Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  To Cavanagh’s campaign in 1961, attorney Keith devoted a considerable amount of time and energy. When he returned to the firm, Willie Horton was one of his important clients. “After leading Northwestern to a city championship in 1959, he piqued the interest of numerous major league teams, including the Detroit Tigers—even though he was just a teenager.” Horton, a native of Mississippi, arrived in Detroit when he was about fourteen, and after being taught the rudiments of baseball in the neighborhood where he lived near the Jeffries Projects, he was a star at Northwestern High School, Keith’s alma mater. At the request of Horton’s parents, Keith became the star’s legal guardian. “I was flabbergasted,” Keith would recall. “Legal guardian meant I would be responsible for him in every way. I couldn’t believe they were asking me that. But they said, ‘Mr. Keith, we believe you can take care of our son. We trust you to watch out for his best interest.’” 4 Horton was still in high school when he signed with the Tigers for a $50,000 bonus, three times the salary Keith was earning. The money was followed by glory. It should be noted that one of Horton’s high school teammates was Katherine Brown’s son, the captain of the team. Another was Alex Johnson, who became a major league star, winning a batting title in 1970.

  One of Mayor Cavanagh’s first acts upon taking up residence at Manoogian Mansion—the first mayor to do so—was to issue an executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in hiring and promotion practices in the city. Next he appointed George Edwards, who previously had served as a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court, as the new police chief, a move that was enthusiastically supported by the black community, given Edwards’s liberal credentials. Another bold stroke from Cavanagh was the implementation of an affirmative action program throughout the city agencies. Even Coleman Young applauded the new mayor. “Detroit politics in general took a new sensitivity under Cavanagh,” he wrote. “He was an active player in the War on Poverty, at the same time working to reverse the decline of the central business district by brisk office construction.”5 Cavanagh’s progressive policies, as Young viewed them, provided a wedge of opportunity for all Detroiters. Opportunities, too, for a platoon of black activists who in many respects were far more militant than Young.

  Much of the incipient militancy sprung from activists who had been influenced by Malcolm X. In speech after speech, and even more vociferously after the provocative 1959 documentary The Hate That Hate Produced, Malcolm gained wider exposure. To him the documentary demonized the Nation of Islam, but it provided him with a useful platform to further his attack on Christian preachers and the “so-called black leaders.” Among Detroit’s radical leaders were James Boggs, the Rev. Albert Cleage, Milton and Richard Henry, Coleman Young, and John Watson. Perhaps the least known of these men was Watson, whose long political history began in the early sixties when he was dismissed from the Congress of Racial Equality for being too radical. “A few years later,” observed Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, “he was expelled from SNCC, along with the entire Detroit chapter, because the group had advocated direct action in the North as well as in the South. During the next few years, he worked with NAC (Negro Action Committee), the Freedom Now Party, and UHURU.”6

  Other than a few minor demonstrations, Uhuru (uhuru is the Swahili word for “freedom”) had very little presence beyond the campus of Wayne State University, where it was composed of a small group of militant activists who spouted revolutionary rhetoric, read Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, V. I. Lenin, Fidel Castro, C.L.R. James, and of course, Malcolm X. “Our mission as expressed in our speeches and writings during that period was a combination of civil rights desegregation, labor rights for Black workers, socialism; Pan Africanism and what some of us called a Black revolutionary internationalism,” said Charles Simmons, a member of the group and later an international correspondent for Muhammad Speaks.7 In the fall of 1963, Watson and other members of Uhuru, most notably Luke Tripp and General Baker, protested a ceremony staged by the city’s civic leaders announcing their bid to host the 1968 Olympics. Among the prominent guests at the event was track and field star Hayes Jones from Pontiac who approached the podium bearing a replica of the Olympic torch. “As the national anthem played, Jones . . . didn’t receive a hero’s welcome. Protestors from an array of local civil rights organizations carrying picket signs used the occasion to point out the hypocrisy of Detroit’s bid to host an event symbolizing international brotherhood while housing discrimination remained rampant and legally sanctioned due to the city’s unwillingness to pass an open-housing ordinance.”8 The protestors were quickly arrested, only fueling Watson and Baker’s militancy.

  Uhuru may have been the most rebellious of the groups demonstrating for open housing, but it wasn’t the only one. The local branch of the NAACP and various church leaders also took to the streets, one group encircling the Detroit Civic Center. The various demonstrations had some impact, but it was the black real estate brokers who supplied the telling blow. Whether the Realtors were true believers in open housing and racial integration or merely “blockbusting opportunists,” as many were called, the results were the same: white residents fled at the first sign of a black family moving into the neighborhood. “The tactics of blockbusting brokers and speculators were simple. They began by selling a house in an all-white block or neighborhood to a black family or using devious techniques like paying a black woman to walk her baby through a white neighborhood to fuel suspicion of black residential ‘takeover.’”9

  The die had been cast. The fight for open housing loosed the torrent, leaving white residents only one recourse, or so they felt—move to the other side of Eight Mile Road.

  17

  MARCH TO MILITANCY

  In the summer of 1963, black residents were less concerned about what was happening on the blockbusting front than the news that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was coming to town for a civil rights march down Woodward Avenue. On June 23, on the Walk to Freedom, more than 125,000 people gathered behind King, who was joined on the front line by UAW leader Walter Reuther, funeral home owner Benjamin McFall, real estate speculator James Del Rio, and the Rev. C. L. Franklin. For the leaders of the march, this was a dress rehearsal for King’s more momentous gathering two months later in the nation’s capital. The “I Have a Dream” speech he delivered in Detroit was not as elaborate as the one in DC, but there were some special remarks for Detroiters: “I have a dream this afternoon that one day right here in Detroit, Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them, they will be able to get a job.”1 King had touched on two burning issues in the city that were particularly well-received by the open-housing advocates.

  Two weeks later, the hope and inspiration of King’s speech in Detroit was washed away by the death of Cynthia Scott. She was shot and killed by the police during a confrontation in downtown Detroit. Scott grew up on the North End and lived in an apartment one floor above Katherine Brown, who, like others on Cardoni Street, knew her as Bay-Bay. She was always big for her age and stood about six feet tall as an adult. According to the police, Scott, twenty-four, had a long arrest record for prostitution, and on this occasion, a day after the July Fourth holiday, she was accosted by two police officers, who claimed they saw her with money in her hands and therefore assumed she had just finished rolling a client. The police claimed that when Theodore Spicher, a white officer, attempted to arrest her, she slashed at him with a knife and then walked across the street as though the affair were over. Spicher drew his gun and shot her twice in the back. But that wasn’t enough to stop her. She turned to face Spicher, who fired once more, hitting her in the stomach. She fell dead.

  “City prosecutor Samuel H. Olsen quickly exonerated Spicher solely on the testimony of the two policemen,” wrote Nick Salvatore. “Olsen, whose reputation was already dismal among black residents, refused to credit the statements of other eyewitnesses, all of whom were African Americans, because he considered their accounts ‘too biased.’”2 When
Katherine Brown heard about it, she couldn’t believe it was Bay-Bay, and remembered her as a little girl who was tough enough to stand her ground against some of the neighborhood bullies. Whites as usual shrugged off the killing of a black sex-care provider as unimportant, while blacks, based on common experience, assumed that she was merely resisting a police shakedown to keep the cash she’d earned on her back. Rallies were called by Uhuru and the Rev. Cleage at 1300 Beaubien, police headquarters, after Scott’s death had been ruled a justifiable homicide. Attorney Milton Henry was retained by the Scott family to represent them in a lawsuit filed against the city and its police force. In any event, Scott’s death—or murder, as some activists charged—was a catalyst for new political formations and a renewed impetus for those already in the streets protesting police brutality. No one was surprised—and certainly not the police—that GOAL (Group on Advanced Leadership) was among the organizations protesting the exoneration. According to FBI files, GOAL had been in existence since October 1961, and in April 1962 was officially registered as a nonprofit educational corporation. “GOAL,” the FBI reported, “was organized to hasten the Negro’s achievement of full human rights and full human responsibilities.”3 The FBI also had under surveillance the Freedom Now Party, formed in August 1963, and agents reported on Malcolm X’s famous “Message to the Grass Roots” speech on November 10, 1963. This event, sponsored by GOAL in collaboration with the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference, was held simultaneously with a more conservative conference convened by the Rev. C. L. Franklin. At one point, the two entities had been one, but when Franklin heard that black nationalists and members of GOAL were involved, he excluded them, thus prompting the Rev. Albert Cleage to form an alternative rally at King Solomon Baptist Church. Malcolm X, the Rev. Cleage, and radical journalist William Worthy were the main speakers. During his speech, Malcolm X mentioned that Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was in town, ostensibly to address those assembled by the Rev. Franklin at Cobo Hall. The Rev. Cleage, the only Detroiter Malcolm X cited, had emerged as one of the most outspoken and fearless black leaders in the city.

  Peniel Joseph, in his book Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, summarizes this period of politics in Detroit with keen insight, noting, “Collectively, their political struggles placed them at the forefront of an informal coalition of militants whose intellectual thought, political manifestoes, and community organizing were early examples of Black Power.”

  In 1964, the Rev. Cleage was the gubernatorial candidate on the Freedom Now slate, which included his brother, Henry Cleage, who sought to unseat prosecutor Samuel Olsen, and Milton Henry, who ran against John Conyers Jr. Michigan wasn’t the only promising base for the party, but, as in the other elections, the candidates were unsuccessful then, although remnants of the party and its outlook flowered several years later with the creation of the Black Slate, which would become significant in the election of future candidates, including Coleman Young, who was endorsed by the slate.

  From the time in 1957 that Rosa Parks and her husband arrived in Detroit, the civil rights icon worked tirelessly for Conyers. Parks’s commitment to fight Jim Crow—North or South—was unrelenting. There was less cohesiveness and commitment, however, in the Freedom Now Party. “Within two weeks of the election, the Rev. Cleage and Grace Boggs resigned from the party, having experienced a power shift to the Henry brothers [Milton, Richard, and Laurence] and their supporters.”4

  A more notable political development occurred when Coleman Young announced his bid for the Fourth District seat of the state senate. Young easily defeated community activist Nelis Saunders and joined Basil Brown, the only black legislator in the state senate. When the unrepentant Young ventured back to his neighborhood after the victory, he was greeted in the customary manner: “ ‘Hey, motherfucker!’” Young recalled. “I turned to my offender, eyed him gravely, and set the record straight. ‘From now on,’ I said, ‘it’s Senator Motherfucker.’”5

  Detroit activists were shocked when they heard that Malcolm X’s house, in East Elmhurst, New York, had been firebombed on February 14, 1965. They were relieved that no one was injured, but they knew their plans to present him at a forum that evening had to be canceled. They were wrong. Stunning many of his followers, who were certain that he would be too traumatized to travel, Malcolm fulfilled his promise to speak. In his speech that evening at Ford Auditorium, he thanked Milton Henry and his Afro-American Broadcasting Company for inviting him and then addressed a broad range of subjects, from his recent trip to Africa and the Middle East to the Ku Klux Klan, excoriating the civil rights leaders for their ineffectiveness. He touched the audience when he mentioned Detroit. “I know Dearborn; you know I’m from Detroit. I used to live here in Inkster. And you had to go through Dearborn to get to Inkster. Just like driving through Mississippi when you got to Dearborn. Is it still that way? Well, you should straighten it out.”6 A week later, Malcolm (now El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in uptown Manhattan.

  Herman Ferguson, a member of Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, witnessed the assassination and recalled flashing yellow lights, possibly indicating that the entire incident was being filmed. “It does not seem that we only had Malcolm with us for about thirteen months after he left the Nation of Islam,” Ferguson lamented. “Yet in that short period of time, Brother Malcolm cast his shadow over our Movement in so many ways. He changed our focus from civil rights to human rights. He influenced the birth of many Black Nationalist organizations (the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Afrika, the Black Liberation Army, to name just a few). People who fight for their freedom from oppression and for national liberation know his name worldwide.”7

  About a month later in Alabama, another fighter for justice from Detroit was the target of racist assassins. Viola Liuzzo, thirty-nine, was brutally killed by men who hated her. Liuzzo, the only white female martyr of the civil rights movement, was emotionally troubled after watching clips of Bloody Sunday on television March 7, 1965, in which marchers were beaten fiercely by state troopers near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. A mother of five children, married to a Teamsters union member, and a student at Wayne State University, Liuzzo, who owned a 1963 Oldsmobile, may have seemed an unlikely person to drive all the way to Selma to participate in the march. She was a member of the NAACP, and at Wayne State on March 12, she joined 250 other students at the federal building singing “We Shall Overcome.”

  This was her first real civil rights demonstration in the South. In Selma, she took on a number of duties, including welcoming people to the march and chauffeuring residents back to Selma after they had completed the fifty-four-mile march to Montgomery. She and Leroy Moton, a young black man, had just dropped off passengers in Selma and were on a return trip to Montgomery on Highway 80 when a car with Klan members and an FBI informant that had been following them pulled alongside. They opened fire. Liuzzo was shot twice in the head and the car careened into a ditch after Moton grabbed the wheel. The Klansmen inspected the damage and seeing blood all over the place concluded that both were dead and drove off. After they departed, Moton, covered with the dead Liuzzo’s blood, climbed onto the highway and hailed a ride. Two weeks after her death, burnt crosses were found on the lawns of four Detroit homes, including the Liuzzo residence.

  Among those attending Liuzzo’s funeral on March 30 at Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic church on the city’s west side was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was there for the high requiem mass on the second day of mourning proclaimed by Governor George Romney. Also present were civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, James Farmer of CORE, the Rev. James Wadsworth, Congressman Charles Diggs, attorney Milton Henry, and “rival union presidents Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and James R. Hoffa of the Teamsters.”8

  Rather than attending the funeral services, students at Northern High School staged a walkout
in protest of what they felt was an inferior education. The walkout began on April 6, 1966, after an editorial by honor student Chuck Colding in the student publication was censored. He had strongly criticized the school’s subpar curriculum and the leadership of Principal Arthur Carty. The students demanded that Carty be removed, or they would not return after Easter recess. In response to the students’ demand, School Superintendent Samuel Brownell “temporarily reassigned the principal to the central office, ostensibly to study the situation at Northern, and he placed the school under the authority of two high-level administrators.”9 On April 19 a school board meeting failed to resolve the crisis; in fact, it made things even worse by refusing to remove Carty. The next day, out of more than 2,307 enrolled at the school, only 183 students showed up. Students, including Colding, and members of the Wayne State University faculty set up a Freedom School under the direction of economist Karl Gregory. What began as a small disturbance at Northern soon spread throughout the city and commanded daily media coverage. Meanwhile, Dr. Gregory and his volunteers continued to hold sessions at the makeshift school and were soon joined by a few Northern teachers. Near the end of April, the students at Northern voted to return to class one day before a scheduled citywide boycott. This protest was just a first alarm; the dissent would simmer for months before it erupted again two years later.

  Related to the issues raised by disgruntled students were salary complaints from teachers. Tension had grown considerably around the millage by which school districts were allocated funds. The demands presented by the Detroit Federation of Teachers were finally met, and the teachers rejoiced in a pay hike of $700, giving them an annual salary of $9,300. A strike was averted, wrote education authority Jeffrey Mirel, but the $7.5 million per year for salaries left the “school board in serious financial straits.”10 The school board took another blow when the millage proposal failed to get the votes it needed for a 2.5 mill tax increase. This was a measure favored by black voters but soundly rejected by white voters, which came as no surprise in the longstanding debate about the allocation of funds to the school districts. Mirel recalled: “Beginning in 1965, even though the state had channeled more resources to schools in the Motor City, the city’s schools were still considerably underfunded. In 1967–68, despite serving 14.23 percent of students in the state, Detroit received only 11.37 percent of the state school aid.”11 Things would get worse, and the only alternative was a demand for another millage vote and, if that failed, a lawsuit.