gordy Jr.’s dream of starting his own record company wasn’t farfetched but rather a logical extension of his success as a songwriter. Several of rhythm-and-blues singer Jackie Wilson’s hits from 1957 to 1959, including “Reet Petite,” “To Be Loved,” and “Lonely Teardrops,” were co-written by Gordy. An intuitive businessman, Gordy began thinking about owning and controlling his creative products.

  Remarkably, when Gordy borrowed the $800 from his family to start his Tamla label, it wasn’t Wilson who recorded the first song but Marvin Johnson with “Come to Me,” one of several tunes he composed with Gordy. What began as a fruitful partnership splintered bitterly, however, over who was the composer and rightful owner of the songs they had written together. Johnson felt he had been shortchanged and ripped off.

  It’s hard to identify where Gordy got his musical genius, but his entrepreneurial drive was clearly in the family’s DNA; his father was an enterprising businessman. In 1936, when his family moved to Black Bottom, Gordy was six and a half years old. “It was an important turning point for the family. Pop had finally seen his struggles pay off. During those Depression years—he had not only survived—hustling his way from being an apprentice plasterer to getting his contractor’s license and hiring men to work for him—but had saved enough money to make a down payment on our very own two-story commercial building on the corner of Farnsworth and St. Antoine Streets, not far from that first little grocery store he had been running.”1

  Working with his father was grueling, backbreaking labor that toughened his muscles and at the same time made him think that there had to be a better way to make a living. Even so, he put his body to another test in the boxing ring, and as a reasonably good featherweight, he shared the card at least once with heavyweight champion Joe Louis. But the smell of liniment and the sitting in the corner waiting for the bell soon gave way to his first love: music. In 1956 he met Jackie Wilson, another former boxer, and their collaboration was almost as magical and productive as Gordy’s was to become with Smokey Robinson a few years later.

  Gordy first met Smokey when he and his group, the Matadors, were auditioning for a contract with a local recording company. Though unsuccessful, they caught Gordy’s attention, who praised them and offered Smokey some songwriting advice. After listening to nearly one hundred of Smokey’s songs, Gordy suggested that he work on telling a story in his music. “That’s how it all started between Smokey and me,” Gordy related. “Our relationship was simple. I wanted to teach, he wanted to learn. He started bringing me songs on a regular basis. I continued to turn them down just as regularly, but I knew it was a matter of time before he’d come to me with something I’d really like.”2

  Gordy recalled that in January 1958 or a year earlier, according to Smokey, that day arrived. “It happened while I was watching American Bandstand on TV. The Silhouettes were singing ‘Get a Job,’ number one song in t
he world, when it hit like a bolt of lightning. Get a Job? Got a Job!” Within minutes Smokey composed his response and hurried to Gordy. “This is it! I got it!” he exclaimed bursting in on Gordy’s meeting. “ ‘Got what?’ Gordy asked. “Got a Job,” Smokey responded, “our first hit. . . . Berry helped me whip it into form, the group started some serious rehearsing, and we cut it over at United Sound in the early part of November 1957. Flip side was ‘Mama Done Tole me.’”3

  “Got a Job” gave Gordy and Robinson what they needed to seal their partnership, the hit and financial boost Gordy sought to form his own company. At the time, the majority of Detroit’s working class was struggling to hold on to their jobs or hoping to receive one more unemployment check. The downward spiral of the economy and the disappearance of jobs were indices directly connected to the ever shrinking manufacturing base, especially the reduced output of the automotive industry and the closing of plants. When Packard suspended operation in 1956, it was an ominous indictor that the industrial decline was fully under way. “I felt like someone had hit me with a sledge hammer,” one Packard worker said.4

  None of the gloomy workplace impact came as a surprise to James Boggs. Since his arrival from Alabama, and while working at Chrysler, he had been warning workers of the impending downturn, with a special concern about overtime and automation. “In every plant the company is demanding more productions from the workforce,” he wrote in 1958. “Dodge and Chrysler workers have been sent home twenty-three days before completing an eight-hour day. The company says they are not producing up to their work standards. Over a hundred men have been fired or given days off for not meeting these standards.”5 Of course, black workers were disproportionately harmed by these layoffs or firings, especially those who by the late fifties were unfortunate enough to be employed at Ford, where the Edsel was running out of gas and gaining little traction with car buyers.

  The only black workers immune to the vagaries of the plant were the entrepreneurs, owners of their businesses. It was advice similar to this that Smokey Robinson urged on Berry Gordy. Rather than being at the mercy of other producers and labels, why not start your own? “Why work for the man, when you can be the man?” Robinson told his mentor.6 With Robinson by his side, Gordy took that advice all the way to the bank, particularly after counting the cash flow from the team’s first million seller in 1960, “Shop Around,” on the Tamla label. In Gordy’s world, a label or two does not constitute a company. He always had a bigger plan. “Because of its thriving car industry, Detroit had long been known as the ‘Motor City,’” Gordy wrote. “In tribute to what I had always felt was the down-home quality of warm, soulful country-hearted people I grew up around, I used ‘town’ in place of ‘city.’ A contraction of ‘Motor City’ gave me the perfect name—Motown.”7

  Robinson recalled that beginning: “West Grand Boulevard was the name of the street. Berry had bought a routine, B-Flat two-story house on the same strip as a funeral home and a beauty shop. We were wedged in between. . . . Downstairs became headquarters. Kitchen became the control room. Garage became the studio where we’d cut ‘Way Over There’ and ‘Shop Around.’ The living room was bookkeeping, the dining room, sales. Berry stuck a funky sign in the front window—‘Hitsville, USA’—and we were in business.”8

  Ironically, it was the factories and their assembly lines after which Gordy patterned his production procedure. After a writer composed a tune, Gordy matched it to a particular group; they rehearsed and refined it, and then it was reviewed and finalized by Gordy and his team of producers. When the song rolled off this assembly line of musicians and arrangers, the finished product was like a new Cadillac. This was the beginning of the brand-new beat that Gordy envisioned. The compilation of hits would be the soundtrack of a generation.

  16

  BING AND BANG

  On the political front, Congressman Charles Diggs’s influence had grown exponentially. Following the national census, he successfully pushed for the creation of a second black-majority congressional district. Equally prosperous at that time was the House of Diggs, the family-owned funeral home, which, like so many black-owned funeral parlors—Stinson’s, Swanson’s, McFall’s, and Cole’s (the oldest dating back to 1919)—faced little competition in burying African Americans. No doubt the black-owned parlors benefited from the passage in 1961 by the state legislature of a bill prohibiting racial discrimination by private cemeteries.

  Inseparably linked to the black-owned funeral homes were the black churches, and in the 1960s, few pastors could rival the pulpit power of the Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin. He arrived in Detroit in 1946 for his installation at New Bethel Baptist Church, and by the late fifties he had risen to a leadership position in both the sacred and secular realms of the city. During this process, he had transformed himself from anything resembling a Mississippi-born, country circuit preacher from Memphis. His hair was “conked,” that is, straightened with lye; his suits were purchased from Kosins, one of Detroit’s top haberdasheries, and he cruised around town in a brand-new Cadillac. These accouterments added luster to his charisma and magnetic voice. It was easy to understand how he could move a church to ecstasy. His ability to mesmerize a congregation did not extend to calming the rancor at the National Baptist Convention, however, particularly the dispute between two leaders he admired. Even so, he was determined to resolve the conflict.

  The Rev. J. H. Jackson, who had led the convention for nearly thirty years, riled many members, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for his opposition to church involvement in the civil rights struggle. Although Jackson had backed the movement during the Montgomery bus boycott, he decided that the organization should no longer be involved. Mediating this split, which Franklin did without leaving the convention, was not easy. Franklin was facing two other challenges—how to keep his Metropolitan Civic League for Legal Action afloat and how to help his daughter Aretha navigate her crossover from gospel to popular music. Meanwhile, his Civic League had lost what little clout it had had.

  Aretha’s situation proved more complicated. “Eighteen in 1960, she already had two children and had left high school before graduating. She also possessed a considerable reputation from her gospel recordings and tour appearances. Her musical abilities were exceptional, and when she told her father of her desire to record popular music, the preacher father and this talented gospel-performing daughter became the talk of the church world.”1 It would have been hypocritical on Franklin’s part to block his daughter’s desires, because he had introduced her to all types of music. If Aretha wanted to follow the likes of Sam Cooke and Ray Charles in leaving the sacred for the secular without sacrificing any of their soulfulness, then Franklin fully supported her.

  In the fall of 1960, her recording of “Today I Sing the Blues,” was among the top R&B tunes in the country. “Just when my career was getting started . . . Detroit was undergoing major changes. For one thing, an urban renewal program meant the end of the New Bethel of my childhood. The Chrysler Freeway was being built right through Hastings. The church—in fact, the entire neighborhood—was being torn down for the highway. (Daddy spoke of how the Catholic Church, only one block away, was saved from demolition while ours was not. He couldn’t explain why).”2

  By 1962, little explanation was needed when the Gotham Hotel, which had stood as a lodestone since 1943, was closed. When business partners John White and Irving Roane bought the nine-story building, located at the corner of John R Street and Orchestra Place, it had become a choice alternative for notable blacks who weren’t welcome in the downtown hotels.3 It was equivalent to Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, with similar architecture, accommodations, and in particular, a similarly spacious dining room and bar. In 1958, when the great bluesman B. B. King remarried, the ceremony was performed at the Gotham with the Rev. Franklin officiating. In 1964 an era came to a shattering close when the wrecking ball began demolishing the building. Paradise Valley had lost its centerpiece. The leveling moved inexorably up and down the rout
e of the Chrysler Freeway, ripping the heart out of Black Bottom so folks in the exurbs had another, faster way to get in and out of the city.

  The early sixties in Detroit was a time of political optimism among black residents. Among the brightest prospects was Wade McCree Jr., whom President Kennedy appointed to the federal district court. There was more jubilation when Governor John Swainson appointed Otis M. Smith to the Michigan Supreme Court, a position a black man hadn’t held since Reconstruction. McCree and Smith joined Damon Keith, who in 1960 was the commissioner of the State Bar of Michigan. Such flexing of legal and political muscle was a prelude to the 1961 mayoral election, in which black voters were a key factor in attorney Jerome P. Cavanagh’s upset victory over the incumbent Louis Miriani.

  With a liberal mayor holding the reins, blacks expected a dramatic change in the often brutally racist behavior of the police, which was sanctioned by Miriani. They even hoped that Cavanagh would live up to his promise to do something about the white “homeowners’ rights” movement ceaselessly instigated by Mayor Albert Cobo during his years in office (1950–57) and continued by Miriani. Blocking the open-housing law was of central importance to the white homeowners who were determined to keep their neighborhoods segregated. Inevitably, the tide of black residents won out. They were tired of being forced to live in inferior and inadequate housing, but rather than live together, white homeowners began to move out of the city. Thus began white flight from the “black invasion” and the city’s population shrinkage. The 1960 census revealed a precipitous dip in Detroit’s population, from nearly 2 million to about 1.6 million. This 9 percent loss was a harbinger of population shift.